I spent 48 hours in an iboga ceremony purging, confronting my deepest fears, and coming out the other side completely transformed. This is my full, unfiltered experience with this very unique plant medicine.
In this episode, I take you through the entire journey: what iboga (Tabernanthe Iboga) actually is, its origins in the Bwiti spiritual tradition of Central Africa, and why this plant medicine operates in a category of its own — nothing like ayahuasca or psilocybin.
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I cover:
🩷 5 months of preparation — blood work, cardiac monitoring, meditation, lifestyle changes
🩷 Microdosing iboga for 5 weeks and the triggers that surfaced
🩷 My 8g streaming dose at home — a full night awake with no anxiety
🩷 The fear that almost stopped me: “What if iboga tells me to leave my partner?”
🩷 Reading my intention letter to Dr. Iboga before the flood dose
🩷 48 hours of relentless purging and what it taught me about surrender
🩷 The two laundry baskets vision — sorting what stays and what goes
🩷 Integration: 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years
This is not an educational episode — it’s a personal account. Every iboga journey is different, and I share mine not to influence your decision but to offer one honest window into what this initiation can look like.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 — Introduction: What is iboga?
2:30 — Iboga’s origins & the Bwiti tradition
4:30 — 5 months of preparation
8:00 — Microdosing protocol & what came up
11:00 — The 8g streaming dose experience
15:30 — Pre-ceremony anxiety & relationship fears
18:30 — My intention letter to Dr. Iboga
21:00 — The flood dose ceremony begins
24:00 — 48 hours of purging
27:00 — Integration & life after iboga
YOUTUBE + TRANSCRIPT:
(00:00) I have an experience I really want to share. Um, this I feel like this has kind of been sounds so lame to say this, but a long time coming. I have been talking a lot on the podcast recently about psychedelics and um, at the beginning of the year I had a very uh, wild experience with a particular psychedelic perhaps one that um, yeah, one that isn’t talked about that much.
(00:25) If you’re into your ethnogens, then you’ve probably heard of it. If you haven’t heard of a boa, then that’s fine. I’m going to explain to you what it is. This is this is an episode where I’m it’s it’s not really an educational episode. Not that I feel I need to do that anymore because you have the internet.
(00:43) Um, this is more going to be about my experience with this particular medicine, but I guess to set the stage, it is worth talking about what a bog is, particularly if you’ve never heard of this psychedelic. And some people don’t even consider this a psychedelic. It is definitely a plant medicine, a plant teacher, but it’s it kind of operates almost in its own category of um psychoactivity. It’s not Yeah.
(01:06) I mean, at least in my experience, which we’ll get into, it’s not like um anything else I have ever tried before. And I am a triexual. I like to try lots of different things. So, a is a plant. Um specifically aboga is the root bark of the taberni aboga shrub which is native to central and west Africa. So particularly the areas of Gabon uh Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo.
(01:34) So it’s it’s a medicine that’s been used for centuries in a spiritual tra tradition called the buiti and um it’s used for initiation ceremonies, healing, religious practices, um rights of passage. And the root bark naturally contains dozens of psychoactive alkoids. Now perhaps you’ve heard of iberane. Ibeane is different to ibogga.
(01:57) Like I said, a bogga naturally contains dozens of psychoactive alkaloids and iberane is one of those alkoids. So, it’s the primary psychoactive compound in a boa and it’s responsible for a lot of its psychological effects. So, what I want to do here is just talk about my preparation for this um plant medicine undertaking uh including the micro doing and the streaming dose.
(02:22) Um, I want to talk about my anxiety going into it, things that were coming up, things that worried me, things that scared me. Um, and then, yeah, I’m going to talk a little bit. No, I’m not going to talk a little bit. I am going to talk about the actual experience, which they call a flood dose.
(02:37) That’s when you do like the full dosage of the Aboga. And then yeah, I’ll get into integration reflections um and yeah, kind of post postab life. I prepared for a bogga for 5 months. It was like it it I had heard about it many many many years before. Uh it’s certainly not as much in the public discourse, public psychedelic discourse as Iawaska or um psilocybin, but I had heard about it many years before trying it through one friend.
