Our Sacred Earth: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

00:01 Growing up with a guru living downstairs

00:05 The silent Sufi path, and the space between the notes

00:09 What silence actually is

00:11 John Cage, Suzuki, and silence as expression

00:13 A deep ecology of consciousness

00:16 The primordial covenant

00:21 Nature communion, and a waterfall in Brazil

00:23 The eye of unity, and the subtle bodies of the heart

00:36 Listening walks, and walking slowly enough to be trusted

00:41 Clock time, empire, and Earth time

00:47 Dreams, emptiness, and time that isn't linear

00:53 Grief, love, and re-sacralizing the world

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Born in London in 1979, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee was formally trained from the age of fifteen in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order by his father, Sufi Master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. In 2014 he was given Adhikara, permission to teach, and after his father's retirement from public teaching in 2018 he became his authorized successor. He is an author and an Emmy and Peabody nominated filmmaker who has directed over twenty documentary films, including Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Aina, The Nightingale's Song, Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, and Elemental. He is the founder and podcast host of Emergence Magazine. He teaches retreats on Sufism and spiritual ecology worldwide.

Emergence Magazine

Go Project Films

Sanctuaries of Silence, his film with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton

Wikipedia

Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology Retreat, Monastère de Ségriès, Haute-Provence, France — November 1-4, 2026

The book

Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, Shambhala Publications, June 2026. Also available as an audiobook.

The book is in two parts. The second offers practices in six areas: Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer.

His other books include Requiem, Invitation and Celebration: A Collection of Seasonal Practices and Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility.

In the conversation

Irina Tweedie, the Russian-born teacher who journeyed to India in the late 1950s, trained with a Sufi master for six years, and brought the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya lineage to England. She lived downstairs in Emmanuel's childhood home and received students five or six afternoons a week.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, his father and teacher, whose work on spiritual responsibility led him toward what he called a new deep ecology of consciousness. Founder of the Golden Sufi Center. Watch a talk from Llewllyn from a SAND Conference: The Significance of This Moment of Time

The Naqshbandiyya, the silent Sufi path, where the dhikr is practiced inwardly rather than aloud. Contrasted in the episode with the Mevlevi order founded after Rumi's death.

Gordon Hempton, the acoustic ecologist who defines silence not as the absence of sound but as the absence of human-generated noise. Subject of Emmanuel's film Sanctuaries of Silence.

John Cage, on silence as a form of expression.

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The book alternates between D.T. Suzuki's Zen teaching and Cage's development as an artist, and culminates in the premiere of 4'33".

Hildegard Westerkamp, the Canadian soundscape composer who developed the practice of listening walks in the 1970s and worked alongside R. Murray Schafer. Her observation that an environment reveals itself differently when we walk slowly, because the animals recognize we are not simply passing through, prompts Emmanuel's s