Several years ago, I came down with a mysterious illness that stumped over a dozen doctors. In search of an alternative path, I found iboga.

Healing with Iboga: The Most Potent Plant

Several years ago, I came down with a mysterious illness that stumped over a dozen doctors. As the symptoms piled up — first the cystitis, then the random aches and pains, then the tingling and tremors — the medications prescribed to me only made me feel worse. In search of an alternative path, I sought advice from a friend working in the world of energy healing, and she suggested something called iboga. “It’s the most potent plant, the chief of all the plant spirits,” she told me.

The following morning, my heart woke me up with a frightening force against my chest. It felt as if my pericardium were made of stone. Another mysterious symptom. I texted my friend for more information.

Iboga, I learned, was a hallucinogen made from the wood of the African Tabernanthe iboga plant. 

It was said to reset the nervous system and purge toxins from the body, both physical and mental. It originated from the Bwiti religion in Gabon but had been brought to the West to heal people from trauma, addiction, and disease. 

My friend introduced me to Spiros, an iboga facilitator who had been initiated by the Bwiti. He had taken iboga to end a twenty-year heroin habit, and after his journey, he never used it again. It was that powerful. But it was not for the faint of heart — literally. It worked powerfully on the heart chakra, which meant it could be deadly for those with cardiac abnormalities. This fact scared me given what was happening with my heart, so I put iboga on the backburner. 

Shortly after, I was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and pursued several other treatments, which helped somewhat but not enough. After meeting a man who had healed Lyme with iboga, I got back in touch with Spiros, who offered to organize an iboga retreat for me at his clinic in Rosarito, Mexico, pending medical clearance. When my EKG came back normal, I pulled oracle cards to decide if I should go. “What will it look like if I take iboga?” I asked. The first card I picked read “sexuality,” and the second read “soul mate.”

These messages were puzzling, particularly “soul mate.” However, the timing seemed apt. I recalled that on March 12, 2016, a psychic had told me I’d meet my soulmate in three years. “You’ll know him when you see him,” she said. “He’ll blow you away. But he won’t be what you expect.” The proposed dates of my treatment were March 1-6, 2019. Perhaps I’d meet someone in Rosarito.

I caught the train from LA to San Diego and crossed the border to Baja California on a Friday morning. In an apartment overlooking the ocean, Spiros and two assistants joked around at the kitchen table. “This is going to be good,” he said as he greeted me. “I have a feeling.” 

During lunch, one of the assistants showed me a jar holding the sand-colored dust of the iboga wood. I’d be taking iboga in capsules for easier ingestion during the ceremony, he said, but I could try a spoonful of the dust if I’d like. In small quantities like this, iboga acted as a stimulant with a slight spiritual effect. I washed a spoonful down with water, coughing as it caught in my throat. 

As we walked along the beach, I felt uplifted and unexpectedly philosophical. “Everything that’s ever happened or will happen, it’s happening all at once,” I told Spiros. “We just can’t see it because we’re caught in the dimension of time.” Then I got distracted by mermaids in the ocean, their tails peeking out from under the waves.

Later that evening, a doctor and nurse arrived to make sure my heart was OK, and at last, it was time to begin. I swallowed five iboga tablets and lay down on a mattress beneath a gong as Spiros, his assistants, and the medical staff danced around me, shaking rattles to the music emanating from the speaker. 

After about an hour, the room began spinning. “I feel weird,” I said. The doctor told me to lay down. As I lay there, my heart pounded and rattled in my chest, shaking the whole bed. Strange, made-up words sounded in my brain. I couldn’t think in English anymore. “I’m losing my mind,” I told Spiros. “Good,” he replied. 

Nonsensical splotches of color appeared on the insides of my eyelids, morphing into images. I saw a cosmic slide show: the big bang, heaven and earth, then the people of every continent. Then, iboga showed me scenes of violence: murder, rape, war, cannibals. Iboga became a real entity to me, a distinctly masculine energy with whom I could converse. I couldn’t hear him exactly, but words popped into my head that didn’t come from me. “What’s the word for what I’m seeing?” I asked him. “Darkness,” he replied. 

I suffered through eight hours of darkness, witnessing cruelties and traumas from my own life and others’. I could have opened my eyes to end it, but I knew I had to face it. I had to clear the darkness from my heart. Then, finally, the sun came up. 

