Sufi Music Therapy
Welcome to this fascinating universe of knowledge that we are happy to share with all who are interested.
We begin the incursion into the dimensions of Sufi Music Therapy with a trip to Edirne, an ancient medieval city three hours from the city of Istanbul. There Sultan Beyazid II built a hospital complex that included the world's first psychiatric center. We discovered in the complex the origin of the application of certain musical sounds with the purpose of influencing the mental field of people with different types of disturbances.
We did a concert, we began to offer Sufi Music Therapy at the Fray Bernardino Psychiatric Hospital, and we witnessed a magnificent result. Groups of 60 patients reported the benefits of the effects they experienced when feeling and listening to music. We decided to move forward in the direction of making this wealth accessible in Latin America. And we announced to our community in Mexico City that the next thing would be to offer Sufi Music Therapy courses.
By chance, we were invited to a retreat in the mountains of Germany to deepen Sufi Music Therapy with Aziza Güvenç and the Tumata group created by the master Oruç Güvenç, who was the main exponent in the West and even in Turkey of the healing application of music developed mainly in the Sufi communities of Central Asia. It was an enriching and inspiring experience that led us to another link of commitment to this path of learning and transmission.
Together with the dervish musicians Ahmed Yunué and Alejandro Haqq Albores, we have already developed a basic introductory curriculum. With them you will be able to discover the fascinating universe of this current that comes to us from Turkey, from the bowels of Sufism that emerged in that part of the world during the Ottoman Empire. It comes to us from the first psychiatric hospital in the world that was ordered to be built by Sultan Beyazid II and that generated as a result an explosion of effective healing methodologies based on a worldview of a very comprehensive and sensitive look at what were the mysteries of the combination of soul and the human body. One of them is precisely Sufi Music Therapy. And now we will be able to access this ancient resource and enjoy its fruits in the Spanish-speaking world, in Latin America.
Amina Teslima al Jerrahi
Testimony
"The fundamental idea behind Sufi Music Therapy is extremely simple. If you change the way you feel, you can change the way you think. While eliminating anxiety completely isn't easy, I've found a simple solution that calms me down every day. My racing thoughts stop, I can focus and concentrate better".- Chetna Sharma -
Sufi music therapy is based on the musical system called makam. A makam is a combination of notes defined by the space (interval) between them. Through centuries of practice and development of this system, multiple benefits of each combination of notes were identified, as well as their nature. From the 17th century, Evliya Çelebi, in her Traveler's Book, left testimony of how in the Darüşşifa, the Edirne hospital complex, makam music was part of the treatment of patients; likewise, he describes how each makam has times in which it is most propitious and regions of the body in which it has resonance, among other things.
Today, and for some decades, the practice of makam as a healing system has re-emerged both in Turkey and in a good part of Europe, and scientific studies that support its benefits are multiplying throughout the world.