(03:13) I I remember him saying, “I’m going to do this thing.” And I was like, “Wa, okay, cool.” And he came back from it and I said, “How was it?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, it was hard.” Then once I signed up, I was just on this like really militant and dedicated and diligent uh preparation journey, which I’m super proud of.
(03:31) Um so yeah, 5 months um I changed up my supplements, focusing a lot on magnesium, electrolytes, and um stuff that was going to assist my heart. The thing with a bog is it’s very very stimulating. And um yeah, the reason that when people go into the clinics and do I gain, they’re hooked up to the cardiac machines is because it can intercept with the electricity of your heart.
(03:57) So I was like all the health stuff that you need to do all the checks and balances that you need like I’ll do them. So I got my bloods done. I wore a halter monitor for 20 no 48 hours to monitor my heart activity just to make sure that everything was all good there. It was interesting kind of going to the doctor and asking for that and having to navigate like how honest do I be about why I want this knowing that this is um you know experimental medicine like for me it’s my personal experiment with a plant medicine I ate really well which I
(04:28) do anyway um I started meditating quite I mean I was already meditating quite seriously cuz this was sort of the next this was the next initiatory challenge in my life from doing vap Ashna the year previous and I’m actually really glad that I had the vapashna practice because when I came out of that 10day vapashna retreat of like 12 hours of meditation a day um 6 months prior to doing my aoga ceremony I was just so in the practice the preparation for a boa really taught me that like preparation for doing psychedelics is in your lifestyle I
(05:04) think it’s it’s a lifestyle thing like you notice that journaling meditating eating Well, getting my supplements right are all not like crazy preparatory things. They’re kind of just lifestyle things, right? And the micro doing part of a burger was interesting. I don’t know if this is part of everyone’s preparatory thing when they embark on an ABOG journey.
(05:30) But for for my facilitators were um yeah there was they were like you you micro dose you meet the medicine beforehand and you get you get acquainted with the spirit and um you do that through micro doing. So for about five 5 weeks I was on a protocol which was like subperceptive dose that you measure out yourself um 3 days on 4 days off or 4 days on 3 days off something like that.
(05:56) And then before in the leadup to the ceremony, you’re off it for you’re off the micro doses for 10 days or 2 weeks. Um and whilst I was doing that the micro doing all of my triggers started coming up. And you know it is interesting. I want I often wonder did all my triggers come up when I was micro doing because I was micro doing or because I was told that when you micro dose a boar before you’ve had a flood dose this can happen.
(06:21) I went through a period of my life where I had quite intense pelvic pain. um more specifically bladder pain and that I had worked really that was a from my understanding it was a nervous system thing. Um like a psychosmatic um chronic stress response thing that was going on and um I I had worked really hard to to I had worked really hard to fix that.
(06:47) Although what it ended up being was like I needed to work less hard. I I need to just be doing less and chilling. But my yeah, my pelvic pain was in a was was non-existent and that reared back up. Yeah, a lot of things came up and that really did affect my intention which I’ll also share um in a bit. I was trying to see that as just like a really important part of the journey preparing me to like set my final intention.
(07:10) So, another part of the preparatory process was doing what’s called a streaming dose, like a significant jump from the micro dose, but not as much as my flood dose would be for the ceremony. I was able to do that by myself in my own home. Um, you know, I let my my partner know I was doing it and I had at that point already been micro doing and I was like not 100% sure what the experience would be, but I was confident that I would be able to handle it whatever the streaming dose I ended up uh doing um 8 g. It took like I think I started doing
(07:40) the doses in increments from 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon set the whole day the whole next day aside to to do this. Yeah. Nothing was really happening until about 6:00 p.m. And at that point, I’d taken 8 grams. And then all of a sudden, I was like, I am awake and I feel kind of high.
(08:00) It was interesting cuz at that point, it was just kind of like at that at that dosage, it was just kind of like a cruisy sort of high. Yeah. You know, I didn’t feel sober. Um, but I wasn’t tripping. And as the night kind of kicked on, I was able to eat. My boyfriend and I had dinner together. Um, we got into bed and hung out in bed for a little bit.
