Latest / Plant More Worry Less: The Huachuma Foundation Podcast / The Megaphone and the Whisper: Iboga, Huachuma, and the End of Personal Suffering
Transcript
- 0:00[music]
- 0:07SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Plant More Worry Less, a podcast by the Huachuma Foundation.
- 0:12SPEAKER_02: We are grateful for the supporters who make this show possible.
- 0:16SPEAKER_02: To learn more about our work or support our mission, please visit huachumafoundation.org.
- 0:23SPEAKER_02: Also note, in this podcast, we discuss sacred plant medicines for educational purposes only.
- 0:30SPEAKER_02: Nothing herein should be considered medical or legal advice.
- 0:34SPEAKER_02: And we do not encourage using any substances in places where they are illegal.
- 0:40SPEAKER_02: We hope you enjoy this very special episode.
- 0:53SPEAKER_03: I'm Hamid, that's Danny.
- 0:55SPEAKER_03: We were just overjoyed that we got in touch with you through our mutual friend,
- 1:03SPEAKER_03: Katie, who connected us.
- 1:07SPEAKER_01: Okay.
- 1:08SPEAKER_03: I don't know how much you know about what we're doing.
- 1:11SPEAKER_03: We're really just trying to connect with people at this point.
- 1:16SPEAKER_03: I mean, we...
- 1:18SPEAKER_03: We have this podcast where we've had a number of guests
- 1:21SPEAKER_03: and everybody brings their own medicine, their own magic.
- 1:26SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
- 1:27SPEAKER_03: we are a nonprofit and we noticed that you have a nonprofit and we were like,
- 1:32SPEAKER_03: whoa, it's like a lot of similar kinds of ideas and synchronicities.
- 1:39SPEAKER_03: But then I was looking at your bio and I don't even know where to start
- 1:43SPEAKER_03: because you've got sound, you've got You've got connecting people with spirituality.
- 1:50SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just, it's endless.
- 1:52SPEAKER_03: So I really rather just turn it over and say,
- 1:55SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 1:56SPEAKER_03: if you'd like to share about what's on your heart,
- 1:59SPEAKER_03: who you are and things like that, we can just start flowing that way.
- 2:04SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 2:05SPEAKER_01: So first, thank you both.
- 2:07SPEAKER_01: Danny, nice to meet you.
- 2:07SPEAKER_01: It's a lovely background.
- 2:08SPEAKER_01: You got there too.
- 2:09SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 2:12SPEAKER_01: So I think if I say anything about who I am, I discover that every day.
- 2:18SPEAKER_01: Specifically,
- 2:19SPEAKER_01: what I would say is this week is the first week my wife has ever been away
- 2:23SPEAKER_01: from myself and the baby since she was born.
- 2:26SPEAKER_01: And so it's just daddy and daughter all day.
- 2:28SPEAKER_01: And so I'm discovering a new version of myself every second.
- 2:33SPEAKER_01: And so that to me is really what I've really found about life and really
- 2:37SPEAKER_01: about My learning lessons in Gabon is that you sort of rediscover that every second
- 2:42SPEAKER_01: of every day.
- 2:42SPEAKER_01: Like, who are you in this moment and in this moment and in this moment?
- 2:47SPEAKER_01: And in the temple, there's moments where you'll see there's this one collective heartbeat.
- 2:52SPEAKER_01: Everyone Everyone's on the shakers,
- 2:53SPEAKER_01: everyone's dancing,
- 2:54SPEAKER_01: everyone's singing,
- 2:56SPEAKER_01: and you really can't tell the difference between you and anyone else.
- 2:59SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty interesting phenomenon that happens in there.
- 3:02SPEAKER_01: To answer your question,
- 3:04SPEAKER_01: I'm discovering myself every day,
- 3:06SPEAKER_01: and the thing on my heart right now is just being a present father,
- 3:10SPEAKER_01: which is the coolest thing I've ever got to do in my life.
- 3:14SPEAKER_03: That's incredible.
- 3:16SPEAKER_03: You did send us a photo of you and Your wife is Joali.
- 3:21SPEAKER_03: How do you pronounce your name?
- 3:22SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Joali.
- 3:24SPEAKER_03: Joali, yeah.
- 3:25SPEAKER_03: And your daughter.
- 3:26SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking,
- 3:28SPEAKER_03: either you're the tallest man I've ever seen,
- 3:31SPEAKER_03: or you've got kind of like a shorter wife.
- 3:37SPEAKER_01: I'm about 6'5", right around 2 meters.
- 3:40SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you are tall.
- 3:42SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
- 3:44SPEAKER_03: But yeah, thank you for sharing.
- 3:46SPEAKER_03: Where are you coming from now?
- 3:48SPEAKER_03: You're in Costa Rica, I think.
- 3:50SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
- 3:51SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we have a property here in Costa Rica.
- 3:53SPEAKER_01: It's a 90-acre finca.
- 3:57SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where we hold our retreats at.
- 3:59SPEAKER_01: We host guests here.
- 4:00SPEAKER_01: I have some friends from Colombia visiting us right now, too.
- 4:02SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, we live here and station year-round here in Costa Rica.
- 4:08SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
- 4:09SPEAKER_03: And I think it'd be cool to talk about the types of medicine work that you're doing there.
- 4:15SPEAKER_03: You know, we are mostly working with Huachuma.
- 4:20SPEAKER_03: Of course, I have a deep love in my heart for iboga as a plant.
- 4:25SPEAKER_03: And I know that that's sort of where you're putting a lot of your energy these days.
- 4:32SPEAKER_03: I think our listeners and people
- 4:35SPEAKER_03: who follow our Our podcast would be super interested to know about that, too.
- 4:41SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 4:42SPEAKER_01: I mean, with Iboga here,
- 4:43SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 4:45SPEAKER_01: when I first came into this space almost 10 years ago,
- 4:50SPEAKER_01: I referred to it as a medicine.
- 4:53SPEAKER_01: And over the years,
- 4:54SPEAKER_01: I've started to see and notice how my language has shifted,
- 4:57SPEAKER_01: with Iboga in particular.
- 5:00SPEAKER_01: The reason I say that is because I started to see that what Iboga is doing at
- 5:05SPEAKER_01: the core,
- 5:05SPEAKER_01: and this maybe will answer your question, is yes,
- 5:09SPEAKER_01: there's spirituality and that's for the individual person to sort of discover
- 5:13SPEAKER_01: on their own, which is what's so beautiful about that.
- 5:15SPEAKER_01: But what it's doing to the brain itself, it's actually working in the limbic brain.
- 5:21SPEAKER_01: And so if you think about a perfect example I like to give is imagine
- 5:24SPEAKER_01: the first time you ever drove a car.
- 5:27SPEAKER_01: You get behind the steering wheel,
- 5:28SPEAKER_01: you're looking around,
- 5:29SPEAKER_01: there's like blinkers and there's a steering wheel and there's a gas pedal
- 5:32SPEAKER_01: and brakes and you're kind of like, what is going on here?
- 5:35SPEAKER_01: And then later in life,
- 5:36SPEAKER_01: after repetition,
- 5:37SPEAKER_01: that becomes automated to the point where you don't have to think about it, right?
