What Is a Temple and What Is a Priestess? — The Sacred Foundation of Walk As Love

Speaker A: 00:00:04

You are never meant to walk this path alone.

You are the soul who is remembering, walking ahead of the wave, feeling the weight of what you know, the isolation of seeing what others can't, yet and deeply ready to come home to your people.

Welcome to Walk As Love.

I'm your host, Kayla Moore, priestess in training and temple keeper of the Walk is Love Temple.

This podcast is for the awakened souls who are done healing in isolation, who feel the grief and the rage of this chaotic world and want somewhere real to put it, who know that liberation, harmony and walking as love aren't just ideals.

They are the work of our time.

Here we talk about what it actually means to look, liberate ourselves from patriarchal conditioning, weave the divine feminine and masculine back into harmony and show up in this world as torchbearers of the world we know is possible.

This is not spiritual bypassing.

This is the real work, the fire, the remembering, and the radical act of choosing love and community over fear and control.

Come gather around the fire, beloved.

This is where you belong.

Welcome back, beloveds, to the Walk as Love podcast.

I'm Kayla Moore, your host.

I go by she, her hers, pronouns, and I am your priestess in training and.

And the Walk As Love, temple keeper.

So today I'm going to go into what exactly is a temple and a priestess?

I know these terms may invoke some other imagery of what we know a temple to be in modern day times.

Priestess may be something that feels vaguely like something you could know or should know, but really have no idea what that means.

So I am here to help explain these terms in the best way that I can and give you a better understanding of what it means to actually be a priestess and what a temple is for and what we can do together to create a space and a community that is about love.

So I think temple might be the better place to start.

So a temple.

There are a lot of different spiritual denominations currently that use temple as what they call their worship space.

And I don't think that this version of temple is much different than that.

Temple to me really means a sacred place that we gather.

It can come in the physical form of like an actual space, an actual building, a dwelling that people gather in.

But I think, especially when it comes to me building an online community that doesn't quite have a brick and mortar temple yet, I personally feel like the temple is more about the people that create it.

It's about an intentional space for us to bring the sacred into how we understand the mundane.

It's meeting the sacred with the Mundane and giving a space and a time and a container for devoting ourselves to understanding what it means to walk as love within ourselves, within our relationships and within the world and our relationship to the earth.

So temple just means a place of sacred gathering.

And there is no, like, deity that we are worshiping.

There is no God or goddess necessarily.

There are a lot of goddesses throughout many different traditions in history that are examples of the different archetypes that I will be bringing into the temple.

Because archetypes, again, are a unconscious collective understanding of what it means to be human.

There are different aspects of what it means to be human put into a personified form so that we get to really deepen into our understanding of what that means and how it pertains to our life and a bigger mythic arc of what it means to be human.

So there are lots of different goddesses that you can pull from or that you can look to as like, oh, this is a characterization of this archetype.

But there's no one God, one deity or goddess that we are here to devote ourselves to.

What we are here to devote ourselves to is love.

That is the main thing.

So I think really, if I distill down the mission of the walk as love Temple, it is to teach the world how to love again, how to love ourselves, how to love each other, and how to love the earth and all the creatures on it.

And so we are here to be devoted to love, to walking as love.

And that really means that this is a space of healing, not in terms of me being somebody that can heal and you being somebody that needs to be healed.

We all are here to heal together.

And I sometimes don't like using the word healing or heal because it inherently means that there is something broken that needs to be fixed and we are all whole.

So a lot of times I also like to just talk about bringing in wholeness, of really learning about our wholeness, because a lot of us have been taught to feel broken, to feel like we are not enough.

And so learning more about our wholeness and our fullness as human beings together in a community, instead of doing it on our own.

That is what the temple is.

That is what it means to be in a temple.

It's a place to share ideas, hopefully with as little judgment and bias as possible.

It doesn't mean that we don't all bring our own perspectives and our own experiences and our own traumas you into the conversations and into how we are processing through what is on our hearts and how we are untangling ourselves from patriarchal conditioning, but meeting each other with love and compassion and curiosity is so important.

And bringing new ideas and new ways of doing things is really what I want to foster in this temple.

This temple is not only about looking at, wounding or looking at shadow parts of ourselves and moving towards more integration and more wholeness.

