The founder
Tom Bem —
a different kind of teacher.
Tom spent 17 years in education — the last five of which were in a senior leadership position in London schools. From the outside, it looked like a career with purpose and momentum. From the inside, it was something else entirely.
Senior leadership meant weeks that regularly ran to 65 or 70 hours. The kind of sustained pressure that stops being stressful and starts being chronic — where the mind never fully comes down, where sleep doesn't recover you, where you go through the motions of being present while actually being elsewhere entirely.
Leaving wasn't a decision made from ambition or inspiration. Staying was breaking him. The stress had become a slow erosion — of energy, of presence, of the ability to simply be with the people who mattered most.
Tom relocated to the rural English countryside. Space, quiet, a different rhythm. For the first time in years, he could be truly present — for his young family, for himself, for the life that had been happening in the margins of all those working hours.
What helped during that transition wasn't a programme or a course. It was meditation. It was sound. Things he'd been practising and studying for over a decade, which suddenly stopped being a discipline and became something much more necessary.
Kula Kriya was built during that period — not as a business plan, but as a response. A collection of tools that worked, made available to the people who need them.