The Living Temple
Who your customer is, in her own words.
You asked about finding spiritual women on Reddit. So I went and read them. This is 112 Reddit posts, each one written unprompted by a woman describing her own situation, checked one by one against the live page. Alongside them sit 266 comments from retired women, kept separately as leads and marked as the weaker kind of evidence. How it was gathered, and what was thrown away, is in section 04.
There are three of her, and each one is stuck on something different
I went looking for one customer and the evidence separates into three. Thirty six posts from parenting groups. Fifty four from groups about being a woman over thirty, forty or sixty. Two hundred and eighty eight from retired women, mostly comments under videos. Put all three against the same five questions and they barely share an answer.
36
54
288
Share of each group's items. Percentages, because the groups are different sizes and a raw count would let the largest one swamp the chart. The small remainder in each group is women who say they are fine, or who are describing caring for someone.
Each has one thing that dominates. The mother is stuck on permission, forty two percent, guilt and a partner she cannot ask. The woman over thirty is stuck on meaning and isolation, and she is the only one of the three where identity is also large. The retired woman is stuck on capacity, sixty four percent: she cannot make herself start, and she misses the structure work used to give her.
The sharpest line is not in the chart. It is whether she can say what she wants. Twenty seven of the fifty four women over thirty name the thing they are looking for in plain words (). Not one of the thirty six mothers does, and twenty one of the retired women do (). One describes a state she is in. The others name a want.
Why the retired women get a filter but not a profile. Two hundred and sixty six of her two hundred and eighty eight items are comments under someone else's video, which is weaker evidence than a woman who opened a search box and typed the problem herself. Only twenty two are unprompted posts. She sits in section 05 as work you could commission rather than a customer I am telling you to serve, and every number above is clickable in section 02 if you want to read her.
How the five questions were built. Each item was categorised by hand in its own source's vocabulary first, then those categories were grouped into five broad questions so all three groups could be compared on one chart. The grouping is a judgement and it is written down: isolation is belonging, loneliness and feeling like the only one; identity is not recognising herself; meaning is purpose and wanting a practice; permission is guilt, a partner she cannot ask, and being burned by overachieving; capacity is time, energy, structure and being unable to start.
01a · The mother of young children
Thirty six posts. Time is the reason she gives. Permission is the reason underneath.
Across eight parenting groups, largest r/Mommit at fourteen. Eleven say plainly they have no time. Thirteen describe something closer to permission: guilt, or having the hour and not taking it. Both are real and the second is the one nobody writes to.
She has already done self care
Bubble baths, exercise, hobbies, therapy. She says so, and says it did not touch the thing.
I don’t mean just self-care routines/exercise etc because I’m already doing those things and it still doesn’t quite hit whatever this feeling is.r/Mommit
Nine of them have the hour and cannot take it
The nanny, the daycare, the willing husband (). Four say their partner would say yes and they still cannot ask (). Six make sleep the constraint rather than the schedule ().
When he gives me time to do that I feel undeserving.r/Parenting
She cannot say what she wants
Zero of the thirty six name what they are looking for, against twenty seven of the fifty four below. Every one describes a condition she is in instead. That is the clearest difference in the data, and it suggests she may struggle with a call to action that begins "what do you want". Worth testing rather than assuming.
01b · The woman over thirty
Fifty four posts. Half of them say plainly what they are looking for.
Across eleven groups, led by r/AskWomenOver30 at twenty and r/AskWomenOver40 at fifteen, with the rest from perimenopause, menopause, pagan, spirituality and women's groups.
She names it, and she cannot find the room
Twenty seven of the fifty four say it in plain words (). "A sense of community." "Some form of in person network." "Somewhere for me." Thirteen ask for company outright (). Six say they want a practice and do not know how to start ().
I often wish I did practice some form of religion so that I could have the community that comes with that.r/AskWomenOver30
Some describe not recognising themselves
Ten of the fifty four describe an estrangement from a self they used to have, and in those ten the verb is recognise rather than improve or become. Five describe it through a mirror (). Ten is a real signal and a small one, so treat it as a thread worth pulling rather than a settled trait.
I feel completely distant from that woman, and it's been causing an unexpected, intense grief.r/Perimenopause
She is asking what her life is for
Eight are asking about meaning and purpose outright (). Not one mother is. This theme does not exist in the parenting groups at all.
