Our Vision
We are on a mission to help people inhabit the deep intelligence and ancient science of their bodies—and to support a new way of living rooted in that intelligence.
For too long, modern culture has undervalued or silenced our most innate embodied capacities: intuition, creativity, sensual presence, emotional intelligence, collective memory, mythic imagination, and instinctual knowing—disconnecting us from the ancestral and feminine intelligence held in the body.
At the DeepBody Institute, we help restore these capacities and the deeper intelligence of the body as a rebalancing force to the intellect. Through the unique soma-and-soul embodiment and movement practices of the Deep Body Method®, we guide people to integrate this powerful intelligence into their daily lives, relationships, healing journeys, and leadership—shaping how they live, create, and connect.
We believe that restoring the lost languages of the deeper body is essential for the wellbeing of individuals, cultures, and the habitats we share.
At the Core: the Deep Body & its Movement
THE DEEP BODY
The deep body is where our emotional, sensual, creative, intuitive, and ancestral intelligences converge in our physical form. To inhabit the deep body is to fully embody these capacities and live through the intelligence they open us to: Our imagination and dreaming capacities, our soulful impulses and personal genius, our elemental connection to the Earth, and what our ancestors called anima mundi—the soul of the world.
Central to our work is the understanding that the body is in a vital, unbroken relationship with Earth and soul– and that the health and restoration of body, Earth, and soul is always mutual.
The deep body is the soul made visible
Our bodies have a vital need to move–creatively, intuitively, uncensored
MOVEMENT
'Movement is the mother tongue of the body– a primal and essential language of the human being and the life that surrounds us. To move and engage the whole body is to tap a vast transformative and healing potential that otherwise remains untapped.
Movement is the opposite of frozenness and of stuckness. It's the antidote of trauma, the counterpoint to depression.
When the body moves, the mind stands back, and the body's true intelligence kicks in- the preverbal, the unspeakable, the unexpected, the deeply held, the unnoticed, that which has been waiting to express– comes to the surface. The deep body has a different, richer, less known story to tell, and it tells it through movement.'
Stefana Serafina,
DBI Founder
THE DEEP BODY METHOD®
The Deep Body Method® offers richly curated practices and spaces where you can revitalize the soulful intelligence of your deep body, attune to its rhythm, and bring the soul of who you are fully into the world.
The method weaves together a unique blend of music and silence, guided movement journeys, sensual exploration, witness practices, embodied storytelling, deep psyche work, and community discussion. It provides a versatile, universal, and integrative approach to the human being in relationship to world, Earth, collective, and spirit.
Our Story
We began as Intuitive Body and Dance, the platform our founder Stefana Serafina started in 2012 in San Francisco. Never trained as a dancer, Stefana’s lifelong love for free-form intuitive & expressive movement inspired her to create spaces where women and non-binary people could move without a recipe or steps to follow, but with support and guidance to access the sensuality, soulfulness, imagination, and intuition of our deeper bodies.
Together, we discovered that our bodies can tell our truer stories, root us back into connection with the living world around us, and give us the wild, sensuous, wordless guidance for the soul journey we must take. We also discovered that the love dance with our own bodies was everything we’d been longing for, a forgotten part of our nature that we had been culturally disconnected from but yearned for with every breath of our lives!
Over the next many years in rooms and forests from San Francisco to Copenhagen & Berlin, and from Amsterdam to Oaxaca, Mexico, Stefana held spaces where together, as a community, we could explore what we came to call the deep body– and the unsuspected possibilities it opened up for healing, making whole, and belonging.
Today, the Deep Body Institute is an emergent and growing collective of deep-body practitioners, embodiment experts, therapists, artists, & educators, passionately advocating for a deep-bodied social change.
We invite you to join the movement!
You can found out more about our team and collective here.