MEET IEVA - the founder of HOLISMUS

I don't remember a moment when I suddenly became interested in consciousness. Looking back, I think I had been circling it for most of my life without knowing what to call it.

My earliest language for understanding the world was music and sound.

I grew up in Lithuania and spent a significant part of my childhood and teenage years immersed in music and artistic education. I studied at the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius, one of Lithuania's most established institutions for young artists, before continuing my musical education at the Juozas Gruodis Conservatory in Kaunas. Altogether, I studied piano for twelve years.

That environment shaped me far beyond learning how to play an instrument. Art taught me to pay attention: to rhythm, atmosphere, emotion, subtle changes in intensity and everything that can be communicated without language. It also introduced me very early to something I would become fascinated by much later in life - our ability to enter states in which the usual sense of time, self and surroundings seems to change.

Anyone who has disappeared completely into music, dance, painting or another creative process knows something about this experience. You begin with the intention to create, and at some point the effort gives way to absorption. Time behaves differently. Attention narrows and expands at once. You are doing something, yet it can feel as though the experience is happening through you.

Back then, I didn't think about any of this in terms of consciousness. I certainly wasn't thinking about neuroscience, flow states or altered perception. I was simply experiencing it.

Years later, when my world expanded into meditation, Tibetan singing bowls, embodiment, psychedelic research and altered states of consciousness, I began recognizing a thread that had been there from the beginning.

I had always been interested in experiences that change the way we perceive.

From art to business - and back to the human being

My path from there was anything but predictable.

I moved from Lithuania to Denmark and entered a world that appeared almost completely different from my artistic upbringing. I studied marketing, international sales and business before completing my Master's degree in Business Administration and Leadership at Roskilde University.

Yet even there, I kept moving toward the human side of things.

Business interested me, but I became far more fascinated by the people creating it: how we make decisions, construct meaning, influence one another and understand our own behaviour. Eventually, that curiosity became the foundation of my Master's thesis, where I researched reflection in leadership practice through in-depth interviews with leaders.

On the surface, studying leadership reflection and spending years studying piano belong to entirely different chapters of a life.

For me, they eventually led toward the same territory.

Attention. Awareness. Perception. The ability to observe ourselves while simultaneously being inside the experience.

And that territory would eventually become HOLISMUS.