About Us

Tom Huston

Tom is a professional writer and a practitioner of Integral Spirituality. Over the past three decades, he has engaged in extensive spiritual training to help develop the view and practice of Evolutionary Dharma.

Growing up in California, his passion for exploring the nature of reality was evident from an early age, and by the time he was a teen, he was creating tantric visualization scripts and teaching himself to meditate. After his mind was blown by a series of revelatory lucid dreams, he spent years diving into Dream Yoga as his primary practice. Later, at 19, while practicing Zen and studying the teachings of Adi Da, he was personally sought out by the renowned integral philosopher Ken Wilber, who had read some of Tom’s writings online. Wilber invited Tom to be a founding member of his multidisciplinary think tank, Integral Institute.

Tom’s fate was sealed in 1998, however, when he discovered the work of Evolutionary Enlightenment teacher Andrew Cohen. In 2000, with Wilber’s encouragement, he became a dedicated student and subsequently practiced, 24/7, as a formal monastic disciple at Cohen’s main EnlightenNext āshram in Western Massachusetts. There, amid countless hours of meditation, chanting, prostrations, and other intensive forms of integral yoga sādhanā, Tom joined his sangha peers in pioneering experimental group practices to invoke a shared awakened state, which Cohen called Intersubjective Nonduality. These collective higher states consumed everyone, sometimes for weeks, in an ecstatic inferno of what the great integral yogi Sri Aurobindo had termed the vertical descent of the Supermind.

For years, Tom practiced these collective arts in weekly student meetings and, especially, in his daily work with Cohen and other colleagues as an editor of the quarterly, Folio Award–winning magazine What Is Enlightenment? (aka EnlightenNext). With each foray into what felt like the next stage of evolutionary potential, Tom added new notes to his ever-developing synthesis of Integral Philosophy and Evolutionary Enlightenment, producing a volume of text that soon numbered in the thousands of pages.

EnlightenNext’s grand experiment in collective awakening continued to inspire Tom on his next phase of spiritual growth: a quest to deepen and sustain his own individual realization. Plunging into years of shadow work and other psychological modalities, he strove to forge a greater depth of embodied integration. To bolster his post-traditional training, he also engaged anew with adepts from traditional religious systems—particularly Trika Shaivism, Tibetan Dzogchen (Atiyoga) and Mahāmudrā, Zen Buddhism, and scriptural Advaita Vedānta—while continuing to develop and refine his Evolutionary Dharma view.

Tom currently resides in London with his wife, Lovena, and their radiant young daughter. Committed to a life of boundless freedom, joy, and creativity, he aspires to share his understanding with as many sentient beings throughout the kosmos as he can.

Lovena Vencatakistnen

Lovena is an Integral Psychotherapist, known for her intuitive and efficient approach to fostering real transformation. As the creator of Symphony Therapy, she’s developed an innovative methodology that combines nondual awareness, hypnotherapy, shadow integration, and contemporary psychodynamic techniques to facilitate her clients’ profound healing and self-actualization.

Her life has been defined by a one-pointed pursuit of self-knowledge and spiritual depth. Growing up in a traditional Tamil Hindu culture in Mauritius, her childhood revolved around the local Śiva temple, where she studied and performed classical Bhāratanāṭyam dance, practiced meditation from the age of three, and engaged in ancient practices shaped by Śaiva-Śākta Tantra. Her father, a warrior-caste Tāntrik devotee of Kālī Mā, and her mother, a Smārta Vedāntic brāhmin, each profoundly influenced her spiritual views.

When she moved to London as a teen to study Actuarial Science and pursue a career in investment banking, her passion for finding deeper meaning in life only intensified. She was fortunate to soon meet, and begin training under, a Jewish-American spiritual teacher with a Tamil Hindu lineage: Andrew Cohen. While spending long days as a banker in London’s Canary Wharf district, she devoted the rest of her time to engaging in meditation and other practices as part of Cohen’s sangha, EnlightenNext. She was trained to teach Evolutionary Enlightenment and first led public courses in 2006. During this period, she was deeply affected by a meeting with Vimala Thakar, in whose awakened eyes she saw the true meaning of women’s liberation. Today, she also counts among her spiritual teachers the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, Lama Lena Yeshe Kaytup, and Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Lovena’s journey into psychotherapy began with a personal encounter with its life-changing power, which added important dimensions of psychological depth, nuance, and insight to the spiritual training she’d undergone. She knew she’d found her true calling and ended up completing her MBA degree while simultaneously raising a toddler and pursuing professional training as an integrative psychotherapist. She now holds certifications in Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy from the UK’s National College of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy (NCHP) and in Past-Life Regression Therapy from the International School of Hypnosis and Regression Therapy (IS-HART). She has been trained in Life Between Lives Spiritual Regression, Future-Life Progression, Inner Child and Ancestral Healing, IFS Parts Work, Trauma Therapy, and is professionally registered with CNHC, the National Society of Talking Therapies, and UKCP. She continues to expand her skillset and knowledge through ongoing practical education and, especially, through her own ever-deepening spiritual evolution.

Lovena lives in London with her husband, Tom, and their vivacious daughter. Her Symphony Therapy ultimately aims to show clients that they’re already perfectly whole and radically free—thereby naturally opening the doorway to soul integration and spiritual liberation.