I'm non religious but crave spirituality. I find it sometimes to be 'too hippy'.r/spirituality
02 · Evidence base
Everything she said, searchable
378 items across three audiences, filtered above. 112 are Reddit posts written unprompted, which is the strongest kind of evidence here. 266 are comments under four videos about retirement, kept as leads and marked as the weaker kind of evidence. Sixty three items were removed on ethical grounds, thirty eight of them because someone had died before anything reached this page. The retired group now has both kinds, so you can compare what a woman writes unprompted against what she says when a video asks her. Search covers eaat guided audio does. Search covers each quoted line, not the whole post.
What she is talking about
Pick several to see any of them. Choosing across two groups narrows to items in both.
Note. Every item here is a Reddit post. Comments under other teachers' recordings were gathered and then cut from this base: they describe that teacher's audience rather than your customer, and most of them were either praise for the recording or a medical disclosure.
Patterns worth seeing on their own
Which video
03 · Next
What I would do with this
- Put the self care argument on the Sacred Life page. It is the one thing here that no competitor can copy, because it is her sentence, not yours.
- Rewrite the Sacred Start opening around the broken night and around permission.
- Say there are other people in the building.
- Design the first session for a woman who cannot settle.
- Then distribution. Read only listening, no posting bots. I will keep this base current if it is useful.
Included
- This review and the 378 item evidence base
- Keeping the listening current
- Answering questions on any of it
Not included
- Changes to your website
- Writing your copy
- Posting anywhere as you or for you
A favour, not an engagement. No invoice, no obligation.
04 · How this was made
What I did, what I threw away, and what I would not rely on
You are being asked to change things on the strength of this, so here is how it was built and where it is weak.
Read only, and nobody was contacted. Everything here is a public post or comment, read the way anyone can read it. Nobody was messaged, replied to, followed or added to a list, and no account was created. Your original idea was a bot that finds these women and recommends the programme to them. I did not build it, because it would get your domain banned and because it is not a thing I will make.
Every quote and every date was checked against the live page, not sampled. Each one fetched and compared. That caught two invented sentences, one from a research tool and one of mine. Both looked entirely plausible and neither was ever written by the woman it was attributed to. Both are gone. It is the reason every quotation here links out: a quote you cannot check is worth nothing, and I would rather hand you the means to catch me than ask you to trust me. The YouTube rows also carry the commenter's public display name, so you can tell one woman from another and follow her back. Of 253 distinct commenters, 245 are handles like shopgirl_ny152, eight are a single first name, and none is a full name.
Sixty three people were removed on purpose. Anyone under eighteen, anyone describing self harm or a crisis, anyone inside an abusive situation, anyone whose name and town and circumstances together would identify her. And thirty eight because someone had died: a woman whose daughter died last year, a woman who lost her mother-in-law and her husband and her mother inside three years, a woman whose mother died last month. Some of them were the most quotable material gathered and they are gone anyway. The test was whether it would survive being read back to the woman who wrote it, and grief being processed in a comment section does not.
Far more was thrown away than kept. About 38,000 YouTube comments under 22 videos were read and nearly all cut, because most were praise for a recording or a medical condition and described that teacher's audience rather than your customer. Forty four comments about what ruins a guided recording were cut as product feedback rather than evidence about who buys. Goodreads and Quora produced nothing usable. Apple Podcasts reviews were gathered, verified, then cut as too thin to carry a claim. What survived is 112 Reddit posts, plus 266 comments from retired women held separately as leads.
Four things I would not lean on. The advertising work is one afternoon, six searches, first page of each, and re-running one query the next day already changed the picture, which is why it sits in section 05 as unfinished rather than as a finding. The mother profile leans on r/Mommit, fourteen of its thirty six posts. The retired women are comments rather than posts, which means somebody handed them the subject, and that is weaker than a woman who opened a search box and typed the problem herself. And nothing here tells you what anybody paid: this is what women say, not what they buy, and only one of those questions is answered.
Two of the suggestions in section 01 contradict what an earlier draft told you. Both were wrong because I had not read your own pages closely enough, and section 01 now quotes them instead.
05 · If you want to go further
Nine things this opens up
Everything above is done and yours. These are separate pieces of work, listed because the research made them possible, not because anything here depends on them.
Competitor teardown and real pricing
Every advert carries the link it points at. Following those gives, per competitor, what the free thing is, what they actually charge, whether the offer is solo or a group, and how the sequence is built. It is the only way to know whether your price sits high, low, or right, and it answers the solo-versus-community question with numbers.
A hook ledger for your whole market
Every message being advertised in this space, ranked by how long someone has paid to keep saying it. A positioning map built from budgets rather than taste. Useful once, then useful again each time you launch something.