- 5:40SPEAKER_01: It's just something that happens second nature.
- 5:42SPEAKER_01: You can literally be texting and driving at the same time.
- 5:45SPEAKER_01: And so the question is, why does that happen?
- 5:47SPEAKER_01: From a functional neurology standpoint,
- 5:49SPEAKER_01: it's because this complex process gets compartmentalized down to the basal ganglia
- 5:54SPEAKER_01: in the limbic part of the brain.
- 5:56SPEAKER_01: And so in the same way that we learn to drive,
- 5:59SPEAKER_01: what I've noticed is that a lot of people learn to suffer.
- 6:02SPEAKER_01: They create problems in their life, they become automated.
- 6:06SPEAKER_01: And so at first I started seeing Iboga as this medicine and now I sort of see it
- 6:11SPEAKER_01: as something far beyond that.
- 6:14SPEAKER_01: It actually has the capacity to go back to the analogy to teach you how to unlearn how to drive.
- 6:21SPEAKER_01: Imagine if that was sort of the analogy we held.
- 6:24SPEAKER_01: Now imagine if instead of driving, it's creating conflicts and partnerships.
- 6:29SPEAKER_01: And so yes, it works as a medicine.
- 6:31SPEAKER_01: Yes, it works as a teacher.
- 6:32SPEAKER_01: Yes, it could be an ally.
- 6:33SPEAKER_01: Yes, it could be a power plant.
- 6:35SPEAKER_01: But what it does, it's something different.
- 6:38SPEAKER_01: It's almost like it's a technology designed specifically for the human brain.
- 6:43SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we do here is we help people stop creating their own suffering.
- 6:49SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day is really what we do.
- 6:53SPEAKER_01: That's powerful.
- 6:55SPEAKER_03: I'm curious about your relationship with the word medicine too because I've thought
- 7:01SPEAKER_03: about this as well in other contexts with other plants.
- 7:08SPEAKER_03: Maybe we bring a lot of baggage with that word and now the Western world is obsessed
- 7:15SPEAKER_03: with not iboga but ibogaine and trying to bring these kind of
- 7:23SPEAKER_03: They're not even practices anymore.
- 7:25SPEAKER_03: They're becoming medicalized medicines.
- 7:28SPEAKER_03: So I'm just curious.
- 7:29SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 7:30SPEAKER_03: Do you have any thoughts on that?
- 7:34SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 7:35SPEAKER_01: I ask the guests just when they come.
- 7:38SPEAKER_01: You know,
- 7:38SPEAKER_01: when they speak about Iboga and they call it a medicine,
- 7:40SPEAKER_01: I ask them, I say, you know, who is someone who needs a medicine?
- 7:45SPEAKER_01: And the natural answer is that it's somebody who's sick.
- 7:49SPEAKER_01: And I can just tell you, and I mean this with all due respect to anyone I've ever worked with.
- 7:53SPEAKER_01: We work with over 150 people a year.
- 7:55SPEAKER_01: I've never seen one person come here who's sick.
- 8:00SPEAKER_01: I've seen people come here who are creating issues in their lives.
- 8:03SPEAKER_01: I've seen people with health conditions.
- 8:05SPEAKER_01: I had a gentleman come here with terminal cancer.
- 8:08SPEAKER_01: What we truly are, beyond the body, beyond the mind, can never be sick.
- 8:13SPEAKER_01: And so...
- 8:15SPEAKER_01: I think for me,
- 8:16SPEAKER_01: the word with medicine,
- 8:17SPEAKER_01: it's totally fine to use it,
- 8:18SPEAKER_01: but as long as we're understanding
- 8:20SPEAKER_01: that what we really are can never possibly be sick.
- 8:24SPEAKER_01: And from that standpoint, then we can use the terminology like medicine.
- 8:27SPEAKER_01: And to go with Ibogaine, yeah, I mean,
- 8:30SPEAKER_01: I think the biggest issue I've found is that I would say around 90% of the people
- 8:35SPEAKER_01: who go to Ibogaine clinics would actually be better off working
- 8:39SPEAKER_01: with something like Iboga.
- 8:41SPEAKER_01: Ibogaine is really for two real situations.
- 8:45SPEAKER_01: The first one obviously is if you have substance abuse or substance addiction going on.
- 8:51SPEAKER_01: That's obviously a very amazing case for it.
- 8:54SPEAKER_01: The next one is for veterans, I would say with severe PTSD.
- 8:58SPEAKER_01: For example, we had a gentleman who wanted to come here.
- 9:01SPEAKER_01: He was a former Navy SEAL.
- 9:03SPEAKER_01: And in our intake call, he basically told me that he spent years as a Navy SEAL as an assassin.
- 9:11SPEAKER_01: And so, you know,
- 9:12SPEAKER_01: this is a person who's had authorities called to his house several times
- 9:17SPEAKER_01: for potential gun violence.
- 9:19SPEAKER_01: In situations like that with severe PTSD, that requires a medical treatment.
- 9:24SPEAKER_01: And Ibogaine is a medical treatment for those cases.
- 9:27SPEAKER_01: A lot of people going to Ibogaine would be much better off with Iboga for a few reasons.
- 9:32SPEAKER_01: One is because the setting is much more gentle.
- 9:35SPEAKER_01: I mean, imagine here you're in this Amazing jungle with medicinal plants all over the property.
- 9:40SPEAKER_01: My daughter goes outside and eats off the trees every day.
- 9:43SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a sanctuary.
- 9:45SPEAKER_01: At an Ibogaine clinic, you're hooked up to these instruments.
- 9:47SPEAKER_01: There's beepings going on.
- 9:49SPEAKER_01: You have these headphones on.
- 9:50SPEAKER_01: You have a trip sitter.
- 9:52SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a total different set and setting.
- 9:54SPEAKER_01: And if you ever read the book by Michael Pollan,
- 9:55SPEAKER_01: How to Change Your Mind, he goes into set and setting in great detail.
- 9:58SPEAKER_01: And so for the majority of people, I would say actually coming to Iboga is a lot...
- 10:05SPEAKER_01: Thank you for sharing that.
- 10:06SPEAKER_01: I feel like we
- 10:30SPEAKER_03: We should at some point get into talking about Iboga and the way that you hold
- 10:36SPEAKER_03: the space and the lineage or teachings that you've studied.
- 10:42SPEAKER_03: But just to stay on that thread a moment,
- 10:44SPEAKER_03: because I'm in Arizona, so we're a border state, obviously, with Mexico.
- 10:51SPEAKER_03: And there's kind of a conglomeration of Ibogaine clinics that have sort of formed
- 10:58SPEAKER_03: across the borders,
- 11:00SPEAKER_03: whether it's across the Arizona border, across the California Baja border.
- 11:08SPEAKER_03: And I, you know,
- 11:09SPEAKER_03: over the years have come to know some of the people running them,
- 11:13SPEAKER_03: and I think some of them are just amazing humans.
- 11:17SPEAKER_03: One of the commonalities that I see, though,
- 11:19SPEAKER_03: is that a lot of them are being run by people who were themselves Drug addicted
- 11:26SPEAKER_03: and don't have the background.
- 11:31SPEAKER_03: So they'll of course have a miracle come to their life and then open a clinic.
