Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Percent Fully Gone

April 21, 2026

Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Percent Fully Gone

Banafsheh Sayyad — April 21, 2026

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Can the body become a doorway to the divine—not by transcending it, but by fully inhabiting it?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Banafsheh Sayyad—master Iranian sacred dancer, choreographer, transformational teacher, and founder of Dance of Oneness—about her new Sounds True book, Dance of Oneness: Embody Love and Luminosity to Transform Your Life. A trailblazing innovator of Sufi dance forms previously performed only by men, Banafsheh draws from flamenco, Persian dance, Tai Chi, Sufi whirling, and her background in Chinese medicine to guide practitioners into deeper embodiment, healing, and spiritual presence.

Join Tami and Banafsheh to explore:

The Dance of Oneness modality—its three interwoven streams of movement, wisdom teachings, and energy healing
What it means to be “100 percent present and 100 percent fully gone”—and why both are essential
Whirling as a portal: the trance state it opens, the stillness it reveals, and what it means to be danced rather than to dance
The ascending and descending currents of energy in the body—and their marriage at the heart
How flamenco gave Banafsheh a form for grief, anger, and sovereign feminine power after leaving Iran
The three layers of the heart—and how movement can break through armoring to restore openness
Discipline as the foundation of surrender: why a sturdy chalice is what allows you to receive
A guided embodiment practice you can do right now

Whether you’re a seasoned movement practitioner or have never considered dance as a spiritual path, this interview is an invitation to come home to the body—and discover what can move through you when you do.

Listen now and begin dancing toward oneness. →

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.

Banafsheh Sayyad is a master Iranian sacred dancer, choreographer, transformational teacher, and founder of Dance of Oneness®, a certification program that explores dance as a path of embodied spirituality. Performing and teaching internationally, she has initiated thousands into the profound wisdom of the body. She is one of the few bearers of Persian dance in the world and a pioneer in creating a liberated feminine expression in the Sufi dance tradition. For more, visit danceofoneness.org.

Posted April 21, 2026

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Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.

Photo © Jason Elias

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Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Pe...

Banafsheh Sayyad — April 21, 2026

Can the body become a doorway to the divine—not by transcending it, but by fully inhabiting it?

Join Tami and Banafsheh to explore:

The Dance of Oneness modality—its three interwoven streams of movement, wisdom teachings, and energy healing
What it means to be “100 percent present and 100 percent fully gone”—and why both are essential
Whirling as a portal: the trance state it opens, the stillness it reveals, and what it means to be danced rather than to dance
The ascending and descending currents of energy in the body—and their marriage at the heart
How flamenco gave Banafsheh a form for grief, anger, and sovereign feminine power after leaving Iran
The three layers of the heart—and how movement can break through armoring to restore openness
Discipline as the foundation of surrender: why a sturdy chalice is what allows you to receive
A guided embodiment practice you can do right now

Listen now and begin dancing toward oneness. →

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Thomas Moore — September 8, 2026

Thoreau said he wasn’t paddling the Assabet River—he was on the Ganges. Was he being poetic, or was he seeing something we’ve lost the capacity to see?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Thomas Moore—bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Ageless Soul—about his new book, The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. At 85, Moore offers a reading of Thoreau that upends the one most of us were taught: not a naturalist cataloguing the woods, but a mystic looking for what he called the divine “lurking” there.

Join Tami and Thomas to explore:

Living daimonically: the guiding presence the Greeks called a daimon and the Romans called a genius—and how to tell it from your own ego agenda
Why Moore left the monastery after 13 years on the strength of a single morning’s clarity
“We are half human, half angel”—and what changes when you look at the people in your life through that lens
Musical time, Bach, and why playing the piano every day has made Moore think differently about dying
Why “the ultimate secret is to show the world who you are”—and why humiliation may be closer to the soul than confidence
Thoreau’s dark night: holding his brother as he died, and what it teaches about grief you never get over
The chapter called “Be Cold and Hungry,” and why the storms belong

Tami presses Moore on the parts she finds hard to swallow—and his answers are the heart of this episode.

Listen now, and find the cure. →

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, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

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Just One Question | Pānquetzani: How Do We Honor Our ...

Pānquetzani — September 3, 2026

Tami asks Pānquetzani how she would put words to the devotion she so clearly feels toward her ancestral line. The answer starts in the body. During her first postpartum womb adjustment, Pānquetzani felt an anger release that she is certain wasn’t hers — it was inherited, and it had arrived alongside the gifts.

That’s the premise of her work as a traditional healer of Mesoamerican and Mexican medicine: the gifts and the wounds come together, and tending the wounds is the job. Her ancestors survived colonization and violence, and they didn’t survive it only for themselves. So she owes them reverence — paid not in words but in living. Slowing down. Crying. Dancing. Sensual and sexual pleasure. All the things they may never have had the privilege to do.

Then there’s her son. At fifteen he taught himself metalwork — knives, swords, bows, tools. Pānquetzani showed the work to her eighty-three-year-old grandmother, who said, oh, your grandfather used to do that. A whole family trade back in Mexico, a shop, generations of it, and nobody had ever mentioned it. He found his way back to it because he was given room to follow what he loved.

In this episode:

Why ancestral gifts and ancestral wounds arrive together
Making your life an altar — reverence as something you live rather than something you say
Healing lineages backwards, and telling the dead their suffering wasn’t in vain
What thriving actually means: joy, energy, celebration, and getting your medicine to the people who need it
The inheritance beyond the physical — the energetic, mental, and social resources previous generations went without

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Pānquetzani. Find the complete interview in this feed or at soundstrue.com

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The Point of Insight | “Half Human, Half Mystery...

Tami Simon — August 27, 2026

Somewhere between the human being you know yourself to be and something you can only call mystery—that’s where this one lands.

In this Point of Insight, Tami Simon follows a thread that runs through decades of her own practice and hundreds of conversations on Insights at the Edge. It begins with somatic meditation and the discovery of the central channel—the flow of energy in front of the spine that yoga calls the sushumna, and that Richard Freeman once told her is the real yoga teacher. It arrives, years later, at a moment mid-interview when Tami felt something press up against her back and realized she had become, in her words, part regular human and part something with wings.

Follow along as Tami explores:

The central channel as a key that unlocks a prison of constricted thinking
What Richard Freeman and Qigong master Robert Peng each revealed about the inner teacher and the flow between ida and pingala
Energy intuitive Lee Harris and “the angel behind you”—an eight- to twelve-foot presence available to all of us
Why you can’t be a light warrior alone, and what that means for the years ahead
Thomas Moore, Thoreau, and learning to see the transcendent in the people you love
The chrysalis, the goo, and Tami’s obstinate refusal of everyone’s butterfly metaphors
What became possible only when she stopped clawing for something to hold and let herself fall back

For anyone in a stripped-down season, or anyone who has sensed there’s more to them than the person they can see in the mirror, this is an invitation to stop bracing—and lean into the support that’s already pressing against your back.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here:
Lee Harris, “Be a Future Human and Find the New”
Richard Freeman, “Living Yoga”
Robert Peng, “The Master Key: Awakening the Four Golden Wheels”

Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Percent Fully Gone

Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Percent Fully Gone

Banafsheh Sayyad — April 21, 2026

600 Podcasts and Counting…

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Also By Author

Banafsheh Sayyad: Being 100 Percent Present and 100 Pe...

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Thomas Moore: “Curing Our Cultural Lostness̶...

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The Point of Insight | “Half Human, Half Mystery...

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