House of Story & Sacred Dance
With Nao Sims & Sylvia V. Linsteadt
The Erato Sanctuary is home to the joint work of dear friends Nao Sims (sacred dance teacher, mother, beekeeper, gardener) and Sylvia V. Linsteadt (writer, singer, scholar of story and the ancient world). Named for the ancient Greek muse of love poetry Erato, our House of Story & Sacred Dance is a sanctuary for our combined devotions.
Through the Erato Sanctuary, we offer in-person sacred dance & story immersions in Canada, California and the UK, as well as online workshops. All of our offerings combine the practices of movement and creative, myth-engaged writing. In them, we dance, we listen to poems and stories told aloud, we dance some more, we write about what we have danced and what we have heard inside our bodies and imaginations, and then we dance again. We enter the warp and weft of the creative process, where soul meets body meets living earth, and in so doing we learn, and heal, and dream while we are awake.
You can expect to come away from our classes and retreats with beautiful new imaginal experiences carried in your body, psyche, and heart, and written down in poem/story form too!
Absolutely no dance or writing experience is needed to participate in any of our offerings. We see both crafts as doorways and as teachers—muses if you will— that help us enter directly into what Nao calls “wisdom body,” and what Sylvia calls something like “earth singing.” In fact, entering with a beginner’s mind around both dance and writing is probably the best way to receive the fullest experience of our work at the Erato Sanctuary. We are here to unlearn the patterns in our bodies that hold us inert, and to re-member the patterns that give us life. To move right down and in to the places in us from which creativity emerges—poetic language, inspired movement, joy, and love.
Upcoming Classes
June 23rd, 2024
10:00 am – 1:00 pm PST
On Zoom
NAO SIMS
Nao has been offering Sacred Dance Classes for 25 years, but her dance background spans over 35. Dance for Nao is not just a luxury reserved for celebratory occasions, nor is it solely a performance art—it is also a practice that invites us into the wisdom of the body and the innermost sanctum of being.
In her early 20's Nao met creative movement teacher and dancer, Irmi Vonhansen, who taught her that dance was a medicine for the soul, and therefore one of the healing arts. Nao's reverence for the wisdom body also brought her to study The Osteopathic Field of Awareness with her wise teachers Greg Blaney and Michelle Benjamin, and to immerse herself in the Body/Soul teachings of Marion Woodman~ Canadian author, teacher and analytical psychologist.
When Nao is not dancing, she is home on the east coast of Vancouver Island with her beloved family, dogs, honeybees and apple trees.
Sylvia Linsteadt
Sylvia Victor Linsteadt is an author, a scholar of ancient history and myth, and certified wildlife tracker. She studied Literary Arts at Brown University, graduating with Honors in 2011. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter.
She is the author of two collections, The Venus Year and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk (Nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2019) and The Wild Folk Rising, and the folkloric novel Tatterdemalion with painter Rima Staines.
Her works of nonfiction include The Wonderments of the East Bay, and Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area, which won the 2018 Northern California Book Award For Best General Non-fiction.
Sylvia has taught numerous writing, ancient myth and wildlife tracking classes and workshops since 2015, in both California and England. From creative writing mentoring with middle-school children, to adult animal tracking and poetry writing workshops in wild places, to “Witchlines,” her popular 2018 course devoted to the archaeomythology of Old Europe as it relates to fairytales and myths, and more recently her mythic writing workshop series started in 2020 under the name “Writing Down the Stars,” Sylvia loves weaving poetic language, myths, stories, and ecological rootedness into everything she teaches.
Testimonials
"It is one thing to dance and to write. It is quite another to be guided into the practice by mythic women, holding the space with such power and grace that anything is possible. The lifting, the unfolding, the heartwork - it was all there moving around and through us. Our weekend together was a devotional space, a space of exploration, of weaving, of being woven into story itself. To retreat in this way is to give yourself a most beautiful and magical gift and Sylvia and Nao facilitate this work with an elegance and ease that is most certainly other-worldly. I can't wait to join them again."
Heather Louise Porter, Australia
“Since I began dancing and writing with Nao and Sylvia, my life has been transformed through profound healing in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The luminary gifts that these two offer are boundless, tremendously nourishing and incredibly inspiring.”
Sophia Elliot, Oakland, California
“Pure magic! A deeply transformational journey that helped me land in my life in a new way.”
Rayann Gordon, Vancouver Island, Canada
“I am fairly new to the world of dance and certainly to writing. Nao & Sylvia created a beautiful space container before, during and after the Swan Stories retreat. I felt encouraged and supported in exploring my inner depths throughout and absolutely loved meeting like-minded souls to hold this space with. Nao & Sylvia hold something special in the combination of conscious movement alongside explorative writing. The weekend seemed to fly by yet at the same time lasted a lifetime, as if we entered a whole other dimension where time and space are irrelevant. I cannot wait for the next opportunity to be in this space again.”
Danielle Cullen, San Diego, California
“Both of these graceful women hold the role of sacred witness lovingly which in turn supports your internal journey. The mythic pathway weaves smoothly between the co-facilitators and their wisdom is complimentary. Three weeks after the Swan weekend, I am still working with what unfolded for me during this workshop/retreat. This is an endorsement to the richness and depth Nao and Sylvia support with your inner work. I’m ready to sign up for their next in person collaboration.”
Raquel Galindo, Vancouver, Canada
“Nao and Sylvia co-created a graceful, gentle, devotional vessel in which to open to deep presence in both movement and words. I felt lucky and grateful to participate in their beautiful collaboration.”
Sophia Rosenberg, Lasqueti Island, Canada
Past Workshops & Immersions
Swan Stories
A Two-Day Dance & Mythic Writing Immersion
In this two-day dance and mythic writing immersion on snowy Vancouver Island, we wove nests with our bodies and our words, gathering strands from different swan stories and myths as a way to explore our own relationship to devotion.
March 2nd-3rd 2024, Vancouver Island
The Bear Wife
A Dance Series led by Nao Sims
During this six-week series, we danced different elements of the fairytale The White Bear KingValemon, exploring themes of instinct and wilderness, civilization and domesticity, promises made and broken, and the alchemical union of opposites.
September 11th- October 23rd 2023, Online
"There is a fund of ancient knowledge in our very bloodstream, if we but knew it. The secrets of the runes, the megalithic stones, the mysterious process we call language—our ancient foremothers understood them– are there in the flowing blood, witnessed to by such oracles as myth, symbol, tradition, parable, fairy tale, ritual and legend. I am not talking here of what is known as the supernatural or of extra-sensory perception. No, I speak of the substantial bloodstream and the body that contains it, microcosm of the macrocosmic planet and all its running rivers. In every tradition, every religion, the body is the essential alchemical vessel in which everything happens..."
P.L. Travers – What the Bee Knows
