I completed my second iboga flood a month and a half ago. It was beautiful, and I am well. First the darkness:
I am a 45 year old woman. At the time of the first flood, my story was that I was going to do iboga to quit smoking, but it wasn’t really true. I just knew I had to do it but couldn’t understand why. I had drunk ayahuasca about 20 times at that point.
The first flood was a miserable experience. I had almost no visions. I spent 36 hours lying on a mattress while broken and meaningless sentences tumbled through my head, overlapping one another. At the very end, there was a single clear and complete sentence that repeated five times: Your mother is dead.I was mystified. I had not spoken to my mother in several years, but I knew she was quite alive.
I felt destroyed in the two months that followed the flood. I had a hard time doing anything other than sitting around crying and not understanding why. It began to spontaneously dawn on me that my mother is a psychopath. The truth of it was brutal and suddenly quite obvious. I came to understand what iboga had told me about her being dead, but I still couldn’t get myself back on track. I went to Peru and drank ayahuasca, knowing that there was more to face, but not knowing what it was. I was terrified to look at it, but also desperate, and just barely managed to get myself there.
More devastation. I recovered a memory of my mother almost killing me when I was a baby. (The scar is another riddle solved). I re-experienced the trauma and then spent the rest of that ceremony shuffling through every memory from early childhood into adulthood when she had let her psychopathy show, and I had missed the sign because I didn’t really know what a psychopath was.
I came home and slid fully into a nervous breakdown. I feared that I was losing my mind. Starting with the iboga flood, this whole process took a year. I went to work (most of it from home), and that was about it.
When I emerged fully from the breakdown, life looked clear and bright, and I knew I had banished the shadow that had been secretly trailing me for my entire life. Like magic, I got a new job, new house, new city, and they are all better for me than the ones I shed. Even as I was still coming out of the fog, I knew that the suffering had been important and worthwhile. I am really not the same person anymore.
Almost two years after the first flood, I went for round two. Considering what had happened the first time, I was a tad bit scared
, but I was hearing the call.
In the hour before the ceremony began, I was filled with this incredible sense of well-being. The fear was completely gone. It was amazing. I had visions of repeatedly pushing a dolly stacked with boxes of files that I knew belonged to my family. I would propel it down a wooden dock and push it over the end into the water over and over. (Who knew there were so many?!) There were things I have no idea how to interpret like funny, nonsensical TV commercials that I can no longer remember. I was seeing Technicolor 50’s photographs in which I could hear all of the people in the pictures thinking petty, hypocritical thoughts, and it all struck me as absurd. I was purging quite a bit while all of this was going on.
The spirit of iboga appeared to me but stayed just out of my peripheral vision. The only part of him I was allowed to see was a human hand. We talked and joked about lots of things, and he told me we would know each other for many lifetimes to come. I said, “What?!!” and he just laughed hard.
He very lovingly laughed at me for thinking the experience would probably be excruciating and doing it anyway. He said he admired my determination. I felt enveloped in pure love by him.
We went for a ride in his spaceship, and he seemed to enjoy startling me by blowing up asteroids with laser beams. Near the end of the ceremony, he gave me a birthday cake, and it had a single candle on it.
The world seems full of magic to me right now. I am deeply and eternally grateful to iboga. I feel almost constantly full of gratitude for all of this life.
Thanks for listening.
