The Journey Towards Understanding Human Needs as a Dynamic System

The Heifetz Matrix is a dynamic experiential model that suggests a fluid inter-relationship between human needs and emotions. It organizes needs into Needs Pairs, formulates the idea of Individual and Tribal needs, names Physical Aliveness as a need, suggests that certain emotions serve specific needs and offers ways of getting people safe.

The Heifetz Matrix creates a language to orient the mind, and a compass to work strategically with needs and emotions. The Matrix supports a range of applications from designing corporate culture to communicating through conflict.

Introducing The Heifetz Matrix

A Holistic Framework Consistent with Developmental Psychology

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A Systems Model

A systems approach to human needs wherein needs interact and react in predictable patterns beginning in childhood, and continuing throughout our lives to keep us safe, preserve relationships and support social survival. Wounded needs dislodge these patterns.

Hungers

Hungers are “inner drives to feel a certain quality and achieve a particular state” of being where we experience different variations of pleasure and pleasurable sensations. Hungers have two aspects expressed through their Needs Pair: One aspect that strengthens the group and one that strengthens the individual in the group.

Emotions Serve Needs

Emotions emerge as early childhood milestones because they express important building blocks in developmental awareness and individuation. Core emotions make our Hungers visible through nonverbal communication expressed by children.

Physical Aliveness

Physical Aliveness is our compelling drive to seek pleasure and vitality. The expression of life force is intertwined with embodied self-awareness, self-regulation and survival with the potential to expand towards curiosity, pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Hunger For Power

The Hunger for Power is satisfied by the needs for Autonomy & Fairness. Power can enable each person to assert their boundaries with courage and determination when grounded clearly, constructively and compassionately.

Fairness vs Justice

The distinction (Fairness vs. Justice) emphasizes sustainable relationships over retribution or punishment. Fairness tends to elicit emotion, which can restore and rebuild relationships. Fairness, unlike justice, fuels rules and rituals of reciprocity.

HUMAN NEEDS ARE NOT BUILT AS A PYRAMIDAL HIERARCHY

Identify the Hungers, Needs and Emotions

Perceiving any need at risk can trigger the defense response. The autonomic nervous system reacts as if one’s existence is threatened because all needs are designed to support survival. Resilience builds on our adaptive ability to see abundance and opportunity when facing unmet needs. Our personal freedom grows when we can hold the space between stimulus and response, to choose our responses versus acting out of reactive patterns. To think and feel at the same time is a great challenge.

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The MAP Journey: A Personal Development Tool to Transform Relationships - April 5th, 2025 in NYC

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Transform Your Relationships at the MAP Journey Retreat

Lago d’Orta, Italy | September 10th-14th 2025

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Who we are

About Deborah Heifetz

“Dr. Deborah Heifetz is an extraordinary woman with a background that is just as extraordinary.”

– Ladies Drive, no. 47, Fall 2019

Deborah Heifetz is a social anthropologist, dancer, and mediator with over 30 years of experience as a peace activist, social scientist, and somatic educator working at the intersection of inner and outer peace. She is a professional facilitator and coach who developed the Human Needs Map, Her model emerged over two decades through action learning, research, and engagement in conflict resolution, from international peacebuilding to personal relationships.

Building on her ethnographic study of gender and Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation during the Oslo Accords, Heifetz introduced the concept of non-mediated peacekeeping. She participated in Track II Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and co-founded an NGO focused on peace-building and community development in Pakistan. In 2012, she expanded her work into sustainability as a peacebuilding vehicle, co-founding the Israeli Hub of the Transition Network, an international grassroots movement.

A Chevening Scholar (University of Manchester & Cambridge University), Heifetz recently published her systems-based model of human needs as The Map to Compassion, in MIT’s Journal for Awareness-Based Systems Change.

What we offer

Courses Designed to Meet Your Goals for Personal Growth

Introduction to The Heifetz Needs Matrix

An introduction to the basic principles which make up the Heifetz Needs Matrix philosophy. More copy and a call to register for this course offering.

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HNM Advanced Study

Advanced 1-on-1 studies designed to allow for deeper exploration into the concepts of the Heifetz Needs Matrix. Additional sell copy and how to register go here.

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response is our growth and our freedom.”

attributed to Viktor Frankl

author of Man's Search for Meaning

Testimonials

What They’re Saying

"The Heifetz Needs Matrix (HNM) takes on the challenge to help people communicate through conflict and get to the other side with deeper self-awareness, compassion, curiosity, and wisdom."

This personal leadership work opened channels to authentic communication, creativity, resolution and growth… to see conflict triggers as doors to compassionate inquiry.

"The Heifetz Needs Matrix has expanded my capacity to think, feel and respond. It allows me to live with integration and thrive with complexity. I have been transformed by understanding myself more deeply."

Deborah Heifetz took our group to another dimension in terms of emotion, connection and interactivity.

"The Heifetz Needs Matrix is an eye-opener! With Deborah’s empathic guidance the matrix helped a group of high-powered entrepreneurs quickly identify self-limiting behavior and aided us in fulfilling our basic needs."

"Deborah is brilliant. She has lived and breathed this work for decades. She has brought forth an advancement to social theory mapping out how we as humans get our needs met. The MAP Journey is transformative and compassionate work. I have experienced it and loved it. I recommended it for my students - training as somatic therapists and movement educators. They all benefited, making big changes in body, mind and behavior, expanding their knowledge base for coaching, mentoring, facilitating and supporting change."