Ground Precedes Path
Finding orientation within Turkish Music Therapy
Why Orientation Comes First
Many people encounter Turkish Music Therapy, Sufi music, or Central Asian healing traditions through fragments: a rhythm, a chant, a historical anecdote, a technique. What is often missing is orientation — a sense of why these musical lineages exist, what kind of human being they were shaped to serve, and what inner capacities they are meant to cultivate.
In traditional contexts, this orientation was rarely delivered as a formal lecture. It was transmitted implicitly through culture, rhythm, repetition, and lived life. For those raised within nomadic, circulatory, or pneumatic societies*, the ground was already prepared. The music landed where it belonged.
For modern Western listeners, however, that ground is often absent.
*Pneumatic societies:
groups whose default orientation is shaped by breath, movement, immediacy, and responsiveness to unseen forces — rather than permanence, enclosure, or fixed structure.
Westerners tend to be highly literate in ideas, but less practiced in orientation.
We are accustomed to information without cosmology, technique without context, and experience without sequencing. As a result, profound traditions can be encountered prematurely — felt, even loved — without being properly situated in the worldview that makes them intelligible and sustainable.
The essays that follow are offered as a foundational orientation.
They are not a comprehensive history, nor an academic survey. Rather, they attempt to articulate the underlying logic of these musical lineages: their nomadic roots, their relationship to nervous system regulation, their evolution through makam and Ottoman culture, and their intimate connection to Tasavvuf — the path of the heart.
This material is placed first because it answers a simple but essential question:
What kind of human being was this music made for?
Without this grounding, the music risks being reduced to technique, aesthetic, or spiritual mood. With it, the music can be received as it was intended: as a living system of orientation, healing, and companionship with the Real.
If these essays feel slow, dense, or foundational, that is by design. Orientation precedes movement. Ground precedes path.
Only then can the music do its real work.
Yolun açık olsun.
May your path be open.
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This essay is accompanied by an example of the music being discussed, because these traditions cannot be understood apart from direct encounter with sound. Please take time to play the provided video, above.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa England is a nomadic writer, listener and practitioner devoted to embodied sacred medicine from the desert — devotional practices that soothe and orient the nervous system; increase inner resilience to change; and cultivate a deeper relationship with the Real. Her work draws from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystical traditions, with a particular focus on Turkish Music Therapy and its Central Asian and Sufi roots. She honors the guidance of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç. This Substack is offered independently and is not affiliated with any institution transmitting Turkish Music Therapy. Lisa lives and works between desert cultures, listening for what endures.