What if the thing you've been trying to get rid of is actually the thing trying to set you free?

In this episode,Kayla explores shadow work through the lens of Venus Retrograde, the myth of Inanna, and the Crone archetype — the Walk As Love Temple's theme for this moon cycle. She breaks down what the shadow self actually is, why we exile parts of ourselves, and how to approach our wounds with curiosity and love rather than shame.

Kayla also gets personal — sharing her own people pleasing wound and what it's like to reclaim the parts of herself she learned to hide in order to be loved.

This episode is an invitation to stop doing this work alone.

In this episode:

• What Venus Retrograde actually means and why it matters
• The myth of Inanna and the underworld journey
• What shadow selves are and how they form in childhood
• The Crone archetype — discernment, wisdom, and wholeness
• The spiral of healing — why the same wounds keep coming back
• Finding the gift within the wound
• Why healing in community is more potent than healing alone
• The Walk As Love Temple as a space to do this work together

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• Monthly Archetypal Theme and Daily Soul Reflections
• 🌑 New Moon — Temple Initiation Circle
• 🔥Weekly Fire and Kin Circle
• 🌕 Full Moon — Holy Rage Circle
• Discount on collaboration and seasonal one-off events

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• Instagram: @priestesskaylamoore

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 is 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 is Love podcast.

I'm Kayla Moore, your host.

I go by she, her hers, pronouns, and I am your priestess in training and the Walk is Love temple keeper.

Today I am going to be chatting with you about our shadows, our shadow cells, and how they are very much coming up right now during our Venus retrograde season.

So astrology is a tool that we use to understand kind of the cycles of the year and the different flavors of energy that we are getting at different times of the year.

It is a very powerful tool used by a lot of spiritual people and mystics to understand ourselves better, to understand what the collective consciousness looks like, and to understand the bigger cycles that we go through on this planet and throughout history.

So I use astrology as a jumping off point oftentimes to talk about the different flavors of the seasons and what a lot of us are going to be experiencing during this time period.

So Venus is in retrograde right now.

What that means is that she is kind of, from our vantage point, seems to be going backwards, and it's just part of her orbit in our solar system.

So she starts out as an evening star, and as she starts to go retrograde, it looks like she disappears from our sky, that we can no longer see her.

And this is because she's passing between the Earth and the sun and gets kind of caught in the sun's glare.

And so you can't see her for a period of time.

And then she re emerges as a morning star in our Sky.

And so this has really been painted as a mythical journey.

The journey, or the story of Inanna, which is like, one of the oldest stories ever written.

It's one of, like, the oldest thing that we have ever had written down as a human species is this mythical story of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna.

And it was her journey into the underworld, where she had to shed seven different layers of herself at seven different gates going into the underworld.

And then she dies.

And there is a mirroring between her and her sister, Ereshkigal.

And there are lots of different ways to interpret this myth and to glean different teachings from it.

But essentially, it is the journey of going into the underworld, reclaiming parts of self, and then reemerging to the earthly plane as a new version of yourself, of a new integrated version of yourself that sees things differently than what you did before.

And so this arc is something that I tend to talk about a lot with different people that I've worked with and have created a meditation around and a way of thinking about your overall journey and your work, because it has been really impactful for me to think of my journey in that sense as well.

And we go through this journey many, many times in our lives, this underworld journey, reclaiming different things about ourselves and then reemerging.

This is part of a process that we go through pretty much every year at this time, but also in different ways throughout our life as well.

And during this period before Halloween, or what the Celtics would have called Samhain, this is a really beautiful time to really go into the underworld and to look at our shadow selves and to face them head on and see what we need to release and what we are wanting to reclaim as we then emerge back to this earthly plane.

So what is a shadow self?

A shadow self is what happens when there are parts of ourselves that we unconsciously exile.

Typically during childhood, when we encounter either a caregiver or someone in our circle in society, or a peer that we see has a negative reaction to a part of ourself, to how we do something or an emotion or some part of ourself that feels threatening to that relationship, we decide that in order to be able to keep that relationship with that person, we need to exile it.

And it's an adaptive process.

It's not something that is meaning that there's something wrong with you or something wrong with doing that.

It's how we survive.

We know that as humans, we need each other.

I think we've lost the plot on that one lately, but we need each other.

And when we are young, we really need people around us to help keep us safe.

We know that our survival is based upon the relationships that we have at that time.

