My Library

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.

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 story of meeting a young buck on his morning walk.

Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practice comes up in the discussion of attention.

The primordial covenant, the moment in Islamic and Sufi cosmology when creation recognized its divine origin, and the bodily remembrance that surfaces when we stand before a mountain or a tree.

Latif, the subtle bodies of the heart in Sufi practice, comparable to the chakra system in Vedic traditions.

The eye of unity, as against the eye of duality.

From SAND