Tiffany von Emmel

Obituary photo

Tiffany Honor von Emmel
09 Aug 1965 - 30 Apr 2020

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Obituary

Tiffany Honor von Emmel, PhD
Compassionate Angel and Teacher 1965-2020

Those who hold us believing we are more than we think, those are the teachers. Tiffany, above all, was a teacher as she was born.

Tiffany's life was cut short by adrenal cancer on April 30th, 2020, but in terms of impact on the lives of those who knew her, and their descendants, she could well have been 1,000 years old.

Tiffany worked constantly and diligently as if she knew her time was limited on this earth. She founded the Empowerment Place in Ventura, California to grow the community's knowledge of self and self-support, before earning a Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University. She then facilitated and mentored for the "touchy feely" class and for the Women In Business program at Stanford's Graduate School of Business for 15 years, and founded a global work cooperative, Dreamfish, which spanned 60 countries, including a retreat center in Nairobi, bringing hope and skills to the young people of Kenya. She was faculty in the M.A. Program in Organization Development at Sonoma State University, and co-founded the educational nonprofit Include, developing leadership capabilities to enable an interdependent world to thrive.

As remarkable as she was with words, she also deeply loved and incorporated the body, from her performing arts background, to her time practicing East Asian medicine, to the Improvisation work her doctoral dissertation elaborated on. In the past few years, her life's work integrated in the development of a meaningful new method called CARES, which is "a somatic approach to leadership, process facilitation, and inquiry." There is more about this on her nonprofit website, Includeleadership.org.

With all of her impressive knowledge, amazing library, learning and network of loving students and friends, she explained her work in the simplest of terms: "I teach people how to talk nice to one another."

She leaves behind her brother and sister-in-law, Jerry Greer, Jr and Jennifer Greer, her mother Camille Harris and stepfather Tom Stanley, and her niece and nephew Mackenzie and Riley Greer. In addition, her closest friends, Pien van den Herik, Lisa Kistler, and Paul Loper.

We may not understand why you left this earth so soon, or why you left before we were ready to say goodbye, but little by little, we begin to remember not just that you died, but that you lived. And that your life gave us memories too beautiful to forget.^[1]