And so there's some understanding in our conscious, subconscious selves that if there's something threatening to that relationship and that survival, that we then exile that off for ourselves.

And it's typically because a lot of humans also have their own wounding and their own shadow selves.

And so they're bringing that into another child's life, and the cycle kind of continues.

So hopefully, eventually we can get to a point where maybe we're more accepting of the vast variety of who we are as humans, and that will happen less and less.

But for those of us that are at this point that are doing our inner work and trying to come back to a sense of wholeness within ourselves, looking at your shadow or your wounding is a lot of the work that all of us have been doing.

Whether you've gone to therapy, whether you've gone to spiritual retreats, whether you've been on TikTok or Instagram looking or listening to different people talk about this.

Like, I think we all have an understanding, at least at this point, of what it means to have these parts of ourselves that have been exiled, and we're trying to reclaim them in some way.

So in the Walk Is Love Temple, we look again at 13 different archetypes.

And each archetype, again has light qualities and shadow qualities.

And that just means the light qualities are more integrated parts of self that reflect that energy or that vibration of the archetype.

And then the shadow self are the parts of self that are still needing some work, are still needing some reclamation and integration into whole self.

And so, as we move into this New Moon in Libra this weekend on October 10th, this is a really great time to understand what are the shadows that are coming up for you because of this New Moon as well as Venus Retrograde?

Venus Retrograde is really taking us all into the underworld and showing us what our triggers are and what things we still really need to look at and reclaim for ourselves, to integrate fully, so that we can again fully show up as our integrated, authentic selves and to have full, unconditional love for ourselves so that we can also then extend that to others and to all living things on this planet and on this Earth.

So in understanding the shadow parts of yourself, the archetype that we are looking at for this New Moon cycle is the crone.

And this is crone season.

This is witchy season.

As well, in October.

The Crone is about integrating both the wisdom of the head and the heart.

It's bringing duality into harmony.

The Crone is also about discernment and really the release of, like, caring what other people think.

She is an initiator, and she's here to bring you back to your own divinity in your own sense of pure perfection.

Because of being divine and being human.

The Crone really teaches us to allow ourselves to let go of the different dualities of life and really understand, like, the oneness of all.

And that's definitely one of the core pillars of the walk is love.

Temple is coming back to this understanding of oneness, Coming back to this understanding that the division that we have been told to accept in our world does not actually allow us to thrive.

It doesn't allow us to survive or thrive in this world.

And coming back to a sense of oneness within yourself and then with all living things around us.

It really helps to integrate who you are into the bigger scheme of who we are and how we are here to be beacons of love in this world.

So the Crone really talks about how we are not broken.

We are already whole, and there's no, like, healer and person that's being healed.

Like, we are all whole to begin with.

And our journey is to actually love all parts of self, even the shadow parts, so that we can begin to find.

I don't always love the word healing, but find our own healing and our own understanding of who we are from a place of love and compassion instead of oftentimes.

For those of us that have been on this journey for a while, it can feel like, oh, my gosh, another journey into the underworld, another time that we have to really look at the hard stuff and figure out how to integrate that again.

I know personally for myself, having been on this journey for many, many years, whether it was in therapy or now in more spiritual spaces, it can feel like the same stuff keeps coming up over and over and over again.

And I tend to talk to people about the spiral of how we are all on this spiral of healing or integration.

And each time we come back around to the same, you know, core wound or the same thing, we're at a slightly different point.

We are able to see it from a slightly different perspective, a slightly different vantage point.

And each time we move through it, we learn something new.

And so it would be so nice if we could, like, see it once and then throw it away and be like, okay, I'm done with you.

Moving on.

That tends not to Be how it happens, healing or integration and wholeness does not happen in a linear fashion.

It tends to be more of a spiral, where you come back around to it again and again and again.

But hopefully the spiral starts out smaller and tighter where you're coming around to it pretty quickly.

And then over time, the spiral gets looser and bigger.

And so you're coming around to it less often because it's not as problematic for you anymore.

But you're still probably gonna come around to it once in a while.

And every time you do again, you're gonna be a little bit further up that spiral.

You're gonna see it from a slightly different vantage point.

You're gonna have a little bit more life experience between the last time you experienced it and this time.

And so it might feel exhausting sometimes to constantly having to be looking at the same things over and over again.

