Intrinsic Chiro’s Dr. Seraphina Freund, along with her daughter Liliana and partner Pryor, at right.
Seraphina Freund’s professional journey was preordained in many ways.
Raised in Silicon Valley by parents who were deeply engaged in the tech industry starting in the late 1970s – her dad a manager at National Semiconductor and elsewhere, including a stint on the standards committee of the renowned World Wide Web Consortium, and her mom a software engineer at a host of startups – Freund had logic puzzle books in her hands at a young age.
“Computer science was the vernacular at the family dining table,” she says. “It was almost impossible to do anything else.”
“I was brought up to think really analytically,” says Freund, who graduated from the computer science program at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, worked at Microsoft for a pair of summers during college and garnered the tech giant’s women’s scholarship, a rarity back then. “The world was my oyster at that time.”
After graduation, Freund worked at Vertical Networks, the startup her mom worked at, choosing to stay in Silicon Valley to be closer to her mom, who was battling cancer at the time.
But in the years that followed, Freund realized that though she was really good at writing code, it wasn’t where her passion was. She began a process of figuring out what was really important to her, all while witnessing her parents’ health deteriorating.
“I was really inspired to learn about holistic health,” she says. “At that time, I wanted to have a career in health but I didn’t know what it was, so I began this journey of exploration to find what my purpose was.”
That led to a holistic health certification program in New York City, becoming a certified holistic health counselor. But then life intervened.
Her then-spouse, a Russian national, had to move home to fulfill an immigration requirement, so the couple, along with their then newborn baby, spent more than four years in Russia, during which time she learned to speak Russian – her now 14-year-old daughter also speaks Russian – and otherwise adapted to being a new mom and navigating a new country.
When they returned, Freund was drawn to Mill Valley, their regular hiking destination prior to their move to the other side of the globe, and she set her sights on getting her doctorate in chiropractic care.
“I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to do the searching and seeking and that I’ve found the thing that really lights me up and that I am excited to get up and do every day,” says Freund, who opened her Intrinsic Health Chiropractic in February 2021 at 641-A East Blithedale Avenue.
“My goal is to educate people about and empower and inspire them to take charge of their health,” Freund says. “I’d like to be their advocate in that process. When you hear about chiropractic care, you think of back or neck pain. But chiropractors take care of your entire nervous system. I look at the whole person, including their emotional and mental health, holistically.”
Freund draws an analogy with dental hygiene. “We’re very well trained that we need to take care of our teeth regularly and have them checked before there is a problem, but unfortunately we don’t have that same way of looking at the spine. If you tend to it, then you can remain healthy and your nervous system can remain healthy.”
“When the spine is not healthy and when it is degenerating and when it’s out of alignment, that can create inflammation and dim the body’s intrinsic health capacity and your brain isn’t communicating with your body the way it needs to. Chiropractic care is everything.”