FAKIR MUSAFAR is known worldwide for his fifty year's research and personal exploration of primitive body decoration and rituals. Fakir has introduced concepts and practices for the "body-first" approach to explore spirituality in art, body modifications, SM and what he calls "body play". Fakir's practices have been shown and his views expressed in the 1985 film DANCES SACRED & PROFANE, , in the 2013 film BODY OF GOD, and in ReSearch publications 1986 book MODERN PRIMITIVES (a word Fakir coined in 1979 to describe himself and a few kindred spirits). Fakir's interviews and writings have been included in many anthologies and scholarly works like: BODIES UNDER SIEGE, Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (1996 by Armando Favazza, M.D., a psychiatric text published by John Hopkins University Press); Mark Thompson's LEATHERFOLK; Freedom Press' VOICES FROM THE EDGE; Random House's Villard Books edition of DIFFERENT LOVING; Valerie Steele's 1996 Oxford University Press book FETISH. He has been labeled by various media as "Father of the Modern Primitive Movement". For nine years he published his own photo magazine BODY PLAY & MODERN PRIMITIVES for those in our culture "who hear the sound of a different drummer." BODY PLAY ONLINE is currently available on his WEBSITE

A Shaman, Artist, Master Piercer and Body Modifier, Fakir has played a significant part in the revival of body piercing, body sculpting, branding and other body-related practices for personal expression, spiritual exploration, rites-of-passage, healing and reclaiming. He is a co-developer of the modern body piercing techniques in general use today. He is also Director of FAKIR BODY PIERCING & BRANDING INTENSIVES, the only courses of instruction of their kind in the world.

According to the IASP (International Association for Study on Pain) "pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with (or described in terms of) a potential or actual tissue damage." By peripheral nerve terminals (there for the thermal pressure sensitivity etc.) through peripheral nerve fibres arrive at the central information system on pain, starting from the entrance in the spinal cord (dorsal horns) where already there is a first important information integration through specific pathways to the brain, where numerous other areas contribute to the experience of pain. In the personal experience of pain we recognize a sensory component for discriminating features (intensity, location, duration of the stimulation painful) and an affective (emotional) component (unpleasantness of pain). For each of these components are activated at the same time various brain structures (PAG, locus coeruleus, thalamus, sensory and motor cortex, anterior insula, cingulate cortex and others), who together form the so-called "Pain Matrix". Pain is a subjective multidimensional experience: different types of painful experience, ranging from physical to social pain (e.g. bereavement, an abandonment etc.) are mapped in the various components of the Pain Matrix, which provides sensory encoding and emotional pain. According to some philosophical currents pain is an intrinsically "private" and personal/subjective experience. Modern neuroscience studies otherwise show as the social species of pain extends to basic levels of neural sensory processing, and how the pain can be modulated by control systems (endorphins, the endocannabinoid system)