(08:18) And then he falls asleep cuz that’s the normal that’s what you do at night. You get into bed and you go to sleep. And I am awake. And normally this is the interesting thing too with like Yeah. I mean one of the interesting things is like normally if you’re in bed awake and the night’s ticking on, I would be anxious about that.
(08:38) Like sh I got to get up tomorrow morning. I’m going to feel like absolute crap all day cuz I haven’t slept. It’s going to be this. Yeah. It’s going to it’s this you you realize like you work up so much anxiety over your future problems without even like knowing how you’re going to feel and and sure like in the past yeah when I’ve not been able to sleep because I’ve been up anxious or I’ve been up think overinking whatever the next day does feel like crap but in this case being up and stimulated and also like we all know the
(09:11) feeling of like you know when you’re younger and you go out and you party too much and and then you get home and you can’t sleep and like that’s a a bad feeling. That’s yeah an anxietyinducing feeling for good reason. But with this it was not like that at all. I was up and I was contemplating. My mind was extremely active.
(09:30) I was having a lot of ideas. Um, once the sun went down and like the lights in our house went down, there was like kind of shooting shooting kind of they call them the swords, the aboga swords, like shooting lights coming out of either side of my ears, but which I couldn’t quite catch them either.
(09:47) It’s like, you know, you wonder are they spirits or what’s going on? Um, and yeah, that that so that was kind of happening, but I was just calm, you know, I just was calm and not overthinking what the next day was going to be like and really able really bolstered by, I guess, the medicine. Um, to to not to to just let things unfold and to not worry about what the future consequences of that would be.
(10:16) Um, and so I was awake the whole night and then sun rises. I’m like lying there in bed. You know, my boyfriend wakes up, his alarm goes off, he goes out and does his morning movement practice. And then I kind of like rolled around in bed still for another couple hours. And at 8:00 a.m.
(10:32) I came out into the living room and I was awake and calm and like pretty much sober at that point. I did my meditation practice and then I just like got into the day. I felt completely fine. But having said that, as the weeks went on and it was getting closer and closer to my ceremony and um you know, I was like organizing my my bits and pieces, taking time off, like organizing to have time off work and um getting my like bedding sorted to take to the retreat center and doing all of that.
(11:00) I started to feel again like what is this going to be like, you know? And they said like your streaming dose is a good um you a good like meeting with the experience but don’t take for granted what 8 g feels like because tripling or doubling that dose whatever you end up doing on the night is like not just is not necessarily going to be like that plus more.
(11:27) It’s it could be a completely different experience. Um so yeah I guess there was some anxiety coming up and the big one which is super interesting is because I had heard that uh a bog can like radically shift people’s lives like radically um they go into these this experience and they confront whatever it is that they’ve been ignoring and then they come out of it and like all these um all make all these big changes and and upon reflection like the the the I suppose trip reports that I’d been reading or experience reports that I had been reading people had reflected that
(12:06) yeah I didn’t think that that was going to happen but the AOGA showed me something and I couldn’t unsee it. So, weirdly, the thing that was coming up for me and freaking me out was like, what if I go in there and I realize that my boyfriend Brad is like not my guy and then I have to come out and break up with him, which is like such a specific neurosis.
(12:27) And if you’ve listened to my other um podcasts on on big experiences like my vapasha one, you’ll know that like my neurosis are quite specific. Um, in the vapashner, it was like the friendship neurosis. like I was worried that my friends didn’t like me. Um, and yeah, so with this one, the specific like the thing that really made me emotional and anxious was like, I don’t want to have to come out of this and break up with Brad. Like I love him.
(12:54) We are so happy. I don’t want this medicine to show me something that I don’t want to see about our relationship. because you’re told that that it’s, you know, one of those sneaky medicines that will give you a hit of of um a part of yourself that you’ve been ignoring. You can’t you don’t know if that’s possible.
