Irina Tweedie
Irina Tweedie (1907–1999) was a Russian-born British spiritual teacher whose life and writings played a vital role in the transmission of Sufism to the West, especially among women. Best known for her autobiographical work Daughter of Fire: A Diary of Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, Tweedie helped open the traditionally esoteric Naqshbandī–Mujaddidī Sufi order to a non-Muslim Western audience. Her writing is notable for its raw, first-person account of spiritual transformation, and as a rare record of a female practitioner on a traditionally male path.
Tweedie, born Irina Tamara Karpova, spent her early life in Europe after her family fled the Bolsheviks. After the early death of her husband, an English naval officer named Tweedie, her spiritual search led her to join the Theosophical Society In the early 1960s, she traveled to India, where she met Radha Mohan Lal, a Hindu-born Sufi master. Although women were rarely accepted into the lineage, he agreed to train her in a path of discipline and direct transmission. Over five years, Tweedie kept a detailed diary of her training—an intimate chronicle that has since become a classic of Western mystical literature. After her guru’s death she returned to England and brought his teachings to the West. Her work is continued today through her student, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and the Golden Sufi Center in Point Reyes, California.
The source that follows comes from the early months of Tweedie’s discipleship and documents the eruption of a primal energetic force, that, from a comparative perspective, closely resembles classical descriptions of kuṇḍalinī śakti awakening found in Śaiva and Śākta Tantra. Marked by extreme emotional and psychological upheaval, severe physical symptoms, and a final emergence into profound inner stillness, Tweedie likened this ordeal to a kind of symbolic death. She later identified it as a transformative initiation into radical inner surrender, an experience she saw as essential not only to the Sufi path but as one that transcends religious and cultural boundaries. Her documentation of this process has left a lasting mark on contemporary conversations on feminine mysticism, psycho-spiritual integration, and cross-cultural esotericism.
Source
Irina Tweedie, Daughter of Fire1
21st January, 1962: IT WAS THEN, AT THIS MOMENT, just when I stretched out comfortably, pulling the blankets over me, that to my surprise I felt a vibration, a SOUND in the lower part of my abdomen. I sat up in surprise. No, I was not mistaken—it was a sound, and I listened to it. . . . never felt anything like that before. It sounded like a soft hiss, and felt like a gentle tickling, as if of butterfly wings, a kind of flutter, or rather a spinning sound like a wheel. Very strange. A suspicion flashed through my mind that perhaps it was leading to some kind of trouble, but what? There was a deep, dark fear, but where? It was so foreign to my body, so unusual, so out of the blue. . . .It did not take me long to discover. Without the slightest indication that it may be coming, I was flooded with a powerful sexual desire. It was just the desire, to no object in particular, just the desire, per se, uncontrollable, a kind of wild, cosmic force. I sat there helpless, shaking with fear. Good heavens, what is happening? Tried to listen, TO FEEL from where this vibration came—where was it exactly? Then I knew: it was at the base of “the spine, just above the anus—I could feel it there distinctly. It must be the Muladhara Chakra! (psychic center at the base of the spine). I went ice-cold with terror. This was the coup de grace!—I thought . . . he activated the Muladhara Chakra at the base of the spine; and he left the Kundalini there, to cook myself in my own juice. . . .
The most terrifying night of my life began. Never, not even in its young days, had this body known anything, even faintly comparable, or similar to this! This was not just desire—it was madness in its lowest, animal form, a paroxysm of sex-craving . . . a wild howling of everything female in me, for a male. The whole body was SEX ONLY, every cell, every particle was shouting for it, even the skin, the hands, the nails, every atom. I felt my hair standing up as if filled with electricity, waves of wild goose-flesh ran over my whole body, making all hair on the body stand stiff . . . and the sensation was painful. . . .
The body seemed to break under this force. All I could do was hold it stiff, still, and completely stretched out. I felt the overstretched muscles full of pain, as in a kind of cramp; I was rigid, could not move. The mind was absolutely void, emptied of its content; there was no imagery, only an uncontrollable fear, primitive, animal fear. And it went for hours. I was shaking like a leaf . . . a mute, helpless trembling jelly, carried away by forces completely beyond any human control. A fire was burning inside my bowels. The sensation of heat increased and decreased in waves. And I could do nothing . . . was in complete psychological turmoil. . . .
