Speaking Topics
Talks That Move People
Leta offers presentations, interactive workshops, and immersive retreats that bring the wisdom of Chinese medicine, Five Element philosophy, and Alchemical teaching into conversation with the realities of everyday life.
Whether she’s speaking to business leaders, educators, wellness practitioners, or a room full of retreat participants, every talk is built to do the same thing: open people up to themselves, and send them home with something they can actually use.
TitWu Wei: The Alchemy of Effortless Action
One of the deepest truths in Daoist philosophy is that the most powerful action is the one that doesn’t force anything.
In Chinese Medicine and Alchemical practice, true transformation rarely comes from pushing harder. It comes from learning when to align with what is already moving and when to simply get out of your own way. Wu Wei, often translated as “non-doing,” is one of the most misunderstood ideas in Eastern thought, mistaken for passivity when it is actually mastery.
This workshop introduces participants to the foundational principles of Wu Wei and shows how this ancient teaching applies directly to leadership, relationships, and decision-making. Leta draws on decades of study in Alchemical Chinese Medicine to reveal why the people who accomplish the most are often the ones who have learned what to stop forcing.
Five Element Rapport: Seeing the Person Beneath the Symptoms
One of the deepest truths in Daoist philosophy is that the most powerful action is the one that doesn’t force anything.
In Chinese Medicine, healing begins with connection. Before transformation can occur, a client must feel that you genuinely understand who they are beneath their symptoms.
This workshop introduces practitioners to the foundational principles of Five Element philosophy and teaches how energetic understanding can deepen rapport, improve communication, and enhance healing outcomes.
Love and the Five Elements: How We Give and Receive It
Every person loves differently, not because of personality, but because of the Element that moves through them.
The Five Elements are not just a framework for health, they are a map of how love actually moves through a life: Wood reaches for love through vision and growth, Fire opens through intimacy and joy, Earth gives love by nurturing and holding others close, Metal loves through devotion to what it values most, and Water loves from a depth that asks to be trusted before it will surface. Most relationship struggles are not failures of love itself, but a mismatch in how two people express it and what each one needs in return.
This workshop introduces participants to their own Elemental nature and how it shapes the way they love, work through conflict, and connect with the people closest to them. Leta draws on decades of study in Five Element philosophy and Alchemical Chinese Medicine to help participants recognize their own pattern, and the patterns of the people they love most, so that connection can deepen instead of repeatedly missing itself.
The Nine Palaces and the Nine Heart Pains: Finding Your Way Home
Every life carries places where we get stuck, and a heart that knows when we’ve stopped listening to it.
The Nine Palaces map the territories of a life: health, relationship, career, and the rest of the terrain we all move through. The Nine Heart Pains, a teaching passed down through Jeffrey Yuen’s Daoist lineage, describe what happens in the body and spirit when we stop consciously evolving and drift from the life we were meant to live. Together, these two maps reveal not just where someone is stuck, but why, tracing the line between an external Palace that isn’t working and the internal pain that put it there.
This workshop guides participants through both maps side by side, teaching practitioners and seekers alike how to recognize a Heart Pain as it surfaces and trace it back to its Palace, so that real change can begin at the root instead of the symptom. Leta draws on over two decades of study with Master Jeffrey Yuen to bring this rarely taught material into a form participants can use immediately, in their own lives and in their work with others.
Alchemy and Your Five Spirits: Meeting the Forces Within
There are five spirits living inside every person, each one carrying a different piece of who you are and what you are here to do.
In Chinese Medicine, the Shen, Hun, Po, Yi, and Zhi are not abstract concepts, they are the living forces that animate the Heart, Liver, Lungs, Spleen, and Kidneys, and through them, your consciousness, your vision, your instincts, your thinking, and your will. The Shen carries your awareness and your capacity for joy. The Hun carries your sense of direction and the dreams that pull you forward. The Po holds your instinct and your grief. The Yi shapes how you think and how you digest experience, not just food. The Zhi holds your will, your drive, and the deep reserves that let you keep going when life asks the most of you.
Alchemical transformation begins when these five spirits are understood, honored, and brought into right relationship with one another.
This workshop introduces participants to their own Five Spirits and shows how Alchemical practice works directly with these forces to resolve what feels stuck, scattered, or silenced within. Leta draws on decades of study in Alchemical Chinese Medicine and her work with Master Jeffrey Yuen to help participants meet these five spirits not as theory, but as living parts of themselves they can come to know and work with.
Cultivating the Thirteen Ghost Points: Treating the Unseen
Some suffering does not show up on a chart, it shows up as a person who feels haunted by something they cannot name.
The Thirteen Ghost Points are an ancient set of acupuncture points first compiled by Sun Si Miao to treat what Classical Chinese Medicine calls Gui, the unseen forces of possession, obsession, and spirit disturbance that modern language might call trauma, addiction, or the sense of being haunted by one’s own past. These points work directly on the Shen, clearing what has lodged itself in the spirit and could not be reached through herbs or conversation alone. Far from a relic of superstition, this is some of the most precise spirit-level medicine the tradition has ever produced.
