Rooting Into Me
It’s about a week since I sat in a 30-hour ceremony with the West African plant medicine of iboga. I close my eyes for a moment, writing these words as I breathe into my body, tuning into this newfound awareness that I live through. I feel a calm, quiet, stillness, and clarity that I have only felt before in meditation or in the throes of nature. I feel this way in a more consistent manner.
I went into the ceremony with the intention of ease. I have been moving through life efforting so much: stacking my hours with work, forecasting into the future, stressing about finances, checking my phone every pause I get, and falling asleep plotting my movements of the next day. I was feeling so exhausted in my daily being. Even my recent blood work showed that I had adrenal fatigue. When I would facilitate retreats, participants would feel my energy and empathize with me. In fact, there was a part of me that relished in the performance of my exhaustion because others could acknowledge just how hard I worked, and therefore just how valuable I might be.
The iboga ceremony defied all of my expectations. I had the expectation that iboga was going to allow me to experience hidden levels of shame and heal them. I expected to confront burdens in my sub-conscious of “I’m not good enough”, “I am alone”, “I don’t matter”, and other existential programming that I wasn’t even aware of. I could not even fathom what a ceremony lasting more than a full day might be like.
What I experienced is something I was not prepared for. First of all, the actual setting was something I could not have imagined. I was lying on a memory foam mat alongside 17 other people lying on their mats. All the windows were blacked out as best as could be. We started around 5am. I saw the sun rise, then set, then rise, then set, then rise again. I could not have imagined I would see three sunrises in one ceremony! Physically, I fasted for the day before and during the entirety of the ceremony. I also drank only 1.5 bottles of water the entire 30 hours, which is something I did not expect given the fasting and the kambo we did previously where I purged everything in my digestive system. Iboga was also very physically uncomfortable: I spent nearly the entire time in nausea where any motion and any position other than strictly prone would stir up my desire to vomit even more. My back ached from holding a position for three sunrises, I was so dizzy that I had to crawl on all fours to the bathroom, and the taste of iboga was a new type of torture.
I remember my first statement after the experience was “I’m grateful for this, but I’m never doing it again.” Now, I am actually excited to do iboga again in the near future.
My experience of iboga is that it has a unique capacity to amplify awareness. My senses were heightened… I felt like I could hear an engine miles away, I could see details in the brick more clearly than ever, I could feel every fiber of fabric on my fingertips. My bodily sensations were clear. I could feel the difference between the inside of my heart and the outside… something I’ve never felt before. I jotted in my journal that my Self is in the innermost center of my heart while the feelings of resistance lie on the outside.
Most of all, my thoughts were extraordinarily loud. I could not hide from them. What would normally be my subconscious processes were full frontal. What’s more, I inhabited the observer so naturally… it was as if I was in a hyper-meditative state for what felt like years. When I compare my experience of iboga with other plant medicines like psilocybin and ayahuasca, I believe that the latter two let your ego take a back seat so that your consciousness can penetrate into the innermost recesses of what is locked away in your subconscious. Iboga, on the other hand, has your ego totally present but it is almost a separate entity.
Buddhism teaches that who we truly are is conscious awareness separate from the ego. This so accurately describes my experience. I felt like my ego was both a separate entity and part of me at the same time, while “I” was a neutral, peaceful, curious observer of all the thoughts that it had. Within this state, what was most striking for me is just how rampant my thinking mind was. My ego was constantly looking for distractions. Every little sound, every little thought, every little pathway of daydreaming… my egoic mind would latch onto the distractions. I remember a moment I laughed at just how easily and readily my ego would seek to distract itself from the present, then I would bring myself into actual meditation–into “No Mind”--and feel bliss for what felt like minutes compared to the years of thoughts that pulled me along.
In this observer state, I performed Somatic Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy on myself over and over again. Every bodily sensation that would come up, every story that I would hear my ego share, I would feel it, allow it, inquire into it, and give the part love from the inside of my heart. Based on my training and my own psychospiritual path, I did not seek to understand why any of the parts were the way they were. I let understanding arise from the surrender into them. There were dozens of parts that I was with, that I felt healed and integrated in a way that would have demanded so many hours of therapy and truly so many hours of ceremonies with other plant medicines.
I repatterned my relationship with money. I have had a complex connection with it. On the one hand, my father expressed his love through money and I also felt that he loved money more than me. My mother always struggled with money and I had been raised by long-term boyfriends of hers that were really loose with money.
I repatterned my relationship with porn and sexuality. I saw how much sex was just a form of distraction for me, something that came from my early childhood trauma. It was a pattern that was looping on itself to perpetuate the trauma that still lived inside of me. I didn’t need it anymore.
I repatterned my relationship with having something to prove. I could see that my performative parts kept trying to hide this exile carrying the burden of “I’m not good enough.” I don’t need to posture to communicate my value, nor do I need to believe in my value. I just AM, and there is no value or not. I don’t need to attach to how others perceive me… I get to trust that I will always be okay, and the universe will reflect the goodness and love that I feel inside.
There were so many more takeaways from my iboga journey that I felt deeply integrated into my psyche and my heart. Since iboga, my awareness of my distractions has persisted and there’s been a greater ease in my system. I don’t need distractions anymore… it’s become a non-issue. I don’t have the inclination to pull out my phone, scroll through Instagram, look at porn, watch TV, or even read books anymore. In the pauses, in the silence, I naturally settle into a meditative state and it feels more peaceful and blissful than any other experience.
Others have commented on how much more relaxed they perceive me to be. I feel it. I feel more energetic, clear, present, aware, and effortless than I have ever before. I am filled with gratitude at the reflection I get to live in as I write these words. Gracias medicina, or as they say in West Africa where iboga is from, bassé!
