About Tantrika

Tom Huston

Tom is a writer, father, and Tāntrika. Over the past three decades, he has trained on the spiritual path of Advaya Tantra—a contemporary expression of the ancient, world-embracing way of tantric mysticism.

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 meditation and studying the teachings of the American guru Adi Da Samraj, 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 become a founding member of his multidisciplinary think tank, Integral Institute.

A decisive turning point came in 1998, when he encountered the work of another American guru, Andrew Cohen, whose teaching—later named Evolutionary Enlightenment—was a modernized, minimalist system of Nondual (Advaya) Tantra. In 2000, with Wilber’s encouragement, Tom became a dedicated student and subsequently lived and practiced as a formal, full-time monastic disciple at Cohen’s main EnlightenNext āshram in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. There, amid countless hours of meditation, chanting, prostrations, group shadow work, guru yoga, and other intensive forms of tantric sādhanā, Tom joined his sangha peers in pioneering experimental group practices to invoke a shared enlightened state, which Cohen called Intersubjective Nonduality. These collective awakened states engulfed everyone, sometimes for weeks, in an ecstatic inferno of what the great integral yogi Sri Aurobindo had termed the vertical descent of the Supermind. The ultimate aim of Cohen’s vision was to make this shared enlightened condition the basis for a new order of relationship and culture.

For years, Tom practiced these communal 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 human potential, Tom added new notes to his ever-developing synthesis of Integral Philosophy and Evolutionary Enlightenment, producing a volume of text that eventually numbered in the thousands of pages. This metaphysical fusion would later inform his unique articulation of Advaya Tantra.

After the sangha unexpectedly disbanded in 2013, EnlightenNext’s grand experiment in collective awakening continued to inspire Tom in his next phase of spiritual growth: a quest to deepen and clarify his individual realization. Plunging into years of deep somatic hypnotherapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work, and other holistic modalities, he strove to forge a greater depth of embodied integration. To bolster his post-traditional, “metamodern” mystical training, he also engaged anew with adepts from traditional religious systems—particularly Trika Shaivism (Hindu Tantra), Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā (Buddhist Tantra), Zen Buddhism, and scriptural Advaita Vedānta—while continuing to deepen his Advaya Tantra practice and view.

Tom now resides in London with his wife and spiritual peer, 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.