Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, PhD, is a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order.
Born in London in 1953, he has followed the Naqshbandi Sufi path since he was nineteen. In 1991 he became the successor of Irina Tweedie, who brought this particular Indian branch of Sufism to the West and is the author of Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master. He then moved to Northern California and founded The Golden Sufi Center.
He is the author of over thirty books within the fields of Sufism, Oneness and Spiritual Ecology. From 1989-2018 he gave hundreds of lectures in North America, Europe and Australia, (available as audio and/or video recordings in our audio and video library). He has written many articles for publications including Parabola, Sufi Journal, and Emergence Magazine among others, and contributed to dozens of books. Between 2001 and 2011 he hosted a series of Sufi Conferences and Interspiritual gatherings to celebrate the unity at the heart of Sufism and other spiritual traditions. He was featured in the TV series Global Spirit, and was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey as part of her Super Soul Sunday Series.
His book, For Love of the Real (Fall 2015), is regarded as a completion of over twenty-five years of his writing on Sufism, as it draws together many of the elements of his work which began with his 1993 book The Bond with the Beloved.
In late 2018, after thirty years, he gave his final lectures and stepped back from public teaching. Finding solace in the beauty of nature he wrote what may be his final works, much of which has been published in the podcast series, “Stories for a Living Future,” exploring what he calls “A deep ecology of consciousness,” returning our consciousness to the living Earth.
Two threads—of making the Naqshbandi Sufi path accessible to the Western seeker, and planting the spiritual seeds for a new era based upon oneness—are the central themes of his life’s work. Foundational to this is his experience of how divine love is the primary energy within creation, underlying all that exists. He experienced how every cell, every leaf, and every star is part of an outpouring of love’s living unity. And how every human being, each soul, is a unique expression of this love, which they are able to realize as Truth within the heart.