Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Percent Fully Gone
4/21/202656 min
What does it mean to be fully here and fully surrendered at the same time? Tami Simon speaks with Banafsheh Sayyad—master Iranian sacred dancer, choreographer, transformational teacher, and founder of Dance of Oneness—about whirling as a spiritual practice, the marriage of discipline and surrender, embodied healing through movement, and how presence itself can become a form of devotion and resistance.
This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.
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First 90 secondsTami Simon· Host0:00
The Sounds True Podcast Network.
Banafsheh Sayyad· Guest0:02
[gentle music] I'm not interested in being in control of what I'm doing entirely because I want to be danced. I want this, this other energy to move through me, and if I'm held and controlled, that can never happen. If I'm on the other side, then there's th- that tension doesn't exist between being here and being gone.
Tami Simon· Host0:31
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Banufsheh Sayyad, master Iranian sacred dancer, choreographer, transformational teacher, and founder of Dance of Oneness. She is a trailblazing human, an innovator of Sufi dance forms previously only performed by men. Banufsheh invokes the ancient roots of dance, devotion, prayer, and adoration. She's taught Persian dance at UCLA, toured and performed internationally with her dance company, Namaah, has created a film with Andrew Harvey on dancing Rumi's journey of the soul. The film's called In the Fire of Grace. And she's the author of a