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Journey on an ancient feminine path of spiritual awakening and the ascent and descent of light through the Great Tree Within — a mystical map of consciousness attributed to Mary Magdalene that reveals how love, wisdom, power, healing, truth, vision, grace, and beauty can become embodied within you… and shared with a world that is in dire need of these divine qualities.
You’ll discover how sacred dance can help you shift from simply understanding these teachings to embodying them, catalyzing spiritual awakening that is rooted in the ascent and descent of light into your entire being and the world.
Mary Magdalene’s path anchored in sacred dance offers a radical invitation into the mystery of divine embodiment…
In The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, she speaks of a Great Tree Within whose branches bear the divine fruit of consciousness:
Love and compassion
Wisdom and understanding
Honor and humility
Courage and strength
Truth and clarity
Power and healing
Light, goodness, grace, and beauty
Each fruit on the Great Tree becomes available as you release the patterns that obscure it.
During this 7-week sacred dance journey, you’ll enter Mary Magdalene’s path of ascension Bough by Bough — moving through your chakras and exploring what each reveals about the nature, divine mystery, and awakening of consciousness, the body, the Divine Feminine, and your own deeper potential in a world desperate for the fruit of the tree.
Throughout this journey, you’ll:
Mary Magdalene’s feminine path of awakening, invigorated by sacred dance and conscious movement, offers a bold vision of spiritual transformation…
The invitation is not to transcend the body; but to experience your body as the place that allows spiritual awakening to happen… lived and real.
You are not asked to reject desire, emotion, vulnerability, power, or human experience.
You are invited to discover what becomes possible when these dimensions of yourself are recognized as sacred.
Imagine what could change when the wisdom of the Divine Feminine is no longer something you simply read about, but something you begin to feel moving through you.
Course Requirements: 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.
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.
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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
Saturdays, October 11 – November 21
10-11am PT
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