But know that you are heading up the spiral regardless, and that each time there is something new for you to glean from that experience.

But it's important to know that there are specific times sometimes that give us more access and more of a stage to really do this work at a deep level and hopefully can excavate some things so that it is a longer period of time before we have to get to the next stage of doing that again.

So the crone is also a little bit cheeky, a little bit light.

She likes to, you know, bring humor to her wisdom and not take ourselves so seriously all the time and to learn again to, like, love both the light and the darkness of ourselves.

She also really wants us to bring our lives into more simplicity, that oftentimes we are over complicating things.

As an overthinker myself, a lot of times we are overthinking, we are over complicating.

And she's here to just say it's easier than we think, that we can come into more simplicity for ourselves, more simplicity for our lives.

And what do we need to kind of shed so that we can come back into right relationship with ourselves in a more balanced experience of our life.

So something that I thought was really cool in my training that we did around the crone was looking at the gift within the wound.

And this is a beautiful way to look at it.

I really do think that it brings a lot of love into understanding your own wounding.

And that wounding sometimes feels like we're just broken.

And from that brokenness, a lot of times we feel like, who the hell is going to love me?

I'm so fucked up.

Like, nobody could Possibly love me.

And we all have that.

We all have baggage.

We all have stuff that we are carrying around with us that we're consistently rubbing up against other people or other situations.

And that can be really challenging.

But also that friction gives us an opportunity to learn and grow.

And so there can be many gifts within a wound.

And looking at the specific wounding that's coming up for you and really trying to hold it in love instead of demonizing it and thinking that you're bad, or there's adding extra layers of shame or guilt around actually having that wounding, having that shadow side of yourself that has been exiled.

If we can come at it with a little bit more curiosity and a little bit more love and a little bit more tenderness and grace and understand for ourselves what it's trying to tell us.

If the last week or so you've gotten triggered by something, think back to, like, how did you react to it?

Was it maybe from a place of like, it's coming up from a subconscious.

Because typically our shadow selves are in the subconscious.

That they're not, like, in a conscious space where we fully understand them.

So those of us that have been doing the work for a while, you might be aware of a lot of the shadow parts of you and be able to identify when they actually rear their heads and are triggered.

And some may not.

And so we're all, you know, at a different point of that spiral.

And that's okay.

But I would just take a moment for yourself, think back to when was last time I was triggered by something and how did I respond?

Did I respond from a place of anger or annoyance?

Or like, oh, my God, not this again.

Or from a place of like, no, we're just gonna shove that back in the closet.

Cause I don't wanna look at it.

Or were you able to hold it with curiosity and love?

And I would invite you to next time that happens, or maybe go back to that time and think of how you could have done that differently.

What would it be like for you if you could hold it with curiosity and love?

To think of that situation again as a new experience for you, to glean something that is important for you to know and to learn something from that and to look at what is the wounding that I need to release so that I can reclaim this part of myself and integrate it back into what it means to be me?

And then seeing, like, what is the gift that I get out of this wounding?

So for me, the wounding that I have been very much looking at is people pleasing, which is part of being the good girl.

I grew up, as many, many, many of us women have, being the one that tried to hold all the things together, tried to be the peacekeeper.

And the way that I learned how to stay in relationship to my caregivers was to make sure that they were okay, make sure that their emotional state stayed happy, which meant that I had to go against a lot of the things that I wanted in order to please them and make sure that they were happy.

So I learned from a very young age not to really think too much about what I wanted and needed and to really only think about what others wanted and needed.

And that my value and my worth was tied to that.

That the things that I did for other people to help keep them happy and safe was how I gained value in how I earned love.

And love is never meant to be earned.

We are meant to be loved unconditionally.

But a lot of us didn't grow up in households where there was unconditional love.

That is one of the biggest things that I want to teach and to reclaim for myself.

Included in the Walkest Love temple is how do we all feel like we even know what unconditional love is?

And that starts with the self.

How do we learn and understand how to love ourselves completely unconditionally?

And I think when we all can do that, then we can start to love others unconditionally as well.

So again, back to how do we find the gift in the wound in looking at releasing people, pleasing and releasing this idea of the good girl and having to do everything right and perfect all the time in order to be worthy of love shedding that really allows me to then step fully into myself, into this woman that I am becoming, and I get to reclaim her.

I get to start to know her and start to think about what does she actually want, what does she actually need?

