PT352 – HOLOS: Returning to Wholeness Through Nature and Community
September 2, 2022
Featuring: Alex Enchin and Ian-Michael Hébert, MA
In this episode, Joe interviews Alex Enchin & Ian-Michael Hébert, MA; Co-Founders of HOLOS, a company building hospitality wellness centers with a strong focus on community, reconnection to nature, and a return to wholeness.
In this episode, Joe interviews Alex Enchin & Ian-Michael Hébert, MA; Co-Founders of HOLOS, a company building hospitality wellness centers with a strong focus on community, reconnection to nature, and a return to wholeness.
HOLOS is currently running retreats in Costa Rica, where they’re in the process of building out their dream wellness center on a very biodiverse 200-acre piece of land complete with 2 km of waterfalls and swimming holes, that, when finished, will have a self-sustaining farm, glamping setup, center for group work, dining hall, and most importantly, 30 lots that are being filled out by various wellness practitioners to round out a surrounding community of support. The idea behind HOLOS is that profound healing can be accomplished in the most beautiful of places with or without psychedelics – that nature’s psychedelic beauty can help visitors return to a wholeness they have likely forgotten. They want to be the place where the biggest psychedelic figureheads visit to relax, commune, and do their own work; to then spread that energy to their individual communities. And, as there isn’t much of an entry point to psychedelic medicine, their next step is to develop a boutique hotel-like wellness center for those who may not yet be ready for a psychedelic experience; to either prepare them for the next step, or to show that nature and community may be all they really need.
They talk about our need for community and how HOLOS was born; viewing wellness centers and scalability differently; their relationship with Stan Grof and how a canyon can help people experience the perinatal matrices viscerally; consciousness; transpersonal psychology; nondualism; how viewing Mount Denali can be a psychedelic experience; what “returning to wholeness” really means; and Joe’s realization that the vision behind Psychedelics Today is in line with that of HOLOS: to bring back the attitude and energy of Esalen.
Notable Quotes
“We’re a place where people can come home: home to themselves, home to an understanding of our relational nature as human beings, and a place where people can reconnect to nature. …HOLOS was inspired by Stan Grof’s work and the holotropic paradigm, and the returning to wholeness. …The idea is: What is it like when we actually land there, inside of being whole, and recognizing ourselves as a fractal aspect of a greater universal pattern?” -Ian-Michael
“I lived in a condo in Toronto for a bunch of years, and I just don’t believe we’re meant to live like that. Whether I go down to HOLOS for a week or for a month, walking barefoot in the jungle and touching the dirt; it does something. It charges you. It invigorates you. Every time I leave there and come back to North America, I just feel alive and invigorated, and I really believe that’s our natural state.” -Alex
“People are looking for something to be a part of. …We’re really trying to design and build HOLOS as not just a place that you come once a year or a couple times a year or once every 24 months, but really, something that you can be a part of on an ongoing basis. …We want to have the psychology shift from ‘HOLOS is a place that I go’ to ‘It’s something that I’m a part of.’” -Alex
“There’s an intergenerational reality that we live inside of, of acquired knowledge or knowledge that is transferred over time, and if we don’t start thinking about our cultures that way; where we have the opportunity to grow a body of knowledge or awareness about a particular ecology or particular healing modalities – if we don’t start thinking of that longer-term context of passing down knowledge, then we’re really a short-lived society.” -Ian-Michael
Links
Evaursiny.com: The Perinatal Matrices According to Grof
Spiritplantmedicine.com: Tony Bossis
Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference (April 19, 2022)
Erik Davis – High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
Psychedelics Today: PT302 – Dr. Adele Lafrance – Vital Psychedelic Conversations
Dradelelafrance.com: The Love Project
The Institute of Noetic Sciences
Exeter.ac.uk: Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku)
Psychedelics Today: Aaron Orsini – How LSD Helped Bridge the ASD Neurotypical Divide
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté
Esalen.org: Michael Murphy Reflects on Esalen’s Past and Future
