Turkish Music Therapy | Latest Articles
This page archives reflections on the pentatonic scale and Turkish makams as medicine; the work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç; and the lived therapeutic effects of sound, drawing from Central Asian, Ottoman, and Sufi traditions. Most recent content appears first. All articles can be read on Substack
7 February 2026
Remembering Rahmi Oruç Güvenç
Sound, trust, and the restoration of a living lineage
Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç (1948–2017) was a Turkish lineage holder of Tasavvuf (Islamic Sufism), a baksı (Central Asian shamanic practitioner), musician, composer, ethnomusicologist, music therapist, and poet. But more than this, his students remember him as an İnsan Kamil—a realized human being—not because he claimed spiritual authority, but because he embodied inner coherence and unconditional love.
7 February 2026
Ground Precedes Path
Finding orientation within Turkish Music Therapy
Many people from Western backgrounds 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. With orientation, the music can be received as it was intended: as a living system of nervous system regulation, inner healing, and companionship with the Real.
7 February 2026
An Opening
The landscape we are listening into
Merhaba ve hoş geldin (Hello and welcome) to the Turkish Music Therapy Substack: a place to explore the power of sound, woven through culture and planted in the soil of Central Asia — tempered by time and tradition into a therapeutic modality trusted by generations of nomads and sultans, later fragmented, then remembered for a new generation by the recent work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç. The musical traditions gathered here arise from circulatory worlds: Central Asia, Anatolia, Persia, the Ottoman sphere: regions shaped for millennia by nomads, semi-nomads, travelers, mystics, traders, healers, and pilgrims.
About the author
All articles on the Turkish Music Therapy website and Substack are written by Lisa England, a nomadic writer, listener and practitioner devoted to embodied sacred medicine from the desert traditions — devotional practices that orient the nervous system and cultivate relationship with the Real. Her work draws from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, with a recent shift toward Turkish Music Therapy and its Central Asian and Sufi roots. She honors the guidance of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç as a transmitter of these powerful music lineages.
© 2026 by Lisa Walker England. All rights reserved.