And how do I start to advocate for that for her and allow her the room to, like, blossom and grow and shine?

In my priestess training, I was able to sit and to, like, emanate, to feel my vibration spread and grow.

And this is how I want to show up in the world.

I want to be vibrant, I want to be energetic and static.

And I want people to feel my true essence, not to just know it.

From being in conversation with me and getting to know me, that's also important.

And I obviously love to talk to people, but just to feel it, to feel like my vibration is so strong and so integrated into who I am that they feel me before they even fully know me.

And then once they do get to know me through having conversations with me, it clicks even further.

It's like, yes, this is exactly the feeling that I felt before I even talked to you.

And that's really what my goal is in becoming a priestess, is to fully integrate all these parts of myself so that I'm just beaming when I walk into a room.

And it's not from a place of.

I, like, selfishly need people to see me to feel worthy.

It's just being so fully integrated into myself and loving myself so much that I'm allowing everyone to see every part of me without hesitation, without fear.

And so that is my gift in this wounding.

And it's still unfolding, and it's still a journey.

It's not something that just happens overnight, but that is something that I'm working towards, is being able to shine, to shine as brightly as I possibly can.

And the part that I love about that is when we are able to do that fully within ourselves, when we are able to fully shine, we become a beacon of love and hope for others.

People see that and more accurately feel it.

They feel that vibration from somebody, and something in them then shifts and says, it's safe for me to do the same.

That I want to feel that, too.

I want to stop wearing the masks.

I want to stop conforming.

I want to stop people pleasing and doing everything that everybody else says and really come back to me, Come back to the self.

Come back to what it means to be fully integrated within myself and truly, truly find that unconditional love for me.

So I invite you also to think about what wounds are coming up for you again with curiosity and love.

And as you begin to shed them, think of, what gift are you getting?

What is the gift that this wound is bringing you?

The final thing that I will leave you with is so many of us have done this work in isolation.

If you have gone to therapy, most of us have gone to therapy as individuals.

We scroll on social media in this very, like, individualistic vacuum of our own algorithms.

You maybe are watching the news, trying to glean something from what's happening.

You try to maybe talk to your friends and family.

But a lot of people always know how to hold you in the way that you want.

And you might have been in some spiritual spaces where maybe there was spiritual bypassing of the actual emotions and wounding and trauma that we all come to that space with.

Or maybe you were in, like, advocacy spaces or active or activism spaces.

And again, there's no, like, processing around what we all are Feeling around the horrible things that are happening in this world, it's just more about action.

So a lot of us have done this work individually.

Maybe you've read some self help books.

There's just, there's a lot that we have been taught to do around this as individuals.

Because also many of us, myself included, feel like we're burdening other people.

If we try to really open up and do this work in any type of community space, it feels like we're burdening people.

And I think for a long time that was the rhetoric that you should keep things inside, especially for men, that you should keep things inside because you don't want to burden somebody else.

Everybody else has their own problems to deal with and so why would we add to those problems?

But what if doing it in community was actually the point?

What if it was more potent?

What if we could actually hold more and had more capacity to heal and grow together than doing it by ourselves?

And that is really the invitation with the walk is Love Temple.

We are here to learn how to love again and then to share that with the world.

I really want to teach this world how to love again.

So many of us look at what is happening in this world and don't see any love.

We don't see any care, we don't see any empathy.

We don't see us being human.

We don't see any humanity that is given to all the different conflicts in the world.

So many people are acting from their own places of wounding and not understanding how that is impacting other people and the collective at large.

And those of us that see that and are grieving this need for more love in the world, most of us feel very isolated because either people don't see it or don't feel like they have enough time to care.

And it can feel very isolating just in that of seeing the things that are necessary for life to happen and people just not allowing themselves to be part of the change and just accepting that this is where the world is.

So the invitation in the temple is to do this together.

We no longer have to walk this path alone.

We no longer have to look at our wounding by ourselves.

This is a safe, safe space where we get to really look deep into ourselves and understand how again can I feel unconditional love for myself then when I can feel unconditional love for myself, how do I then give unconditional love to those in this space?

The idea of having a co ed space is also because sometimes we need that friction of learning about other people's experiences that are different from our own.

To really take that next step of empathizing and giving unconditional love to those experiences, as well as understanding our own differently and hopefully integrating it further.

It is hard work.

