About The Center

Pragmatic, Creative, and Contemplative Experiences Onsite and Online

The Center for Deep Self Design (CDSD) is what’s called a third place—a creative and contemplative space that bridges life and work, enhancing and replenishing both.

We are an educational collective that offers participatory training and coaching around self-authorship, work/life redesign, creative courage, collaborative fluency, and ethical leadership. CDSD is not a self-improvement community. It is not a religious community. It is not a community that encourages magical thinking. We offer pragmatic and functional methods that cultivate self-expression, self-awareness, self-compassion and self-responsibility.

Our founder established an internationally-known visual facilitation and fluent collaboration company in 2007 and through that organization, our team has designed and facilitated hundreds of multi-sensory learning experiences in environments around the world, with groups ranging in size from five - 5000.


Our core mission is to support learners in stepping into their greatest potential and highest function by becoming familiar with and friendly toward their unique Inner World, befriending and dissolving unnecessary obstacles toward self-actualization, relationship, career fulfillment, and joy.


The great, transformative technologies are the ones that make the invisible visible.

—Beau Lotto, Ph.D.

What Makes Us Interesting

We Unlock Potential Faster through Experiential Techniques that Address the Inner and Outer Worlds

At CDSD, we combine multi-sensory facilitation techniques with established methods of inner science to address both internal and external terrain. We change the state of individuals, teams, organizations, and cultures by improving the quality of hearts and minds, working in tandem with material reality. In our offerings, we emphasize and prioritize exploration of the Inner World because when you pause to discern the roots of most challenges, this truth becomes self-evident:

We cannot sustainably solve complex problems without addressing the ultimate ground from which they spring: our human conditioning.

The journey with this community is, therefore, one of self-examination, internal literacy, emotional honesty, and resilience. The process of becoming a more wise, compassionate, and confident agent of change is rigorous and rewarding, and we support you along the way using techniques that make the invisible visible. Our creative and contemplative practices are tested based on science, time, or scale as well as practical, observable outcomes. They accelerate embodied cognition and personal insight:

  • Internal Family Systems

  • Visual Literacy

  • Inclusive Design Thinking

  • Facilitated Contemplative Silence

  • Gamestorming

  • Emotion as Data

  • Somatic Language

  • Applied Improvisation

  • Mindful Self-Compassion

Our commitment to experiential learning enriches this path and also honors the diversity of learning styles. This is part of how we unlock your potential faster. In service to that aspiration, we also curate and collaborate with high-integrity wisdom practitioners, as well as innovative facilitators, to nourish community alongside skillful means.