Musical Process as Medicine
Active music therapy for the devotional instrumentalist
What happens when you become the instrument of your own music therapy? Or surrender to the healing medicine of your own sound? More than you might think possible … even if you’re relatively new to your instrument.
“The divine has always been accessed musically, through story, through art, in so many different ways … All of this is a different way of getting out of agitated consciousness …”
— Joshua Michael Schrei,
in a conversation with Omid Safi
One of the most powerful qualities of music
is its capacity to open a portal for us — a doorway into a different dimension of consciousness, or into parts of ourselves we rarely access: parts that are more peaceful, more connected, less agitated.
One way to engage this portal is through receptive sound therapy, which is reflected in the typical Turkish Music Therapy environment where live musicians perform while the audience relaxes and receives the “medicine” of the vibrations, often while lying down.
Another way is by making the music oneself.
But therein lies a paradox — is this performance, or medicine, or both?
As a devotional instrumentalist,
I find it easy to get caught in a traditional performance mindset that obsesses over technical mastery. In the right context, of course, such an orientation is a gift. The drive to improve can lead to a more coherent sound that allows listeners to remain inside the portal rather than falling out of it psychologically due to small musical irritations or distractions.
But for devotional instrumentalists who perform music therapy on themselves — the value of the sound lies less in its technical perfection and more in the energetic, vibrational, and emotional transmission it carries.
The question is …
Are we as musicians humble enough to believe that the music passing through our own body / instrument is “enough” to heal us exactly as it is, in this moment? Even if it doesn’t fit the definition of a polished or performance-worthy sound?
This requires a cultivation of fundamental trust in the instrument, beyond our own skill set. Or as Ney instructor Niri Sadeh has expressed it, a willingness to let each note pass through our instrument exactly how it wants to, without judgment.
In my time on Oruç Baba’s path so far,
I have had few opportunities to be the passive recipient of music therapy. (Though last summer, I was blessed to experience beautiful sessions at a camp held by Bengüşu Gield, an organization launched with Baba’s blessing by his European students.)
So far, the bulk of my music therapy experience has come through process: my own daily wrestling with Sufi ilâhîler, with Turkish and Central Asian instruments, and with the makams themselves as both teachers and therapeutic tools.
It didn’t matter that I am a fledgling musician, at least with these instruments and musical traditions. Many times I have had only myself as a resource or guide. In such moments, I’ve noticed something significant about my own self-therapeutic explorations:
Even my most rudimentary sounds — broken phrases, uneven breath, imperfect tone — shifted something fundamental inside of me.
The quality of the music itself, I noticed, was not the primary determiner of healing or effectiveness. What mattered more was that I showed up to the music consistently, with enough humility to be influenced by the vibration I was producing.
In other words, the most important thing was that I came with a willingness to be reordered inside by my own sound.
Over the past year, the music I have made for myself, with myself, and by myself has ushered irreversible change into my life.
My own music softens my edges.
Insights and intuitive awareness rises more easily after a session.
Over time, the music has made the hardest places in my soul more porous, allowing Deeper Presence — or what I would call Divine Light — to enter.
Of course, most seekers of sound therapy would prefer to receive their music from highly skilled musicians. That makes sense. But this does not negate the power of even the most rudimentary sound made by oneself, for oneself.
During the years when I ran the Temple of Divine Radiance, I consistently encouraged participants to develop a relationship with at least one instrument … even one as simple as the desert frame drum, or their own voice … and to observe the effects of a daily practice over time.
Their responses were often remarkable.
Participants reported the quiet dissolution of trauma-based emotional and behavioral patterns they long had assumed were permanent. Others described a steady sense of groundedness and well-being that replaced years of malaise or even depression, without dramatic effort.
I believe these are examples of the power of active sound healing: a therapeutic effect unlocked not only by listening to the music, but also by becoming the generator of the sound itself.
Today’s audio musical sample — which is not Oruç Baba’s, but my own — is meant to be a case in point:
I recently recorded this Sufi ilâhî, called Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni, based on a poem by the medieval Anatolian poet Yunus Emre:
According to my Turkish teacher Seda, this poem remains widely beloved across Türkiye to this day. I myself have seen it recorded online in contexts ranging from intimate devotional gatherings to contemporary performance spaces.
For me, this ilâhî has been the primary “medicine” of the past month or two.
It comprises seven verses (in the version I have, at least). Here is an example of the first verse as translated by Seda, which are addressed to God in the first person:
Aşkın aldı benden beni
Bana seni gerek seni
Ben yanarım dün ü günü
Bana seni gerek seni
Love has taken me from myself,
What I need is you, only you.
I burn day and night,
What I need is you, only you.
I first encountered the poem through my Turkish language studies. Fortunately for me, Yunus Emre wrote in simple, vernacular Turkish that remains accessible many hundreds of years later. I began working with his poems as a way to widen my Sufi vocabulary. Memorizing Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni has been a challenge, though I am nearly there.
At the same time, I taught myself a traditional ilâhî melody associated with this poem and began playing it daily on my ney. At times, I would listen to other artists play this exact tune and first analyze their technique and style, then play along with them. This simple version by Ismail Metin is one of my favorites:
Finally today, I brought these elements together, recording all seven verses with voice, along with a ney melody, and a frame drum rhythm, which I then edited into the final piece, which I shared above as an audio file.
I publish this first Turkish devotional recording of mine not because I consider myself a skilled performer. (I do not.) Rather, I share it because I want to make the active music therapy process visible.
We are so conditioned to believe that music must reach a certain level of technical perfection before it becomes valid or share-able. But transmission does not wait for perfection. It happens through the sound as it is, in the moment it is made.