- 11:38SPEAKER_03: And so, you know,
- 11:39SPEAKER_03: speaking of holding the space and the set in the setting,
- 11:43SPEAKER_03: I think there's definitely a gap.
- 11:46SPEAKER_03: Even in that world,
- 11:48SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 11:48SPEAKER_03: people have asked me where to go and it's like, well,
- 11:51SPEAKER_03: I don't know because I don't even know if the people,
- 11:55SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 11:55SPEAKER_03: in the clinical setting are holding it in the right way or in a safe way that
- 12:00SPEAKER_03: that would be conducive to healing.
- 12:02SPEAKER_03: I personally, you know, this show is not about healing.
- 12:08SPEAKER_03: We don't have peer review studies for everything.
- 12:10SPEAKER_03: So a lot of what I share is just my own personal things.
- 12:14SPEAKER_03: But I can't imagine being in any type of experience with IVs and heart monitors.
- 12:21SPEAKER_03: And in a hospital setting,
- 12:25SPEAKER_03: going through this type of experience, it sounds almost more traumatic to me.
- 12:30SPEAKER_03: And I don't know.
- 12:32SPEAKER_03: But people are having amazing...
- 12:36SPEAKER_03: So there must be something there too.
- 12:39SPEAKER_03: And of course I haven't done it, so I can't speak.
- 12:43SPEAKER_03: Maybe I would be able to tolerate IVs and all this kind of thing,
- 12:47SPEAKER_03: but I would much prefer to be in the jungle where you are.
- 12:52SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 12:53SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 12:53SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, I think your reflection is very accurate.
- 12:57SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of the individuals in the space too.
- 13:01SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean,
- 13:02SPEAKER_01: and I think this is why you're starting to see so much bufo obviously being served
- 13:06SPEAKER_01: in these clinics as well too.
- 13:08SPEAKER_01: A lot of times people have a really difficult sort of obtuse kind of experience with
- 13:14SPEAKER_01: the Ibogaine.
- 13:15SPEAKER_01: And so then you bring the 5-MeO-DMT after and it sort
- 13:18SPEAKER_01: of provides this euphoric You know,
- 13:21SPEAKER_01: meeting the creator type experience and people kind of go home happy with that.
- 13:26SPEAKER_01: But a lot of people I've connected with,
- 13:28SPEAKER_01: they have very,
- 13:28SPEAKER_01: very difficult times being hooked up to the instrument in that type of setting.
- 13:32SPEAKER_01: And yes,
- 13:34SPEAKER_01: you're seeing these clinics start to start to find ways to sort of navigate around
- 13:37SPEAKER_01: that and make sure that the reviews are right.
- 13:40SPEAKER_01: And I also do know some clinics from some people who,
- 13:43SPEAKER_01: a dear brother of mine runs a clinic and he's initiated the same village as I am.
- 13:47SPEAKER_01: And so there are some people doing it really well.
- 13:49SPEAKER_01: There is a clinic named called Basi Ibogaine, who we are connected with.
- 13:54SPEAKER_01: And the woman who runs that is an ayahuasca.
- 13:57SPEAKER_01: And so she's brought a whole sort of dimension into that, which is really beautiful.
- 14:01SPEAKER_01: They don't work with 5-MeO-DMT.
- 14:04SPEAKER_01: They're very specific.
- 14:05SPEAKER_01: It's sort of ran by Dr. Deborah Marsh, who's obviously one of the experts in the Ibogaine field.
- 14:10SPEAKER_01: And so there are some places doing it really well.
- 14:13SPEAKER_01: And there are some places that are,
- 14:16SPEAKER_01: I think,
- 14:16SPEAKER_01: kind of to what you said,
- 14:17SPEAKER_01: lost in sort of a different frequency due to the ownership, I would say.
- 14:23SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 14:23SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 14:24SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I've heard of the Basi.
- 14:27SPEAKER_03: And I don't know much about that, but is that a lineage?
- 14:31SPEAKER_03: Like when people say that they're Basi.
- 14:33SPEAKER_01: No, Basi is a term.
- 14:37SPEAKER_01: So I guess to go back a little bit, my paternal lineage is from Gabon.
- 14:43SPEAKER_01: I never met my biological father,
- 14:44SPEAKER_01: but my first time ever having Iboga,
- 14:47SPEAKER_01: I saw myself in a jungle and these people approached me and were telling me
- 14:51SPEAKER_01: about my lineage.
- 14:52SPEAKER_01: I went home and took a genetics test and found out that my father I never met was Gabonese.
- 14:57SPEAKER_01: That's actually how I first went.
- 14:58SPEAKER_01: That's why I first went to Gabon.
- 15:00SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, now I'm going out there.
- 15:03SPEAKER_01: And one of the first things you'll hear is a word called basi in the buiti.
- 15:07SPEAKER_01: The buiti are the indigenous tradition, you could say, that are the trusted bearers of Iboga.
- 15:13SPEAKER_01: And basi is like an ahol, ashe, an affirmation of sorts.
- 15:18SPEAKER_01: So if someone says something really profound like,
- 15:21SPEAKER_01: Let's say someone at the ceremony is like,
- 15:22SPEAKER_01: you know, I'm done with my healing journey because I'm not sick.
- 15:25SPEAKER_01: I'm whole.
- 15:26SPEAKER_01: And now I'm going to start a journey of remembering.
- 15:28SPEAKER_01: I would say basi, right?
- 15:30SPEAKER_01: It's a confirmation.
- 15:31SPEAKER_01: And then in this tradition, everything is balanced.
- 15:35SPEAKER_01: Some of their core teachings are actually very similar to some of
- 15:38SPEAKER_01: the Buddhist core teachings, which are kind of fascinating.
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: And one of their principles is something called inzenzen.
- 15:44SPEAKER_01: And in Zen Zen is the perfect point between all polarities.
- 15:47SPEAKER_01: There's a Ram Dass song, Sitting Around the Fire, I don't know if you guys have ever heard it.
- 15:51SPEAKER_01: He starts off by saying,
- 15:52SPEAKER_01: beyond all polarities,
- 15:54SPEAKER_01: I am the judgments and opinions of the mind,
- 15:56SPEAKER_01: be the judgments and opinions of the mind, and you exist beyond that, our soul.
- 16:01SPEAKER_01: He's basically talking about Inzenzen.
- 16:03SPEAKER_01: The Buddha called it Buddha nature.
- 16:05SPEAKER_01: Eckhart Tolle calls it the deep eye.
- 16:07SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of words for it.
- 16:08SPEAKER_01: It really doesn't matter.
- 16:09SPEAKER_01: But the point I'm getting at is for them, everything's balanced.
- 16:13SPEAKER_01: And so if someone says Basi, you'll hear someone say Yao Yao.
- 16:17SPEAKER_01: And so Basi Yao Yao, it's like a call and response sort of deal.
- 16:22SPEAKER_01: That's beautiful.
- 16:23SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 16:24SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 16:26SPEAKER_03: Can we explore that, Rad?
- 16:29SPEAKER_03: I'm so fascinated by your discovery of your lineage through Iboga.
- 16:38SPEAKER_03: Was that the vision or was it in another medicine?
