No Fear by G.

It felt like a long time being high for four days, without much sleep and not being able to relax. Toward the end it eased up and became more pleasant. Colored designs. Flashing light. I was deep inside myself. No fear. Thinking about my addiction and why I kept coming back to it. I thought that drugs are a quick fix and that in the long run I need to deal with things instead of using drugs. They only make you feel better for a little while and then you need to deal and cope. People need feelings and they should listen to what their feelings are saying without repressing them with drugs.

A New Meaning for Tough Love by R.

It was very deep and intense. I pretty much died to my old self. The old me was fighting to survive but the good people here at the ITH were very supportive. I yelled, I kicked, I screamed (inside myself) but this new knowledge is too powerful to ignore. I want to undo my wrongs but I have to be patient. I can't let old emotions and thinking control me. This experience was life changing, spiritual, powerful. Also incredibly loving. Tough love is the best sometimes. Thanks for looking after me and my mother on the last night. I really feel the staff enhanced my experience in their own special way.

Iboga Experience by J.

I had the image of a long house, or a smoke house of which natives sit in for a vision quest. The long house extended into a deep green forest. The leaves of which became my bronchiole and lungs. The fire at the opening of the house burned up into my mind, sparking and lighting its darkest recesses. For the long cabin had become my spine.

Three Bwiti surrounded my bed, to my left was a man wearing a wooden black mask, on my right side stood another masked tribesman, while at the foot of the bed was the man in charge. This man scowled at me and my smugness for thinking I hadn't taken enough Iboga. They waited for me to leap out of my body and fly away into the sky over Vancouver Canada with them, which I did.

Taking me up above Canada they showed me how to travel the inner skies. Being far from home I flew back to Ontario visiting friends and family. Stopping at my sister's house, (Whom I haven't seen in about 16 years) I was told to leave this house alone.

Finding myself back in the therapy house I was saddened and heavy. A brief moment of breathing and the three masked Bwiti returned. As they looked upon me other men arrived, and pushed in to get a glimpse. Then suddenly the entire therapy house filled up with Bwiti. I watched my facilitator's spirit body rise out of herself as she was sitting on the couch to meet a beautiful leader, with a head of short dark curls. They seemed as old friends.

My first visions had the hue of rusty orange, and desert rock brown, yet as the experienced progressed and the intensity increased, the colors which I saw changed. These new vibrations could be described as green, pink, and blue. I also saw white; however the white was more like a bright invisible, translucency.

I am an avid lucid dreamer and astral projector, and have been so for a decade. My out of body experiences before Iboga have shown me that various colors and the speed of their vibrancy are a good determination as to the level of astral plane which you may be on. Low levels have colors that are slow and dark such as browns and reds, you will rarely if ever see a color like pink on the low astral levels. Such as the ones the dead walk on.

I believe Iboga brings you into, and through the land of the dead, to the land of the Gods by traversing you through the low astral, right through into the higher astral and even the mental and spiritual bodies. Further experimentation would be beneficial regarding the dosage requirements for these travels.

Clairaudience was common as was spirit communication.

During the experience I incorporated the use of various crystals such as clear quartz, phantom quartz, smoky quartz, amethyst, amber, and apophyllite. I used them both for protection and to store the mental and emotional memories of the experience.

It is likely that the crystals facilitated in some of the higher psychic experiences. However I believe this to be the case in terms of protection of the energy field(s) from harmful psychic attacks or encounters, which are often encountered in the use of shamanic plants. There was a period during my trip, which I would describe as a pull between demonic, and higher spiritual communication. Possibly my own higher and lower natures.

This is not to say that I only saw scary, violent, and sad things. I felt a great deal of bliss and thankfulness for the depth and benefits of the journey.

Carlos Castaneda, in his teachings of Don Juan, speaks of the necessity of the warrior to recapitulate his personal history so that he can become acquainted with the actuality of freedom. It is my firmest belief that Iboga can be used for this purpose. Iboga brought me in touch with both personal problems of my own which require inner work, it also brought me in touch with family issues. While on a larger scale, I received visions regarding the community and society.

Another example of a dream symbol occurring shortly after the experience was of me wearing pure, clean, white shoes. Sure, perhaps I'll buy new shoes, but the image is one of direction, and cleanliness.