But it's then alchemizing that.

It's using that information and using how we have learned and grown to then envision a new world.

And that is a segue to priestessing.

The type of priestessing that I am learning how to do is becoming an alchemist.

And an alchemist just means transforming something from one thing to another.

And so priestesses do have a historical history.

It's spotty.

And a lot of people and historians that have tried to put the her story together around priestesses do take, you know, what we have available and then try to morph it into their own story.

So take it with the knowledge that there isn't a whole lot of documentation.

However, we do have different carvings and different idols that have been found all the way Back to like 31,000 years ago that do give evidence to the fact that we had goddess culture.

That for most of the human history that has been recorded and I've seen a lot of stuff, we have human history way, way, way before we even have recorded history.

But with what we know so far, we used to have goddess culture.

We used to not have only one monotheistic male version God that all different religions surround themselves around.

We'd had multiple goddesses that were worshiped and again, I think provided different archetypal understandings of what it meant to be human.

And priestesses, as I have been taught through my training, were pillars of the community.

They were spiritual leaders, but they were also healers in terms of sometimes it actually was not.

It may have been energetic healing, but also like health care that some people went to temples to priestesses to get health care.

They were oracles and visionaries and helped the nobility really understand and see the divine path in front of them and make like divinely sacred led decisions in what they were meant to do.

They were medicine women, they were midwives, and they were ceremonial leaders.

So they had a lot of different roles that they played within being a spiritual guide and pillar of the community.

And they tended to do a lot of what we know spiritual leaders to do today.

They anointed birth and death.

And so they really were ones that kind of walked and shepherded the death rebirth portal that we go through multiple times during life.

When you're born, that is a portal.

When you become a mother or a parent, that is a portal.

And dying is a portal.

And a lot of people go through different death and rebirth maturation experiences, or what we now would call like rites of passage throughout their life.

And that was definitely something that a priestess was able to preside over and to guide.

They really just guided people on their path and would offer counsel.

So what we would today say is like what a therapist does or what a counselor does, or even often people still go to some type of spiritual leader for counsel and guidance.

Priestesses were the ones that did that.

And again, we don't have a ton of information around this, but I do know that there also were certain temples where specific goddesses were worshiped.

And so sometimes the priestesses that trained in those temples were more of like a focalizer of that goddess.

So they were channeling that goddess into themselves and allowing people to commune and gain that goddess's wisdom through their bodies.

And so I think that's a slightly different way that the priestesses worked and helped the community.

But that is also something that I have been taught about how priestesses would move and work in the community through one specific temple, one specific goddess as well.

And so a modern day priestess is really somebody that has again devoted themselves to walking the path of love.

It's not someone who was anointed divinely and told by God, you are meant to do this.

Of course, I believe, like we all have our own soul path that we are here to follow.

And a lot of us are coming here right now and remembering the traditions that we had 30 plus thousand years ago that were erased when patriarchy then took over and erased a lot of the feminine, erased the priestesses, erased the medicine women, erased the midwives, erased the women that carried this knowledge and this medicine and this lineage because it was a threat to being able to control people.

And this took place within the witch trials and the killings of thousands, if not millions of women over the course of thousands of years within Europe and then within the United States as well.

And so modern day priestesses are those who are bringing back that remembrance.

They're remembering that this was part of who we were and knowing that we all.

It doesn't matter if you're a woman, a man, anywhere on the gender spectrum or identity spectrum.

Priestess is also an archetype.

It was and is also a person.

But priestesses are also living out an archetypal role.

So anyone could be a priest or a priestess in, in the terms of the Sacred feminine and what it means to walk the path as love.

Not necessarily what it means to be like a priest in Catholicism, but a priest in terms of being devoted to yourself and to humanity and walking the path of love.

And so what a modern day priestess does is go through the initiation of really understanding how to wield and hold her own or their own power.

It is uncoupling and unearthing the wounds that have been there through our patriarchal conditioning.

I personally feel like we have to unravel the things that we have been taught and learned and without judgment.

And this is not pointing to one group of people or anyone, as this is who we are mad at, this is who the villain is.

It is really just understanding that as a collective of humans for the past 5ish thousand years, we have decided on this being our reality, on these belief systems, and this way of doing life as our reality.

