For my inaugural guest podcast on A to Z of Altered States, I’m joined by social impact entrepreneur, psychedelic breathwork coach, and musician Steve Rio. Steve and his wife, Austin, are co-founders of Enfold Institute, an immersive psychedelic retreat space situated in Howe Sound on picturesque Bowen Island, BC — just a short ferry ride from Vancouver.
Steve and Austin work primarily with 5-MeO-DMT and 3MMC, pairing guided psychedelic journeys for individuals and couples with breathwork, meditation, sound bath, and other somatic modalities like sauna and cold plunge during their multi-day retreat offerings. Grounded in Buddhist philosophy, Steve and Austin pose a serious question to all who visit their retreat (and their website): Are you ready to awaken to the full potential of life?
I had the pleasure of visiting Enfold last summer to take part in Communal, a one-day group retreat rightfully described as “a spa day for the mind.” Arriving at Enfold and standing on the wooden deck overlooking the ocean and coastal rainforest, I was struck by the intentionality with which everything on the property seemed to be placed. All sensory input, from visual to auditory and natural to manmade, seemed to support the experience we were about to have (something Steve and I discuss on the show).
After a casual meet-and-greet with other guests, we were led through a guided psychedelic meditation, sound bath, and breathwork session lasting about 90 minutes. Steve, a lifelong musician, often records guided breathwork sessions for Othership, an app I use frequently, so I was already familiar with his work — but to experience a guided journey live and in the presence of a dozen other spiritual seekers was something else entirely. After what felt like 20 minutes, every cell in my body began to vibrate. By the time the 90-minute session had ended, I felt as if I’d been scrubbed internally — like a program had been reset, and like the resistance to pursuing a new career I’d been carrying for a few months finally began to melt away. I felt renewed, and for the first time, I could see the path I needed to take laid out clearly before me. Topping off the experience with contrast therapy (20 minutes in Enfold’s wood-fired sauna, followed by a three-minute cold plunge in the ice bath), a healthy meal, and satiating conversation with other guests, I left Bowen Island that day with a renewed sense of purpose.
Here’s a time-stamped run-down of some of the topics Steve and I discuss on the show, plus pull quotes from each section.
01:03: Integration Practices
“Psychedelics can offer often this accelerated access into our own psyche, or into our own conditioning. But with that acceleration comes a tremendous amount of time compression. Some people describe [5-MeO-DMT] as like doing 10 years of therapy — and the outcome of that sounds great. But it's also an incredible amount of time compression in terms of how much you're processing at one time. And so in order to actually benefit from that, I think it's super important that people commit to practices around that… I don't think I would be making what I feel is really incredible progress around some of my healing, if I wasn't so close to nature, if I wasn't able to get out for walks in the woods and be able to slow things down, really investing in meaningful connections and meaningful relationships.”
04:43: 5-MeO-DMT in Combination with Breathwork, Sauna, and Cold Plunge
“I think one of the most unique aspects of 5-Meo-DMT is how it really seems to penetrate straight to the nervous system, like it really accesses your physical system, and people often come back with this much deeper sense of interoception, or the ability to sense oneself from within, right? To a sense of embodiment. And that can be quite uncomfortable for people, there can be a lot of energy that they weren't aware of that's in the body; there can be a new awareness of tension that they carry. But it's also such a gift to step into more awareness of the body.”
09:02: The Intentionality in Enfold’s Design
“There's very few things on the walls, there's no religious idols or deities or symbolism of that nature, we want to have a very clear palette for someone's own spiritual experience, to be able to manifest and not be influenced by a statue of Buddha or a photo of Jesus or any type of symbolism. So, that part of it's very important, especially in the ceremony spaces to create a sense of sacredness through natural objects. We often have flowers, we have beautiful plants and a sense of nature in this space. So a sense of softness with lots of the materials that we have there. It's like creating comfort, creating a sense of sacredness, and a sense of intentionality.”