Who is actually a competitor
Adverts flagged as having multiple versions are being actively tested, which separates funded operations from people posting occasionally. That turns a list of thirty names into the three worth watching.
A distribution plan built on what already works
Your original question was how to find these women. The adverts show exactly how your competitors find them, which hooks they use, and which attempts survived. That is the answer you were after, reached without a bot and without risking your website.
The words nobody is using
One finding is strong enough to state and not finished enough to build a section on. I took fourteen words your pages lead with, sacred, ritual, divine feminine, priestess, goddess, temple, womb, ceremony, altar, devotion, sisterhood, circle, spiritual, and searched the complete text of all 112 Reddit posts, 120,174 characters.
Eleven of the fourteen appear zero times. Ritual appears once, inside a list of things a woman wishes a religion would give her. Circle appears twice, once meaning her friends. Spiritual appears in nine posts, and every one is a question about how to get in rather than a description of a practice she has.
Alongside that I read about 160 adverts across six keyword searches, which showed those same words being bought by sellers of body oils and ceramics. That half is one afternoon's work, one query returned a different picture the next day, and it is not solid enough to act on. Finishing it properly, with what competitors actually charge and which messages they sustain, is a real piece of work and it is the one I would do next.
Three places she talks that nobody has read yet
Every woman in this report was found on Reddit or YouTube. Three other places would each add a different kind of evidence, and I checked each one on 25 August to see what is actually reachable before listing it here.
Facebook groups. This is where the over-fifty woman is at volume, and the posting is first-person and unprompted the way Reddit is. A search for empty nest groups returns Empty Nest Moms: Rediscovering You, public, 1,200 members, three posts a day, alongside private groups of 24,000 and 19,000. A search for sober women returns Beyond Sober Nation, public, 87,000 members, ninety-plus posts a day, and Sober Lifestyle, public, 174,000. How to find them: group search on the sentence she would type, then read the group's description and its last twenty posts before judging it. Public groups are readable without joining. Private ones are not, and the biggest ones are usually private, so the readable pool is smaller than the search suggests. The retired women on YouTube are a fraction of the ones here.
Amazon reviews on the books she would be shelved beside. Untamed, The Artist's Way, Women Rowing North, How to Keep House While Drowning. Goodreads gave five usable reviews across 178, one of them from this decade. Amazon reviews are written by buyers, dated, and far more often "here is my situation and why I bought this". The constraint, checked: the full reviews page now sits behind a sign-in, and the product page shows only the top few. Reading them at volume means a logged-in browser session, one title at a time, which is slow and read-only and fine, but not something a research tool can do unattended.
Substack comment threads. The woman you write for reads Glennon Doyle, Anne Helen Petersen, Ann Friedman, and their comment sections are where paying subscribers say what they are going through. The constraint, checked: comments are readable without an account on free posts and closed on paid ones. On one such newsletter, a free post gave 225 comments in full, 121 of them substantial; a paid post with 853 comments gave none. How to find them: each newsletter publishes an archive that marks which posts are free and how many comments each has, so the readable threads can be listed in one pass before any reading starts. The yield per comment is likely higher than YouTube, because a subscriber commenting on an essay about her life is closer to a Reddit post than to a video reply.
Of the three, Facebook is where the numbers are, Substack is where the writing is best, and Amazon is the cheapest to sample but the most tedious to read. None of them has been touched.
The segments still thin
The sampling gap that used to sit here has been closed, and the result is in section 01. Three groups are still thin and would repay a listening pass of their own: empty nesters, women in recovery, and women who have left a religion and are looking for what replaces it. That last one is the largest unmapped group adjacent to you, and the only way to reach it at volume is where leaving and asking happen in the same post.
Settling the length question
One thing in the adverts I could not resolve, and did not want to state as a finding on the evidence I have. The clearest advert aimed at an overwhelmed woman answers her by making the practice shorter: "Too Busy for Self-Care? Try This 7-Minute Reset", running 121 days. Your women mostly do not say they are short of time. Twelve have the hour and cannot take it.
But the evidence genuinely cuts both ways. One woman with chronic fatigue asks outright for a twenty to thirty minute version, and several stop a long session partway. So the question of whether length is helping or hurting you is open, and it is answerable: it needs the run-lengths of short-format against long-format offers across the market, and the drop-off points named in comments. Worth doing before you decide the shape of the next product, not after.
To be plain: the review above is a favour and stays one. These nine are proper pieces of work and would be quoted as such. There is no expectation either way, and nothing above is held back pending them.