My dreams also continued to reiterate some of what I learned during the Iboga trip. They also reinforced and validated the purification of my mind, and the healing which is associated with the "breaking open of the head."

Three days after the experience my body feels light and buoyant. I feel more as energy than body. And when I wake up from dreaming in the morning, and in the evenings after the sun has set, I am still able to see my energy body very clearly in the form of very vibrant rainbow white "trails".

Dreams, and the practice of lucid dreaming forges the energy body. Lucid dreaming is a method by which one is able to achieve astral projection, as well as various psychic and trance states. I am suspecting that the early morning, and evening appearance of "trails" is due to the further strengthening of my energy body due to the Iboga. Quite possibly the Iboga has raised my vibration to a new level. It has certainly increased my perception and strengthened my spirit.

My Ibogaine Journey by C.

About 5 years ago, I learned of a drug called ibogaine, which had cured the heroin addiction of someone I believed to be an incurable and unrepentant addict. While the relief of addiction in itself was incredible, I found myself intrigued by the implications this could potentially have for other forms of self-discovery and healing. I was not a substance addict, but I was captivated by other parts in the accounts I read… the descriptions of experiences of rebirth, enlightenment, insight, inspiration, the laying down of a lifetime of burdens. For a lifetime I have struggled with a lack of spiritual or emotional groundedness, and something about this medicine spoke to me. “Ten years of therapy in one night”, they wrote. In spite of the unlikely promise, I was interested.

Nonetheless I was hesitant… after all, this substance is illicit in the US, people had died from improper supervision or administration. For even the most bare-bones providers, the expense for treatment and travel were not trivial. Also, ibogaine is a potent psychedelic, something of which I had next to no experience. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t just scramble my brains and leave me a drooling vegetable in a hotel room while some shady fly-by-night provider deposited the treatment fee. However, as time went on, it became more obvious to me that continuing with this emptiness was not an option… if I did not deal with it, I would either become something quite ugly, or seek death. I chose to act, and I selected the Iboga Therapy House in Vancouver.

When I arrived at the house, I was nervous, anxious, and didn’t know what to think. It was a warm, homey, welcoming house decorated in subdued, earth-toned colors and tribal artifacts. It certainly didn’t look like the kind of place where you’d blow open your skull with potent African psychoactives. It was about 8 PM… I was told I’d have to wait 4 more hours, without food, no less. Frankly, I had built up 5 years of anticipation and was desperately craving relief for a lifetime of pain. I wanted the treatment immediately, but I suppressed the urge to make a scene. Since the attendants radiated knowledge, confidence, experience, caring, and professionalism, I submitted to trusting the process.

We talked briefly about what to expect in the experience, and then I took a 100mg test dose. I was so excited to finally receive some part of the drug that I tried desperately to feel something, but I got nothing.

About 2 hours passed, and still nothing from the test dose. This was good, they said; it meant I wasn’t allergic. At about midnight, I was given what they told me was 1290 milligrams… on top of the 100mg test dose, this was 15 milligrams per kilogram of ibogaine per kilogram. It was presented to me as six white capsules lined up side by side in a small black box, appearing to me like a bleached bones in an ossuary. I felt like I was being handed my own death, and I suddenly felt afraid. I balked, wondering how I could stall for time. But I also felt something driving me from the inside… I had arrived at the end of a road that spanned 5 years, 3000 miles, 3000 dollars, 6 hours of fasting, and many hours of deliberation and soul-seeking. The time for hesitation had long passed.

I swallowed all 6 of the capsules. After feeling nothing for about 60 seconds, I began to feel relaxed. I’d found in the past that I was often resistant to new substance, noticing none of the expected effects. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to do this difficult journey after all. I relaxed and chatted with Sandra for a bit. Then, after about 45 minutes, it suddenly became startlingly clear that there would be no resistance to this substance.