“It’s time to go into the light,” Iboga said. He whirled me through a tunnel, and at the end, I saw a light. I was at my birth. A rebirth. The darkness had been washed away, and for the first time in years, I landed back home in my skin. I ran my hands over my legs, feeling rows of goosebumps. My chest still trembled like an earthquake, but this time I didn’t mind. I could tell it was only my heart bursting open.

Iboga wanted to talk to me again. Except this time, he wasn’t just giving me answers. He was putting the questions in my head as well. 

“What am I?” I asked him (or did he ask the question?).

“Numbers,” he replied. “The only things that are real are numbers, colors, shapes, and sounds.”

What an odd thing to say. “I don’t understand.”

He was telling me a creation story, an elaborate theory of the universe. It was difficult to follow, but I jotted down what I could on a pad of paper: “God is a computer, and we came from the Cloud. And soon, we’re going back. Back to zeroes and ones.”

I’d never been in the presence of a being like this. Iboga was so spiritual and magical, yet so intellectual. 

Like me. It was almost as if we were soul mates. I remembered that card and the psychic reading. Could it be? I was so enamored with him.

“Iboga’s hot.” I laughed at the thought. What an absurd thing to think about a plant. Yet in my mind’s eye, I could see him take human form: eight feet tall with giant arms like tree branches, a leafy sash tied around his waist, his skin tinted ashy blue, black hair falling over pale green eyes. I grew wide-eyed with excitement as I pictured him. 

“I think I have a crush on this drug,” I told Spiros.

“That’s where I draw the line,” he laughed. “Iboga is not your boyfriend. Trust me, you don’t want him as your boyfriend.”

But my body told me otherwise. As the ceremony came to a close and I retreated to my room, I felt tiny twitches gather in my arms, legs, and abdomen, like jolts of energy trying to break out. Iboga was coursing through my body, working to heal it. I grew curious. “Move to my pussy now,” I challenged him using my thoughts. He did not skip a beat. A wave of pleasure shot between my legs like a lightning bolt, making my pussy twitch pleasurably. 

I wanted more. I wanted him. “Fuck me,” I whispered, timid but voracious, and the bed started rattling and bouncing to the rhythm of my heart, almost knocking me to the floor. At that moment, it occurred to me what those palpitations were: From the day I learned about him, Iboga was in me all along, opening my heart. Breaking down my stone pericardium. 

My attention was drawn away from my shaking bed by a purple light on the wall. As I looked closer, I realized it was a fairy! I watched in awe as she flew over to my bedside table and began speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear her. She was about one fourth the size of a person, in a long, flowing gown. Reading her lips, I made out the words “tooth fairy.” A visit from the tooth fairy. 

How magical, this gift from Iboga. He was full of surprises. Utterly unpredictable. 

After she flew away and faded back into the wall, I knew it was time to get back to business. The twitches picked back up, starting in my chest and radiating out to my fingers and toes. Over the course of the next few hours, every part of my body that needed healing twitched: my creaky knees, my tight lower back, my stiff neck. Tiny twitches traced each upper and lower eyelid. I twitched all night, no sleep, just convulsing until the sun came up. 

Sixty hours into my journey, I finally passed out, and I awoke a different person. I was no longer exhausted; I was no longer in a fog; I was no longer in pain. Every muscle in my body that had twitched felt completely healed — not just free from discomfort, but full of pleasure. 

I spent five more hours lying there in disbelief, wrapped in my beige cotton sheets, writing down Iboga’s creation story — our story. Writing theories about numbers and computers and humanity’s return to the cloud we came from. Once I could no longer think, I walked along the beach then returned for a shower. 

I’ve come back into my body, I thought. I didn’t know where I’d been, but I knew I hadn’t been here. But now I was. It was such a relief, so good to be back. I wanted to feel myself. I soaped myself up slowly and deliberately, the loofa tantalizing my stomach and thighs and breasts. It was as if I’d blocked out all the good sensations along with the bad, but now, I could finally feel them.

Actually, I could feel everything. I couldn’t help but wonder how the rest of my body would feel in such a state of receptivity. My skin was starved for pleasure. I could touch myself, I thought. But I wanted more. I wanted Iboga to touch me. 

