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Nature's Healing Balm for Life's Greatest Challenge
Grief can be one of the most devastating, intense and all-encompassing emotional experiences that we encounter in our lives. It has been so since the beginning of time.
Amazingly, two of the most profoundly effective healing powers are often lost to us in modern societies. They are ceremony and nature.
The ceremonies that we have retained today is mostly public expressions of mourning around death. The myriad other losses that come from lost dreams, lost love, lost friendships and lost health are largely ignored. We are in need of ceremony that heals our deeply held personal losses-- ceremony that originates from deep within and allows us to grow strong from our inner core .
And so, too, do we need to re-connect with the restorative healing power of nature. From Ancient times, humankind has understood the simple power of taking our pain into the wilderness to be made whole again.
Nowhere can the two great forces of nature and ceremony be more important and effective than in allowing the deep pain and loss felt in grief to be initiations into the mystery of life itself.
The Grief Walking Wilderness Ceremony Experience
Grief Walking is a three step process that enables you to immerse yourself in the healing powers of both ceremony and nature. The three stages of the experience are preparation, alone time, and integration. Each Wilderness Ceremony Experience is limited to 12 participants.
In the preparation phase, you participate in a series of group councils with others who are calling on their experiences of loss to deepen into personal process. Over a two-day period, through these group efforts and through guided individual exercises, you will prepare yourself physically and psychically for the alone time phase of the Wilderness Ceremony Experience. These sessions will assist you in opening up to your grief so that you may wholly face it and heal it. Our guides work with you to find practices and ceremonies to take with you as well as ensuring that all of your physical and safety considerations are provided for.
Alone time is the essence of the Wilderness Ceremony Experience. It enables you to draw on the healing strength of nature. Your 24-hour alone time is structured to fit your individual physical, emotional and spiritual considerations. Beginning with your personal selection of a site that you find to be at once beautiful, serene and secure, the ceremonies you elect to enact, and the simplicity of your connectedness to the natural world which surrounds you form the core of your healing experience.
Grieving is both a profoundly personal experience as well as a collective experience. Through sharing your loss with others, you may draw strength. At the end of your alone time, you are afforded the opportunity to share your alone time experiences with others, if you so desire. Your guides are available to work with you individually to assist you in processing the experiences of your alone time and help you in preparing to return to your daily life -- restored and healed from many of the paralyzing effects of grief.
Deborah Coryell is a leading teacher and counselor in holistic health and wellness education, with over 25 years of experience in related fields. As an educator and counselor for 11 years at the Canyon Ranch Spa in Tucson, she designed and founded their world-renowned wellness program. It was during her time at Canyon Ranch that Deborah began focusing her attention on individuals struggling with life-threatening illnesses and catastrophic life changes. This led to her becoming a co-founder of The Shiva Foundation and the publication of her book "Good Grief: Healing Through the Shadow of Loss." Before joining the Canyon Ranch Spa, Deborah was director of the Awosting Retreat and Spring Lake Spa in New York.
Bill Coryell is co-founder of The Shiva Foundation and its Executive Director. His commitment and deeply felt understanding for the grief work that his wife Deborah was doing, led Bill to leave his airline industry career and join Deborah in a full-time commitment to The Shiva Foundation. Bill's extensive wilderness experience led him to the inspiration of combining grief work with the alone time wilderness experience that is at the heart of the creation of Grief Walking.
John Wallace is a group facilitator and organization consultant with extensive experience in both wilderness alone time and in studying and creating the rites of ceremony. He is the founder of Seventh Generation Consulting, whose mission it is to show individuals and organizations how to incorporate their talents and visions into their day-to-day living and their business practices. John has been leading and facilitating wilderness alone time programs for over 7 years now. He is also a student of Steven Foster and Meredith Little, the acclaimed authors and teachers of wilderness passage rites. Additionally, for the past ten years throughout the United States and Europe, John has been presenting "The Business of You," a workshop he created for helping people integrate their "essential selves" into their everyday lives.
The mission of The Shiva Foundation, a non-profit organization created in 1994, is to open the perceptions and attitudes of modern society regarding grief by creating an understanding that grief can and should be a doorway to rejuvenation and renewal -- to life, growth and evolution. "Living" the experience of grief fully and consciously, as in the Shiva tradition of Judaism, allows us to manifest deeper and richer connections to the natural cycles of creation and destruction. The Hindu deity Shiva embodies this notion of perpetual destruction and renewal, the understanding and appreciation of which the foundation seeks to incorporate into modern-day precepts.
Seventh Generation Consulting (SGC) was founded in 1985 to foster ways of living, working and creating that are both life-enhancing and regenerative -- for individuals and collectively for the community. The name is derived from the Iroquois ethic of considering the impact of each decision on the next seven generations before taking any action. Originally formed as a consulting business, SGC has evolved to assisting individuals and organizations to consult with themselves -- at a core, essential and holistic level -- to create solutions that are organic and unique to each individual or group situation
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| Canyon Ranch Spa |
Bereaved Families of Ontario Color |
Rancho La Puerta Spa |
| Jewish Family & Children's Services |
American Airlines | M University |
| Fitness Elite |
Kolel |
U of A - Program in Integrative Medicine |
| Joel Swirsky Athletic Foundation |
Baycrest Geriatrics |
Young Presidents Organization Chief Executive |
| New Mexico AIDS Services |
Organization |
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