January 22nd: THE NIGHT WAS EVEN WORSE than the first—if such a thing is possible at all. It was unbearable. Beyond myself with desire, half unconscious, I suddenly noticed in the dark room around me, some kind of whirling, dark, grey mist. Trying to focus on it, I detected strange shapes moving about, and soon I could distinguish most hideous things, or beings, leering, obscene, all coupled in sexual intercourse, elemental creatures, animal-like, performing wild sexual orgies. I was sure that I was going mad. Cold terror gripped me: hallucinations, madness—no hope for me, insanity—this was the end. Buried my face into the pillow not to see—oh, not to see—perhaps it will go, will vanish. But the aroused desire in my body forced me to look. . . . Things I never knew could be done, could exist—the most lecherous filth, I had to witness—I had learned this night. Never knew? if I did not know it, how COULD I see it? It must have been somewhere in my depths, or else how, how could I see it? It must have been in me. I was sure I was going mad. I never suspected that anything like this darkest vice could be experienced by a human mind, for it was NOT WITHIN human experience. Such helplessness, such black depression came over me; I was a prey to some terrible cosmic forces unknown to me.
January 31st: Woke up with this picture vividly in my mind, and as soon as my thoughts became clear, I realized with surprise that my body seemed to be singing . . . literally so. Singing softly and resting in Him, in deepest pool of peace. It seemed to me that I never felt such a tranquil bliss in all my life! Stretched out comfortably with a sigh of relief; no torture, no tension, just stillness, and a kind of SOUND in all the tissues, as if the whole frame of the body was vibrating in gladness, to its own inner music . . . every cell, every particle happy in its own right. All my being seemed to be streaming forth in steady flow, but softly, gently, full of unearthly peace. It lasted for quite a while. Tried to think, tried to analyze, to grasp what was happening. Was that the feeling of Perfect Love, of Surrender? I could not know. And it did not matter. Not really. All that mattered was that the dreadful tension was gone.
Endnote
1 Irina Tweedie, Daughter of Fire: A Diary of Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, the complete unabridged edition (The Golden Sufi Center, 1986), 251–71. This source material is reproduced faithfully from the original and may contain typographical or other errors.
Bibliography
Golden Sufi Center, https://www.goldensufi.org (accessed June 20, 2025).
Sviri, Sara. “Daughter of Fire by Irina Tweedie: Documentation and Experiences of a Modern Naqshbandi Sufi.” In Women as Teachers and Disciples in Traditional and New Religions, edited by Elizabeth Puttick and Peter B. Clarke, 77–89. Edwin Mellen Press, 1993.
Tweedie, Irina. Chasm of Fire: A Woman’s Experience of Liberation through the Teachings of a Sufi Master. Condensed version. Element Books, 1979.
———. Daughter of Fire: A Diary of Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master. The complete unabridged edition. The Golden Sufi Center, 1986.
Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn. The Face Before I Was Born: A Spiritual Autobiography. With a Forward by Irina Tweedie. Second edition. The Golden Sufi Center, 2009.
Naameela F. Jones
Naamleela Free Jones, PhD, is a scholar-practitioner, educator, and musician specializing in the history of religions and esotericism. She teaches at Naropa University, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Jung Center of Houston, with a focus on new religious movements, Gnostic spirituality, modern yoga and Tantra, and consciousness studies.
Her work bridges lived experience and scholarship, exploring how religious traditions shape consciousness and culture. She examines the intersections of Western esotericism and Asian religions, as well as the evolving landscape of American metaphysical spirituality, with particular attention to gnosis, nonduality, and the sacred in global, post-traditional contexts.
A lifelong musician and classical pianist, she has performed internationally at venues including the Teatro della Pergola and the Bargello Museum in Florence, as well as in more intimate settings across North America, Europe, and the South Pacific. Her music, like her scholarship, explores the relationship between embodiment and transcendence.
