A message from Thom Yeomans, PhD, to the Psychosynthesis Trust community.
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
I am writing to you at the second anniversary of the publication of my book Holy Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening (March 3, 2020). My intent is to thank you for the support over the last two years that you have given to me and to the journey of this book into the world. This has come in many different forms, unique to each of you, but I have experienced as a whole a strong international community of support for the book and the work it is doing in the world now.
Holy Fire
Holy Fire sells slowly and steadily, and I have received over this time many letters sharing the impact of the book on people’s lives and their search for deeper living. I had hoped that it would have this kind of effect and use—a direct learning experience of the vicissitudes of the soul journey and encouragement and support for it—and it has. One friend has referred to the book as “psycho-active” in the sense that it works experientially to support the process of soul awakening in a myriad of different ways. I am very grateful to have written it and now to know about the impact it is having in readers. It was published at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic in this country, and, at first, I thought this would doom it. But, in fact, as many of you reminded me at that time, it came out at just the right time when it was most needed.
Holy Fire has now been translated into German and was just published in Germany last month, and this will expand its readership significantly. I am very grateful to my German colleagues for making the effort it took to carry this project out. It is my hope that in time it may find itself into other languages. We will see.
So, thank you again for the help you have given me and Holy Fire over the last years. I am very grateful to you for this.
The Concord Institute
A second related development is the transformation of the Concord Institute website (www.concordinstitute.org), from a professional training institute into an Archive and Resource Center on the world wide web. This is partly due to my retirement from professional work in Psychosynthesis/Spiritual Psychology, and partly to my desire to share more widely the writing and speaking I have done over this period of the Institute’s life (1990-2020). The Center will make available at no charge seminal professional papers, talks, interviews, and videos that I have done over the last three decades. It will also provide a way to order the earlier book Soul on Earth: Readings in Spiritual Psychology and the more recent Holy Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening. The site also includes a short history of the ideas behind the work of the Concord Institute and its philosophical/psychological orientation. It also sets this work in the larger context of planetary crisis that we are now in, and points to how this work can be used to address and help resolve this critical situation on planet earth.
World Awakening
As for myself, I continue to be engaged in the human and planetary issues that both the book and the website speak to, and I am also now giving more time and attention to my work as a poet, painter, and musician. I am painfully aware, in the light of the events of the last week in Ukraine, of how needed the ideas and experiences behind the process of awakening to a mature human consciousness are. I am also aware of how far we still have to go to realize this state of being and species maturity. There are good signs around the planet of this collective human potential emerging, and, as we all know, there are very powerful impediments present also. Each of us is needed to contribute what we can toward this world awakening.
I am sending every good wish to you, wherever you are on the planet, and the hope that you are thriving in your life and work. Certainly, it is a challenging time to be alive, but also one that calls us.
to new possibilities.
Warmly, Tom Yeomans