Deborah Heifetz is a social anthropologist, dancer, and mediator who has over 30 years’ experience as a peace activist, social scientist and somatic educator working at the nexus of inner and outer peace. A co-founder and director of BraveHearts International, Heifetz is a professional facilitator and coach who developed the Human Needs Map, a circular matrix that captures the systemic complexity and interconnectivity between human needs, beliefs, emotions, and embodied memory. The model coalesced over 20 years in an emergent process of action learning, research and engagement in conflict challenges ranging from international peacebuilding to personal relationships.
Deborah developed the concept of “non-mediated peacekeeping’ from her ethnographic study of gender and Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation during her research of the Oslo Accords. She took part in Track II Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and co-founded an NGO focused on peace-building and community development in Pakistan. In 2012, she began to work directly with the sustainability movement as a vehicle for peacebuilding through an international grassroots movement known as the Transition Network, where she served as a mediator and co-founded the Israeli Hub.
Dr. Heifetz integrated her diverse background with certifications in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Somatic Experiencing (SE) to educate graduate students of International Conflict Resolution and Mediation in Culture, Conflict and Community Development. Working in collaboration with Kibbutz Neot Semadar (Israel), she bridged academia and community development through deep personal learning and a reflexive pedagogy. With twelve years teaching experience on faculty at Haifa University’s dance/movement therapy program, she taught LMA and “communicating under conflict”, by weaving cognitive, experiential and action learning with core principles of mindfulness practice, witnessing and social theory either directly or indirectly inspired from Laban’s work.
In 2013, Heifetz co-created the Embodied Leadership Training - a series of workshops taught in Europe, China, and the U.S. with an emphasis on the body as a personal resource of knowledge, resilience, “presence” and compassion. Participants developed core competencies in communication and conflict resilience for more effective leadership to meet today’s adaptive challenges. As a member of the Laban community, Heifetz has produced numerous on-site dance performances for the Global Water Dance (GWD) beginning in 2011, when with the sponsorship from Friends of the Earth, Middle East, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli children danced together on the Jordan river in affirmation of peaceful co-creation.
Heifetz is a Chevening Scholar (University of Manchester and Cambridge University) and recently published her systems-based model on human needs as a Map to Compassion in MIT’s Journal for Awareness-Based Systems Change. In her daily life, she practices Qigong and Tai Chi.
