DOSE:

repeated

oral

Tabernanthe iboga

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

74 kg

Iboga is a mysterious piece of the cosmic puzzle. Nothing can prepare you for it, although absolute faith in yourself can certainly help. For me it was beautiful, magical and terrifying.

I came to this detox house not for addictions, as I had already quit my polytoxicomania 2,3 years before then, but for emotional and physical healing. It's been 2 years and a half that I suffer from chronic acid reflux which I am currently treating with green clay, besides this, I am in the process of doing shadow work with several sacred plants which is about shedding awareness on repressed psychic content in order to integrate our being and thus reach the light of our Inner Self.

After initiating the fast with epsom salts the day before, I was given several doses of iboga TPA 'total purified alkaloid' extract, which consists of 60 to 90% of ibogaine and thus 10 to 40% of the 11 other alkaloids (such as ibogamine, iboganine, voacangine...), the extract seemed more complete than pure ibogaine hcl.

The whole trip lasted 40 hours, with the initial visionary phase taking up to 10 hours. It does feel longer than that at times. The come up was smooth, with a body load similar to ketamine, thought-patterns stretched, I sunk heavily in the bed and I started seeing hypnagogic lights dancing in the dark. Each time I glanced at the bed the sheets were waving furiously and loudly while the bedroom doors closed in next to the bed so I thought it was safer to stare at the ceiling. A stunning little glowing orb with an eye in the center and shining symbols floating around it whizzed passed my bed. Three big cartoonish eyes blinked and dissapeared in the dark and the well known buzzing sound, akin to a bee swirling around your head, made its entrance. For a small instant I literally popped out of the matrix : I became a bubble of white liquid light surrounded by streams of glowing blue alien glyphs, I had a deep emotional reaction : 'WOW amazing I'm out of the matrix' then a nostalgic 'OH NO I'm already out' and so the spirit of iboga brought me back to the bed in my physical shell and started to adjust and dim down the lights and sounds of this mystical play. A few teenage african girls, perhaps kindred bwiti spirits, floated briefly above me, I felt that my third eye was only half open : I could see some parts of the spirit world but not all of it.

In front of me there was this kind of entity/machine scanning my mental body, at my right hand side sat an owl and at my left there were two cat spirits swimming in the Ether, while always the same buzzing light rotating around my head. I kept focusing on the reassuring buzzing each time my sight wandered too far down the scary far edges of the room. When I managed to follow a wisp's trail it made fireworks to congratulate me. An astral window opened up to reveal this middle aged revenant women, I asked 'are you a spirit?', she said 'if I am a spirit...yes I am'. Then I felt some hands grab my upper stomach and I heard 'your hiatal hernia....'. After that I entered a dreamy phase from which I can't seem to recall much : it seemed as if the scanning entity was dissecting my mind and vague memories were coming out, a bit from my childhood, and I also realized that some of my erroneous thought-patterns came not from me but from my dad. The divine feminine has certainly been repressed in our times.

When the visions started to fade, during twilight, B walked me to the wooden pyramid in the garden. That first night came without sleep, I was getting into Iboga's second phase: the 'Grey Day', I did not know it was going to be the most challenging part for me. I spent the night in trance, trying to avoid some magnetic thought-forms and a few weird entities. The patterns in the wood resembled grey aliens. Sometimes I jolted out of bed assaulted by impossible paradoxical thoughts. Soon after dawn came and I felt horrendous, I thought I had failed the therapy. My mind was trapped in an immense turmoil, perhaps I had come to witness eternal hell... Had I committed the ultimate sin of wanting to manipulate reality? Was this the impossible place of lost agonizing souls? I wasn't sure as Time was continuously stretching. This couldn't be : there is no eternal prison as consciousness is bound to flow back to its own Source of Freedom.

I wanted to die but as the pain wasn't physical I wasn't sure if that would be a suitable escape, death still remained a big mystery. I remembered some helpful quotes : one from C 'what matters is After', and others 'when you arrive in the shadow world don't look at the demons on your sides but just focus on the path ahead step by step', 'The only way out of hell is through it'. There was this excruciating pain up in my mental body, like the bleeding hole when a leech gets cut off. Or perhaps like something trying to get out, knocking extremely hard on my psyche. This mental pain felt a hundredfold stronger than any physical pain. I wanted to scream but all the emotions were so very tightly locked down in the steel cage of the gut. I called B for help, he reminded me that I can't take 'it' out of me, only 'it' would leave by itself. Much to my surprise C wasn't troubled, she said that it's a common part of the trip.

Then B brought me to the shower and that's where the true healing miracle happened : with the water, the emotions were coming out of the gut and the sharp mental pain vanished. I cried, and cried so much and so very loudly. It was both a cry of hidden past torments and a cry of big relief of having escaped hell. I moved from shower to shower crying without end like an infant. C and her little baby son M were so kind and non-judgmental, they were helping me tremendously, blessing me with their loving presence, I couldn't believe that the baby understood these emotional tidal waves... his innocence and purity was astounding... He was also a little healer! When I remembered the pain I had felt, repressing our emotions and our true self seemed to be the worst torture you can ever inflict on a human being. It was like I hadn't felt my emotional body in so long. An oasis geyser in an arid desert. I still didn't have much notion of time so I thought I would have to cry for years before getting back to a normal state of being. C and B were very compassionate and helped me out when needed. It wasn't easy dealing with all these emotions, some came from old traumas and it is true that we hold a lot of shame within us that we need to clear out. I alternated between intense peace and difficult emotional outbursts.

When the second night came I was still shaken up and manic from the grey day, in my mind's eye a very imposing and stern Spirit (an ancient floating 'eye') was scaring me off a little so I was given some valium and I finally managed to have my first sleep in 48 hours. The third day I was back to a normal state of being with a soothing mental clarity. I slowly started breaking the 60 hour fast as my body was pretty weak from having fasted so much this year. For a few days, before going to sleep I could still see some tracers and feel the iboga or perhaps the nor-ibogaine, my dreams became also a bit more vivid during this afterglow.

This first flood dose has definitely started some mental healing but not yet to the extent of shifting physical ailments. After having fully integrated this experience I'll probably work again with the Sacred Wood some time.

A special thanks to C and B.

Blessings to you all.

Notes (2 years later, 2018):

This episode clearly revealed some part of my shadow aspect. While every single day I still feel the same knot, this visionary event has fueled me with even more willpower towards achieving wholeness. While at the same time I bow down to the sacredness of all of Life….the vast cosmic beauty which we gather by little fragments.

Exp Year: 2016	ExpID: 111816
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Apr 12, 2018	Views: 1,350
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Tabernanthe iboga (200) : Unknown Context (20), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Multi-Day Experience (13), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), General (1)