Banafsheh Sayyad – Cultivate a Body of Light With Sacred Sufi Dance
Bridge the sublime and the sensual through sacred dance — and become luminous.
Take root in the pulsating presence of life by honoring your true divine nature and the sacred vessel through which your life unfolds.
What You’ll Learn In Cultivate a Body of Light With Sacred Sufi Dance
In Cultivate a Body of Light With Sacred Sufi Dance, Banafsheh will guide you through the fundamental skills and competencies you’ll need to embody your sublime and sensual divinity and cultivate a body of light through sacred dance.
Cultivate a Body of Light With Sacred Sufi Dance will feature step-by-step teachings and experiential practices with Banafsheh. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to embody your sublime and sensual divinity and cultivate a body of light through sacred dance.
Module 1: Root Chakra — Enter the Body Temple
You’ll begin your journey with an initiation into the root chakra’s sacred truth: All is one. This is your link and your interconnection with all of life, as we are all part of one divine family. Every choice you make and every belief you hold exerts influence upon the whole of life.
Your wellbeing and your dance are dependent upon your connection with the Earth as Gaia, one of the supreme manifestations of the Great Mother — the more you revere and honor the Earth the healthier and more vibrant you will feel.
When you don’t honor the Earth, you are unable to honor your body and your bond with others… you’re actually unable to be.
As most of us are focused in our heads, the goal of this opening class is to actively remember you have a body and are one with the Earth.
Module 2: Sacral Chakra — Awaken Sacred Sexuality
The sacred truth of the sacral chakra is that sexual energy is sacred, a key aspect to your relationship to power.
Shame and guilt make you powerless, creating an energetic armor around your hips that traps your life-force. You’ll begin to loosen the armor in this class to liberate your life-force and free energy in your body and your energetic field.
The sacral chakra is also the realm of duality — male and female. The imbalance between masculine and feminine energies has tilted in favor of the masculine for eons, leading us to value doing over being… the active principle of yang over the receptive principle of yin.
You’ll dance to harmonize and marry the two flames — the intuitive, life-bearing, being aspect of your psyche with the active and intellectual doing aspect.
Ultimately, your dance becomes a lovemaking with the Beloved — the union of spirit and matter in your body in ever-expanding, sublime, wild, and tender ways.
Module 3: Solar Plexus Chakra — Flamenco to Activate Self-Authority
Rumi said, “life is the sound of your inner dialogue.” In other words, your life amplifies how you feel about yourself — and echoes your thoughts and feelings back to you.
You’ll explore the solar plexus’ sacred truth that self-love is your anchor… and learn to activate your center to access a point of light that can expand into a sun — whose radiance rests upon how you feel about yourself.
The more you regard yourself and your body with kindness and love, the warmer, and more radiant will the sun emanate in your body, your life, and out into the world. This is why when you don’t feel good about yourself, the world appears dim and gloomy.
You’ll also learn movements inspired by fiery flamenco that activate self-authority. As you claim your power you will realize there is no room for victimhood and blame.
Module 4: Heart Chakra — Open the Portal to the Infinite
Love is divine power and the most powerful state of being. This is the sacred truth of the heart chakra.
The midpoint of chakras, your heart chakra mediates between body and spirit where you can tune in to your subtle body, become more energy than matter, and enter the quantum field of oneness.
In this module, you’ll learn about the sacred physiology of the heart, and be introduced to the Sufi Path. For the Sufis, life is a love affair with the Beloved and the heart is the home of the Beloved — the “I AM” presence. Through falling in love with the Beloved, you polish your heart of the debris of separateness and step into your true self.
Your heart has an electromagnetic field that extends beyond the physical heart by about five to eight feet. What you create in your heart influences yourself and the world around you. This is why all healing begins in the heart.
Module 5: Throat Chakra — Whirl to Surrender to Love
The throat chakra teaches us to surrender personal will to Divine will. It is about finding your authentic voice, and listening — attuning to inner guidance. It bridges the head and heart to create coherence.
One of our toughest armors is around our throat. You’ll learn to loosen this armor to activate your voice and creativity.
You’ll be initiated into Sama (whirling dance) through a simple method that allows everyone access to this profound Sufi practice. An inner journey to the Beloved, Sama dissolves the limited mind into the unlimited ocean of presence, and you begin to simply be… a channel for compassion and wisdom.
The science of physics states that matter is actually space spinning. How profound to spin consciously, activate supernatural powers, and upgrade ourselves!.
Rumi’s poetry flowered while whirling in perfect rhyme and meter — a testament to the power of Sama to receive direct transmissions from the Source, and create body-heart-mind coherence.
Module 6: Third Eye Chakra — Activate the Pineal Gland & Experience Dance as Invisible Architecture
The Third Eye chakra teaches us to see only the truth. Considered the mother of all the chakras, this is where you are beckoned to open yourself to the unknown and expand your mind to gain wisdom that can guide your actions. As the center of intuition, you can access profound inner vision and insight when your pineal gland is awakened and activated… including dissolving the illusion of separation between you and the world.
“Walk with the universe,” say the Navajo. Walk in beauty, feeling the harmony between yourself, the world around you, and all of existence.
As you deepen your journey into Sama, you’ll activate intuition and insight, and begin to experience the stillpoint at the center of all movement at the core of your being.
By approaching dance as invisible architecture and becoming aware of the patterns as you move, your dance will become a powerful way to shift, influence, and shape consciousness.
Module 7: Crown Chakra — Reside in the NOW Beyond Name & Form
The sacred truth of the crown chakra is to live in the present moment. It requires courage, trust and a constant disidentification from our limited self… for to be in the present moment is to lovingly release the past.
Your crown chakra is your connection to spirit — the greater field of consciousness — that motivates you to seek an intimate connection to the Divine in everything you do. Sacred dance is about experiencing this connection.
During the concluding class, you’ll learn to move in spirals and integrate the learning from previous classes. The spiral is a sacred pattern seen in all living forms — from galaxies to our DNA molecules. It is the way nature resolves conflict and restores balance.
The visible world flowers from the invisible through the spiral. At the innermost level is divine mystery, and at the outermost, physical forms of matter.
The spiral is the most advanced human movement, engaging all the chakras — which are spiraling themselves.
