Our Vision
We're here to help usher in a new cultural paradigm, a post-patriarchal order, informed by the soulful intelligence of our bodies- whose genius has been oppressed for centuries in the patriarchal era.
Our work serves to restore the primary languages of the deep body– sensuality & erotic connectivity, imagination & creativity, instinctual and evolutionary wisdom, mythic depth, and soulful expression–
and to center these languages as vital and primary for the wellbeing of humans, cultures, and our planetary habitats.
Read Our Story
At Our Core: the Deep Body & Its Movement
THE DEEP BODY
To inhabit our deep bodies is to embody our deep psyche, our imagination and dreaming capacities, our soulful impulses and purpose, our elemental connection with the Earth, and way we hold a thread in what our ancients called anima mundi- the soul of the world.
In our worldview, what we call the deep body is the convergence of our emotional, sensual, expressive, intuitive, ancestral, & mythopoetic nature–
in our physical form.
Central to our vision is the understanding that the body is in a vital and unbroken relationship with the Earth, and that body and Earth must be explored together, as their health and restoration are always mutual.
The deep body is the soul made visible
Our bodies have a vital need to move–creatively, intuitively, uncensored
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.
Movement is the mother tongue of the body– a primal and essential language of the human being and the life that surrounds us. So to move and engage the whole body is to tap a vast transformative and healing potential that otherwise remains untapped.
THE DEEP BODY METHOD®
offers richly curated spaces where through music & silence, guided movement journeys, sensual investigations, witness practices, embodied storytelling, deep psyche explorations, and community council, you can revitalize the soulful intelligence of your deep body, attune to its rhythm, and realize its need to deeply express the soul of who you are in the world.
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.
You can read Stefana's first-person story about what inspired her and guided her in the development of the Deep Body work here.
You can also see Who We Are here
We invite you to join the movement!