Unlock the Wisdom and Transformative Power of Rumi’s Original Persian Poetry (with English Translations) through Sufi Whirling, Persian Dance, and Iranian Tribal Dance.
Meet the Beloved in your own body as you viscerally experience Rumi’s original Persian poetry, transmitting light and love in your own way just as his verses emerged through the ecstasy of union, movement, and devotion.
In this sacred dance journey, you’ll:
- Experience Rumi’s original Persian poetry and English translation as wisdom transmissions for awakening, healing, and higher guidance
- Integrate Rumi’s teachings through Sufi whirling, Iranian tribal dance, and Persian dance — turning poetic insight into embodied awareness, flow, and presence
- Work with Rumi’s teaching on surrender, presence, and “holy madness” as a response to modern overwhelm
- Explore your body as a mirror of the Divine — where longing, seeking, and fulfillment become one
- Recognize how the Beloved emerges in your everyday life — and can guide you through challenge, uncertainty, and heartache
- Discover the deeper meaning of some of Rumi’s most recognizable poems — and how they unlock deeper dimensions of spiritual power when embodied
- Receive an introduction to Rumi’s life, lineage, and mystical path of love and devotion
- Explore the chaos of life as a catalyst for sacred unfolding
- Learn how love, in Rumi’s perception is the foundation of unshakable stability, presence, and clarity
Course Requirements: This course is ideal for those interested in Rumi, sacred dance, embodiment practices, Divine Feminine wisdom, mystical teachings, and spiritual growth — whether you are a beginner or experienced in movement or meditation. By the end of the course, you’ll have a stronger understanding and integration of Rumi’s deeper wisdom, and begin to experience yourself as a channel through which the energy of the Beloved can move, breathe, and express. It also offers trained dancers, somatic movement practitioners, psychotherapists, yoga instructors, creative arts therapists, and other movement practitioners the opportunity to deepen their professional skills.
Week 1: June 6, 10-11:30am PT
Embodying Rumi’s Poetry Through Sacred Dance — You Are the Divine Script
What if what you are seeking… is already alive within you?
In this opening session, you’ll enter directly into the heart of Rumi’s teaching through the verse, “A version of the Divine script you are… Whatever you seek, you are,” recognizing your body and being as the source of what you long for.
What does it mean that nothing is outside of you?
What happens when you stop seeking and begin embodying?
Can your body become a mirror of what Rumi calls sovereign beauty?
As you move, you’ll explore these deeper questions within the poem and gain a visceral understanding of why, when wisdom remains conceptual, it cannot transform us.
You’ll also receive an introduction to the life and lineage of Rumi — including the pivotal experiences of exile, devotion, and transformation that shaped his Sufi poetry, mystical teachings, and path of Divine love.
Week 2: June 13, 10-11:30am PT
Rumi’s Reed Flute — Experience the Breath of the Beloved & How Life Moves through You
With every breath, a messenger from the Beloved arrives. When you become empty like the reed flute, Rumi teaches that divine music flows through you, and can guide you through challenge, uncertainty, and heartache.
The heart of this week’s teaching is a poem from Rumi’s Divan-e Shams that explores how we meet the Beloved in our everyday lives.
Rumi points to a reality that becomes especially relevant in times of collective uncertainty and personal overwhelm: every moment carries a message. In this way, the chaos of life is not separate from the sacred, but part of its unfolding.
Through sacred dance, breath, and somatic awareness, you’ll begin to sense how your body is a channel for wisdom, intuition, joy, and transformation.
Week 3: June 20, 10-11:30am PT
Encountering the Sacred Visitor – Meeting Life with Presence, Receptivity & Sovereignty
Enter one of Rumi’s most disarming teachings from the Masnavi — a passage that quietly overturns how we tend to interpret our inner world. It begins with a simple, almost unsettling recognition: something is always arriving in you.
What we experience arrives with direction, timing, and a kind of hidden intelligence that is easy to miss when we are only trying to manage or escape them.
From this place, two questions begin to quietly open the practice of this module:
What if the very thing you’ve been trying to get rid of in yourself is actually the doorway to a deeper kind of coherence you haven’t yet learned to recognize?
And: what might change in your life if you stopped meeting your inner experience as a problem to solve?
You’ll explore these questions through sacred dance practices that awaken a deeper kind of listening… to that which is already speaking within you.
Week 4: June 27, 10-11:30am PT
The Heart as Alchemist: Rumi’s Call to Love in a Time of Inner & Outer Chaos
This week, Rumi asks us something radical: Can you stay open when you don’t know what’s going to happen next?
