Alchemy of Oneness: Sacred Dance & the 3rd Force
Transform Inner Conflict into Wholeness Through Sacred Movement, Sufi Whirling & Embodied Mysticism
What if your exhaustion, overwhelm, and inner conflict were not obstacles — but doorways into a deeper kind of unity?
Alchemy of Oneness: Sacred Dance & the 3rd Force is an immersive 4-day retreat with spiritual embodiment teacher and sacred dancer Banafsheh Sayyad held at the luminous and natural sanctuary of Menla Retreat Center, that guides you into the living intelligence of your body, where opposites are no longer in opposition — but become the birthplace of healing, clarity, wholeness, and transformation.
In a world that often pulls us into fragmentation, this is an invitation to return to coherence and back home to ourselves.
Experience this for yourself by joining us on June 11, at 11:30am PT for an IG Live with Banafsheh and Menla Retreat Center, Finding Coherence in a Polarized World, to explore how we can begin to gently hold complexity, stress, and uncertainty without becoming exhausted, overwhelmed, broken down, divisive, defeated, dismissive, or even frozen.
Banafsheh will also guide us in a practice to reconnect with our center and experience a deeper sense of coherence, presence, and wholeness.
IG: @menlaretreat or @banafshehdance
Banafsheh’s retreat offers a container for deep inner renewal, embodied awakening, and spiritual remembrance. And to discover what the Sufi mystics called the alchemy of the heart — where paradox becomes harmony, and life itself becomes prayer in motion.
Through sacred dance, Sufi whirling, meditation, breath, and conscious movement, you will be guided into what Rumi called the field beyond opposites — where a third force emerges: a living coherence that cannot be accessed through thinking, but only through embodiment.
This is not about performance or technique. It is about becoming a vessel for something greater to move through you. Strength and softness, grief and joy, stillness and wildness.
Instead of choosing between them, you will learn how to let them meet — and transform — within your body.
What You Will Experience
- Enter ecstatic embodiment through sacred dance, awakening vitality, sensual presence, and inner unity
- Learn and deepen the practice of Sufi whirling as a direct experience of oneness and interconnectedness
- Transform inner conflict into coherence, activating what mystics call the “third force” of creation
- Release emotional holding patterns and experience heart-opening clarity, freedom, and renewal
- Work with mystical poetry, feminine embodiment practices, and teachings from sacred lineage traditions
- Reconnect to a deep sense of belonging — in your body, in community, and in life itself
Drawing from the teachings and methodology in Dance of Oneness: Embody Love & Luminosity to Transform Your Life, this retreat weaves ancient mysticism, embodied practice, and contemporary understanding of human transformation into a living experience of awakening.
You do not need prior dance experience — only a willingness to listen inwardly and move honestly.
Who This Is For
- This retreat is for those who are ready to move beyond inner conflict and into embodied coherence.
- For those who feel the call toward healing, depth, spiritual embodiment, and authentic presence.
- For practitioners, seekers, movers, healers, and anyone longing to feel fully alive again in their body.
The Invitation
To stop fighting within yourself, stop splitting into parts, and to discover what becomes possible when everything within you is allowed to belong.
This is where movement becomes medicine. And where wholeness is no longer an idea — but a lived experience.
Join us: July 30 – August 2.
Menla Retreat Center
375 Pantherkill Rd,
Phoenicia, NY 12464
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.
