Certified Insight Meditation Teacher & Mentor | Queer Dharma Practitioner, Advisory Circle Member

Deanna Sophia Danger (they/them) is a somatic & embodiment guide, Queer Dharma practitioner, certified meditation teacher & mentor, certified embodied conflict facilitator, systems change facilitator and retired professional performance artist. Deanna’s approach to transformative healing & change finds ground within the intersection of SOMATICS + SOLIDARITY, motivated by co-cultivating the embodiment of liberation at the cellular + relational + systemic levels. Deanna’s survivor-led support as a working class, queer, nonbinary, neuroexpansive, chronically ill, IPV + trauma survivor, and former sex worker, weaves generative practices built on relationships of rawthentic dignity & belonging. As a somatic systems weaver, Deanna’s modalities work with the body and lived experience in context, leveraging healing & repair at root causes & conditions. Deanna works with LGBTQIA+ folks, femme folks, trauma survivors, neurodivergent folks and other care providers to alchemize their shame, disconnection, dissociation and collapse survival shaping into the medicines of embodied choice, connection, compassion and collective counter-oppressive action.

Deanna guides “STL QUEER SANGHA” a monthly, inclusive Dharma & meditation group for all LGBTQIA+ folks and co-conspirators cultivating a path of Spiritual Solidarity, and serves as an Advisory Circle Member here at Empowered Spaces. Deanna is accredited to teach Insight meditation through The Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California at Berkeley, with guiding, internationally recognized Theravada Buddhist meditation teachers, authors & psychologists, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Deanna has studied politicized somatics with Staci Haines of the Stozzi Institute, and receives mentorship guidance from Saraswati Pottekkatt who is in Buddhist chaplaincy, is a Certified NVC Trainer, has studied Somatic Abolitionism (Resmaa Menakam) & Somatic Extimacyⓒ (Dr Kesha Fikes), and leads systemically informed mindful relating & conflict groups.