Desert Devotion

The Creative Work of Lisa England

Embodied sacred medicine from
the Middle East, North Africa,
Persia and the Silk Road

About Lisa

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I tend the places where ancient devotion still lives and breathes, in contact with the human body.

My work centers on ancient devotional practices as embodied medicines: systems of rhythm, sound, ritual and time that only reveal their original therapeutic intelligence when they are lived in the human body.I believe that these traditions — once prevalent from the deserts of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia — were never meant to be preserved as ideas alone. When practiced as they were designed, sacred technologies regulate the nervous system, orient ethical decision-making and restore a sense of inner alignment that modern substitutes rarely reach.As a devotional historian, sacred archivist, votaress, artist and musician, I work at the threshold between lineage and modern life. Rather than translating sacred traditions into concepts, I translate them into practice — that is, livable forms contemporary bodies can inhabit with depth, dignity and coherence, even across millennia. My work asks not “What does this story / ritual / music mean?” but “What does this story / ritual / music do when it is truly lived?”

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From 2021 to 2025 ...

I founded and led the Temple and School of Divine Radiance, an online space devoted to embodied devotional practice rooted in esoteric feminine wisdom long obscured within Jewish and Christian tradition. The school housed a wide range of ritual, musical, lunar and somatic teachings designed to be practiced rather than consumed. While the temple has now concluded its offerings, its work continues to inform everything I do.The philosophy that now guides Desert Devotion was not developed in theory, but forged through years of lived instruction, repetition, and transmission within the temple and school.Many students from traditional religious backgrounds described this work as deeply transformative — enabling them to reorient spiritual authority in the body; reclaim suppressed stories and rituals within their own traditions; and restore a sense of wholeness through voice, rhythm and practice.

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Today, the work continues ...

in new forms across the spectrum of the Abrahamic traditions and their devotional predecessors in Mesopotamia. One current project reweaves lunar liturgies by bringing the three-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian lunar temple of Eḫulḫul at Harran into contemporary digital space.I am also deeply influenced by the work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç, a Turkish Tasavvuf (Sufi) master and Central Asian shamanic practitioner who revived and articulated traditional music therapy practices from across the Ottoman world, Khorasan and the nomadic cultures of Central Asia. His work serves as a guiding lineage in my own efforts to restore ancient devotional elements — particularly music — to their original therapeutic function.At the heart of my ongoing work is a devotion to continuity — not as nostalgia, but as function. I remain attentive to the voices of desert ancestors that still speak through clay tablets, oral histories, ritual systems, lunar calendars and traditional music. These voices are not relics of a vanished world; they belong to living systems that still act powerfully upon the body when approached with care and discipline.

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Desert Devotion exists as a container for this work:

a place where ancient practices are allowed to remain practical. Here, devotion is not a belief system, but a way of living governed by rhythm, restraint and relationship with forces larger than the personal will. The aim is not revival for its own sake, but embodiment: allowing ancient 'sacred medicines' to once again do the inner work they were designed to do, in modern bodies and lives.The work shared on this site offers a small glimpse into a broader creative and devotional field expressed through temple teaching, medicinal chant, drum and flute music, visual art, and ritual practice. I remain committed to forms of transmission that engage the whole being — not only the mind.

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Contact

I welcome questions, ideas and shared stories.