It is not easy work, but it's something that I think those of us that are really feeling and hearing the call to change the world, it is part of the process for us is really coming into this integration for ourselves and then feeling the integration as a collective.

My hope for this temple is that we do have safe spaces where you get to feel super validated and held in a similar experience space.

So for women that want to join, I want to have circles of women.

Because being with other women and men, being with other men, that is so rich.

It needs to be part of the process.

You need to feel held in a community that feels more alike to your experience first.

I think, I think that's the soft place to land.

Because a lot of us have had similar experiences.

It doesn't mean it's the same, but a lot of us have had similar experiences.

And that's where we get to feel like, huh, I can finally talk about this without feeling like I'm a burden on somebody else.

And you get to feel validated and heard and seen.

And then in spaces like the Fire and kin circle, we get to do deeper work when we get to hear maybe opposing experiences and opposing ideas and views.

And we are entering into those spaces with love and with hopefully the most curious and graceful nature we possibly can have.

But it doesn't mean that there isn't probably gonna be some friction there based on sometimes other people's experiences might be of the opposing person in your own experience.

And it doesn't erase the harm that has been done.

I never want people to feel like we're here to erase what you have experienced.

But I do think as we grow in ourselves, we have to grow our capacity to.

To hear others experiences and to hold opposing views or opposing, I keep saying experiences, but that's pretty much all that's coming to mind.

I just think that empathy is really at the heart of again extending unconditional love to the other.

And a lot of us have lost the ability to empathize because so many of us are stuck in our own stuff, rightfully so, that we feel like we can't empathize with what other people are going through.

And the goal here is for us to all come together, to love on ourselves, to love on each other, to hold all of our wounding together as a collective and to Then heal it as a collective too.

In my priestess training, we say when one person speaks, they speak for all.

And I wholeheartedly believe that.

I think when any one person is brave enough to speak their own story and their own experience, it ripples out because so many other people can identify with that.

And that's what being human is, it's being able to identify with each other.

Because a lot of us know what it's like to be in those experiences.

And that's what empathy is, that we're empathizing with the feeling of the other person, not necessarily the details of what they experience, but the feeling of what they experienced.

And I think this is a very unique container that I am building to allow people the space to feel validated in the spaces that feel right to them.

Because ultimately you get to choose.

If you enter into the temple, there is no obligation to be in any one space.

You get to decide what spaces feel the safest and best for you.

And then there's always the invitation to work into more spaces if that feels like you are called to.

I think the integration of the divine feminine and the divine masculine together is really one of the biggest pillars that I am working with in this temple.

And it's something that's still being formed.

But that's part of this work is understanding that integration again within self and being able to find that harmony within yourself and then being able to find that harmony within our relationships to each other and then with our relationship to the earth and all living things.

And so that is always kind of the foundation and the root of what I'm working from to in this temple.

So I hope that that feels inviting, feels like I don't have to walk this path alone.

I don't have to continue to figure out my own internal stuff by myself by reading some self help book or scrolling on social media, that there are real people that want to be in a community together, to look at these things, to hold them with love and curiosity, to reclaim parts of ourselves so we can feel that unconditional love and then again do the work to extend that unconditional love to the relationships that we build in this community.

This community is definitely about wanting to build real connection, not just fake connection.

That's in like a Facebook group where either just the person that created it is talking at you and there's no ability for you to talk back to them or, you know, some people comment here and there, but there's no real like investment into the community.

This is something that this is a container Where I want people that are going to be invested in creating community and putting their energy into doesn't mean that it has to take over your life.

Absolutely not.

But wanting to connect with others because it's meaningful for you and hopefully you can take those connections offline.

Hopefully there are going to be people that connect not only online but in person as well.

And it is really truly in my heart to do more in person things online is always a good space to be in and to help congregate people from all over.

But it's also definitely a goal and a desire of mine to do in person work as well.

And so I hope to meet a lot of the people that come into this temple in person and those spaces and workshops or circles or retreats that I facilitate in the future.

So Happy Venus Retrograde Happy New Moon in Libra and I will talk to you all next week.

Take care.

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 His 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 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.

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, change so let go of your clinging and let it 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's let go of your clinging and let it be rearranged.

If you stop needing reality, that increases the gravity if you stop needing reality, that increase increases the gravity if you stop needing reality, that increases 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 for change so let go of your clinging and let it be rearranged Sam.