The first thing I noticed was that the wood-panel ceiling, arranged in horizontal parquets, started shimmering and almost breathing. This wasn’t too unusual; anyone in a sober state can achieve the same effect by staring at any patterned surface until ocular fatigue sets in… the patterns will begin to shimmer, trail, and flow. I dismissed this effect as the wishful thinking that occurs as one anticipates an altered state that never quite arrives. Next, square patches of colored patterns seemed to crawl and settle on the ceiling, like living kaleidoscopic tiles, until the entire ceiling was decorated. Still, just a derivative of the existing surroundings… not so impressive. Then, the ceiling suddenly took on the appearance of a pool of water, lit from the inside with pink light. Drops of water were striking the surface and creating ripples that spread gracefully across the entire ceiling. Ibogaine now had my complete and undivided attention, and this was probably the most excited moment of my life. Nonetheless I was still in the real world… I could see objects and people in the room. I recall someone suggesting I close my eyes and “get into it”.

At this point I began to lose track of time and reality. Although I did want to “get into it”, I also wanted to hold onto reality as a reference point understand the depth of the experience, and hopefully also to hang some memories on. After going through so much to get here, I wanted to have a little something to take back with me. But on the other hand, the closed-eye visuals were compelling, so eventually I decided I would leave my eyes closed and get into the visions.

Chaos was all around me. Fluorescent green spheres shot from behind me to a point in the distance in front of me. I saw green laser-like lines dancing in my headspace. I got the sensation that I was at the end of a long movie theatre, with 4 screens at the end. On these screens I saw very simple geometric patterns of various shades of black and blue… aqua, turquoise, teal, robin’s egg. Mostly they were square and diamond patterns but there were rounded ones too. They reminded me of “First Breath” by Vibrata Chromodoris as well as some more Dave Hunter’s blue-dominated work. And these just kept periodically flipping, just like background decorations. I felt that these visions represented the iboga spirit that was constantly in control… much as if it was supplying me with visions to distract me while it performed the heavier work behind the scenes.

While the ibogaine wallpaper was working at the end of the theatre, there was so much going on in the foreground that unfortunately I can’t remember it all. I do remember that it was dazzling. I remember seeing I remember having the impression of a large greenish bag-like organ floating in my right field of vision, with a long appendage stretching out and connecting to my temporal lobe. It pulsed and constricted; I got the impression that this was the Broca’s area of my brain; the language center. It was squeezing words into my brain and processing the sounds that were entering my ears. Suddenly, the appendage became detached and spraying words into space. Uh oh. Can’t be good. I had lost language; I started hearing gibberish and speaking gibberish as well.

Suddenly I lost myself entirely. The boundaries of my internal vision field disappeared, the boundaries even of my own ego disappeared. I lost the ability to do anything except see that I was floating in a green miasma, and I had no name, no language, no identity, and no idea where I’d even come from. It was frightening. At this point I knew for certain that this wasn’t a game; something powerful had hold of me. My ego was disintegrating, I could visually see the pieces flying outward at every angle. All I could think was “please pull it back together” (without words, of course, because I’d lost my language). Fortunately with ibogaine, one can generally re-integrate with reality just by opening the eyes, which I did. I now regret fleeing this ego-dissolved state, as I probably missed visiting some very interesting places. Nonetheless as a tender, inexperienced psychonaut I had an abiding fear of losing it altogether. Next time I’ll be a little more courageous.

After coming “back” to myself, I found that I no longer saw my Broca’s area anywhere. Instead, all of my words were lying in a heap of fluorescent blue Scrabble pieces at a recess in the bottom of my headspace in sort of a volcanic mound. Controlling my speech or forming words was difficult. Periodically the mound would erupt, propelling words upward into my headspace. I wanted to communicate but I absolutely could not assemble sentences… all I could do was pronounce whatever words I saw as they floated by. “Foot.” “Pigeon.” Okay, we’ll go with that. “Hey everybody, footpigeon.”

Next was the chakra tree. I call it the chakra tree because it closely resembled Dave Hunter’s artwork of the same name. First, I had a realistic vision of myself and the treatment facilitators sitting in a wooded clearing by an obelisk-shaped reservoir of magenta-colored liquid which I took to be ibogaine. (In my visions, the ibogaine substance figured prominently, and was symbolically assigned the color magenta). From the reservoir, there was an intravenous hooked into my arm. My facilitators were looking at me with a mixture of resolve and amusement as if to say… “Here it comes… you don’t even know what’s coming, but you’re about to find out…” And as I watched it gushing through the tube through my arm, I thought…. Wait, no, I’m not ready, that’s too much, just give me another minute to prepare. But it all hit me and flowed into my arm through the hot-pink tube. Then something interesting happened… another magenta IV tube sprouted from my arm and attached itself to the earth, and suddenly I saw the earth become a huge network of blood capillaries which filled with ibogaine. Oops. I sensed that I had just dosed the entire earth with ibogaine. Oh no… I didn’t mean to do that. Well, the earth looked like it needed it, so maybe it wasn’t a bad thing,

