DEBORAH MORRIS CORYELL: Speaking Topics

Devorah Morris Coryell is available to speak on the following topics. Each represents an exploration into the nature of loss, into the mystical body of loss as well as into healing through loss. She uses imagery, meditation, breathing exercises, dialogue, movement, journaling and art as vehicles of exploration.

The Yoga of Loss
For spas and yoga studios
Using yoga as the model, we explore release and surrender through postures, meditation and breath. The places in our bodies, our minds and our breath where we hold on become pathways into awareness of how we resist letting go, and ultimately take us into our healing.

Training for Loss
For athletes and schools
We are told from earliest childhood not to be "sore losers." What does it mean to be a "good loser?" How can we learn from life that loss is not a punishment from which to hide but an opportunity to open to life's deeper mysteries?

Love and Loss
For divorce groups, bereavement groups, synagogues, churches and schools
To love, to feel deeply, to admit that we care is to make ourselves vulnerable. Many of us have learned to build walls around our hearts thinking that we will be safe from the pain of attachment: "If I don't care, I can't get hurt." Sometimes this is a result of childhood wounds, sometimes it comes from painful experiences as adults. The end result is not safety but that we are cut off from life. Here we explore the path of healing that allows us to include the pain without excluding the experience.

Health, Wellness and Loss
For spas, hospitals, clinics, insurance companies and schools
Disease is loss. It is a loss of health that might be transitory or it might be permanent. There are physical challenges that can be cured and those that must be healed. Once we meet traumatic illness, we lose our innocence in the face of what we never considered might happen "to" us. Using a wellness model developed at Canyon Ranch Spa in Tucson, Arizona, we weave the tangibles of nutrition, exercise, stress management and environmental attunement with the intangibles of grieving, realizing our dreams and connecting in relationships to come to a more complete union with our selves.

Catastrophic Collective Loss
For airlines, bus and train companies, cities, schools and corporations
Where is the healing within collective catastrophic loss such as the airplane disaster of TWA, the Oklahoma City bombing or the death of a charismatic public figure such as Princess Diana? How can we hold our sense of ourselves as spectators with the profound disturbances in our personal lives that we experience in the face of disasters belonging to others? Life gives us many opportunities to learn it's lessons sometimes as by-standers. We give loss meaning when we are willing to be students of life.

Recovery and Loss
12-Step programs, abuse centers, schools, hospitals, clinics and spas
At the heart of substance abuse is grief. The pain of separation from those we love who can't see us or love us back is so overwhelming that the only place we can go is into hurting ourselves so badly that we only feel our relationship to substance instead of our relationship to life. Weaving the courage to embrace our grief into the fabric of our recovery is the goal of this program