- 16:41SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was working as a chemist.
- 16:44SPEAKER_01: I was completely disassociated from my emotions.
- 16:47SPEAKER_01: I grew up in the foster system.
- 16:48SPEAKER_01: So for me, emotions weren't safe.
- 16:51SPEAKER_01: So when I got to college,
- 16:51SPEAKER_01: I was playing basketball in college and I sat down with the counselor and she said
- 16:56SPEAKER_01: to me, what do you want to study?
- 16:58SPEAKER_01: And I was like, well, nothing.
- 16:59SPEAKER_01: I just want to play basketball, right?
- 17:00SPEAKER_01: It was the only safe thing I had in my life.
- 17:03SPEAKER_01: She said, well, you have to study something.
- 17:04SPEAKER_01: And so I said, well, what's the one major with the least amount of emotions?
- 17:09SPEAKER_01: And she said, chemistry.
- 17:11SPEAKER_01: So I said, I'll do that.
- 17:13SPEAKER_01: And then I said, and I was like, but that might not be enough to hold me.
- 17:16SPEAKER_01: What's the second?
- 17:17SPEAKER_01: She said, biology.
- 17:18SPEAKER_01: So I double majored in biology chemistry.
- 17:21SPEAKER_01: Anyways,
- 17:21SPEAKER_01: after college,
- 17:22SPEAKER_01: when I was in grad school for analytical chemistry,
- 17:24SPEAKER_01: I met someone who had gone and basically sat in an ayahuasca circle.
- 17:30SPEAKER_01: And she was trying to explain it to me and was basically telling me
- 17:33SPEAKER_01: about how much hope it was bringing into people's lives.
- 17:37SPEAKER_01: And in full transparency,
- 17:39SPEAKER_01: I was at such a dense place in my own journey, I wanted to disprove it.
- 17:45SPEAKER_01: I wanted to show that there wasn't hope,
- 17:46SPEAKER_01: that life was a sort of dim,
- 17:49SPEAKER_01: dismal place where families were broken, love didn't last.
- 17:52SPEAKER_01: That's kind of how I lived.
- 17:54SPEAKER_01: And so I went to an ayahuasca retreat literally to disprove it.
- 17:57SPEAKER_01: That obviously didn't happen.
- 18:00SPEAKER_01: The actual inverse happened.
- 18:02SPEAKER_01: And on my way home, I I saw a whole new world, got back to San Diego.
- 18:07SPEAKER_01: My entire life was different.
- 18:08SPEAKER_01: And about two weeks after that,
- 18:09SPEAKER_01: a woman who happened to be on that retreat with me went to Iboga right after.
- 18:13SPEAKER_01: And apparently during her journey, she saw a vision of me.
- 18:17SPEAKER_01: She reached out to some people,
- 18:18SPEAKER_01: got my phone number and sent me a message and basically said,
- 18:21SPEAKER_01: hey, I know we didn't get a chance to connect.
- 18:23SPEAKER_01: I was at the Aya retreat with you.
- 18:25SPEAKER_01: I went and worked at this stuff called Iboga and I saw a vision of you.
- 18:28SPEAKER_01: And obviously at this point, my spiritual eyes are open.
- 18:31SPEAKER_01: So now I go out there and that's when I had the vision of Me being in Africa,
- 18:36SPEAKER_01: finding out all my lineage,
- 18:37SPEAKER_01: then I went home and took a genetics test,
- 18:39SPEAKER_01: and about two months after that,
- 18:42SPEAKER_01: I quit my job,
- 18:43SPEAKER_01: moved to Costa Rica,
- 18:44SPEAKER_01: literally sold all my possessions,
- 18:46SPEAKER_01: and I've been doing this the last eight plus years.
- 18:52SPEAKER_03: Danny, I'm just going, and I know that you're sitting there nodding.
- 18:57SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you have anything you want to interject or talk about, too.
- 19:02SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
- 19:03SPEAKER_00: I actually,
- 19:04SPEAKER_00: a question did come up just now about that and how you sold all your things
- 19:08SPEAKER_00: and just went to go and continue on the journey with Iboga.
- 19:12SPEAKER_00: What was it in you that felt more like a calling than just participating in
- 19:16SPEAKER_00: the ceremonies and sort of doing it for self-exploration?
- 19:19SPEAKER_00: Because it seems like you moved and then really stepped into a place of service with it.
- 19:23SPEAKER_00: So how did you know or did you know or it just unfolded from there?
- 19:28SPEAKER_01: You know,
- 19:29SPEAKER_01: the truth is that I was so obnoxious for a long time and ignorant,
- 19:35SPEAKER_01: to be honest with you,
- 19:36SPEAKER_01: that what happened with Aya was one of those stories you kind of hear about
- 19:39SPEAKER_01: where people have some grandioso fundamental shift in life.
- 19:46SPEAKER_01: And so when I got to Iboga, I was sort of just going because of the message.
- 19:50SPEAKER_01: I understood that there was breadcrumbs,
- 19:52SPEAKER_01: like Hansel and Gretel,
- 19:53SPEAKER_01: I think was the old story where the breadcrumbs and you follow it.
- 19:56SPEAKER_01: I just sort of saw it like that.
- 19:58SPEAKER_01: And when I was in the ceremony,
- 20:00SPEAKER_01: one of the things you do with Iboga that's different
- 20:01SPEAKER_01: from other plants is you do something called a psycho-spiritual journey
- 20:04SPEAKER_01: where we actually guide you while you're in it.
- 20:07SPEAKER_01: Imagine being able to have someone while you're in a lucid dream invite you to like,
- 20:12SPEAKER_01: okay, now fly into the sky over there, whatever it might be.
- 20:14SPEAKER_01: That's what we do with Iboga.
- 20:15SPEAKER_01: It's really fascinating work.
- 20:17SPEAKER_01: And the person who was journeying me at the time,
- 20:20SPEAKER_01: who I apprenticed under eventually,
- 20:22SPEAKER_01: he said, you know, with Iboga, you can ask questions.
- 20:26SPEAKER_01: Do you have any questions?
- 20:27SPEAKER_01: And I was like,
- 20:30SPEAKER_01: I don't, honestly.
- 20:31SPEAKER_01: I didn't even think about that.
- 20:34SPEAKER_01: And then I thought about one and I said, well, what do you do when you're happy?
- 20:39SPEAKER_01: Because I had came back from Aya and I was miserable my whole life.
- 20:42SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, I'm just happy, period.
- 20:47SPEAKER_01: And so I said, what do you do?
- 20:49SPEAKER_01: And the most fascinating thing happened was there was a black screen in front of me.
- 20:54SPEAKER_01: I saw a hand show up with a pen,
- 20:56SPEAKER_01: like a stylus pen,
- 20:58SPEAKER_01: and I wrote Y-O-U in green writing,
- 21:01SPEAKER_01: and that slid over like a typewriter, and I wrote S-E-R-V-E, you serve.
- 21:07SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what in the heck does that mean?
- 21:11SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden the music changed to a new song,
- 21:14SPEAKER_01: and this is traditional Gabonese music, Buiti music.
- 21:17SPEAKER_01: And the lyrics started saying,
- 21:18SPEAKER_01: Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavad Gita, over and over and over again.
