Dancing Rumi’s Poetry: Embodying the Original Persian Transmissions
June 6 – June 27, 2026 | Saturdays | 10:00–11:30 AM PT | Zoom | Mixed Levels
What would it be like to meet the Beloved in your own body? To encounter that which you have longed for here.
This is the premise of sacred dancer and embodiment teacher Banafsheh Sayyad’s new 4-week online course, which illuminates a path to ecstatic communion with the Beloved through Rumi’s original Persian transmissions and sacred dance.
You’ll unlock the wisdom and transformative power of Rumi’s original Persian poetry (with English translations) through Sufi whirling, Persian dance, and Iranian tribal dance. Yet, this isn’t a dance course… it’s a path back to your soul through your body.
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 whirling and the ecstasy of union, movement, and devotion.
Most people have never actually encountered Rumi’s poetry as it was originally written…
What we’ve inherited are interpretations — smoothed, simplified, and often stripped of the raw, paradoxical intensity that lives in the original Persian.
Rumi’s true voice is not only beautiful and poignant… but disruptive.
It’s devotional to the full experience of being human, seeking not only to offer wisdom and relief to the heart but to reinterpret what it means to be a divine being in human form. When experienced in its original language and energetic form, and danced — just as Rumi danced while transmitting it — we receive the true transmission of Rumi’s poetry.
This is medicine for our time. In a world wrought with division, uncertainty, injustice, and chaos, Rumi’s original teachings call us back into direct contact with the sacred — where wisdom, truth, courage, and beauty are remembered as our true essence.
Through sacred dance practices such as Sufi whirling, Persian dance, and Iranian tribal movement, this wisdom can take root in the body.
Just as Rumi’s poetry emerged while whirling and communing with the Beloved, you are invited into that same current — where the body is recognized as a holy vessel and becomes a channel for the sacred.
Here, you don’t just study the Beloved… you begin to move, breathe, and create as a channel for what the Beloved wants to express through you.
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
Early Bird Discount:
Register by Thursday, May 14 at 11:59 PM PT to receive early registration savings.
Integrative Experience: The Embodied Rumi Audio Journey Series
Optional Add-on:
Deepen your experience beyond the live sessions with an immersive audio companion designed to integrate Rumi’s teachings into daily life.
Includes:
- Intimate poetry recitations in Persian and English
- Commentary and transmission by Banafsheh
- Guided reflections on each week’s Rumi verses
- Practices to support embodiment and ongoing connection
Who This Is For
This course is open to all levels, including beginners.
It is especially relevant for dancers, somatic practitioners, psychotherapists, yoga instructors, creative arts therapists, movement educators, and spiritual seekers.
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.