And in order to change that reality, we have to understand how it has affected us, because most of us just are born into this and don't actually think about it.

We don't think about it critically and how we are indoctrinated into these belief systems.

And so when we are indoctrinated into them and then we perpetuate them, we are perpetuating this reality.

And the only way, I believe, to break ourselves out of that is to understand it, to have an awareness of it, and to then learn what.

What do we want to do instead?

How do we want to move in this world in a way that feels like there is more freedom, there is more love, there is more divinity and sacredness in all of us, in all of humanity, that we are treating ourselves and then each other with the highest form of unconditional love and compassion and kindness.

And that starts from within.

That starts with you deciding that that is how you want to treat yourself and carry yourself in this world.

And when you can treat yourself that way, then you can treat others that way too.

And when we can gather a group of people that are deciding to treat themselves and others that way, it then has a ripple effect into the rest of the collective and we start to change the narrative and the belief system in our culture of how we want to be in this world, and it can change reality.

So that is what we're here to do.

And so the priestess has gone in and has done a lot of this work.

I don't think the work is ever done.

I think we are always going to be continuously evolving and growing.

That doesn't mean that we're not whole Though we are still whole, we are still enough.

Even from the day we are born to the day we die and everywhere in between, we are enough.

Because we are divine.

We are enough.

But the priestess has done the work to really understand how she wants to move through the world as love.

She has uncoupled herself as much as possible from the teachings and belief systems of the patriarchal structure.

And I like to use the terminology of the ancient way of understanding the word virgin.

Virgin used to mean a woman or a person unto themselves, a woman unto herself.

And I truly believe that that is what the priestess is.

The priestess is someone who has said, I am no longer beholden to anyone but me and my divinity.

And because of that, I am here to walk specifically as love in this world.

I am here to breathe love fully into myself and hold my full power, my full sexuality, my full availability, to hold the wounding that I have had with also love and compassion, and to see herself as fully whole and fully devoted to the path of love.

And there is a sovereignty to being a priestess or walking this path.

She has done enough of the internal understanding and alchemy of herself and the wounding to carry herself in a way that is through pure sovereignty to who she is and how her frequency is able to ripple to other people and help them feel like it is safe for them to do the same.

And so, as a priestess in training, I am walking that path.

I am continuing to understand my wounds, to understand how patriarchal scripts and narratives and belief systems have impacted how I am showing up in my life.

And I am choosing to do things differently.

I am choosing to see myself as a whole being and not as broken.

I am reclaiming my sense of sovereignty and love for myself and wanting that to ripple out to the people around me.

And the one thing that I am bringing into my work that I've, again, not yet fully seen and felt the weight of, yet is wanting to bridge this into the masculine as well.

As I've said in previous episodes, we all have feminine and masculine within us.

But a lot of what I'm going to talk about in most of the temple is very heavily on the feminine side.

And I do think that that is important because a lot of the feminine has been erased in our lineage.

But I want men to also know that this is fully your invitation, too.

And there are some programs that hold priest along with priestess as well, that it's.

It's kind of interchangeable because, again, it is more about the devotion to love and not about whether you're masculine or Femin in.

And so men can also walk this path.

Men can also work towards becoming conduits and visionaries of love and doing this healing work for themselves.

Because we have all, no matter who we are, have been indoctrinated into patriarchal conditioning.

And the more that men also walk this path and learn how to fully embrace and love themselves and then love the people around them fully and completely, and can take that into the different spaces and realms of their life.

I mean, how much would our collective consciousness change if we were all doing that together?

So it is not just for women.

And the temple isn't necessarily here to create more priestesses or more priests.

But I do think a lot of what I'm doing as a priestess, then, is rippling out into the pillars that I'm here to hold as well within the temple.

And I think it all weaves together in us all learning how to walk as love.

And essentially, that is what the priestess is, is she, again, is here to devote herself to walking as love in all realms.

And so the temple is here to shape that and help grow that in other people.

Whether you are really wanting to embody a priestess or priest archetype or are just wanting to know how to do that more for yourself and carry that back into the world and also create a new vision for what the world could be, I think all of it falls under some similar umbrella.

So that is really the work.

I think I will ground it in One last thing before I go.

The sacred symbol that I used for the temple is called the Solar Cross.

