March 31, 2026

Five Days

Two sessions in, and the energy of this series keeps surprising us!

Today we're so excited to introduce you to Steve Rio, one of the most respected coaches in psychedelic-assisted healing and this Thursday's guide at Seeds of Flourishing.

In the early 2000s, Steve Rio borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the bank, maxed out his credit cards, and set out to become an indie rock star.

Five days later, he was broke.

Steve didn't know it then, but that was his first brush with a question that would come to define his life's work:

What happens when who you think you are falls apart?

The Selves We Build

We spend decades constructing an identity. Brick by brick. The career, the credentials, the story we tell at dinner parties.

I'm a musician. I'm a founder. I'm the kind of person who...

Psychologists call this the narrative self, it's like a running autobiography the brain writes to make sense of experience. Dan McAdams, a personality researcher at Northwestern, has spent forty years studying how humans construct what he calls "life stories": internal narratives that give our lives coherence, purpose, and meaning.

We don't just have identities. We author them. Actively. Selectively. Often unconsciously.

The trouble is, we mistake the story for the person.

And when the story breaks, because of a layoff, a diagnosis, a marriage ending, or a dream dying in five days, we don't just lose a job or a plan. The voice inside, who was supposed to know what happens next, breaks down.

We feel deeply lost.

Steve kept the debt secret for five years. It became the "black hole of his soul". "I had let one bad decision completely change the way I looked at the world and myself". "When I thought about the debt, I was flooded with shame. I hated money. It was a deep phobia".

Then one day, despite barely knowing how to fix a flat tire, he got on a bicycle and rode from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Somewhere on a hill in California, the shift happened.

"I stopped calling it my debt," he said, "and started calling it my education".

Within six months it was paid off. He founded Briteweb, a digital agency for the social sector that he successfully ran for over a decade.

A second identity, built from the wreckage of the first.

But Steve would keep dissolving.

The Silence Between Selves

Neuroscience has a name for where the narrator lives: The default mode network, a web of brain regions most active when we're not focused on the outside world. It's the part of the brain that daydreams, reminisces, plans, worries, and above all, maintains the sense of a continuous "I" moving through time.

Robin Carhart-Harris, the neuroscientist who pioneered psychedelic brain imaging at Imperial College London, describes the default mode network as "the orchestra conductor of the self". Under psychedelics, his research found, this conductor loses its grip: the network's internal coherence breaks down, and the boundaries of identity soften with it.

5-MeO-DMT, what Steve calls the strongest psychedelic known to science, doesn't produce visions or stories. What it does, in the span of roughly fifteen minutes, is dissolve the sense of self.

Steve describes the moment after: "The mind comes back online", his phrase for the ego reassembling. But between the last thought you recognize as yours and the first one that returns, there is a gap.

A silence.

Contemplative traditions have pointed toward something similar for millennia.

The Sufis have a concept called fana, the annihilation of the self in the divine. In Buddhism, the concept of anatta (non-self) holds that what we experience as a fixed identity is an illusion.

These are not metaphors to Steve. They are descriptions of what his clients report on a regular basis.

That doesn't mean it's always easy. Steve remarks that only about 20% of participants have that blissful "white light" experience. For the other 80%, the medicine exposes what the body has been storing for decades. Grief. Generational shame. Pre-verbal terror.

"There's nowhere to hide," he says.

He calls the residue "cellular muck", an unpretentious phrase for something profound. His conviction, supported by work like Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, is that trauma lives in the nervous system, not in the stories we tell about it.

Where Good Things Grow

The space between identities is where something new can grow.

Your version of that space might be much smaller than a psychedelic ceremony or a thousand-mile bike ride.

Right now, or when you have a moment later today...

Take three deep breaths

Let your attention rest in the body

Notice: What is your body feeling right now that you haven't named in a long time?

No rush to label it.

Just notice.

That gap, between the sensation and the story your mind wants to build around it, is fertile grond for creation.

And that's the territory Steve has spent seven years mapping.

This Thursday: Facing Your Deepest Fears

Steve Rio brings this inquiry to Seeds of Flourishing on April 2nd.

Today he and his wife Austin run Enfold, a retreat centre on Bowen Island where guests spend five days in an immersive process of preparation, ceremony, and integration. Five days. The same amount of time it once took to lose everything. But now the dissolution is an intentional part of the journey.

This Thursday we won't be taking 5-MeO-DMT. Steve will be guiding a live, participatory inquiry into what it means to face the fears we've spent a lifetime building walls around.

The session is online, 45 minutes, free, and open to all, with the possibility of making a donation.

If you are registered already, we can't wait to see you there.

With warmth,

The Centre for Human Flourishing Team

PS: We're preparing the recordings from the previous sessions. Stay tuned!