Why the Living Temple,Why Now
Across cultures and centuries, people have honored the feminine face of the Divine. In the temples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and India, she was invoked through many names and forms: Inanna, Isis, Lakshmi, Coatlicue, Artemis, beings who carried the force of life itself. Creation and destruction, sovereignty and surrender, sensuality and wisdom, death and rebirth. She was not one figure but a living field, reflected through countless mirrors.
With the rise of monotheistic traditions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Sacred Feminine became veiled, yet she did not vanish. She lived as Sophia, divine wisdom in early Christianity. She dwelled in the Shekhinah, the indwelling feminine presence of God in Jewish mysticism. She radiated through Mary, vessel of holiness, mother of mysteries, tender witness at the thresholds of life and death.
In many Indigenous and earth-based traditions, she never left the center. She is Pachamama, Grandmother, the living Earth herself, sustainer of all life, carrying an unbroken thread of reciprocity and reverence through centuries of colonization and attempted erasure.
And within the mystical traditions, including the Shakti schools of Hinduism, the Sufi songs of the Beloved, the emanations of Kabbalah, and the Gnostic gospels revealing Magdalene as Christ’s initiated companion, we find her again. Not only goddess, not only Earth, but essence itself: the animating force of creation, inseparable from Source, alive in everything that breathes.
The Erasure of the Sacred Feminine
For thousands of years, across continents and cultures, humanity lived inside a different frequency, one where the Sacred Feminine was honored as essential to life itself. Her wisdom shaped the way we related to the Earth, to each other, and to the Divine. We understood ourselves as part of the web of life, belonging to something vast and interdependent.
But over time, this balance was dismantled. The Sacred Feminine was deliberately erased, not as an accident of history but as a strategy of control. As Her presence faded from stories, ceremonies, and structures of power, the systems that had sustained reciprocity and wholeness were replaced with hierarchies, extraction, and domination.
Temples were destroyed. Wisdom keepers silenced. Women who carried knowledge of the body, the plants, and the stars were hunted and killed, not only out of fear or superstition but because they held land, resources, and influence that threatened centralized control. Communities rooted in shared stewardship were broken apart, and entire economies reorganized around profit rather than care.
In the stories that survived, women were split into archetypes of purity or danger, virgin or whore, saint or witch. Generations inherited these narratives, shaping how we see ourselves, how we see one another, and how we understand power. Men were taught to separate from tenderness and grief. Women were taught to mistrust their bodies, their knowing, and their authority. A culture of separation replaced a culture of belonging.
Colonial systems spread across the globe, outlawing ceremonies, severing ancestral lineages, and imposing economic and political models designed for domination. Indigenous knowledge of reciprocity, including ways of tending the land, community, and Spirit, was violently suppressed.
This was never only about belief. It was about power, about who controls resources, who decides value, who gets to speak for God, and whose lives are centered or erased. And we are still living inside the architecture it built: extractive economies, political polarization, endless war, climate collapse, and systems designed to keep us disconnected from one another and from the Earth.
And yet, what has been hidden is not gone. The memory of another way lives in us still. It stirs in our bones, in our dreams, in the deep longing so many of us feel, the knowing that we are meant to belong, to be in right relationship with each other, with the Earth, and with what is sacred.
Restoring the Sacred Feminine is not about reversing the imbalance or replacing one form of domination with another. It is about remembering the wholeness we came from, returning to reciprocity, and choosing a different future, one where care and interconnection guide how we live, lead, and create together.
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Why the living temple now
We call it the Living Temple because it is not fixed or separate from us. It is alive. It breathes through the people who gather here, through the ceremonies we hold, and through the choices we make in our daily lives. It moves with the seasons, the cycles of the Earth, and the moment we are living in together.