At this point, I returned to the visions, and this was when I really took flight in them. Suddenly I had the sensation of being propelled upward at a dizzying speed through the blackness in a blue-ringed tube. I was being pushed upward by the first flood of ibogaine. I reached the top of the chakra tree and found myself in a silver basin containing boiling pink and blue foam. The ibogaine was jumping and dancing across the surface in magenta arcs. The whole basin started rumbling and shaking as if in an earthquake, and the arcs intensified. I had the feeling of my facilitators confirming to me “This is it, this is the core iboga vision… you’re seeing what we all saw, this is what you came to see. Release yourself to it, go with it, be initiated and be reborn.” Then I felt a huge pressure under me, and I felt blasted out the top as if from a giant pyrotechnics mortar. I felt as if I’d been splattered all over the ceiling of the universe, and I lost myself for a few minutes again.

My sensation at this point was that I had journeyed to the deepest part of the experience. I was in complete blackness, except for an upwelling fountain of purple mist which was holding me up with its gentle upward pressure. I sensed I was communing with an ancient and powerful spirit. It was communicating that I had arrived at the central mandatory part of the experience. It expressed that everyone who takes ibogaine must come to this place, that doing so is the ultimate purpose of life, and that the entire purpose of the universe was to bring us to this place. I was perfused with a deep sense of interconnectedness of all things, and this helped me perceive the truth of what I was being told. I saw the formation of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe in the nanoseconds after the big bang and the formation of the stars connected to all the events and people in my lifem for the purpose of bringing me to this moment. I can say honestly and without a trace of irony that this particular awakening represents the most important part of my life. I can’t see how anything before or after could ever approach it.

At various points my reverie was interrupted by baseline checks from the facilitators, which momentary brought me back into the room. I have impressions of what was happening in the “real” world at that time; I know now that some were real and some weren’t. I saw Sandra’s face covered by a translucent mask, covering her mouth and making it very difficult to understand her. At various times I felt as if six facilitators were in the room; I know now there were never more than three plus myself. At one point in the night I felt I was being monitored only by an African girl in her late teens; I now realize this didn’t happen. I was conscious of my facilitators writing things down, which was true… but I also perceived that they were repeating my every utterance to reassure to me that they were giving me the utmost attention… if I coughed, or said “uh”, I heard someone say… “Ok, that was a cough… that was an ‘uh’”. (I’ve since been told this did not occur). At one point later in the night, I found it completely impossible to vocalize or communicate… I was too tired and dehydrated. I felt I was letting down my facilitators as they had asked me to vocalize as much as possible. At one point I believed I heard someone directly over me say “…he hasn’t said a single word?” I was later told that nobody said this, and in fact I was vocalizing quite a bit. I believed I had urinated in the bed and heard someone said “does he know?” Later I determined that neither of those things occurred. All these trivial observations serve nothing except to demonstrate that my perception of reality was definitely distorted, and that trying to hold onto my immediate reality was largely useless and distracting… a mistake I won’t make next time, should I go through this again.

After I settled, the next phase came, in which I saw photo-like images. I began to get pictures of various people and events in my life, overlaid on top of the iboga screens at the end of the theatre. These were often vague, fuzzy, and nonsensical, and I don’t remember much about them. I was manipulating them like windows on a computer screen, using my hands, and then I recall a facilitator telling me: “you don’t need to use your hands, try manipulating them with your mind.” I found that I could, just by wrinkling my nose like Barbara Eden in “I Dream of Jeannie.” But I never could really get a good picture. I found that the pictures of things I thought were difficult or maybe intense, I wasn’t able to open. I couldn’t get into death, my thoughts of suicide, or pictures of certain people close to me. Those windows were simply unavailable. Not being able to get into the pictures, I gave up on them.

Next, I got landscapes. These were interesting. I got images of geological features and ruins… of the great pyramids at Giza, the Parthenon in yellow, Bryce Canyon, the Sphinx in red. Ankgor Wat in blue. I tried to enter these pictures and I had a little success… I was able to walk through the pyramids briefly. But this didn’t last.... the last of the visions faded away as the sun rose.

After 6 grueling hours, I was exhausted. If I’ve made the visionary phase sound like a fun, trippy lightshow… well, there was a lot more to it than that. Physically, it was extremely difficult. I had vomited a couple of times, my throat was parched dry because I was mouth-breathing the whole time, I had been coughing heavily. At one point I felt as if I was either breathing improperly or not enough, and I struggled to get enough breath into my body (which I now believe was an illusion; nobody reported any undue distress on my part). At the end of it, I felt like I had been hit by a truck.

Worst of all, I was woefully sad. Sure, I’d been to another place and seen interesting things, as I’d hoped… but most of all I’d expected to work through issues in my life and gain spiritual and psychological insight, and I felt none whatsoever. I felt that my last hope of self-help had turned out to be a sham and that I’d wasted a large sum of money. I wanted to cry, but I was too exhausted. I just sat there as the sun began to rise, trying to pull myself together. However I’d overlooked something important. In my research, I had entirely overlooked the fact that ibogaine comes in 2 phases… the visionary phase, and the introspective phase. In my research, mostly I’d always been interested in the visionary phase and glossed over the introspective phase. So I really was not expecting the wonderful experience that followed. In my head I began talking to myself… I said “This has been a waste of time, I feel exhausted and miserable, I just want it all over.” And then something odd happened…, I heard an answer back from myself, clear as a bell… “Just give it 10 more minutes”.

Ordinarily, this would have startled me. But by this point, having just been through 6 hours of visions in which my brain was splattered across the ceiling of the universe, nothing could have surprised me at this point. So I started playing around with this inner voice, asking questions. Am I going to be OK? The answer came back…. “Yes, you’re going to be OK.” It was unmistakable. I knew the voice was coming from inside me, but it was authoritative, confident, and unbiased. Somehow the “questioning me” was separate from the “answering me”. Fascinated now, I continued asking questions:

Have I wasted my money on this endeavor? “No.”
How can I heal myself? “First, eliminate all unopposed negative language in the present and future tense, except for the phrase ‘don’t have to.’ You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. Replace ‘have to’ with ‘want to’. If you have an obligation, make sure you identify who the obligation is toward. If the obligation isn’t to a person, then you don’t have to do it… from now on, you only do things for people, not for things or concepts. And you treat everyone with love and respect.
Are you serious? Take no prisoners.
I don’t understand what you mean. When you create strife with someone, you lock them into conflict with you, as if you had locked both of you in a prison cell. Take no prisoners.
How can I be happy in life? “Be true to yourself and help others the way you’ve always tried.”

This was real progress; I was getting excited now. I barraged myself with questions, each time getting a useful answer. I should have been writing all this down and I wish I had, but I thought I’d have no trouble remembering it. For the next 18 hours I paced around the house, curling up on sofas and beds, constantly whispering questions to myself and whispering answers back. All the answers made me smile; some of them made me giggle and laugh out loud. All of them were important and useful tools for building healthy, happy thoughts, permanently. During this period I never felt tired or hungry but I forced myself to drink juice because I knew my body needed nourishment. I engaged in conversations with facilitators at times, but the internal dialogue was so compelling that I wasn’t much interested in talking to others.

At about midnight, 24 hours after I was launched on my experience, the reflective phase was fading away, and I reached a place of pure raw emotion, of the deepest possible joy and gratitude. I was still reflecting, but no longer actively engaging my internal other. I found myself still not sleepy or hungry. For a while I simply lay on the bed. Alone, I reflected deeply on this wonderful gift I had been given. At times, I laughed at my past self, so serious and hubristic. At times, I wept in relief that my darkness was unbelievably, finally, undoubtedly over. I tried to plumb the deepest wells of gratitude in my soul to express thanks for what had happened to me. Mostly, I began to think backward in my life to understand how I had come to such a place of darkness in my life. It began coming together in my own mind as a symbolic narrative of my own internal struggles, and at about 2AM I felt guided to write down. For the next 3 hours I wrote like a fiend, churning out an allegorical story of my life, chronicling how my intellectual self had separated from my emotional self early in life, and the resulting consequences. That document is the most important product of the experience, and without it, I’m not sure I would have brought home the same lessons or progress. I am a bit abashed to recall I foisted this piece of highly personal, exuberant juvenilia on all my facilitators, and I’m humbled by the support that they gave it.

