Mary Magdalene’s Map of Ascension through the Great Tree Within
September 19 – October 31, 2026 | LIVE Online | Mixed Levels
Register by August 22 for a Discount!
What if the path to awakening isn’t about leaving your body behind—but discovering the sacred wisdom that’s already within you?
Enter a transformative seven-week journey inspired by Mary Magdalene’s path of ascension and the Great Tree Within—a mystical map of consciousness that guides you to awaken through the body, sacred movement, and the wisdom of the Divine Feminine.
Rather than simply learning about spiritual transformation, you’ll be invited to feel and embody it.
Through sacred dance, Sufi whirling, Persian dance, movement meditation, mystical teachings, and conscious movement, you’ll explore practices designed to cultivate greater presence, vitality, connection, healing, and embodied awareness while awakening qualities of love, wisdom, courage, truth, grace, and beauty.
No advanced dance experience is necessary. Come with a willingness to move, explore, and discover your body as the vessel that allows spiritual awakening to happen.
Throughout this Journey, you’ll:
- Discover the symbolic fruit of each Bough and what becomes available as consciousness moves beyond the patterns— the vessel through which Divine consciousness can become lived
- Awaken the root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, Third Eye, crown, and soul star chakras as energetic gateways into the journey
- Engage the elements of earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and the transpersonal realms through embodied movement and awareness
- Explore Sufi whirling and Sama as a practice of listening, surrender, devotion, and communion
- Discover the descending spiral of light, learning not only to reach toward higher consciousness but to receive and embody what you encounter
- Experience Persian and Iranian dance traditions as gateways into sensuality, vitality, presence, and embodied wisdom
- Release patterns of judgment, ignorance, intolerance, arrogance, fear, illusion, and attachment that can obscure your deeper nature
- Explore holy sensuality and the sacred intelligence of desire, pleasure, receptivity, and the life force
- Open meridians and selected acupoints associated with the chakras as additional pathways into embodied awareness
- Discover how spiritual awakening can become grounded in your relationships, creativity, purpose, service, and everyday life
Journey Through the Great Tree Within
Week by week, you’ll explore Mary Magdalene’s mysterious Great Tree Within, moving through its Boughs to discover the divine fruit that is there — as pathways into different qualities of consciousness.
Journey through love and compassion, wisdom and understanding, honor and humility, courage and strength, truth and clarity, power and healing, and ultimately light, goodness, grace, and beauty.
Along the way, you’ll engage with chakras, the elements, sacred movement, meditation, Sama and Sufi whirling, Persian and Iranian dance traditions, meridians, and embodied awareness.
The invitation is not simply to ascend toward the light, but to bring light down into your body, relationships, creativity, purpose, service, and everyday life.
More information: https://danceofoneness.org/e/mary-magdalene-map-of-ascension
Who Is This Journey For?
This mixed-level course is open to everyone who loves to move and feels called to explore sacred dance, embodied spirituality, and the wisdom of the Divine Feminine.
No advanced dance background is required.
Trained dancers, somatic movement practitioners, psychotherapists, yoga instructors, creative arts therapists, and other movement practitioners are also invited to deepen their professional skills through this immersive experience.
Special Integration Offering
Select this additional option at check out.
Deepen your journey beyond the live sessions with Unlocking the Hidden Mysteries of Mary Magdalene through Movement — an immersive 4-part video journey recorded in France by Banafsheh during a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene.
Through onsite video footage, candid commentary, and transmissions by Banafsheh in both Persian and English, you’ll gain a rare view into the path Mary walked following the resurrection and the hidden mysteries of her transmissions and journey unlocked by Banafsheh through sacred dance.
All videos in this series will be accessible once class begins on September 19.
Register here: More information: https://danceofoneness.org/e/mary-magdalene-map-of-ascension
Your Journey Begins September 19
Dates: September 19 – October 31, 2026
Time: 10:00–11:30 a.m. PT
Location: LIVE Online
Level: Mixed Levels
Register by August 22 for a special discount: https://danceofoneness.org/e/mary-magdalene-map-of-ascension
Awaken what has been waiting within you. Move beyond understanding into embodiment—and discover what becomes possible when the light you seek becomes something you can carry into the world.
If you feel called to experience the Divine Feminine through sacred movement, embodiment, and spiritual practice, reserve your place and join us for this seven-week journey.
As a special additional offering, you can also deepen your journey beyond the live sessions with Unlocking the Hidden Mysteries of Mary Magdalene through Movement — an immersive 4-part video journey recorded in France by Banafsheh during a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene.
All videos in this series will be accessible once class begins on September 19.
Member
Banafsheh - Dance of OnenessEvent MemberIranian-born master dance artist and transformational teacher, Banafsheh communicates the universal message of Sufi mysticism and Divine Feminine wisdom in a passionate yet serenely meditative way. Her dance is an interplay between trance and directed movement, precise yet abandoned and unrestrained. Her explosive yet fluid movement is sensual and ritualistic, uniting the feminine and masculine energies, body and soul, light and dark in a marriage of opposites. She invokes the ancient roots of dance as devotion, prayer and adoration while blazing an original trail in contemporary dance with her masterly fusion of high level dance technique and spirituality.
Her mesmerizing offering of the timeless Divine Feminine inside a contemporary gypsy dervish beckons all to engage, serve, exalt and honor our sexuality as sacred. She is one of the few bearers of authentic Persian dance in the world, an innovator of Sufi dance previously only performed by men and a pioneer in contemporary Persian dance, all of which characterize the form she has created called Dance of Oneness® geared towards empowering women and men through sacred embodiment.
Internationally known for her innovative movement vocabulary and high artistic and educational standards, she draws from her extensive background in Sufism, Persian dance and ritual, Tai Chi and flamenco to present a new form, rooted in tradition yet universal.
Banafsheh’s movement is comprised in part by the Persian alphabet translated into gestures and movement, which when put together dances out words and poetic stanzas, mostly taken from the works of the great mystic poet, Rumi, whom she has studied extensively, resonating with his fierce yet gentle essence that beckons each and everyone to break through conformity and limitation to find their individual glory.
Banafsheh comes from a long lineage of pioneering performing artists. Her father, the legendary Iranian filmmaker, theater director and actor, Parviz Sayyad, hailed as the Charlie Chaplin of Iran, is the most famous Iranian of his time. Banafsheh is a recipient of the prestigious James Irvine Foundation grant in Dance. She holds an MFA in Dance from UCLA where she taught Persian dance. She has studied with some of the great masters in dance and choreography including Antonia Rojos, Victoria Marks, David Rousseve and Donna Uchizono. Also an acupuncturist, she draws from the Taoist view of the internal functioning of the body to uncover the healing, rejuvenating aspects of movement. Banafsheh’s solo and ensemble work with her dance company, NAMAH has been presented extensively in festivals and by dance presenters in North America, Europe and Australia where she has gained tremendous audience and critical acclaim. She recently performed at the closing night of the Festival of Sacred Arts in Madrid at Teatros del Canal. Her 2011 dance film In the Fire of Grace with author and scholar, Andrew Harvey traces Rumi’s journey of the Soul in dance.