Your heart beats over a hundred thousand times a day in an unbroken rhythm of exchange, receiving and releasing, holding both what must be transformed and what is ready to be renewed. This natural alchemy inside the body becomes a mirror for how we are asked to meet life itself in times of uncertainty, emotional overwhelm, and cultural fragmentation.
Through sacred dance and a startling invocation by Rumi, explore a different kind of madness life that meets life without armor, without calculation, and without the need to dominate what is unfolding.
Experience the heart as a site of continuous transmutation — where darkness is not rejected but metabolized into clarity, and where experience is not judged as “good” or “bad,” but received as part of an ongoing spiritual process of becoming.
Integrative Experience - Optional Add-On:
The Embodied Rumi Audio Journey
NOW: $47
Deepen your experience beyond the live sessions with the Embodied Rumi Audio Journey Series — an immersive companion designed to anchor this work into your daily life. Through intimate poetry recitations, candid commentary, and transmissions by Banafsheh in both Persian and English, you’ll go deeper into the Rumi verses taught in all sessions, deepening embodiment and strengthening your connection to the Beloved.
Select this option at check out. Each week’s extended audio session will be available to you the Sunday following that particular class.
Learning Streams
Dance & Movement
A combination of new sacred movement and routines from the Dance of Oneness repertoire, Sufi whirling, Persian dance, yoga, seated meditation, and free-style dance.
Divine Feminine Wisdom
You will be initiated into the mysteries and wisdom transmissions of the Divine Feminine. She calls us to enter a harmonious relationship with all Her creation. By coming into loving conscious awareness in your body, you’ll dissolve inner divides and experience greater wholeness, vitality, joy, and presence.
Mystical Teachings & Science
Experience gnosis, or the experiential knowing of the Sufis and the Taoists, and drink from the poetic wellspring of Jalaleddin Rumi and other mystics. You’ll also explore parallels between these mystical teachings and insights from quantum physics.
Healing
Experience the full-on transformation that comes from discovering and releasing deep-seated beliefs that have blocked you from living your full potential. You’ll find the balm you yearn for to heal the wounded places inside your being. And, you’ll discover the medicine you carry within you to heal and bless our world.
Community
Through dancing and sharing, you’ll enter an energy field that supports each of us in finding our unique gift. Our own light becomes magnified when shared and merged with like-hearted people.
Dance Experience
This retreat is mixed level and open to ALL who love to move.
Additionally, this retreat offers trained dancers, somatic practitioners, psychotherapists, yoga instructors, creative arts therapists, and other movement practitioners the opportunity to deepen their professional skills.
Certification
This retreat fulfills 6 hours of the 200-hr Dance of Oneness® Certification Program.
Please find FAQs and read our health disclaimer here
What Students Say
How this Dance Journey Works
Each session is 1.5 hrs long including instruction and a community sharing circle after we dance
Sessions will be conducted on Zoom
Recordings of live sessions will be available up to 48 hrs post session in the student dashboard
Pre-registration is required
Registration includes permanent access to session recordings, music list, and course material
Tuition for Embodying Rumi’s Poetry: Sacred Dance & Rumi’s Original Persian Transmissions
4 Saturdays, June 6 - June 27
@10-11:30am PT
Permanent Access to Recordings
$197
About Banafsheh
Banafsheh Sayyad, MFA, Choreography and MA, Chinese Medicine, is a master sacred dancer, choreographer, and visionary teacher of spiritual embodiment whose life’s work is devoted to helping people activate greater health, awareness, and resilience through conscious movement. Internationally acclaimed for her pioneering fusion of spirituality and sensuality, she is the founder of Dance of Oneness®, a Divine Feminine lineage of healing and transformation uniting Sufi whirling, Persian dance, flamenco, mysticism, and Taoist wisdom.
Banafsheh’s forthcoming book, Dance of Oneness (St. Martin’s Essentials, March 2026), invites readers to rediscover the body as a portal to presence, vitality, and joy. Drawing from her own awakening through dance that transmuted the pain of exile from Iran, Banafsheh weaves Rumi’s poetry, feminine mysticism, and embodied healing into a radiant call to live as a channel of love and light. Born in Iran, she defied cultural taboos to create a feminine expression of Sufi whirling, transforming dance into a pathway of liberation, divine communion, and activism.
Through her non-profit Dance of Oneness and her transformative teachings, Banafsheh has inspired thousands across the world to awaken, embody love, and dance the divine into being.