- 21:25SPEAKER_01: And if you've ever read the Gita,
- 21:26SPEAKER_01: which I had read a bunch of times when I came home,
- 21:29SPEAKER_01: it was actually the first book gifted to me.
- 21:31SPEAKER_01: The premise is that we have to take action in this world.
- 21:34SPEAKER_01: So how do we do that without creating karma for ourself or for others?
- 21:37SPEAKER_01: And the answer for that is karma yoga, the path of selfless service.
- 21:41SPEAKER_01: And so think about it.
- 21:42SPEAKER_01: I asked this plant, what do you do when you're happy?
- 21:44SPEAKER_01: And it says, you serve, you take care of others.
- 21:47SPEAKER_01: And so that's really how I sort of, why I dove into it.
- 21:53SPEAKER_01: Cause I came back to San Diego,
- 21:54SPEAKER_01: I had a job as a chemist making,
- 21:55SPEAKER_01: you know, almost 200K a year, had a beautiful condo, a loving partner.
- 22:00SPEAKER_01: And I just looked around the world and I saw all the people in the city who were miserable.
- 22:05SPEAKER_01: My friends who were just like me, who were just as miserable.
- 22:08SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I can't just sit here and Like, what am I going to do?
- 22:12SPEAKER_01: I'm happy.
- 22:13SPEAKER_01: I have to go serve.
- 22:14SPEAKER_01: And so that's why I sold everything.
- 22:16SPEAKER_01: Honestly, it was just, it was like that.
- 22:20SPEAKER_00: Wow.
- 22:21SPEAKER_03: Dani's getting ideas.
- 22:23SPEAKER_01: I am.
- 22:25SPEAKER_03: Actually,
- 22:26SPEAKER_03: that is such a beautiful thing because it shows this trust,
- 22:32SPEAKER_03: this inner trust to, you know, to be able to do that.
- 22:38SPEAKER_03: I see a lot of people have insights like that and then maybe don't trust enough.
- 22:45SPEAKER_03: And so I wonder where your trust comes from, the trust in that knowing, in that belief.
- 22:53SPEAKER_01: I think it came from a life of distrust.
- 22:56SPEAKER_01: I think that when you see the other side of the coin so much,
- 23:01SPEAKER_01: when you see and recognize something pure and something beautiful,
- 23:05SPEAKER_01: There's not even like a question about what it is.
- 23:08SPEAKER_01: It's just, it's so clear from you.
- 23:10SPEAKER_01: And I, you know,
- 23:10SPEAKER_01: like I said,
- 23:11SPEAKER_01: I spent my entire childhood,
- 23:12SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was raised in the foster system up until I was 18.
- 23:15SPEAKER_01: And so I was abused repeatedly over the years.
- 23:19SPEAKER_01: I mean, to the point where it was commonplace.
- 23:21SPEAKER_01: And so my childhood, you would look at it from a traumatic lens, was so dense.
- 23:25SPEAKER_01: But the beautiful part about the density is you recognize the light.
- 23:30SPEAKER_01: You know, you're in the absolute darkness.
- 23:32SPEAKER_01: You'd see a tiny, even a little fire fly off in the distance.
- 23:34SPEAKER_01: You're going to notice it.
- 23:36SPEAKER_01: And so I guess what I'd say is it's not so much trust.
- 23:39SPEAKER_01: It's just like, aha, this is so clear.
- 23:42SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
- 23:43SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
- 23:47SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 23:48SPEAKER_03: Thank you for sharing that.
- 23:51SPEAKER_03: It's kind of a,
- 23:51SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 23:53SPEAKER_03: I don't know how old you are,
- 23:54SPEAKER_03: but I think that it's like a phase in our life where It starts to become
- 23:59SPEAKER_03: about service.
- 24:01SPEAKER_03: We talk a lot about that, Danny and I.
- 24:03SPEAKER_03: A lot of the early part of the spiritual path, at least just speaking for myself, was about me.
- 24:11SPEAKER_03: Like, oh, I need to understand myself.
- 24:13SPEAKER_03: I need to learn to feel.
- 24:15SPEAKER_03: I need to...
- 24:18SPEAKER_03: Understand,
- 24:19SPEAKER_03: but then once you have that,
- 24:20SPEAKER_03: like what you framed it as like once you're happy, what do you do?
- 24:24SPEAKER_03: It's like once you have that exploration sort of done in a way, then what do you do with it?
- 24:33SPEAKER_03: And In our lineage that we study with Huachuma,
- 24:37SPEAKER_03: which is coming from Native American traditions here in the United States,
- 24:41SPEAKER_03: what you do is you serve, you help the others.
- 24:45SPEAKER_03: And so I love that thread.
- 24:48SPEAKER_03: You want to know how to
- 24:50SPEAKER_01: use basi?
- 24:50SPEAKER_01: Right there.
- 24:52SPEAKER_01: Basi.
- 24:53SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 24:55SPEAKER_01: Do you mind if I just, first of all, I'm 42.
- 24:59SPEAKER_01: And if I might share real quick, have you ever read The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz?
- 25:04SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
- 25:05SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 25:06SPEAKER_01: He actually talks about this in that book and The Voice of Knowledge,
- 25:10SPEAKER_01: which is one of my favorite books.
- 25:12SPEAKER_01: If you've never read it, I would highly recommend checking it out.
- 25:15SPEAKER_01: The Voice of Knowledge by Don Miguel Ruiz.
- 25:18SPEAKER_01: If you remember in the book, he talks about something called The Dream of the Attentions.
- 25:22SPEAKER_01: So the dream of the first attention,
- 25:24SPEAKER_01: he says,
- 25:25SPEAKER_01: is what happens basically is in the dream of the first attention,
- 25:28SPEAKER_01: it's where you're first forced to place your attention.
- 25:31SPEAKER_01: And what he says is you're a little tiny kid and you don't really have a choice.
- 25:34SPEAKER_01: Like my daughter,
- 25:34SPEAKER_01: for example,
- 25:36SPEAKER_01: every single morning,
- 25:36SPEAKER_01: like we get up at sunrise like we did today,
- 25:38SPEAKER_01: I walk her up to this old tree on the property.
- 25:41SPEAKER_01: We take a little tobacco out of a bag.
- 25:43SPEAKER_01: She's only one and a half years old.
- 25:45SPEAKER_01: She goes, blows into it and throws it on the tree.
- 25:50SPEAKER_01: So where her attention is first forced to be, she doesn't have a choice, right?
- 25:55SPEAKER_01: Is in this beautiful, sacred ritual.
- 25:58SPEAKER_01: I know for a lot of us, including myself, it wasn't like that in my childhood.
- 26:03SPEAKER_01: And so what he says is that where your attention is first forced to be,
- 26:06SPEAKER_01: you start to build a structure that's your psychic reality.
- 26:09SPEAKER_01: And what he says is imagine a brick wall.
- 26:12SPEAKER_01: Each of those bricks are a belief that you form about your life.
- 26:16SPEAKER_01: And so you have belief by belief by belief from where your attention is forced to be
- 26:19SPEAKER_01: and you create a psychic reality for yourself.
- 26:22SPEAKER_01: And faith is the concrete that holds it all together.
