Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology Retreat (King Parrot, Victoria, AU)

ABOUT

An Emergence Magazine retreat with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Dates: Thursday, October 1 (check-in 2-5pm) - Sunday, October 4, 2026 (departure at 12pm)

Location: King Parrot Event Centre, Gadubanud Country, Pennyroyal, VIC, Australia 

Fee: $750–$950 (AUD), depending on accommodation choice (only shared rooms or camping is available). Fees include everything but travel. Needs-based financial assistance is available for some.

 Please contact events@emergencemagazine.org if you have any questions.

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For millennia our mystical and cultural traditions understood that the Earth is animate, alive, and sacred. Everyday life was imbued with a conscious recognition of this divine presence, and the values of interconnectedness, kinship, reciprocity, compassion and reverence that were rooted in this awareness. But we have forgotten how to live this way. Modern life and its numerous destructive and oppressive systems have separated us from the Earth and led us on a path of causing irreparable harm to our own nature and that of the world around us. Yet within each of us a memory of that primordial way of being in relationship with the living world remains. What will it take to renew our reverence for this ancient bond and learn to live again in communion with Earth? 

In October 2026, in the depths of spring, step into a remembrance of the living Earth with Sufi teacher and Emergence founder and executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan–Lee in the Great Otway National Park, located on Gadubanud Country in southern Victoria, Australia. Drawing from the main themes in his forthcoming book Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology (Shambhala Publications, June 2026), this retreat will offer a guided framework for awakening the memory of our sacred kinship with Earth, and turning towards an embodied spiritual ecology. 

Immersed within the Otway’s ancient eucalypt bushland awash in the call of the kookaburra and the sulphur-crested cockatoo, participants will explore how a practice of spiritual ecology can be integrated into all aspects of their lives through simple and transformative ways of finding intimacy with the Earth. Practices will engage the breath, heart, walking, listening, time, and prayer to draw participants into tending the threads of grief and love that connect us with the Earth. Each practice is a doorway, inviting you from concept to communion, from observer to participant in the sacred web of life, offering an embodied spiritual ecology that moves beyond ideas into lived experience.

This four-day retreat will contemplate the role of engaged spirituality in responding to the challenges of our time, offer practical and metaphysical spaces to remember our place in the more-than-human world, and include lectures, silent and walking meditation practices, and storytelling.
 

Learn more about the other locations where this retreat is taking place: England (June 25–28, 2026) and Whidbey, US (September 10–13, 2026).