(13:13) So, I was freaked out by that. Um and I add my grievances to my facilitators and they’re kind of, you know, they’re not there to like tell you that’s not going to happen essentially. They’re there to say, “Oh, okay. That’s interesting. I wonder why that’s coming up.” up and you know when you you’re like I’m scared of breaking up with my boyfriend and then someone says oh I wonder why that’s coming up you’re like oh maybe I’m scared of it because it’s going to happen and anyway so I worked myself up into a little fit over that.
(13:39) Sorry to interrupt this incredibly important conversation but there is something I really want to show you. If you are like me and you are constantly questioning the nature of reality and wondering why it feels so weird to be a human, questioning if there’s any way to influence this whole thing, then head to my description and find the link to buy me a coffee.
(13:59) When you do that, it supports this work and means I can bring you more of the conversations that answer your burning questions. We’re in this together, but I need you to buy me a coffee. All right, that’s all. Back to the episode. When it came to the actual ceremony, the intention that I set was simple and it was to see myself in truth.
(14:20) I guess I want to take this opportunity to read the the the letter that I wrote myself like right before we did the flood dose. I was already at the retreat center. I was ready to go. Um I was in my ceremonial whites. I’d had my last meal for the day. So the letter goes, “So dear Dr. Boga, my intention for this evening’s ceremony is to see myself more clearly in truth.
(14:40) I ask that you keep me safe on this journey. Help me in letting go of what no longer serves me. Help me to let go of my anxiety in friendships. See, I said I told you um things that you think you’ve handled end up coming up again in your your preparation with the micro doses.
(15:02) Um, and whether that is a a a a placebo psychological thing or the actual medicine, who knows? Anyway, sorry. Uh, help me let go of my anxiety and friendships. Help me to trust more in the grand plan of life. Help me to love more deeply and fully. Help me to make decisions with more clarity and confidence. Help me to live up to my potential and put meaningful work into the world.
(15:22) Help me to cultivate a stronger relational field with Brad to see him more clearly in truth. Help me to become more generous and courageous. Help me to accept and love my family more deeply. Help me to prepare for motherhood, to hold more with grace and honesty. Help me become more still and to tell people the truth. Help me to become more community-minded and to draw the right souls into mine and Brad’s life.
(15:51) Help me to create my own idea of family from truth, integrity, and love. Help me to birth better ideas into the world, to reach out for collaborators when I need them, and to use my creativity to make the world a more flexible place. Help me to live from my heart and solar plexus, to not overthink, stall, catastrophize, or sabotage, to come into right relationship with my ego.
(16:16) Please help me to build a life that truly feels like my own. Show me what I need to see. Teach me what I need to know. Help me to feel what I need to feel with surrender and reverence. Paige, PS. Please connect me more deeply to my body and my womb. Yeah. Um once we were all kind of sitting around, we shared our intention, which happens like in a plant ceremony pretty often, if not always.
(16:45) And then um I dosed the first um 4 g and then an hour later my next 4 g which meant I had taken 8 g in 2 hours which was the equivalent of my streaming dose. My the dosage allocated to me had been 32 g for me. I I had a blindfold and um earplugs and you’re in a bed by yourself and so you can sit up, you can lie down. Mostly you end up lying down.
(17:10) you end up like pretty paralyzed um by the medicine which is part which is part of it as well is that it like gives you what they call ataxia I think and it’s like muscle your muscles kind of stop working that’s another big edge I suppose you have to cross so yeah my bed was all comfy blindfold on ear plugs in and then the experience kind of unfolds and you get a I was getting reminders you know like every few hours like ready for your next dose how are you feeling um facilitators are checking in with you very vigilantly
(17:37) and diligently and um you share with them what you can. They assist you if you need it. Um they also leave you to your to your piece to work with your own experience. I had some closed eyed visuals, but the boa experience for me was very bodily. It it’s hard to describe because it it was almost void of intellectual insight.
(17:57) For me, it was a very physiological experience. Yeah. I I ended up having like quite a challenging journey with the aogga um and purging a lot. And by a lot, I mean from about 4 hours in, four to 5 hours into an a to a 48 hour experience. Um, yeah, I was like just purging the entire time. I have not vomited that hard ever.
