Remain connected to your deeper authenticity, stay healthy and transmit grace to others during one of the most emotionally intense times of the year.
Now through November 21, gift this course to someone you love and receive 50% off on your own enrollment.
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The holiday season can easily pull us away from ourselves. Between the expectations, preparations, gatherings, and pressure to make things meaningful or special, we can lose touch with what we truly need and what feels most important to us.Â
This is a time of joy and celebration, nostalgia and remembrance, connection and belonging, but also loneliness, family complexity, and the challenge of staying true to yourself amid competing expectations. Beneath the familiar rhythms of the season, something deeper is unfolding.Â
We may find ourselves celebrating cherished traditions while longing for what has changed, surrounded by loved ones while feeling unexpectedly alone, or wanting deeper connection while struggling with the familiar dynamics that pull us away from ourselves. These experiences remind us of our wholeness, the wholeness of others, and of life and are doorways into greater self-awareness and spiritual depth. These sessions offer sacred dance practices and practical spiritual tools or hacks for staying grounded and centered in yourself and open to the grace of the holy days regardless of what comes.
As the astrological energies of this season invite reflection, transformation, and a renewed relationship with the sacred, you’ll discover ancient and practical ways to remain connected to your inner authenticity, connect without over giving or overextending, and be a calming presence for others through movement, ritual and reflection practices.
Drawing on the contemplative wisdom of Iranian mysticism and the transformative teachings of the Divine Feminine, this four-session sacred dance course invites you into a richer experience of the season. Through movement, embodied spiritual exploration, and practical tools for daily life, you’ll learn to navigate relationships with greater grace, listen more deeply to your inner wisdom, and cultivate a sense of connection that can sustain you through life’s changing circumstances.
You’ll learn to honor your needs, meet relationships with greater awareness, cultivate a deeper sense of belonging, and create space for genuine nourishment.
Throughout this course, you’ll discover how to:
Most importantly, you’ll have a renewed sense of how to honor yourself while remaining present to the people, relationships, and experiences that make this time of year meaningful.
Come as you are, with whatever the season is bringing. Give yourself the gift of movement, reflection, and reconnection — and discover what it means to be Grounded in Grace.
This course is suitable for anyone who is interested in accessing the spiritual power of love and awakening through sacred dance. 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.
The holiday season can easily pull us away from ourselves. Between the expectations, preparations, gatherings, and pressure to make things meaningful or special, we can lose touch with what we truly need and what feels most important to us.Â
Through a sacred dance journey of listening, grounding, and returning to the heart, you’ll learn to stay connected to your own authenticity and inner wisdom — and rediscover a sense of being supported by something deeper than the demands of the moment. You’ll also learn a Pause and Listen practice to use whenever you feel scattered or pulled in too many directions: What matters most right now? What would it mean to honor that?Â
The holidays can bring us face-to-face with familiar family roles, old wounds, unspoken expectations, and ways of relating that we may have outgrown but still find ourselves repeating. We might become the peacemaker, the caretaker, the one who keeps everyone happy, or the one who retreats to avoid conflict. Even when we have done considerable inner work, being around certain people can draw us back into old conditioning before we realize what is happening.Â
Through a sacred dance journey exploring the dance between connection and self-honoring, you’ll embody the movements of reaching out, receiving, creating space, standing in their own ground, and returning to the heart. You’ll explore how to remain open without overextending yourself, and how to create space without closing yourself off. To bring this awareness into everyday interactions, you’ll learn the Pause, Feel, Choose practice, which asks: Am I responding from an old pattern, or from who I want to be now?
For many people, the holidays intensify the longing to belong. We may be spending the season alone, missing someone we love, grieving changes in our family or friendships, or navigating relationships in which we don’t feel truly seen. Sometimes loneliness comes not from being physically alone, but from feeling disconnected in the very places where we hope to experience closeness. This module offers space to acknowledge these experiences without minimizing them or rushing to fix them. It invites you to explore a deeper sense of belonging — one that begins with how you meet yourself and can expand into your relationship with the sacred, the natural world, and the people with whom genuine connection is possible.
Through a sacred dance journey of opening the heart, receiving support, and moving between solitude and connection, you’ll explore the experience of being with yourself without turning away from your longing for others. Beginning with gentle, inward movement, the dance gradually opens into gestures of reaching, receiving, and connecting with the larger circle of life. Alongside this, discover the Hand on Heart, Open to Connection practice for moments when loneliness arises: What kind of connection am I longing for, and what is one small way I can move toward it?Â
Even with the best intentions, the holidays can leave us depleted. Full schedules, social commitments, disrupted routines, and the desire to make everything work for everyone can cause us to overlook the very things that sustain us. We may push through tiredness, neglect our own nourishment, or return to familiar coping habits when the demands become too much. This final module explores what it means to care for yourself while participating in the season’s celebrations, relationships, and responsibilities and how you source nourishment from within: how you feed yourself, rest, move, connect, create space for stillness, and make choices that support your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Through an integrative sacred dance journey exploring the rhythms of giving and receiving, movement and stillness, engagement and retreat, you’ll practice listening to what is needed in the moment rather than forcing yourself to maintain a particular state. You’ll also receive the Three Breaths of Grace practice. Used before a gathering, between commitments, or whenever overwhelm begins to build, this small ritual helps translate spiritual intention into everyday action.Â
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 & ScienceÂ
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.Â
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.Â
Dance Experience
This course is mixed level and open to ALL who love to move.Â
Additionally, this course offers trained dancers, somatic practitioners, psychotherapists, yoga instructors, creative arts therapists, and other movement practitioners the opportunity to deepen their professional skills.Â
4 Unique Journeys – Learn at Your Own Pace
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 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.
Dance of Oneness® is the dance I had been waiting to do all my life. From a young age I had danced, read watched and followed Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Joffery Ballet, Margie Gillis, Gabriel Roth and many more than I can name that moved in a way that spoke to me. Dance of Oneness® is the culmination of all that I had been drawn to in the other dance forms which seemed to be missing the main ingredient. Banafsheh has found the missing thread which is the opening to the Beloved, to truly give yourself in movement to the Divine energy that resides and moves through all of us from the Earth and the Heavens. I felt that for the first time in our dancing. It also reintroduced me to my own body, allowed me to accept my imperfections and for the first time in years swim naked in the ocean. All of this and more.
Janet Sawatsky
Transformative! Banafsheh skillfully takes us step by step to an experience of dance that brings me deeper into my body, to peace, feeling grounded and open to beauty and to love. Most importantly for me, the process brought me to experience a lovingness toward myself. I appreciate her presence of gentleness and fierce passion, and I’m inspired to bring my best self into my world.
Mary Regis