12:49: Embracing “the Middle Path”
“There's kind of this battle for the Western medical model and the corporate model that's coming into play, and going through the process of colonializing psychedelics in some way. And then on the other side of that polarization is this extreme tendency to lean towards Indigenous and shamanic practices, which have been around for thousands of years in certain cultures and carry deep wisdom and have a very important voice… The middle path is saying, look, there is a spiritual aspect to this, there is a scientific aspect to this, we are learning about how these medicines and how these substances work in the brain. And we also have some excellent psychology and mindfulness to draw from, and there's lots of incredible ancient wisdom from layers of shamanism and from other practices. And to take these and say, let's just find the simplest middle path that we can take, that allows for people to bring their own context to it, that's not steeped in ideology, that doesn't have a reductionist perspective, and just allow people to create their own experience.”
20:09: Why Modern Life has us Feeling Disconnected from our Potential
“I think we naturally begin to live our lives through the lens of our conditioning, and the lens of our conditioning is really a fear-based system to keep us alive. It's a survival system… But there's, there's a tremendous amount beyond that when we actually start to move beyond our survivalist conditioning. And I think that takes a tremendous amount of work that isn't really talked about at all in mainstream society. And even if it is, it's complex, and it's a leap of faith, so I just think very few people actually ever enter into that. And I think the way they enter into that usually is with some kind of dramatic wake-up call, where something goes terribly wrong, whether it's their health, or their relationships, or their career fails, or all three things, or addiction catches up with them, or something like that — and the pain of that moment is so dramatic, that finally it's worth it, to go through the pain of awakening.”
24:09: 5-MeO-DMT: in a league of its own
“5-MeO-DMT is very different in the experience of the substance, because there's generally a very low visual experience, or none at all. It's a very fast-acting experience. And generally, what we find is that, as the medicine gets stronger, it becomes more and more of a somatic experience than anything else. And at the peak of the experience, and this is where 5 for me really stands alone, is that there is basically a guarantee of a pure non-dual experience, meaning complete dissolution of self, the complete dissolution of any awareness of time and space, and you have no memory of the experience, because there is no you there. In those moments, a couple of things are happening. One is that we see people's energy systems just open up, it's kind of like the nervous system and the body has been clenching your whole life and collecting tension and storing trauma. And the system, it just opens, it’s like fists unclenching. And for some people, that's a very relaxed and very blissful, calm state. And for others, the whole body starts tremoring, screaming, shrieking, crying, spitting, vomiting, like everything is coming out of the person (not all at once). But those are variations of things that can happen. And it's this incredible release of energy.”
31:48: The Risks of Resisting Integration
“It's important that people know that this is the beginning, like the process begins the day they leave, in many ways, where they go back into their regular environments and have this deeply heightened sense… they're much more sensitive, they're much more tender. And so where there is misalignment, it is so much more pronounced. And where there is alignment, it's more pronounced. There's beauty in all of this, but it's a lot of work to be much more sensitive than you were three days ago. And for everyone around you to expect you to be the same, same old you, there's a tremendous dissonance that can can come along with that. And so it just requires the right level of commitment to that process and an understanding of what that process can look like, and having support for that process.”
39:20: Recording Breathwork Sessions that Stand Out
“A few of the elements that I think that stand out: one is that there’s almost always a blend of organic and digital sounds. I love synthesizers and I love more electronic sounds, but you'll almost always in my music, maybe not every song or every piece, but mostly, you'll find a guitar or a drum or some sort of organic elements… There's a lot of nature in the sounds, like where you'll hear fires crackling or wind. Sometimes the wind, which you can't even really tell is there, it's just certain white noise frequencies that are literally recorded of the trees around me, or the birds that are in our in our area, or I go down to the water and record the water.”
43:46: One Go-To Technique for a Quick State Shift
“Austin and I, we have these little practices where we just pause throughout the day, and we'll just put our faces on each other's, and we call them ‘face snaps.’ But they're just like this little practice, we pause everything and we connect. And it's like the whole world dissolves. It's just the two of us and we become a sink, like just an entity of energy, and everything melts away. And then we come back. It's just a really beautiful, simple practice; these little ways of, to me, it's escaping the abstraction of the mind.”
46:15: SPEED ROUND
(including questions such as: what is your favourite psychedelic, where was the worst psychedelic experience you’ve ever had, what is the best live concert you’ve ever seen, and one mantra you live by, among others).
Relevant Links:
Enfold Institute
Steve Rio on Instagram
Guest Testimonies
Co Pilot Stories: A conversation with Steve Rio + Austin Austin (via Othership)
Self + Partner Guided Breathwork Sessions (via Othership)
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