Principles and Trainers

Founding Principles

The Bio Self-Emergence Institute supports transcendence from a contracted, conflicted model of being to an expanded, compassionate model of being.

Transformation will be supported through the understanding of the totality of the inter-relatedness of the biological body, the emotional life of the body and the brain, and the vibratory rate of the human energy system.

The Bio Self-Emergence Institute was formed as a treatment, educational, and training center for personal and professional transformation through the study of Bio Self-Emergence - The Science of Sensology Theory and Practice. Clinical services offered include a variety of complementary psychological, marital, massage, cranial sacral, and body energy services.

Donna Richoz Harber, MSW, CBT, Founder

During her twenty-five year professional career, Donna Richoz Harber’s passion for life and being in the body fueled her to develop her inter-related treatment model and theory of practice: Bio Self-Emergence - The Science and Energy of Forming. Donna founded the Bio Self-Emergence Training Institute in 2004. Currently, sixteen therapists and professionals are in training at the Institute. She conceived the inter-relatedness model in 1999, began researching how the three main systems that make us human interrelate, and, in 2000, started teaching Bio Self-Emergence classes.

Donna’s clinical training began at Trinity College, where she received her BA in Psychology and minored in Bible. She continued her formal education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she received a Masters in Clinical Social Work. Donna has completed a ten-year training program in Bioenergetic Analysis and is a Certified Bioenergetic Analysis Therapist. Donna has also completed a six-month introduction course to Biodynamic Cranial Therapy.

Donna conceived and taught her first Women's Identity Group in 1987. This program was implemented in two states and gave women a basis for a beginning sense of self and a frame of reference for a positive body image. Building on this concept, Donna researched and developed (in 1989) one of the first school-based prevention and identification programs for young women at risk of eating disorders.

In 1989, while serving as the clinical director for a clinic in Minnesota, Donna developed an Adolescents Out-Patient treatment program. The program gave the clinic a credible outreach program that enabled the clinic to expand. As a result of this expansion and the need to provide brief treatment, Donna developed specialty groups for adolescents, couples, women’s issues, anxiety, and depression.

She went on to serve as a Site Director of three outpatient mental health clinics, which gave her a unique experience providing staff training. In 1996, Donna began her own private practice, which gave her the time and space to take a deeper, closer look at the theoretical underpinnings of traditional psychotherapy. This resulted in the awareness of the need for and the forming of Bio Self-Emergence Theory.

Since 1996, Donna has developed and taught "Women’s Identity" series, "Bio Self-Emergence" (all four levels), "Walking the Body’s Labyrinth", "Passion, the Body, and Food", and "Energies of Parenting". She continues to be driven by the broadening range of therapeutic applications for the inter-related treatment modalities of Bio Self-Emergence.

Donna is currently the president and the primary trainer of the Bio Self-Emergence Institute.