- 26:24SPEAKER_01: That's his framing.
- 26:26SPEAKER_01: And then he says what happens is that 99.9% of the people on this planet are going
- 26:30SPEAKER_01: to live and die in the dream of the first attention.
- 26:33SPEAKER_01: But a select few,
- 26:34SPEAKER_01: which I would imagine are people on this call and your listeners,
- 26:38SPEAKER_01: wake up from that dream and they enter something called the dream of
- 26:40SPEAKER_01: the second attention.
- 26:42SPEAKER_01: Same thing as the first, but this time it's where you choose to place your attention.
- 26:47SPEAKER_01: And I think this is kind of going to what you're alluding to.
- 26:49SPEAKER_01: Now we are choosing to place our attention in more beautiful, holistic things.
- 26:54SPEAKER_01: And then he says there's a dream of the third attention, which is very fascinating.
- 26:57SPEAKER_01: He says after a while you stop putting your attention on yourself
- 27:01SPEAKER_01: and you start putting it on other people.
- 27:03SPEAKER_01: And so you build a structure just like the first two,
- 27:05SPEAKER_01: but this time it's a structure of the planet.
- 27:07SPEAKER_01: It's about service.
- 27:09SPEAKER_01: And I've always loved his framing on that.
- 27:12SPEAKER_01: And you know, you asked a question earlier about how we work with Iboga.
- 27:15SPEAKER_01: This is sort of the framework we use.
- 27:17SPEAKER_01: What we tell people really is that there's really nothing wrong with you.
- 27:21SPEAKER_01: It's just where your attention was first forced to be,
- 27:24SPEAKER_01: it created some beliefs that are harming you.
- 27:26SPEAKER_01: Like some people have a belief that they have to be perfect to receive love.
- 27:31SPEAKER_01: And then they also have a belief that says perfection doesn't exist.
- 27:36SPEAKER_01: So now what?
- 27:38SPEAKER_01: And so what we're doing with Iboga really at the core is
- 27:41SPEAKER_01: a very simple thing is we're removing the concrete from the structure.
- 27:45SPEAKER_01: That's all it does.
- 27:45SPEAKER_01: It takes the concrete out of the structure and so now you can tear it down
- 27:49SPEAKER_01: and now you can build up a structure of your own.
- 27:51SPEAKER_01: That's the dream of the second attention.
- 27:52SPEAKER_01: That's really what we do here.
- 27:56SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
- 27:57SPEAKER_03: we're going to have to go back and listen to that again and also read the book again
- 28:01SPEAKER_03: because I love that it's...
- 28:04SPEAKER_03: These traditions and these teachings, they're all kind of honing in on the same thing.
- 28:09SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 28:11SPEAKER_03: In a different way.
- 28:14SPEAKER_03: Can you share with us if you're willing to share about your ceremonies?
- 28:18SPEAKER_03: And yeah,
- 28:19SPEAKER_03: I don't know how many people that listen to our podcast,
- 28:22SPEAKER_03: which is, we mainly talk about Huachuma.
- 28:24SPEAKER_03: I don't know how many of them have had experience with Iboga.
- 28:28SPEAKER_03: And I think it would be really helpful...
- 28:31SPEAKER_03: You should really just talk about that and how you all work with it
- 28:36SPEAKER_03: and maybe even honor the plant and the lineage.
- 28:39SPEAKER_03: There's definitely a lot there.
- 28:41SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think starting with the lineage is always appropriate there.
- 28:46SPEAKER_01: So like I said, in Central West Africa and Gabon is where this plant comes from.
- 28:52SPEAKER_01: And the people there are the Bwiti people.
- 28:53SPEAKER_01: You could think of the Bwiti like a tree of sorts.
- 28:57SPEAKER_01: The roots of the tree are the desumba tradition, which is the first tradition.
- 29:00SPEAKER_01: The trunk is the masoko.
- 29:03SPEAKER_01: And then there's various branches,
- 29:05SPEAKER_01: the machogo, the fang, the mabundi, there's all these different branches.
- 29:10SPEAKER_01: And so my first initiation was into a fang tradition,
- 29:13SPEAKER_01: which is a blend of traditional masoko and Christianity,
- 29:17SPEAKER_01: when they came together in desumba, excuse me.
- 29:20SPEAKER_01: And then after that, I got initiated into a Masoko branch, Masoko Ngonde, which is the moon.
- 29:25SPEAKER_01: And that's the family in the tribe I'm associated with now.
- 29:28SPEAKER_01: That's the one our nonprofit is helping.
- 29:30SPEAKER_01: We just help them purchase land to build a traditional school.
- 29:32SPEAKER_01: We're building a house for the female shaman.
- 29:35SPEAKER_01: It's not the word they use, but I'll use that terminology because people will get it.
- 29:40SPEAKER_01: She's just considered a mother.
- 29:41SPEAKER_01: That'd be the actual official term there.
- 29:43SPEAKER_01: So we're building her house.
- 29:44SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah,
- 29:44SPEAKER_01: our nonprofit is really helping this specific family and village
- 29:47SPEAKER_01: with my spiritual father there.
- 29:49SPEAKER_01: And yeah, Iboga for them is, it actually isn't the only plant.
- 29:54SPEAKER_01: It's just one of many plants.
- 29:57SPEAKER_01: The knowledge they have of the forest down there is one of
- 30:01SPEAKER_01: the most beautiful things you ever see.
- 30:04SPEAKER_01: When I go there,
- 30:04SPEAKER_01: they literally take me into the forest and they're telling me
- 30:07SPEAKER_01: about all these different plants.
- 30:08SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's an oral tradition, so you can't write anything down.
- 30:12SPEAKER_01: So I'm just forgetting things.
- 30:14SPEAKER_01: Every time I go, I'm forgetting more than I learn, but then I'll hold on to one nugget.
- 30:17SPEAKER_01: For example,
- 30:18SPEAKER_01: they taught me about a certain insect out there that produces a really dark type
- 30:23SPEAKER_01: of honey.
- 30:24SPEAKER_01: And this honey actually counteracts the effects of iboga.
- 30:28SPEAKER_01: And so if someone is in an experience where it's too strong,
- 30:32SPEAKER_01: let's say,
- 30:33SPEAKER_01: you could serve them this honey and it'll help sort of bring down the experience
- 30:36SPEAKER_01: a little bit.
- 30:38SPEAKER_01: There's also plans for stomach stuff.
- 30:40SPEAKER_01: There's plans for rashes.
- 30:41SPEAKER_01: They have it all down there.
- 30:43SPEAKER_01: And so the real knowledge of the buiti is about the forest.
- 30:46SPEAKER_01: That's really where their wisdom and their knowledge comes from.
- 30:49SPEAKER_01: And then the ceremonies are community events.
- 30:52SPEAKER_01: Where everyone comes together.
- 30:53SPEAKER_01: I got in trouble this year.
- 30:54SPEAKER_01: I brought two women for initiation into our village, two dear sisters of mine.
- 30:58SPEAKER_01: They wanted to be initiated and I didn't plan it right.
- 31:01SPEAKER_01: And so I had one ceremony on a Friday, which was amazing.
