In Conversation with Ed Olver, Founder of Sacred Lands
1. What is Sacred Lands and what inspired you to create it?
Sacred Lands is a platform for personal evolution, integrating reconnection with the land, philanthropic service, spiritual retreat, devotional practice and agroecological regeneration. Working in partnership with local communities, we aim to deliver lasting transformation for individuals and landscapes alike.
2. Why is reconnecting with the land so important for our personal healing today?
Meister Eckhart spoke of GROUND as the philosophical anchor of coherence within humanity. In an age of accelerating AI and deepening polarity, it’s critical to recognise universal principles, the truth of the seasons and the reality that we are nature. This deeper knowing can stabilise humanity, offering balance and rootedness to those who choose to reconnect with these fundamentals.
3. You’ve said “food is a detonator to awareness.” What does that mean in practice?
Industrialised food systems have depleted our microbial vitality. A healthy gut is essential for reconnecting to our intuition, to what is good, beautiful and true. Biodiversity, both internally and externally, is crucial. As Sir Albert Howard reminds us:
"The health of soil, plants, animals, and people is one and indivisible.”
4. What does the shift from ‘wellbeing to welldoing’ look like in everyday life?
In the West, many seek meaning beyond the materialist, secular paradigm. Wellbeing is only the beginning. Once we feel whole, we can enter into a reciprocal relationship with life, recognising service as a metaphysical reality.
‘Welldoing’ means serving something greater than oneself, guided by faith and trust in universal truth. As St. Francis of Assisi taught, “In giving we receive.” Indeed, many wise souls echo this truth:
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” - Winston Churchill
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” - Pablo Picasso
“No one has ever become poor by giving.” - Anne Frank
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Happiness doesn’t result from what we get, but from what we give.” - Ben Carson
Through self-inquiry, we learn to distinguish between the desires of the ego and the knowing of the soul. The more we surrender to that inner encouragement, the more coherent and joyful our lives become.
Rabindranath Tagore captured it perfectly:
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
To transcend mechanistic understanding, we must welcome a new way of being, allowing our doing to emerge naturally from embodied and metabolised wisdom. It is not just our minds that must reconnect to life, but our whole beings.
5. What do the words Soil, Soul, and Service mean to you personally?
Soil is the humus, the grounded wholeness of being human. Humility shares the same root, meaning “close to the earth,” reflecting the ancient understanding that humans belong to the Earth, not separate from it.
Soul is the inner light within everyone. In some, it burns like a pilot flame, in others, it is a roaring fire. Wisdom helps us discern what nourishes the soul. As we feed it, the hearth warms not only ourselves but those around us.
Service is the actionless action of surrendering to a greater purpose. It is allowing the Divine to work through us, unattached to outcomes, aligned with our dharma, the real reason we exist. Conscious alignment between personality and soul accelerates our coherence and fulfilment.
6. How do you see the land respond when we take care of it in the way Sacred Lands does?
Sacred Lands focuses on places where ritual and devotion are still alive. When we interact with land in reverence, a dialogue opens, it is astonishing to witness.
One of the most rebellious acts today is to regather our attention. When we offer full-hearted presence to the land, it responds, it grows, it yields, it flourishes. We’ve seen this in mantra with our partners at Green Sakthi in Tamil Nadu and even here in England, where our national symbols like St. George piercing the dragon lines represent activating the energy of the land.
Talking to plants, offering devotion, farming with reverence, these are all ways to plug back into the living mainframe of nature, as humans have done for millennia. When we open our hearts in prayer, meditation and cultivation, miracles happen.
We are no different from seeds in germination or birds in migration. When we recognise our nature as nature, everything flows.
7. How do you work with local communities, and what does true collaboration look like to you?
True relationship with land must be shared through community stewardship.
Industrialised farming treats agriculture as mechanical, valuing profit over people. Ownership distorts relationship; the economic system has displaced our true place in life.
True flourishing arises not from ownership but from custodianship, community-led, rooted in shared responsibility.
Projects with Green Sakthi in Tamil Nadu, with the Achuar in Ecuador, and at Broughton Sanctuary in England demonstrate the power of this model.
The Achuar rise before dawn to share dreams and intuition, understanding life as an interactive, liminal space. Local children are taught reverence for the land from a young age.
In these communities, the field of consciousness is strong. Prayers, pujas, guayusa drinking and focused intentions manifest reality tangibly.
This is a glimpse of Eden: when devotion and right-relationship are lived, nature flourishes and human beings rediscover their place within it.
8. For someone who lives in a city or doesn’t have land, how can they start to reconnect with nature?
Platforms like Earthed, founded by Christabel and Ruby Reed, are doing vital work, empowering urban dwellers to become ecological citizens.
Even without land, we can choose organic food, wear natural fibres, use biodegradable products and exercise our sovereignty in an animate world.
It’s not about perfection, it’s about intention.
Traditions such as Zen teach us to embody natural wisdom. Every year at Broughton Sanctuary, we host “Learning from Nature,” a retreat rooted in Zen principles led by a 16th-generation Samurai teacher. Even small practices can reawaken our alignment with the living world.
9. What kind of personal shifts or healing have you seen through this work?
I have witnessed extraordinary transformations and shifts that reveal how inner work leads to outer change. Everyone’s journey is unique and as Sri Aurobindo taught, “As one stumbles, life perfects itself.”
However, a key realisation is discerning between the small self (ego) and the capital Self (Atman, the eternal). The Upanishads offer profound insights on this:
“The Self is not born, nor does It die. It did not spring from something, and nothing sprang from It. Birthless, eternal, everlasting, and ancient, It is not killed when the body is killed.” - Katha Upanishad 1.2.18
“Tat Tvam Asi” (“That Thou Art”). - Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7
Furthermore, meeting realised beings like Sri Sakthi Amma Narayani in Tamil Nadu offers a direct experience of coherence and divine unity. Through such encounters, we come to understand that service and devotion are the headlights guiding our journey from ego into universal faith, what some might call plugging into the energetic mains.
10. If you could share one message with the world about how we treat the Earth, what would it be?
We often speak of the Anthropocene as the age when humans impacted nature. I believe it can instead be understood as the age when we remembered we are nature.
Our true evolution is intimacy with our interiority an awakening that integrates shadow, releases conditioning, and allows an interactive, mystical relationship with life.
Environmental activism is only part of the solution. What we truly need is a ‘renaissance of being.’ To paraphrase Einstein:
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Only through an internal shift in perspective can we heal the Earth—and ourselves.
This is The House of Tomorrow I live for at Sacred Lands.
"The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life" - Rabindranath Tagore.