(18:30) At about the like four or five hour mark, according to my recollection, I started to feel like nausea. And the the natural inclination with nausea, right, is to to be like, “Oh, please go away.” Like, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do nausea. No one likes nausea. I literally I’ve never met a person that likes it.” And fair enough.
(18:48) I’d be suspect on someone that said, “Oh, I enjoy I enjoy nausea.” It’s kind of like saying, “I enjoy being exhausted.” So, the nausea comes on and it’s really hard to like it’s it’s hard to move. It’s hard to shift, but it’s hard to ignore. And I wonder now in in retrospect if this was because I wasn’t paying attention to my body and this was like part of the initiatory um teaching of the of the medicine.
(19:19) I kind of battled with this nausea and I really wanted like I wanted it to come up like I was ready to purge. I was like, “All right, come up. come up and it just it wouldn’t come up, but it also wouldn’t go away. And so you’re s you’re you’re forced into like accepting and confronting your situation in a really direct and embodied way.
(19:37) You can’t think your way out of nausea. You can’t um you can’t ignore your you can’t ignore it or avoid it. There’s no other stimulation at all. You’re literally just there and it’s you and your nausea and the fact that your nausea is not peaking and so it’s not ending. This was my experience for pretty much the rest of the ceremonial as like the ceremonial aspect of the retreat.
(20:02) For those people who don’t know, it’s a root bark. So, it’s like it’s it’s it’s terrible to eat. Um, incredible plant. Not a nice meal at all. It tastes exactly how you would expect root bark to taste. It’s gritty. It’s um earthy. It’s dirty. It tastes like dirt. Um, and you we washed it down with soda water because washing it down with actual water would be like horrific.
(20:31) Soda water is like the probably only thing that makes it possible. And at a certain point, you can’t eat the raw bark anymore. So, you take it in capsules, but you also don’t want to be taking the whole blood dose in capsules because that amount of gelatin capsules in your stomach, I assume, is not a nice feeling.
(20:49) So they have this thing called TA extract which is the um yeah the the all the alkaloids extracted from the AOGA. It’s not I gain um but it they put it in a capsule and that’s how you get the rest of your dose dosage down when you are struggling like I was with nausea and couldn’t possibly eat more dirt.
(21:07) The only thing that would help me to purge was to eat more a boga. And initially it was just like the smell of it that would make me purge. And so, like I said, I was battling this nausea for a ages and I couldn’t get it out. It wouldn’t like break through its threshold and come out of me. And then it was suggested, well, maybe you should eat some more of a burger, which is the craziest thing.
(21:31) But if you’ve done plant medicine, you know, like crazy crazy, you got to do crazy things to navigate it sometimes. And as the facilitator went off to go and get me more to serve me, I purged. Like the thought of it at that point, the thought of eating more bark made made me vomit. That’s happening. Um, and I’m purging and I’m feeling better.
(21:52) And then a nausea is hitting me again. Like a massive wave immediately. Just like, oh, relief. And then boom, more nausea. Okay, great. Here we are again. Same thing. All right. Well, why don’t you eat some more boa? Just the thought of it. Purge. Done. Okay, good. A couple of minutes of chill in my body and then back into like the wave of nausea.
(22:13) I managed to get through like a few rounds of not having to eat a boa anymore to purge, but to just think of it and then it would get the the nausea out of my system physically out of my system. But then that started not being enough. So I started to actually have to like taste the tip of the the spoon with the bark on it because the TA extract capsules are not going to make you purge.
(22:35) And like at this point, I’d eaten 32 g of a boar. And I was like, I didn’t need to be higher. I didn’t need more. I just needed to get um the nausea. I needed to to to to work with the nausea. You try not to overthink it, but you can’t help but think like what is this teaching me? And that is the craziest thing about at least my experience with a boa is that it is like it is not intellectual.
(22:57) The teachings are not the kind of insight that we’re used to having in personal development and selfwork and transformation. I I think like that can make it harder until you just surrender to that and go, I don’t need to understand. Uh, and to be honest, I’m not sure that I ever got to that point in the ceremony where I was like, I don’t need to understand this.