This workshop teaches participants the history, the points, and the clinical logic of the Thirteen Ghost Points, drawing on the lineage Leta explores in depth in her book Cultivating the Thirteen Ghost Points. Participants leave with a working understanding of how to recognize Gui-pattern presentations in their own practice and how these points offer a path back to wholeness for patients that other approaches have not been able to reach.
Alchemical Chinese Medicine: The Practice of Becoming
Chinese Medicine has always been more than a system for treating illness, at its root, it is a practice for transforming who you are.
Alchemical Chinese Medicine draws on the classical texts and Daoist roots of the tradition, the layers that existed long before the medicine was simplified into protocols and symptom charts. This is medicine that treats the body, the spirit, and the trajectory of a life as one continuous thread, where physical symptoms are read as messages from a deeper process trying to move a person toward who they are meant to become. Healing, in this lineage, is not the absence of disease, it is the active work of transformation itself, the same work alchemists have always done: taking what is base and unrefined and turning it into something whole.
This workshop introduces participants to the foundations of Alchemical Chinese Medicine, the philosophy, the lineage, and the practical lens it offers for reading a person’s life through their body. Leta draws on over two decades of study with Master Jeffrey Yuen to show how this approach changes not just how a practitioner treats, but how anyone can understand their own path toward wholeness.
The Divergent Channels: Where the Body Keeps Its Secrets
Beneath the channels every acupuncturist learns first, there is a second system, one the body uses only when it has to protect what matters most.
The Divergent Channels are a lesser-known layer of the channel system, the pathways the body calls on to safeguard the deepest resources, the Jing and the constitution itself, when the primary channels and the more commonly treated vessels cannot handle what a person is carrying. They surface in patterns that don’t resolve through standard treatment, the chronic case that keeps circling back, the constitutional weakness that no formula seems to touch, the deep grief or shock the body never fully released. Understanding the Divergent Channels means understanding what the body protects when it has run out of other ways to cope.
This workshop introduces practitioners to the pathways, the clinical logic, and the diagnostic signs that point to Divergent Channel involvement, drawing on the Daoist lineage Leta has studied for over two decades with Master Jeffrey Yuen. Participants leave with a new layer of discernment for the cases that have resisted everything else, and a deeper respect for how intelligently the body works to protect itself.
The Nine Palaces: Removing the Obstacles in Your Way
Every person has a place in their life where they keep arriving at the same wall, again and again, without knowing why.
The Nine Palaces map the core territories of a life: health, relationship, career, wisdom, and the rest of the terrain that makes up who we are and where we are going. When a Palace is blocked, the obstacle rarely lives where it appears. A career that won’t move may have nothing to do with ambition. A relationship that keeps repeating may have nothing to do with the partner in front of you. The block is energetic before it is circumstantial, and until it is seen for what it is, no amount of effort in that area of life will resolve it.
This workshop teaches participants how to identify which Palace is currently blocked in their own life, trace the obstacle to its true root, and begin the work of clearing it rather than pushing harder against a wall that effort alone cannot move. Leta draws on her work developing the Nine Palaces framework through years of Alchemical practice to give participants a working map they can return to long after the workshop ends, whenever they find themselves stuck again.
Treating Chaotic Energy: Restoring Order to What Feels Unmanageable
Some patients don’t walk in with a single clear pattern, they walk in with a storm, and the storm itself is the diagnosis.
Chaotic energy shows up as symptoms that won’t sit still long enough to be named: the pain that moves, the emotion that swings without warning, the constitution that seems to contradict itself from one visit to the next. Classical Chinese Medicine does not treat chaos as a failure of diagnosis, it treats it as a distinct presentation with its own logic, often rooted in Xie Qi, perverse influences that have disrupted the body’s natural order rather than settled into one organ or pattern. Treating chaos requires a different skill than treating a clear pattern, the ability to find the order underneath the disorder before reaching for a point or a formula.
This workshop teaches practitioners how to recognize chaotic presentations, understand the role of Xie Qi in disrupting the body’s natural order, and approach treatment in a way that restores coherence rather than chasing symptoms as they shift. Leta draws on decades of clinical practice and her study with Master Jeffrey Yuen to help practitioners feel confident treating the cases that resist every standard framework.
Each Talk is Unique
No two talks are ever the same, even when the topic is.
Leta builds each presentation around the room she is actually standing in, not a script written months in advance. The topics above are starting points, not fixed material, and what unfolds depends on who has gathered, what they are carrying into the room, and what wants to emerge in the moment itself.
This is the same principle that guides her clinical work: meet what is actually present, not what was expected. Organizers are welcome to request a specific topic or bring a theme they’d like Leta to shape something new around entirely.
Want to see where Leta has spoken before?