And the Solar Cross is really a symbol that meant so much to me when I came across it.

And in the priestess archetype, this is her sacred symbol as well.

And so the Solar Cross is just a simple cross with a circle around it.

And so the vertical line is about the connection between the cosmos and the below Earth.

So I often think of myself as a priestess, as being the connector of worlds that I walk at the zero point, that is that middle point of the cross.

And so we, as humans especially, are rooted very much into the Earth.

The Earth is our Mama Gaia, and she is here to support all living creatures and is really what ties us all together.

The cycles that we go through are so tied to the Earth and to the moon and to the cosmos.

And so it is all a big ecosystem that is working together.

And so we are very much rooted to the Earth.

But then we are also, again, if we go up the vertical line, rooted into the cosmos, into the cycles of the moon, the cycles of the planets, all the different astrological configurations and constellations, and whether you believe in other beings on other planets or other universes, you know, we are part of the universe.

And so there could be galactic family, or you can think of it more in terms of spiritual ancestry that you are connected to through the cosmos, whatever that means to you.

So we are definitely connected to a higher realm that is literal, but also could be more spiritual, Just as we are connected to the below.

So it's the above and the below.

And then the horizontal line or plane is for everything on this earthly plane, on this earth, all the humans, all of the animals, everything that is living, we are also connected to on this plane of consciousness and of reality.

And then the circle around the cross is again, to just bring us into all the cycles that we move through, the seasonal cycles that we move through in a year, the moon phases that we move through within a month, the menstrual cycle that lines up with the moon cycle that women move through.

There are so many different cycles that we have within our existence that is depicted by the circle.

And it also, you know, is like the sun, which is a big part of those cycles happening, as well as the moon.

And the sun and the moon are both masculine and feminine energy.

And so it kind of ties all of that together.

So the priestess, again, walks at this zero point within the middle of all of that, within the middle of the cross, and is holding all of this together, is holding the cosmos, holding the earthly below plane, is holding everything living on the horizontal plane together, and is really making herself a conduit to help understand all of these realms and how they fit together and how all of this works together as an ecosystem.

It's not that she personally is holding it all together, although maybe there are some interpretations of it.

But I think of it more as she is devoted to all realms and sees all realms and walks between them and alchemizes between all of them, and really understands the power and the majesty and the sacredness of all realms and wields that and uses that in the way that she needs to walk as love.

So that is why that is the sacred symbol of this temple and why I typically will use that as the mythic overlay for a lot of what I will be doing in the temple.

So I hope all of that makes more sense.

And again, if this is something that is continuing to call to you and you are continuing to maybe get an inkling that this community could be something that is in your path and in your devotional space, I would love to invite you into the Walk Is Love Temple.

The information is down below in the show notes.

And I appreciate all of you for being here and listening.

Take care all.

I will talk to you next time.

Thank you for gathering around the fire with me today.

Beloved.

If this episode touched something in you, share it with a soul you know who needs to hear it.

The right people find this work through each other.

And if you are ready to stop walking this path alone, Walk is Love Temple is open a sacred community for the souls who are remembering gathering every new moon, full moon and every week around the fire together.

Come home.

Join [email protected] the link is in the show notes.

Before I go, I want to leave you with something special.

This is an original song called It's Time for Change written and composed by Christopher Crooker, created specifically for the Walk is Love Temple.

Let it find you wherever you are.

Until next time, beloved.

This is where you belong.

Speaker B: 00:30:59

Have some faith, you beautiful child Wipe away all of your tears Let go of all of your anger Give up all your fear A new age is coming on it's time to embrace the strange you wanna be Right where you belong we all know it's time for change it's time for change it's time for change so let go of your clinging Let go be rearranged.

If they don't stop it soon it may be too late But I'm a pacifist and don't feel the hate I promise you it will all be all right now you must believe it really might New age is coming on it's time to embrace the strange you wanna be Right where you belong we all know it's time for change it's time for change it's time for change so let go of your clinging and let it be rearrange.

If you stop needing reality that increases the gravity if you stop needing reality that increases the gravity if you stop needing reality that increases the gravity is the gravity.

It's time for change it's time for change so let go of your clinging and let it be rearranged it's time for change it's time time for change so let go of your clinging and let it be rearranged Sam.

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