What Is Iboga?
The Godfather of all Plant Medicines
Iboga is a powerful plant medicine from equatorial West Africa. The Pygmies, known as the Babongo, discovered it long ago in what is now South Gabon.
The Babongo tribe is one of the oldest in Africa and still lives in traditional ways deep in the jungle. They’ve been using Iboga for thousands of years for both rituals and medicinal purposes.
This plant is a small shrub that grows wild in Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon. The scientific name is Tabernanthe Iboga, and it usually reaches about seven feet tall, though it can grow into a small tree up to 30 feet under the right conditions. The tree sports bright green leaves, tiny white and yellow flowers, and orange oval-shaped fruit.
When it comes to using Iboga, it's the root bark that gets harvested and ingested for healing and spiritual guidance. This guidance is especially important for the Bwiti people, as it helps them understand life, which plants to use for different ailments, how to create and play their instruments, and how to conduct their ceremonies.
What can it do for me?
Plant medicines can provide either physical or spiritual healing and have a masculine or feminine spirit. Iboga is the only plant that has a twin spirit, both male and female, and the only medicine that can heal you physically and spiritually, send you on a live Spiritual Discovery, and do all three in the same night.
Also called "Root of Truth," Iboga is deeply grounding and uses the truth to heal. Its goal is to bring you back to your original true self and reconnect you with your soul. It can help you understand how you got lost in the first place and give you the tools to find your way home to yourself.
It helps release patterns, blocks, and traumas to free you from them—so you can be the true you. After the ceremony, Iboga continues to help you by improving mindfulness and promoting neuroplasticity, so you can create a new, healthier life with ease.
Iboga is a highly intelligent spirit that gives each of our guests exactly the experience they need to get the healing they’re looking for.
Read more on what Iboga can do for you.
How does it work?
There is a saying in Gabon, If you are lost in the jungle you better know you’re lost, otherwise you will just go deeper and deeper into the bush until the day you meet a hungry tiger.
Iboga will show you where you are in that jungle, and it will give you the tools to make your way home to yourself, and show you how to use them. Once home—once healed—you will have the tools and the knowledge to start building the life you really want to live.
Iboga is about truth, getting to the root of your problems, teaching you who you are, where you came from, and reconnecting you with your GPS, your inner compass, your Soul.
Physical and Spiritual Detox
The first step in your healing will be the detox. Iboga will cleanse your body of chemicals, toxins, viruses, parasites… anything that doesn’t belong there. Purging is not uncommon (vomiting, using the bathroom), and your providers will be available at a moments notice to help you make your way to the washroom.
It will also detox your mind. It does this by showing you how your mind works. This process deprograms it, helps flush out all the lies, falsehoods, belief systems and negative thought patterns that don’ t serve you.
Once your mind is clear, Iboga will show you how to program it so that it works for you, not against you.
With the body and mind clean, we can get to the soul and start a process unique to Iboga called the Spiritual Discovery.
Spiritual Discovery
This is where you will have a live spiritual journey. Not a dream, not something abstract, but a real 1-on-1 encounter with your soul, where you will have the opportunity to ask all the questions you have about yourself.
Those questions will be your targets for the week: what you want to heal, what you want to know about yourself and your life.
Your providers will guide you through every step of the experience, reading your questions for you to pose to your soul.
The medicine will show you the way,
But you must walk the path.
Self-Empowerment
The medicine is about creating a spiritual foundation within yourself to build your life upon. Iboga will give you the tools you need to free yourself and teach you how to use them. By you applying the teachings of the medicine, you will understand how your mind and soul work.
Now understanding the mechanics of life, you have the freedom to create the life that you want. The medicine will be with you long after the retreat, but its teaching are what you will use the rest of your life.
Iboga gives profound insights and clarity into our lives. It will keep working with you for months after your retreat, and you will have the tools and knowledge it gave you for the rest of your life.
Used in a Shamanic traditional Bwiti psycho-spiritual ceremony setting, this is a powerful sacred plant teacher that has the ability to heal the mind, body, and soul.
That has been my personal experience with the Iboga plant medicine, and that’s why I choose to do this work. It can give you healing and freedom beyond anything you thought possible.
-David O'Brien, Bwitiboga Founder