While listening to my audio recording may not be especially moving or therapeutic for you as a passive listener — and may even be uncomfortable if you are a trained musician — the process itself was deeply transformative for me.
That was the whole point anyway.
At the heart of my engagement with this beautiful ilâhî is its title:
Your love has taken me from myself.
Over the past months, I have been wrestling with devotion as an elemental force that reorders reality. A relationship that does not reorder something in us is not devotion. (Or so I have concluded thus far.) Devotion is transformative by nature. Without transformation, devotion itself has never truly been present.
This, I think, is part of what Yunus Emre is pointing toward:
Love that takes a person from themselves is the highest force there is. What else but love could move us beyond what Joshua Michael Schrei so eloquently terms “agitated consciousness?”
As I worked with the poem, I moved through stages: resistance, then longing, then recognition as that reordering began to take shape in my life in my tangible ways.
All the while, I kept practicing. Kept singing. Kept working on breath, phrasing, tone. Kept attending to the complexities Turkish vowels and the elusive softness of ğ (yumuşak ge). Kept doing all the small, technical things required when learning music in another language.
One by one, these small accumulated disciplines shaped and changed me — even if I ultimately did not master the technical quest itself.
And all the while, the music was doing its work.
Not through perfection, but …
through participation.
Oruç Baba noted in a 2006 talk:
“Tedavinin amacı, dengesi değişmiş bir organizmaya eski dengesini kazandırmak veya, var olduğu umulan bir denge kazandırmaktır. Tedavi, dengeyi sağlama yönündeki çalışmalardır.”
“The aim of therapy is to restore balance to an organism whose equilibrium has been disrupted, or to establish a balance understood to be inherent. Therapy is the work undertaken to bring about this balance.”
To this I would add: the work can be done on us, through receptive listening. Or it can be done through us, by means of active participation.
Fewer people consider that the latter is possible. But my own experience, along with what I have witnessed in others, suggests that the restoration of balance Baba describes can unfold through either path.
What has been the result of all this musical work (so far) with Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni?
During this period of working with this beautiful ilâhî, I have entered a significant phase of endings in my life.
Patterns I struggled with for years are resolving. Long-standing questions are being answered. I find myself gradually closing a ten-year chapter, while becoming aware of something new (albeit as yet inscrutable) forming alongside my life.
The work with Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni has softened me within this transition. It has allowed me to meet these endings with more openness, and much more grace.
It has also shown me that full cooperation with the Divine Love reordering my life may be the most important practice available to me right now.
By way of tangible example …
After completing the recording of this ilâhî, I lay down to rest and entered a state between waking and dreaming. In that state, I found myself in a place in southeastern Türkiye that has been deeply significant in my life.
My connection to that place had dimmed over the past year as I established my life in Egypt. But in that moment between wakefulness and sleep, something reopened.
A layer of sadness dissolved. I understood that the connection had not ended — it had simply gone dormant while I entered a period of change. I saw old relationships with the earth, the people, the animals, the culture, and even the governance of the place come back to me again in beautiful new forms.
When I woke, I felt a deep sense of reconnection — as though I had returned literally to this small town in Urfa Province and been welcomed once more.
I understood that the love I felt for this place, and experienced in relationship with it, had “taken me from myself,” as Yunus Emre writes. That version of myself then went down to Egypt (where I now reside) to pass away and be reborn in a new form.
Now, I have passed through that rebirth … which will make it possible (at some future time, known only to the Divine as yet) to return to the place I love with a different embodiment, perspective, and opportunity for connection and contribution.
This is the first time in many long, weary months that I felt a sense of rest in my body around my relationship to this place, and a settled, grounded confidence that the story has another chapter.
That altered inner state remains with me even now.
What brought about this amazing experience of integration?
Not thinking.
Certainly not ruminating, raging, or going to talk therapy.
Rather, I received this healing / integration via methods that are just about as old as they come:
Playing a flue and a drum …
and singing.
More specifically, by singing a song that says: Your love has taken me from myself.
Nothing I have ever done through thinking alone has produced the kind of release that making music for myself can, and does:
Especially the Jewish Kabbalist vocal exercises that focus on the mysticism of the Hebrew letters. And Islamic music from Türkiye and Central Asia, which adds a full orchestra of instruments to my “vibrational medicine chest,” along with Sufi poetry, Turkish makam, breath, and rhythm.
This music medicine can be received passively, yes. But enacting it oneself brings a different kind of power.
It feels fitting that this work centers on Yunus Emre,
the medieval dervish wrote in simple Turkish to reach ordinary people — in a time when most other “serious” poets around him wrote in languages like Persian that were only accessible to the elite.
I imagine Yunus Emre as someone living his devotion out loud — through words, rhythm, and sounds that continue to move across centuries. A dervish who, in finding his own poetic way out of “agitated consciousness,” paved the path for many others to do the same.
My recording will not last as long as Yunus Emre’s poem.
But what the process of making that recording has done in me, will last a lifetime.
And that is enough.
Until next time …
Yolun açık olsun.
May your path be open.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lisa England a writer, musician, and independent scholar of Desert Devotion who follows migratory lineages of mysticism and music across the Middle East and Silk Road. Her work explores intersections where the region’s many spiritual traditions meet through voice and instrument, influence one another, and reveal deeper continuities beneath their distinctions. She also hosts the Jewish Sufi Pilgrim podcast.
Currently, she is focused on music as medicine across medieval Central Asia and the Ottoman world, with particular attention to contributing voices and therapies often overlooked in modern transmission — such of those of Jews and women. She honors the legacy of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç as a spiritual guide in this work, and a steward of medicinal music traditions from Türkiye and the Silk Road.