- 31:05SPEAKER_01: And then I didn't plan it for them to be there the next Friday.
- 31:07SPEAKER_01: So we had to do their second ceremony on a Wednesday.
- 31:09SPEAKER_01: And the part that got them the most upset was that they couldn't invite more members
- 31:13SPEAKER_01: from the community on a Wednesday night.
- 31:16SPEAKER_01: It just shows you what this is for them.
- 31:18SPEAKER_01: It brings people together.
- 31:19SPEAKER_01: And for their initiations,
- 31:21SPEAKER_01: which is an initiation into the Bwiti, Iboga is used, but it's not the main plant.
- 31:27SPEAKER_01: There's actually other plants involved,
- 31:29SPEAKER_01: and the main ceremony you do is called an Etika,
- 31:32SPEAKER_01: which is a combination of 30 things.
- 31:34SPEAKER_01: I can't really say too much about the Etika,
- 31:36SPEAKER_01: but what I can tell you,
- 31:37SPEAKER_01: it's the most powerful thing I've ever experienced, and it's non-psychedelic.
- 31:44SPEAKER_01: It's a mix of a lot of things.
- 31:46SPEAKER_01: And so their initiation is an initiation into the buiti.
- 31:49SPEAKER_01: And what that means is you're entering a school.
- 31:52SPEAKER_01: And the last lesson of school happens at the day you die.
- 31:56SPEAKER_01: And so you're forever a student, never a master in this sort of tradition.
- 32:01SPEAKER_01: Really, really beautiful.
- 32:04SPEAKER_01: The men have their roles.
- 32:05SPEAKER_01: The women have their roles in the masoko.
- 32:07SPEAKER_01: Some of the different branches, there's women villages who lead the ways.
- 32:10SPEAKER_01: And so there's all different flavors.
- 32:12SPEAKER_01: We're connected to a lot of different tribes and villages out there.
- 32:16SPEAKER_01: And so yeah, that would be sort of the side on the traditional aspect.
- 32:20SPEAKER_01: And then in terms of,
- 32:21SPEAKER_01: yeah, what we're doing here, we really just try to keep it as light as possible.
- 32:28SPEAKER_01: One of the things I found is that the more conversation there is around trauma
- 32:33SPEAKER_01: and healing, you start to condition people.
- 32:36SPEAKER_01: And what happens is they go into ceremony with these narratives.
- 32:38SPEAKER_01: What we try to do is keep it light.
- 32:39SPEAKER_01: You have integration support on the front end.
- 32:42SPEAKER_01: We give you access to Nektar, which is a beautiful e-integration software that helps you.
- 32:47SPEAKER_01: They get a 99-page workbook that they're coming in with,
- 32:49SPEAKER_01: like I said, with free integration coaching.
- 32:52SPEAKER_01: We do all the medical checks from the Ibogaine Clinic, but it's not as dangerous.
- 32:55SPEAKER_01: They come into our retreat fully prepared, ready to go.
- 32:59SPEAKER_01: Eight days, seven nights here in the jungle.
- 33:01SPEAKER_01: We do two ceremonies, one on day two and one on day five.
- 33:05SPEAKER_01: With rest days in between, we have doctors at the ceremony.
- 33:08SPEAKER_01: They're never needed because,
- 33:10SPEAKER_01: like I said, the cardiotoxic effects with Ebola just aren't the same.
- 33:13SPEAKER_01: And if anyone ever is curious about that, I can go into all the science of why.
- 33:17SPEAKER_01: But just so you guys know,
- 33:18SPEAKER_01: my wife,
- 33:19SPEAKER_01: when she was six months pregnant with our daughter,
- 33:22SPEAKER_01: went to Gabon and was initiated into the Mabundi tradition of the Buiti.
- 33:27SPEAKER_01: And so if I thought that Iboga wasn't safe at all, I obviously never would have let her go.
- 33:33SPEAKER_01: She never would have went.
- 33:34SPEAKER_01: If she would have wanted to go do Ibogaine at the same time, we wouldn't have gone.
- 33:39SPEAKER_01: And in Gabon, lots of women get initiated while pregnant.
- 33:42SPEAKER_01: And what you see with the children is that their neurocognitive capacity is greatly,
- 33:48SPEAKER_01: greatly enhanced.
- 33:50SPEAKER_01: Especially around association and meaning making happens at a much earlier age.
- 33:54SPEAKER_01: It's very, very fascinating stuff.
- 33:57SPEAKER_01: And so the ceremonies are really safe.
- 33:58SPEAKER_01: We start around the fire.
- 34:00SPEAKER_01: We'll ingest a plant around 9 p.m. By 10.30, 11, you're starting to feel the effects.
- 34:05SPEAKER_01: We'll lay you down in the bed.
- 34:06SPEAKER_01: We'll play the traditional music till about 3.30 a.m.
- 34:09SPEAKER_01: And then around 3.30,
- 34:10SPEAKER_01: I switch to an ayahuasca playlist,
- 34:13SPEAKER_01: which is just, yeah, I mean, it's just really loving and it's a nice way to ground.
- 34:17SPEAKER_01: The next two days are days off.
- 34:19SPEAKER_01: We do a traditional ceremony,
- 34:20SPEAKER_01: which is called the spiritual shower, which is meant to sever your past.
- 34:24SPEAKER_01: Basically, the spiritual shower is the middle point between your old life and your new life.
- 34:28SPEAKER_01: In other words, stepping from the dream of the first attention into the second.
- 34:32SPEAKER_01: And so now the second ceremony is about the dream of the second attention.
- 34:35SPEAKER_01: The first one was about all the stuff that wasn't your choice.
- 34:38SPEAKER_01: Now we're going to use the second one, which is the rebirth on what is your choice?
- 34:42SPEAKER_01: What type of life do you want to live now?
- 34:45SPEAKER_01: Do you want to go home to the partner who's treating you poorly?
- 34:48SPEAKER_01: It's your life now.
- 34:49SPEAKER_01: You get to make that choice.
- 34:50SPEAKER_01: And so it's more of an empowerment ceremony.
- 34:53SPEAKER_01: Once they leave, they have integration coaching on the back end.
- 34:56SPEAKER_01: And then I've been collecting data from my doctoral research project for about five years now.
- 35:01SPEAKER_01: And so they're participating in our data collection as well, too.
- 35:04SPEAKER_01: And then we have monthly community calls.
- 35:05SPEAKER_01: We have monthly integration calls.
- 35:07SPEAKER_01: And then every July, we take guests who want to come back to Gabon with us to be initiated.
- 35:14SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of our whole process there.
- 35:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah, one of the things you mentioned, it comes up a lot when I mention Iboga.
- 35:22SPEAKER_03: Of course,
- 35:23SPEAKER_03: I'm not as deeply entrenched as you are,
- 35:27SPEAKER_03: but I am a curious person,
- 35:29SPEAKER_03: so I've done a lot of my own research, and it's the safety.
- 35:33SPEAKER_03: And usually what I end up telling people is that this kind of belief about Safety
- 35:39SPEAKER_03: and deaths is really coming out of the fact that there are clinics working
- 35:43SPEAKER_03: with people who are heavily drug addicted and giving them intravenous ibogaine.