Then, automatically, as if the spirit of iboga himself were guiding me, I dried myself off, walked naked over to my bed, opened my computer, scrolled to Youtube, and typed “hypnosis hands free orgasm.” I put on headphones so as not to be heard and clicked the title, "Erotic Hypnosis - Hands Free Orgasm for Women." 

In the recording, a low male voice imparted commands. I imagined Iboga speaking to me through this voice. He took me into a hypnotic trance, bringing my body to a state of complete relaxation. “You’re doing really well,” he purred. 

He had me go down an escalator, becoming more aroused with each step, and lie back on a bed at the bottom. His volume picked up, speaking more firmly, more authoritatively. He issued cue words: My pussy would drip and my clit would throb whenever he said “sleep.” When he said “good girl,” waves of pleasure would wash through me. When he said “clit,” I’d feel his tongue, and when he said “pussy,” I’d feel his hand. I pictured Iboga, with his blue skin and strong arms, kneeling between my legs. 

“I’m rubbing your pussy, licking your clit,” he said again and again as female voices moaned and whimpered in the background. I couldn’t help but sigh along with them. 

As he spoke into my ear, twitches radiated from my heart and through my stomach, gathering in my pussy, making it twitch uncontrollably. I could feel it open up, blossoming outward to meet him. I became dripping wet, my clit peeking out from beneath the hood, twitching faster and harder.

A big splotch of red appeared in front of my closed eyes, similar to the colors I saw at the beginning of my trip. As I focused in on it, it became more defined until it morphed into the shape of a cock. It was throbbing and swelling and on fire. I knew what he wanted. I knew what he needed. I wanted to fulfill his needs. I gave him permission to enter me. “I’m ready.” 

I heard an alien-like buzzing above my head, the signal that iboga is beside you. It got closer as my pussy spread wider, and a forceful gust of air pounded deep into me, caressing places no human had reached, drilling deeper until I could feel myself being opened up from the inside.

“Don’t cum until I tell you,” said the voice. But my body couldn’t hold back any longer. “I can feel it deep inside you,” he continued. And just as if that were some cue my very cells understood, I started cumming and cumming, in slow motion, for minutes on end, my pussy pulsing repeatedly, my hips bucking, my stomach clenching, my feet shaking. 

Spurts of liquid shot out of me as I held back screams, half praying it would end, half praying it would go on forever. I couldn’t believe how long it went on for. I paid attention to the contractions, trying to figure out if I was actually orgasming. But everything that happens during an orgasm was happening — and more. Instead of just my pussy, my whole pelvic area was clenching and releasing. 

It was a deep release, a spiritual release, purging the negative out of me. 

Finally, my body stilled, leaving a sopping wet puddle in its wake. The buzzing faded. “What the hell just happened?” I thought. It was as if, for that brief moment, Iboga had taken over my body, filling me to the brim. 

The moment he was gone, I needed him again. “Don’t leave me,” I silently told him. I hastened to replay the video, letting out a sigh of relief as his rich, low voice returned. In a sultry whisper, he told me to say “Yes, Master” each time I received a command. Squeals of pleasure filled my ears, echoing the electric currents running through my body.

“Yes, master,” I whispered. “Yes, yes.” More twitches poured down from my heart into my pussy, waking up every nerve ending, filling me with waves of ecstasy. Once he got to “I can feel it deep inside you,” my pussy clenched tight and then relaxed, and to my disbelief, I started cumming again, even harder this time, my inner lips opening and closing to the rhythm of my pounding heart.

Over the course of what must have been 10 minutes, the contractions got further and further apart, and my shakes and quivers subsided. The recording had long ended, but it didn’t matter: I knew it was Iboga who was inside me, caressing every place that needed touch, making me cum like no human could. Leaving me with a deep satisfaction, both physical and emotional. 

I heard one of the assistants preparing dinner and snapped back to reality, hoping no one would guess what Iboga and I had been up to — although, who would ever suspect something like this?

Before anyone could come knocking at my door, I caught my breath and threw a bra over my flushed breasts, panties over my still-dripping pussy, and a flowy dress over them both. 

I beamed and glowed as I walked out to the kitchen knowing my life would never be the same, because now, I had the most potent plant medicine in me. He had penetrated the depths of me, impregnating me with his wisdom, and I was forever his.