Chameli Ardagh: Women’s Temple is a space where we come to mirror, celebrate and empower each other as women, exploring spiritual awakening through the portal of the woman’s body.
We have a large network of Women’s Temple Groups all over the world and offer Women’s Temple Facilitator Trainings for women to learn how to create and lead their own group.
In Temple, we dive deeply into practices that open us to the inherent source of vast wisdom within. We connect with the bliss of devotion and with the truth in our hearts. We align with the dignity and grace of the feminine warrior; we touch infinite compassion, silence and beauty beyond measure. We meet beyond the personal, from the feminine essence.
That which we are longing for is who we already are ~ this insight is the basis for our spiritual exploration in Women’s Temple. Our practice is not towards a goal of attainment in the future; it is a process of melting, of unraveling the wisdom and beauty already inherent in each woman. There is no more powerful place to do that than in a circle of conscious women.
Instead of enforcing the status quo by focusing on our problems and personal shortcomings, Temple practices connect us with truth beyond our fears and limited self images. From this deeper place, we can navigate our lives with Presence and inner guidance, instead of exhausting ourselves in trying to be leaders from a tense, competitive and disconnected state of mind.
Women’s Temple is not a therapy or a support group. It is a space where we come to mirror, celebrate and empower each other. A space where we can drop our masks and let the beauty of our authentic face be seen in all its glory and pain, passion and vulnerability.
Women’s Temple is based upon being present in the body, so a lot of the practices are interactive and include movement, as well as respectful touch. The feminine touch has an inviting quality to it that softens, opens and invites deeper presence into our bodies. All the numb and cold places, the unmet corners of our body can be visited with gentle awareness as we cultivate a greater capacity to allow feelings, as energy, to flow through our bodies. This part of the practice is most women’s favorite part.
Women’s Temple was founded in 2005 by Chameli Ardagh and Helena Montelius in Nevada City, California, when they gathered together to explore a new form of women’s circle less based in the personal, and more in connecting to the essence of the divine feminine. The Nevada City Women’s Temple Group in California is still active 12 years later, meeting every Monday night.
