SOUL VALPIO (A)LIVE
Soul Valpio
Soul Valpio presents an energetic blend of hip-hop, dance, and Finnish
Pay attention to your breathing and yourself because that is the biggest teacher in life. Breathing keeps you back in to your life.
Summary
- The performance incorporates hip hop music and dancing by the Flow Mo crew and Aina to promote physical movement and engagement during the event. - Mind-lifting techniques and breathing are emphasized as essential tools for self-awareness and staying connected to life, inspired by the Wim Hof method. - A 15-episode video series titled "Tea Backpackers" explores global tea culture across Finland and Sri Lanka, launching on social media on November 1st. - Health and nutrition expert Jaakko Halometer contributes to the "Tea Backpackers" series as an expert during the episodes filmed in Sri Lanka. - The presentation at the Biohacker Summit blends artistic performances with themes of health and the human experience to encourage a holistic approach to life.
Article
Soul Valpio Turned Biohacking Into A Living Pulse Of Music, Breath And Movement
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, A Performance Blended Hip-Hop, Tea Culture And Mindfulness Into A Meditation On What It Means To Stay Alive
In a programme often dominated by metrics, methods and optimisation, Soul Valpio brought something harder to quantify to the stage at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki: presence.
His presentation, *SOUL VALPIO (A)LIVE)*, delivered on Friday, 13 October 2017 in Helsinki, Finland, unfolded less like a conventional talk than a communal invocation. It was part hip-hop performance, part movement session, part reflection on breath, resilience and the fragile discipline of being human. With Flow Mo, Aina and DJ Tuho alongside him, Soul Valpio transformed the event space into something warmer and more elemental, asking the audience not merely to listen, but to move, breathe and pay attention.
“There is a lot of talk about life,” he said during the set, “but most of all there is a lot of talk about being a human.”
That distinction mattered. At an event devoted to the enhancement of body and mind, Soul Valpio’s contribution suggested that health was not only biochemical or technical. It was rhythmic. It was social. It was cultural. It was carried in the lungs.
A Stage Set In Motion
From the opening moments, the performance rejected stillness. Applause rolled through the room as Soul Valpio welcomed his collaborators, calling out Flow Mo, DJ Tuho, Juho, Ramsay and Aina before promising “fifteen minutes of some nice hip hop music dancing” and inviting the crowd to join in.
The invitation was not ornamental. Movement was the message.
What followed was a kinetic translation of biohacking language into art. The body, so often discussed in terms of protocols and outputs, became expressive again. Dance was not framed as spectacle alone, but as participation, a way to shake loose passivity and reconnect people to sensation. Even the transition into the lunch break was folded into this idea, as Flow Mo took the stage for a high-energy dance sequence that turned an ordinary pause in the programme into an act of collective reawakening.
“If you have hands, put them together for focus,” Soul Valpio urged, in one of several lines that fused performance banter with a deeper insistence on attention.
Breathing As Teacher
The clearest philosophical thread running through *SOUL VALPIO (A)LIVE* was breath.
Referencing coach Casper and inspiration drawn from the Wim Hof method, Soul Valpio framed breathing not as a trend or hack, but as a return. “Pay attention to your breathing and yourself,” he told the audience, calling it “the most biggest teacher in the life.” He continued with a line that distilled the mood of the performance: “Breathing keeps you back in to your life.”
The phrasing was rough, immediate and unvarnished, which only made it more convincing. This was not the polished language of wellness branding. It was the language of someone trying to bring a room back to first principles. Inhale. Exhale. Notice yourself. Stay here.
In that sense, the performance stood apart from many summit presentations. It did not merely describe resilience. It attempted to induce it, through rhythm, sound, movement and breath awareness. Soul Valpio’s phrase about translating “all this talk about breathing” into “the Finnish nature soul music flow” captured the ambition neatly. He was not interested in repeating the discourse. He wanted to embody it.
Tea, Travel And A Wider Culture Of Health
Yet *SOUL VALPIO (A)LIVE* was not confined to music and breathwork. Running through the set was another thread, quieter but no less revealing: tea.
Introducing the project *Tea Backpackers*, Soul Valpio described a 15-episode video series exploring tea culture, nutrition, people and places in Finland and Sri Lanka. The series, he said, would launch on 1 November across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, with new episodes released weekly on Wednesdays.
In another context, this might have sounded like a promotional interlude. Here, it felt of a piece with the larger vision. Tea was presented not just as a drink, but as a cultural practice and a point of connection between landscapes, habits and health. The project also featured health and nutrition expert Jaakko Halometer in the Sri Lanka episodes, extending the biohacking frame beyond supplementation and self-experimentation into food traditions and lived environments.
The idea was expansive: wellness was not only what happened in a lab, a gym or an ice bath. It was also found in shared rituals, in what people drank, in the stories carried by plants and places, and in the way culture itself shaped vitality.
Songs About Pain, Light And Endurance
There was another reason the performance resonated. It made room for difficulty.
Soul Valpio signposted one upcoming number with characteristic bluntness: “Next song is about pain.” In a summit environment where the emphasis can drift toward improvement, efficiency and control, that acknowledgement landed with force. Human experience, the performance suggested, could not be reduced to peak states. Pain was part of the material too.
And yet the set refused despair. Its language kept reaching upward, toward energy, clarity and renewal. “Seek some light and stay fresh,” Soul Valpio said. Later, in closing, he offered a final line that sounded half blessing, half instruction: “Take great health and take runs.”
Those phrases carried the looseness of live speech, but also a kind of street-poetic wisdom. Health here was not presented as perfection. It was pursuit. It was motion. It was choosing, again and again, to remain in contact with life.
A Different Kind Of Biohacking
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Soul Valpio’s presentation may have been one of the most unconventional on the programme, but it was also one of the most coherent. It argued, through form as much as content, that optimisation without soul risked becoming sterile. Breath without feeling was just technique. Movement without joy was just exercise. Knowledge without culture was incomplete.
By weaving together hip-hop, dance, Wim Hof-inspired breathing, tea culture and reflections on pain and vitality, Soul Valpio offered a broader and more humane understanding of what it meant to care for the self. Not betterment as obsession, but aliveness as practice.
That was the quiet triumph of *SOUL VALPIO (A)LIVE*. It did not simply ask how to live well. It asked how to remain fully, vulnerably, physically present inside life at all.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki