Iboga Medicine: Move Slowly
With all the recent attention on Trump’s executive order on psychedelic research, and the talk about more funding and support going toward these medicines, including ibogaine, I wanted to share something a little more nuanced here… especially after I experienced my first flood doses with iboga after about 14 years of contemplating working with it.
Before reading on, please take a minute to read this Practitioner Statement on the Responsible Development of Ibogaine in the United States, written by a collective of highly experienced practitioners, researchers, clinicians, and integration specialists with direct, long-term experience working with iboga and ibogaine across a range of settings.
And, I’ll start by saying this in response to the recent news… I am glad more people are waking up to the healing potential of these medicines. I am glad there is more openness, I’m happy there is more curiosity. And at the same time, my hope is that this is given the care and deep respect these medicines deserve, along with real safety and reverence for their healing potential for humanity.
Ibogaine versus Iboga
Ibogaine comes from iboga (and Voacanga africana). Iboga is a root medicine from Africa. It comes from the soil of our Earth, someone’s home. It comes from people who have been in relationship with it for a very long time. It comes from tradition, ritual, prayer, music, and a whole worldview that does not reduce life down to chemistry alone. So while I understand why the modern world wants to study compounds, isolate mechanisms, and move things through research channels, I really hope we do not lose the deeper context in the process.
These medicines are not just alkaloids, compounds or molecules. The world’s most powerful plants are not just to extract, scale, or turn into the next regulated way for Big Harma to increase profits.
One thing that also stood out to me in the above letter from iboga and ibogaine ispractitioners was that they make a very important distinction around ibogaine itself. They acknowledge that ibogaine may help interrupt deeply entrenched thought and behavior patterns, and for some people can create a real window of clarity or even interrupt withdrawal. BUT they are very clear that ibogaine is NOT some standalone miracle, “reset,” or self-sufficient cure. They say what most shapes long-term outcomes is not just the event itself, but the quality of preparation, the relational and environmental context, proper screening, and the presence of sustained integration afterward.
They also warn that ibogaine carries real risk, that its therapeutic potential is narrow and highly context-dependent, and that reducing it to a molecule alone can be inaccurate and dangerous. Their concern is that as ibogaine moves further into U.S. clinical and commercial systems, it is too easily being shaped into something clean, scalable, and marketable, while leaving out the deeper relational, traditional, and ethical realities that actually matter.
Contrary to much of the media that makes their income via clickbait, Iboga and Ibogaine *do not* always “cure” everyone for everything they seek…
There is no Amazon Prime of sacred medicines.
I don’t think this is something to rush. I don’t think this is something to flatten into “good news” without nuance.
And after finally working with iboga myself, I feel that even more strongly now.
What shapes long-term healing is not just the medicine itself, but the depth of preparation, the relational context, and a commitment to consistent integration afterwards.
My Experiences with Iboga
This story and more about my first experiences with Iboga was also recently shared on my podcast HERE and here.
The follow up “After iboga” episode is HERE on YouTube and here.
I first heard about iboga, and detailed experiences of it, in 2012. I was in London with a friend, and another friend of his, who used to actually serve iboga, was the first person to tell me all about it. I remember him saying something like… “there are usually two ceremonies over the course of a week, and in the first one it basically cleanses your karma, and in the second one it tells you what to go do with your life”. I remember feeling, “wow… that sounds very enticing… I want a clear directive telling me what to do with my life!”
And, over the years, I learned A LOT more about iboga and ibogaine than that.
I had interviewed many Iboga and Ibogaine facilitators on my podcast, Medicine For These Times, and Psychedelics, Sacred Medicines & Purpose Summits over the years.
(Here are links to some of those interviews: Tricia Eastman and Tricia Eastman many years ago, here, Tom Feegel of Beond Ibogaine and many past interviews on my Psychedelics and Soul’s Purpose with Elizabeth Bast, Chor Boogie, Elizabeth J.O. and more. I had become pretty friendly with Tricia and Elizabeth, and have the honor to learn a lot from powerful women who had been serving this medicine for a long time).
I heard that iboga is “truth medicine”. I heard stories that were beautiful and terrifying and profound. I watched people go do it. I came very, very close many times myself. And then I would change my mind.
One of the biggest reasons it took me all those years to finally with Iboga was because I wanted to give it proper time and spaciousness for proper preparation and integration.
I’ve done master plant dietas with ayahuasca in the jungle, extended meditation retreats, and long retreats with ayahuasca. I’ve done profound work with many medicines and modalities over many years, and one thing I know from experience is that it is not just about the ceremonies or the retreat. . You can’t just do something this deep and then go right back into normal life as if nothing happened.
The integration of life-changing medicine experiences can be quite challenging and destabilizing.
I know what it’s like to come back from a master plant medicine dieta or retreat and go right back into working hard, back business as usual, actually, and then crash, run into major integration challenges and wonder… did I REALLY give that enough space to integrate as well as it could have? Probably not. So with iboga, having lots of space for preparation and mostly integration really mattered to me.
I didn’t want Iboga to just be another life-changing experience squeezed into one week out of a busy life. It’s not something you grab off a shelf, consume, and move on as so many powerful psychedelic experiences have become these days.
I wanted to be able to leave enough space and room around my iboga flood doses over a week-long retreat.
That was part of why this last year made sense…. I had already been on what I kept calling an energetic sabbatical. It wasn’t really a sabbatical because I still had clients and I was still working, but it was the first time in years that I had stepped back from running my big mastermind.
I had more room to breathe. I had more room to feel what was actually happening in my life. And I was in a pretty major portal already… helping move my mom into assisted living, selling her house, questioning what I really want now that I’m in this next phase of life, asking what is actually most important to me now.
At the same time, there was also one area of my life that has been a very big mystery for a long time. I won’t get into all the details here, but it felt like there was this one thing I could not fully get to. And I’ve both done and studied a lot of work…everything out there somatic therapy, IFS, Hakomi, depth psychology, family constellations, Transformational NLP, energy work, meditation, prayer, plant medicines. I’ve been a lot of transformational work on myself since I was a teenager. So this wasn’t coming from some place of wanting a quick fix. It was more along the lines of, “There’s something here that has not fully revealed itself, I can feel it, and I’d like to know it….and know myself, of course!”
That was one of the reasons the call to iboga started getting louder again.
A few years ago, I started building a relationship with only the *spirit* of iboga… before ever touching the medicine. And it was POWERFUL.
And this is something I really recommend to anyone who feels called to a plant medicine. Start there. Start by building a relationship with the spirit of the medicine. It actually works.
One day, I decided to open a conversation with Iboga.
I basically introduced myself to the spirt of the root and said, hey, I want to talk to you and see if you are a plant I should work with.
And that night I had a dream that was very different than my normal dreams. It had a whole different energy to it. It was clear, profound, and helpful. It felt obvious to me that the plant was speaking through that dream. The next morning I told someone I trust, who also used to facilitate the medicine, and that eventually led to me doing a small microdose protocol with iboga. Even in tiny amounts, I could feel how strong it was…. I could barely sleep from the smallest amount. That alone told me this medicine was no joke.
Then, more recently, there were a whole series of things happening in my life that felt like lightning bolts coming in. I had been working with Hanuman and learning the Hanuman Chalisa for many months last year. I was having all these timeline-jump kinds of moments, going through some pretty profound astrology transits, doing some deep healing work. Plus, all the stuff with my mom and business “sabbatical”.
There were significant dreams with a different quality that I never had before, wild synchronicities, a freak accident that came out of nowhere with a miracle healing that came within an hour of it, and hours later, a guy who appeared out of nowhere who I was really into and the back and forth with him that stirred up a lot inside me… ongoing transformational NLP and family constellation work showed me many new perspectives I had not seen, throw in some kundalini energies, wild dreams, more synchronicities and astrology transits.
It was an interesting time! It felt like everything was moving very fast but flowing very precisely. Looking back now, I really do believe the iboga flood doses were already coming into my life about 1.5 years before it did.
Around that same time, I had a friend whose husband went to work with iboga about 8 months before me, and when I heard about his experience, the seeds were planted for me one again. Then that friend said she was considering going to work with it, and I knew it was the right time, right place, right facilitators.
I was scared. Honestly, I have never been that scared to go work with a medicine before. When I said yes to iboga, the fear that came up was intense. It wasn’t even the fear of death, although of course with a medicine like this there is a real need for medical screening and real care. (Seriously, there have been a bunch of iboga and ibogaine deaths). It was more like the fear of stepping into something that I knew was going to be very, very profound and life-changing.
Once I said yes to the retreat, my dreams changed immediately. The same thing had happened when I first started relating to the spirit of iboga a few years earlier. This time again, it was obvious that the medicine was already with me. I was in conversation with the spirit of iboga in prayer, with my intentions, with what I was asking for, with what I was willing to see. And things started ending in my life. A friendship ended. A few other things ran their course. It wasn’t “bad,” but it was hard. It felt like a purge process had already begun before I ever got there.
After 14 years, I finally did Iboga flood doses at a week long retreat.
It has now been about three months since that experience, where I did two flood doses over the course of a week. And I still feel like I would say… ask me in six months. Ask me in a year. Ask me at the end of my life. Because this is not the kind of experience where I can tie it up with a neat little bow and tell you exactly what it did.
What I can say is that it was quite different than any other medicine I’ve ever worked with. I have deep reverence for this master root medicine. It deepened my reverence for plants in general, but especially for this one. I do see it as a master healer. I had some experiences that were extremely deep peelings, and I know for a fact they have already affected my day to day life. I also know that I left a lot of room for integration, and I’m very grateful I did.
I’ve been doing nearly weekly sessions with the “therapist” I work with, who is not a “traditional” exactly, but someone I do very deep somatic and soul work with. A mix of IFS, Hakomi, Depth Psychology, energy work, Psycomagick, and more…lots of modalities woven together. And I really believe that level of preparation and ongoing integration is part of why the experience was as powerful as it was. Not because mine was “better” than anyone else’s, but because I came in with years of work already happening, and very clear prayer.
Iboga didn’t show me a lot that was totally new…but it was very, very different. That’s one of the most interesting things about it. It was more like a deeper level of clarity around things I had already been working on for years. Certain patterns, beliefs, epigenetic energies, ancestral and karmic imprints… Certain isomorphic patterns that I could feel running through me, my parents and multiple generations beyond that. It brought many of these to consciousness in an unusually clear layer-by-layer kind of way. (I’m not sure why I’m even trying with my words….there are no English words to explain this, really).
One example was around with my relationship with/to the masculine (not “men”, per se, but The Masculine) that I have been processing and working on for a very long time. Sadly, this includes some pretty heavy trauma from incest and rape in my ancestral line. Nothing happened directly to me, but I’ve been carrying this in my body passed onto me. It’s gotten better over many, many years, not because there is some final place to “get to”, but because there has been deeper awareness, healing, integration.
A few months before I said yes to iboga, some interactions and events with a guy helped me me start seeing a particular pattern and “trance” I was in with the Masculine on an entirely new level. (Massive bow of gratitude to that guy who I liked who I was talking to during super profound Mars transits I was moving through… you can’t make it up!) Something in my not-conscious started becoming conscious in a new way. I could finally see and feel it… more unconscious was conscious. Great! So then what?
That was one of my prayers going in.
And this medicine… wow. It was like all my prayers were intertwined and addressed at once… but, no, they were NOT all answered, healed, fixed! The team even told us beforehand to write down our questions, our prayers, what we were there for. I had many prayers, but of course they were all connected because it’s all one life. It’s all one field. And the journey with this truth medicine really did deepen my clarity around those things. It also brought my inner child into a whole different level of understanding and relationship building. It felt like a deeper integration of soul into body, into this vessel.
It’s referred to as “The Mount Everest of Psychedelics” for a reason.
Iboga brought up a lot to the surface that was NOT easy to look at… as it often is, it was very physically and mentally challenging. But again, that wasn’t new to me.
I’ve become pretty used to looking at things that are challenging, filled with collective grief, fears, traumas, destruction, literal hell on earth. At some points, the only way I can describe it is like seeing and feeling everything that one would call “negative” in the entire Kali Yuga happening all at once to the worst possible degree you could experience it.
Pretty freakin’ dark stuff! Thankfully, Ayahuasca definitely trained me in sitting with utter hell and discomfort for many hours. In some ways, iboga was harder than any medicine out there …but in some ways, it was actually easier. Which is interesting to me! Ayahuasca, to me, is still the master trainer for sitting in ultimate discomfort for hours and hours and hours. Ayahuasca is THE trainer for Human-ing on earth at this time.
There was one morning after ceremony when I asked a friend who was there how it was, and she said, “that was horrible!!” Iboga was highly uncomfortable…and deeply profound.
And, I bow in deep gratitude and reverence to this medicine and to the tradition that holds it. Bassé.
That feels really important to say.
Because one thing I understood even more directly after being there is that this medicine does not exist apart from tradition. Like many of these master teachers, it does not work the same without the music, without the ritual, without the ceremonial ground, without the human beings who have built relationship with it over generations. There are, of course, people isolating ibogaine and serving that in more clinical settings, and I’m not here to say what is right or wrong for everyone. But it is not my path, and I can say very clearly now that iboga is not just ibogaine.
That distinction matters to me.
Ibogaine may be the compound modern research wants to focus on, but iboga is a whole medicine. It is a root. It is a relationship. It is a spirit. It is tradition. It is people. It is place. It is ritual. It is song. It is not just a thing to extract and study as if that tells the whole story.
I also had some very clear visitations and experiences connected to Gabon and to the carriers of this medicine. I’m not saying I “know” exactly what any of that was, because of course the human mind loves to make stories out of everything. But I saw things that I later described to others, and what I described was apparently exact… colors, place, details, all of it. That was fascinating to me. I also saw how dreams I’d been having for a year and a half, maybe even longer, suddenly made sense in the context of this medicine. Certain themes had been repeating, especially around water, and those themes came to fruition during the journey in a way that felt very precise.
That was another thing that struck me…the precision. They call it truth medicine, and there is a certain level of pinpointing and clarity to it. And then there were also hours and hours that made no sense whatsoever. So again… ask me later. I don’t think this is one of those medicines where you come back with some neat little summary.
I will say this too… the purge was beyond anything I have ever experienced before in my life. Beyond. And not in some dramatic “oh wow that was a lot of throwing up” kind of way. It felt like something far more ancient moving through. Generational, ancestral, epigenetic, who knows. I don’t need to make a story out of it, but whatever moved was profound. It was like sitting with grief, starvation, abuse, destruction, pain… like the whole weight of so much that has moved through lineages and humanity and maybe the collective itself. It was incredibly hard. And also unbelievably beautiful.
None of this makes me want to glamorize it. Actually the opposite.
I feel even more strongly now that Iboga, the world’s most powerful plant medicine, is not to be taken lightly. Bassé.
I’m very glad I waited. Even though part of me had moments of thinking, wow, I wish I had done this ten years ago. No… divine timing. It took me 12 or 14 years to finally say yes, and I trust that.
I also feel strongly now that if someone is going to work with this medicine, there needs to be real medical screening and real discernment. Proper intake. Proper questions. Real support. Medical on site is important in my opinion. This is not to create fear. It’s just reality. The more people die doing these medicines, the more it keeps them from being accessible for everyone. So if you are going to work with iboga, please be discerning. Really inquire within yourself. Do you need this? Is it the right medicine? Is it the right time? Are the facilitators asking the right questions? Are they doing a proper medical intake? Are you approaching this with respect?
And also… where is your reciprocity? Where are you giving back to the people and traditions carrying this medicine? Maybe that is money. Maybe it’s not. But there should be some level of respect and reciprocity here.
Another thing I’ll say is that I personally cannot imagine getting on an airplane and going right back to normal life immediately after one of these retreats. I really can’t. There is a level of destabilization that can happen with all psychedelics, and with iboga that felt especially important to honor. I was actually doing well, and I still would say… leave ample room. Give your body time to recover. Give your nervous system time. Give your soul time. Give the medicine time.
One of the most fascinating things since coming home has been how it has affected my body. My body felt amazing and destroyed at the same time. Certain old injuries seemed to disappear and then reappeared differently a few weeks later. There are tiny little places in my body that now feel more online, more available to consciousness, more present. Even the smallest areas that once felt kind of offline now feel different. I find that part incredibly interesting, and it’s one of the main things I’m still watching as this unfolds.
As for whether I got my intention… no, not in some simple linear way. It hasn’t “manifested” yet if we’re talking in those terms. But I also have no doubt on a deeper level that something moved very significantly. There is more surrender. More trust, clarity, more knowing Your True Self. And I don’t think this is the medicine you go to just so it can tell you what your life purpose is and make you rich. (God help us if that’s how people start approaching this!!)
So when I come back now to all the conversation around psychedelic funding and research, especially around ibogaine, this is why I feel protective of the nuance.
Iboga teaches you how to slow down. (You literally HAVE slow down or else you’ll end up purging what feels like all of your organs and entire insides purging out in the most intense purge you’ve ever had in any of your multiple lifetimes. The purge is no joke).
Yes, I’m glad there’s more openness… I’m glad there’s curiosity…I’m glad people are paying attention to the healing potential of these psychedelics and sacred plant medicines. BUT…
I truly pray the frenzy and the movement from the recent executive order around psychedelics is approached with respect and care.
I hope it’s approached with presence. I hope it includes respect for the fact that iboga is not just ibogaine, and that these are not just molecules detached from the living world they come from.
I also hope we remember that these medicines are not here to do something to us or fix us or cure us in some mechanistic way. They are here to be in relationship with us. Or at least that is how I experience them. It is a symbiotic relationship. It is prayer. It is intention. It is humility. It is being willing to be changed, and then being willing to live your life differently afterward.
And I really hope we don’t lose the sacred in all of this. Bassé.
Because once this all becomes only about biotech, policy, compounds, profits and scaling, something essential gets left behind. For me, that essential piece is relationship. Relationship with the plant, with spirit, with the traditions that have carried these medicines for a very long time. Relationship with the earth.
That’s the point I most wanted to address in this.
I’m not saying don’t fund psychedelic research or research with these medicines. I’m not saying science has no place here. I’m saying… please let this be done with real care and deep respect. Please remember where this comes from… these are sacred medicines. Let’s remember that some of these ancient traditions have been in relationship with them long before the modern world decided they were interesting or valuable.
That is my prayer.
And after finally saying yes to iboga, after all those years, I feel an even deeper reverence for these plants and for the prayer that goes with them.
Bassé
– Beth Weinstein, Soul Expansion Guide, Spiritual Business Coach, Host of Medicine For These Times Podcast & Psychedelics, Sacred Medicines & Soul’s Purpose Summits
If you are looking for preparation to help with your Iboga journey, or deciding whether or not Iboga is for you, reach out to me here for a donation-based Iboga preparation session. (not a medical intake or medical preparation session).