(23:15) I think I was just really fighting with this nausea. Yeah. I just like eating tiny bits on the end of a spoon of the bark and then purging and then before I knew it, like eating those tiny bits wasn’t enough to purge. And so I had to eat like a full teaspoon and then I would purge. So, I wasn’t ingesting and absorbing and metabolizing any more medicine, but I was taking more medicine to then get the um whatever needed to come out of my system out of my system.
(23:41) And it was literally that for almost 48 hours. I’m hesitant to say more. Actually, I just I got a ping like I don’t need to share more because it’s you know everybody needs to have their own experience with with this with this medicine and it is very different for everybody and I don’t want my experience to influence a decision to either go for or not go for this um initiation but yeah safe to say like I had a purgy time and it was yeah it required me to really pull out the warrior really like dig in to the warrior. But you know, time rolls
(24:19) forward as it usually does even in the plant medicine space where time is kind of a weird concept. Um, and the the sun rose and then it set again and then it rose and um things calmed down and uh I was able to like settle back down and lie back down in my bed. I’d been upright for quite some time with my touristy bucket and um yeah and and the other thing is there’s like a lot of silence too that’s yeah worth worth mentioning at least in my experience is there was a little bit of buy music playing on a speaker but it’s not like
(24:57) IA where there’s like singing and chanting and tal laaring it’s it wasn’t like that at all it was very um silent darkness vibes so as I was laying back down right at the end I was given the um invitation to sort what I wanted to take with me and what I didn’t um uh as the kind of like ceremony was coming to a close and I just had a visual of of um two laundry baskets and one of them was full of one of them was color and then one of them was like decrepit and um old and kind of like barnically and I was like I just had
(25:33) this symbolism playing out in my mind’s eye of putting things that I no longer wanted um like pulling like dirty rags out of myself and putting those those dirty rags that I no longer wanted in the barnacle basket and then pulling colorful like very vivid colorful um scarves and and and ribbons out of myself that I wanted to put in the um colorful basket and that was just sorting through what I wanted to take and what I want didn’t want to take.
(26:02) Um yeah, and then things settle even further. uh you’re kind of like drifting in and out of this state of of like awakeeness but also not like tired like really tired um physically and mentally. It’s a lot of stimulation. Um and then uh yeah the sun they opened the curtains. They opened the curtains and it was time to go and get some food.
(26:27) So we had a very um silent and plain dish of chicken and rice which is a bui um a buoy meal. Yeah. And then things to kind of start to to recalibrate. Not like again not intellectual things but um your body feels your body starts to feel different. Um and and for me like my body felt different cuz I had been purging for so long.
(26:51) And it’s worth saying that everybody who I journeyed with had a very different experience. And so again, if you have made it this far and you’re listening to this and you’re wondering like do I want to embark on or do do you know like you’re curious then just know that again like I’m this is my personal experience and it’s highly likely that yours will um not be anything like mine.
(27:14) Yeah, the integration is obviously a big process. I’m still very much in it. They say that it takes you 3 years to integrate. Um and there’s different stops along the way. three days, three weeks, three months, three years. Um, and yeah, like I said earlier, I think that that a lot of what I wrote in that letter to to Dr.
(27:32) Aboga was has in in in their their own ways come to fruition. And whether that’s because I wrote it down and I paid attention um to it in preparation for the ceremony or whether it’s because my being interacted with the the alkaloids of um the aboga bark and that had some like lock and key effect and shifted my reality entirely.
(28:03) Who knows? This is the whole thing of you don’t we don’t know. I’m so glad I did it. Um, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but I trust that if you’re listening to this, then you are smart enough to make your own decisions around like what initiatory or transformative experiences you want to have. Um, I I felt really powerful afterwards and I felt really proud of myself.
(28:31) Work with the discomfort of the unknown is is a positive thing because that is what life is like. It’s it’s unknown. It’s uncertain. We have no You have no idea. That’s kind of it. That’s kind of my That was my whole my journey with um with a bogar. Thanks so much for making it to the end of the episode. I trust you had a good time.
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