Irina Tweedie

Background

Irina Tweedie was born Irina Tamara Karpow (Ирина Тамара Ка́рпов) in Russia.

Education

She studied in Vienna and Paris. Her teacher"s first request of her was to keep a complete diary of her spiritual training—everything, all the difficult parts, even all the doubts.

Career

Her family escaped the Bolscheviks to Central Europe, and she eventually lived in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, and then finally England. Because of her second husband"s premature death in 1954, Irina Tweedie went through a personal crisis that launched her on a spiritual quest. He predicted that one day it would become a book and would benefit people around the world.

Indeed, it became the book, This diary spans five years.

The book is written in diary form. From a psychological viewpoint, the diary maps the process of ego dissolution, gradually unveiling the openness and love that reside beneath the surface of the personality.

The book was first published in its abridged form as The Chasm of Fire which has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into five languages. Later the unabridged book, Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, was published.

This title has sold over 40,000 copies worldwide and is now being published through The Golden Sufi Center.

After her guru"s death in 1966, she returned to England where she started a Sufi meditation group in North London. Gradually the group spread throughout Europe and North America. Irina Tweedie retired in 1992 after having named Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee as her successor.

"I hoped to get instruction in Yoga, expected wonderful teachings, but what the teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within myself and it almost killed medical

I was beaten down in every sense until I had to come to terms with that in me which I kept rejecting all my life." — from her Foreword to Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with A Sufi Master. Branded by God: Interviews with Irina Tweedie Recorded in the late 1980s, released by The Golden Sufi Center in 2005.

The Golden Sufi Center.

Membership

She became an active member of the Theosophical Society and eventually she travelled to India in 1959.

Connections

teacher:

Western Literature