Transform Your Relationships at the MAP Journey Retreat
Lago d’Orta, Italy | September 10th-14th 2025
Join us for a 4-day immersive retreat designed to expand your capacity for relationships with ease, clarity, and joy. Led by Dr. Deborah Heifetz & Judy Gantz, this experience combines the MAP (Mental, Affective, Physical) Model with fascia-based movement (MFE) for deep self-awareness and connection.
Overcome relational conflicts
Discover your core needs & patterns
Experience embodiment through movement
What You’ll Experience
Discover Yourself on the MAP Journey!
Explore the four Hungers and eight core Needs that shape your relationships. Transform how you communicate for more ease , emotional intimacy and clarity.
Locate yourself on the MAP (Mental, Affective, Physical) a human needs model created by Dr. Deborah Heifetz to recognize the tensions and bolstering dynamics between your needs. Throughout the retreat you will work with the Hungers and Needs to gain more power and self-awareness.
Through fascia movement practices (MFE), somatic mindfulness, and compassionate inquiry, you’ll uncover unconscious patterns and transform conflict into deeper connection. The MAP Journey opens new opportunities for growth, intimacy, and balance.
Transform Your Relationships at the MAP Journey Retreat
Heifetz Matrix: A Human Needs Map
This matrix started with Deborah Heifetz’s doctorate fieldwork 30 years ago, where she witnessed the negotiation of relations between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. Her goal in seeking and supporting peace-building has continued and evolved into a systems-based human needs model inspired by a central question: How can human beings effectively, compassionately and strategically “think with feeling”?
The Map organizes eight core Needs into the four Hungers—Love, Meaning, Power, and Survival—each supported by fundamental emotions. By exploring which Needs and Hungers feel at risk and listening to what our emotions are trying to communicate, we can break reactive patterns, cultivate emotional awareness, and improve communication.
The MAP approach integrates our thoughts, emotions and physical responses to our needs as an experiential journey of self-discovery.
What is Movement for Equanimity?
Sensory perception (interoception)
Slow, rhythmic movement
Yoga/Pilates inspired moves
Movement for Equanimity (MFE) is a fascia-focused movement practice developed by Judy, who is certified in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies and holds an advanced teaching diploma from Karin Gurtner’s FAMO-Fascia Movement program.
Rooted in 30 years of teaching dance, functional anatomy and somatics, this practice enhances kinesthetic and somatic awareness through slow, rhythmic movements inspired by Yoga and Pilates. By engaging the nervous, endocrine, and myofascial systems, MFE fosters greater body awareness, grounding, inner stability and ease. It also reveals how our defense patterns manifest in our tissues while providing resources for deeper presence, pleasure, and joy in our bodies.
Strengthening our somatic felt-sense through MFE helps anchor the emotional and mental discoveries from The MAP Journey, supporting lasting transformation.
Your Facilitators
Deborah Heifetz, Ph.D., M.A., CMA
is a social anthropologist, dance ethnologist, mediator and professional facilitator who supports personal and interpersonal change processes and peacebuilding.
Deborah developed the concept “non-mediated peacekeeping” during the Oslo years (1994-2000). She co-founded the peace-building and community development NGO – HiMaT – with projects in Pakistan, and actively engaged in the international grassroots movement known as the Transition Network. Deborah spent years on faculty at Tel Aviv University educating graduate students of International Conflict Resolution and Mediation in “Culture, Conflict and Community Development,” working at the nexus of inner and outer peace. The Human Needs Map, explored at this workshop, developed from her life work and search to support thinking with feeling. The model has been published as a Map to Compassion in MIT’s Journal for Awareness-Based Systems Change.
“Human needs interact as a system of dynamic forces which both support human life and stir inner and interpersonal conflict. Yet, many of us grow up without knowing our needs, let alone with the capacity to name them. I was not aware that I had needs behind my passionate emotions nor the gift to feel deeply what others feel. My life journey has led me into many channels of research, training and practice culminating in one central question: How can we infuse agency and ignite compassion in ourselves and others to ease suffering and human conflict? The HNM has helped me make sense of my own life. I hope that it can help you find more clarity, self-understanding and joy in your relationships”.
Judy Gantz, M.A., CMA
is the Director and Founder of the Center for Movement Education and Research (CMER), a 501c 3 non-profit organization (2003) and retired UCLA dance professor.
From 2005-2016 she directed the CMER Dance/Movement Therapy Alternate Route Training program in California. Her academic teaching at UCLA in the department of Dance, World Arts & Cultures from 1982-2005 focused on Laban Movement Analysis, Somatics, dance kinesiology and creative dance/movement education. Judy has taught at numerous universities in the United States; internationally, she has taught at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and programs based in South Korea, Russia, China and Germany.
As a certified Laban Movement Analyst (CMA), Judy has taught in LMA Certification programs; holds a Diploma as a teacher at an advanced level from Karin Gurtner’s FAMO fascial movement program. She applies these fascia movement principles to personal development as a means for self-discovery and self-regulation. Judy is a dancer who values creativity and expression; and she leads with clarity, empathy and the power to invoke personal exploration in others.
“I am interested in helping others discover the power and meaning that comes from living an embodied life. The MAP has transformed how I communicate with my partner and has given me a greater capacity for understanding myself and others. I firmly believe that we need tools to navigate our global world humanely. Conscious embodiment develops empathy and is a source for integrating social/cultural awareness and emotional intelligence. It is vital to our humanity that we connect to the wisdom within our conscious bodies and become literate in the psychophysical aspects of movement.”
The Venue
This international seminar center Centro d’Ompio, is located around the alpine Lake of Lago d’ Orta. The retreat center is surrounded by beautiful garden areas and excellent spaces for walking, quiet moments, and our outdoor activities.
Do I need prior experience in movement or mindfulness?