But the name carries an even deeper meaning. The Living Temple is not only a place where we gather. It is something we become. Our bodies, our homes, our families, and our communities are living extensions of the sacred. When we come into ceremony, we are remembering how to hold the frequency of the temple within ourselves, to live as the temple wherever we are.
to remember that the Divine dwells within us, to tend that flame, and to embody the teachings in how we love, how we lead, and how we belong to each other and to the Earth.
And because remembering must become practice, the Living Temple has two distinct spaces.
The Temple is where we gather in sacred feminine ceremony, to remember the Divine within, to root ourselves in love and sovereignty, and to hold the frequency of wholeness together.
The Agora is the practice field, where what opens in ceremony moves into how we live, lead, and respond in the world. Here we explore interconnection, courageous truth-telling, holding complexity, collective care, centering impact, and turning remembering into response.
One without the other would be incomplete. Together they create a living ecosystem where devotion becomes movement, where personal transformation ripples into collective repair, and where the restoration of the Sacred Feminine is inseparable from the restoration of the world.
one
Women's rights and bodily autonomy
two
LGBTQ+ Rights
three
Racial Justice
Four
Immigrant Rights
five
Indigenous Sovereignty
six
Democracy
The unconditional right of every woman to make decisions about her own body and life.
The full legal rights, safety, and dignity of queer and trans people to live and love as who they are.
The active dismantling of white supremacy in our systems, institutions, and culture.
The dignity and humanity of every person regardless of where they were born or what papers they carry.
Land rights, treaty rights, and the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination.
The right of every person to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, and the protection of the systems that make that possible.
seven
Climate Justice
The protection of the Earth from extraction, pollution, and ecological destruction.
eight
Food Justice
Equitable access to clean food and the dismantling of industrial systems that poison land, bodies, and communities.
nine
Human Rights
For every person, without exception.
The Living Temple Is A Stand For
The world this list points toward has a name: a matriarchy.
We are living through the death throes of a dying patriarchy. What replaces it will not be an accident of history. It is the choices we make every day.
Not women ruling over men, but a civilization that organizes itself around the values patriarchy has always suppressed: bodily sovereignty, ecological reciprocity, collective care, and the dignity of every person. That is what we are building here. The inner work and the outer work belong together, and this is what they are both in service of.
About The Founders
Sarah Jenks is an Ordained Priestess and co-founder of the Living Temple. For over a decade she has guided women into a deeper relationship with the Sacred Feminine, helping them weave ceremony into their daily lives, awaken to their innate power, and remember the truth of who they are.
She wasn't always a priestess. She built a life that checked every box — Williams College, advertising career, a successful emotional eating company. From the outside it looked complete. From the inside, something was missing.
Everything changed when she found herself in a Sacred Feminine ceremony for the first time. Something cracked open, and she couldn't unknow it. What followed was years of training to become an ordained priestess in the 13 Moon Mystery School, immersing herself in ceremony, the Avalon mysteries, the Feminine Path of Mary Magdalene, and the Ancient Egyptian art of Anointing.
Today her work reaches a global community of over 100,000 people, holding space for women from all walks of life to come home to themselves through the power of ceremony.
sarah jenks
Kelly Taveras never imagined she'd end up here.
She spent over a decade in communications and policy advocacy, earning a master's in Sustainable Development, serving as VP of Communications for the Organic Trade Association, and lobbying for sustainable food systems on Capitol Hill. It was a good life. A predictable one. One she thought she wanted.
Then, six months after the birth of her third child, she wandered into a winter solstice ceremony at Sarah's home. She walked in uncertain. She walked out forever changed. Six months later, she left her career behind and stepped into an entirely different way of working, leading, and living.
Now as CEO and co-founder of the Living Temple, Kelly stewards a global community devoted to the restoration of the Sacred Feminine, building something that holds both spirit and strategy, devotion and the gritty work of making it real.
Kelly Taveras
Together, Sarah and Kelly lead the Living Temple as an experiment in what becomes possible when women stop performing the lives they were handed and start building the ones they came here for.