At about 6AM I decided take a walk. At this point, my physical condition can only be described as magical. I felt so light that I had the sensation that my body was evaporating. Down by the seaside, I watched the sun rise, and it was glorious. I wandered around for a bit, having some friendly interactions with a few strangers and a dog.

At this point, I would say that I had entirely returned to consensus reality, and the heavily committed portion of my journey was officially over at about the 34th hour. Though I hadn’t eaten or slept in almost 2 days, I wasn’t hungry or tired. I felt exuberantly happy, I was in a state of indefatigable optimism, I saw only the best in every interaction with every person, I saw all around me nothing but the pure beauty of creation, and thankful for every moment in it. This state persisted for about 90 days, and the residue of it is still resonating inside me, constantly changing my life in small ways each day.

Ibogaine Visions by S.

After a smudging ritual three hours post ingestion I began to feel weightless especially in my chest. My balance was definitely off so I decided to get assistance climbing the stairs up to the bedroom where I would spend the next 24 hours. Blood pressure was checked and I lay down on my back quite comfortably. My assistant put on some ambient music and I closed my eyes.

I have no clear ideal of time I spent there, eyes closed and listening to the calming sounds of the music. I felt calm and quite relaxed but also eager and anxious to see what the Ibogaine had to share with me. Soon colors like deep magenta and dark blue swam on the inside of my eyelids. The colors, seemingly alive and pulsating, became brighter and brighter making the darkness of closed eyes beautiful and visible. As the scene became more visible at least five translucent, mirror skinned caterpillar creatures crawled gently from my peripheral into my forward vision and back into my skull. I got the feeling that they were scouts for the Ibogaine taking an inventory of my psyche. They were gentle and deliberate and didn’t cause any discomfort at all.

The scouts subsided and lines of deep blue and green created grids and lattice revealing a geometric landscape with mountains and shapes previously unseen to me. Here I felt a soaring sensation traveling through this geometric world. The landscape itself seemed to be welcoming me. It felt like the landscape felt I was as beautiful as I thought it was. I don’t know if that makes any sense but the feeling is difficult to articulate in language. The world was in as much awe as I was. Pulsating points of light began to appear at certain intersections of the green and blue lines.

The points of light continued reminding me of pressure points in the geometric landscape. I felt so much energy in my base chakra that I feared I might urinate in the bed. I asked for assistance numerous times to use the bathroom. Walking to the bathroom felt awkward to say the least. I saw layers of color and dimension and felt an electric buzz as I passed through them into the bathroom.

Returning to my position in the bedroom with eyes closed I was again visited by the mirror caterpillars and the points of light and geometric world returned into my vision. Cellular and amoeba creatures began to appear on the individual points of light and those points began to form a circular spiraling. Different animals at different stages of evolution continued to reveal themselves on these points of light. Primates to homosapiens spiraled further and further with my extended family and friends closer to the center of the spiral. At the center of the spiral were my nuclear family, my partner, my son and myself. A golden light glowed behind us in one of the sweetest most loving moments I have ever experienced. With a deep drone and hum my family and the entire evolutionary process was ripped away from me and I was naked.

I was utterly alone. There was no geometric landscape, no evolutionary family. Tremendously alone I wept. The feeling of closeness was now of alienation and desolation. All the pressure points of light began to swirl from my third eye and Lotus pedals danced on the lining. I was overcome with a sense of familiarity to the whole life. The spirit and souls of my family and every other life form comforted me and gave an overwhelming sense of joy. A great white essence enveloped myself and the entire geometric world I had visited. I knew that this was the white light of the infinite. The collective soul and perfect color had allowed me to gaze at it. I felt extremely honored and grateful for it and it was here that I faded into a semi dream sleep and when I awoke the visions had subsided. The visions were gone and I felt a hunger to go back to that geometric world of beauty and Oneness. A sorrow overcame me, as I knew that my journey had ended but at the same time I was changed, elated and enlightened. I bid farewell until the next time I am lucky enough to visit that world.

I am looking forward to that time……………..