About The Listener
Who's walking the path here with you on Substack?
If our guide through the world of Turkish Music Therapy is Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç, then who is the listener bringing his work here to Substack? I say listener because writing for a platform like this is not so much a role as it is a way of relating to sound.
This work is written by me, Lisa England. My life and practice have unfolded along nomadic lines, shaped by long periods of movement across countries and cultures, and by a recurring, unavoidable question: Where is home? For those who live this way long enough, the question ceases to be philosophical. It becomes practical, spiritual, and embodied.
It is the central question of my life.
Within nomadic cultures, home is not always a fixed place. So it has been for me throughout my journeys. Home has become an orientation — something carried with me rather than defined by or possessed through geography. Over time, I noticed that certain musical and devotional traditions function in the same way: as inner centers that remain available even as language, place, and circumstance shift.
This recognition sits at the heart of what I have come to call Embodied Sacred Medicine — the therapeutic application of ancient devotional practices that work directly with the human nervous system, perception, and orientation. Not as belief, but as lived, regulating experience.
Countries, houses, communities, religions, and cultures have passed through my life like a Silk Road caravan — or perhaps more accurately, I have passed through them. What has stayed with me, and supported my own inner resilience through ongoing change, are devotional practices such as prayer, chant, text recitation, bead counting, liturgy, iconography, meditation, holy-day ritual, and sacred dance.
I have come to believe these practices were never meant to function as religious tools alone, but as powerful technologies for human repair and evolution.
For nearly a decade, I have been translating ancient devotional practices into livable medicinal forms that contemporary bodies can inhabit with dignity, while honoring the distinct heritage of each tradition. During the last five years, I ran the online Temple and School of Divine Radiance, devoted to embodied sacred medicine and feminine wisdom within Jewish and Christian contexts.
Out of this work, I encountered Middle Eastern rhythms, and later the makam system. That encounter led me to ask a simple question: Can makams be used to heal the human body? No one I asked — even those with advanced musical training — seemed able to answer. So I set the question aside.
Then, at a critical moment in my life, as I returned to a nomadic path after a period of rootedness, Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç stepped forward as an ancestral voice. The first time I encountered his work, I knew I had found both the answer to my question and a guide into a deeper, more specific form of Embodied Sacred Medicine. He became my sheikh and also my baksı, modeling a wise integration of Abrahamic devotional practice and shamanic knowledge. Through his guidance, my focus has shifted fully toward documenting and preserving lineages of embodied sacred medicine within pre-Islamic and Sufi contexts.
Outside of this Substack, my work with Embodied Sacred Medicine comes together under the name Desert Devotion — a framework that understands the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as arising from shared desert conditions: movement, uncertainty, oral transmission, and reliance on presence rather than permanence. Within this landscape, music is not ornament or expression alone. It is a regulating force, a carrier of knowledge, and a means of orientation.
For me, the discovery of kalbin yolu — the path of the heart — arose not as an abstraction, but as lived necessity: a way of partnering with uncertainty rather than resisting it, and of remaining oriented while in motion.
I write on this Substack from that orientation — with the understanding that Music Therapy in this tradition is not only an Embodied Sacred Medicine capable of stabilizing the human being during periods of transience and change, but also a portal into the path of the heart as expressed in Tasavvuf (Sufism).
The emphasis here is not on personality or visibility, but on listening as discipline — listening to sound, to silence, to the body, and to the Real as it reveals itself over time. Essays are always accompanied by musical examples because these traditions were never meant to be encountered through words alone. Sound is not an illustration of the ideas; it is their source.
When I first encountered Baba’s work, I did not speak Turkish and had been in the country only a handful of days. What reached me was not understanding, but orientation — a felt coherence that preceded explanation. In nomadic life, recognition often comes before comprehension.
That recognition led me to learn Turkish, not as an academic pursuit, but as an act of listening. Language became another way of approaching sound, rhythm, and meaning without shortcut. Over time, this drew me deeper into Türkiye itself, including extended periods among tribal and rural communities where circulatory life, oral transmission, and relationship to land remain active realities.
The desire to hear Baba directly — without subtitles or paraphrase — eventually led me to translate select teachings into English. I undertook this work not as abstract scholarship, but as devotion to accuracy and presence: a refusal to replace encounter with interpretation.
In this way, kalbin yolu has unfolded for me as sequence rather than concept. Listening led to language. Language led to presence. Presence led to responsibility.
My work as The Listener here emerged from that process — not as an identity, but as a commitment: to stay close to sound, to move slowly enough for meaning to reveal itself, and to let orientation come before explanation.
This work is offered independently and without institutional affiliation.
Yolun açık olsun.
May your path be open.