- 35:50SPEAKER_03: And that's a very different situation than a ceremony with the root bark.
- 35:56SPEAKER_03: And the safety of the root bark is on par with any other plant like ayahuasca or huachuma.
- 36:04SPEAKER_03: And would you...
- 36:07SPEAKER_03: You know more, so I'm curious what your thoughts are on that too.
- 36:12SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the misconception is really in one sort of specific point.
- 36:16SPEAKER_01: And so you have a channel in your heart called the H-E-R-G channel.
- 36:20SPEAKER_01: And what happens is potassium flows from the inside of your heart to the out, back and forth.
- 36:27SPEAKER_01: And when it flows in and out, you have an electrical change that happens.
- 36:31SPEAKER_01: And every time this potassium flows in and out, you have a boom, a boom, a boom, a boom.
- 36:37SPEAKER_01: That's called your Q to T interval.
- 36:39SPEAKER_01: It's something we measure.
- 36:41SPEAKER_01: Ibogaine specifically blocks the HERG channel.
- 36:45SPEAKER_01: And so potassium cannot flow in and out at the same rate.
- 36:48SPEAKER_01: And so instead of it being like boom, boom, boom, boom, your heart rate, it's boom, boom, boom.
- 36:57SPEAKER_01: It elongates the QT interval.
- 37:00SPEAKER_01: If that gets too long, that's called cardiac arrest.
- 37:03SPEAKER_01: That's the risk of Ibogaine,
- 37:05SPEAKER_01: is you're flooding the system with something that's actually blocking that channel,
- 37:09SPEAKER_01: elongating the Q to T interval and making a risk of cardiac arrest or also
- 37:14SPEAKER_01: of stroke, right?
- 37:15SPEAKER_01: Because every time your heart beats, it's like a pump.
- 37:18SPEAKER_01: And when it slows down, there's less pressure in the system, which we call blood pressure.
- 37:22SPEAKER_01: And so if you don't have a high enough blood pressure rate,
- 37:24SPEAKER_01: you won't get blood to your brain and you have a stroke.
- 37:28SPEAKER_01: The misconception with Iboga is that Iboga maximum...
- 37:32SPEAKER_01: Is only 3% Ibogaine.
- 37:35SPEAKER_01: Maximum.
- 37:36SPEAKER_01: And so in order to ingest enough Iboga to get enough Ibogaine in your system,
- 37:41SPEAKER_01: you would have to literally eat over a kilogram of Iboga,
- 37:45SPEAKER_01: keep it all in, and have near 100% extraction efficiency of the alkaloids.
- 37:52SPEAKER_01: Not to mention that when ibogaine goes into your system and it hits your liver,
- 37:57SPEAKER_01: it gets metabolized to neuroibogaine by an enzyme called the CPY2D6 enzyme.
- 38:02SPEAKER_01: So the majority of the ibogaine is getting converted into neuroibogaine anyways.
- 38:07SPEAKER_01: So in order,
- 38:07SPEAKER_01: what I'm saying is in order to have the same cardiotoxic effects with iboga,
- 38:12SPEAKER_01: it's impossible.
- 38:14SPEAKER_01: It's not going to happen.
- 38:15SPEAKER_01: In my initiation in Gabon,
- 38:17SPEAKER_01: I ate so much iboga that If there was a risk of dying,
- 38:22SPEAKER_01: I for sure would have been gone.
- 38:24SPEAKER_01: I can tell you that much.
- 38:25SPEAKER_01: And I'm someone who serves it, so I know what a lot is.
- 38:27SPEAKER_01: This was like so much.
- 38:30SPEAKER_01: And so when we work with guests, we are using the smallest amount possible.
- 38:35SPEAKER_01: Because the risk with Iboga isn't from the Ibogaine, it's from the lack of sleep.
- 38:41SPEAKER_01: And the misconception that happens with providers,
- 38:44SPEAKER_01: and I think going back to your point,
- 38:45SPEAKER_01: the first wave of providers were people with substance abuse backgrounds.
- 38:49SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad they all got clean,
- 38:52SPEAKER_01: but a lot of times the traits of going big sort of stays with you.
- 38:57SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of these initial providers were giving people tremendous amounts of iboga.
- 39:01SPEAKER_01: Now imagine you have this wood bark that's all in your stomach,
- 39:04SPEAKER_01: it's making its way into your GI tract,
- 39:05SPEAKER_01: so it's not really moving,
- 39:06SPEAKER_01: it's constipating you,
- 39:08SPEAKER_01: and it's dumping alkaloids or a stimulant into your system over the course of days.
- 39:14SPEAKER_01: Now you're staying up for two, three, four days, plus you're already psychologically unstable.
- 39:19SPEAKER_01: That's the risk of iboga.
- 39:20SPEAKER_01: What we do is I grind the iboga into a super fine powder to increase
- 39:24SPEAKER_01: the surface area, which is a chemistry trick.
- 39:26SPEAKER_01: And so I'm only,
- 39:27SPEAKER_01: I can get by using six, eight,
- 39:29SPEAKER_01: nine grams and people are having full blown journeys and they're falling asleep
- 39:34SPEAKER_01: the next day, not even nighttime.
- 39:37SPEAKER_01: And so it almost eliminates the risk completely.
- 39:39SPEAKER_01: And then we have the doctors here.
- 39:40SPEAKER_01: If someone's having a psychological panic, you know, my heart's stopping.
- 39:43SPEAKER_01: We have the doctor come up who will put the stethoscope there and And check
- 39:48SPEAKER_01: a blood pulse or blood meter and they're fine every single time.
- 39:51SPEAKER_01: But it's really a very safe process when the people know what they're doing and
- 39:57SPEAKER_01: the dosing is done right.
- 39:58SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 39:59SPEAKER_03: Thank you for sharing that.
- 40:02SPEAKER_03: There's kind of this phenomenon in the plant world where I think a lot
- 40:06SPEAKER_03: of us are thankful because we're working with Huachuma and Ayahuasca
- 40:10SPEAKER_03: and there hasn't been that misconception about them that we have to then defend
- 40:15SPEAKER_03: by having a doctor with a stethoscope on hand.
- 40:18SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 40:19SPEAKER_03: Because that, in and of itself, creates fear.
- 40:24SPEAKER_03: Just having the doctor there, in my mind, would create fear.
- 40:28SPEAKER_03: Because I don't trust doctors as much as some people.
- 40:33SPEAKER_03: Our doctors have all sat Just so you know, they love it.
- 40:36SPEAKER_01: Your doctors I would trust, I'm sure.
- 40:38SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the guests don't even see them.
- 40:40SPEAKER_01: We know they're there.
- 40:41SPEAKER_01: The doctors show up a little bit after we start ceremony and they walk straight down
- 40:45SPEAKER_01: to the kitchen and fall asleep and wake up, check in in the morning and they leave.
- 40:48SPEAKER_01: So the guests never see them unless they're doing an EKG on site with us.
- 40:52SPEAKER_01: But yeah, if I saw a doctor somewhere, I'd be like, why is there a doctor here?
- 40:56SPEAKER_03: Like, what do I not know about this process?
- 40:59SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 41:00SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
- 41:01SPEAKER_03: No, I appreciate that.
- 41:03SPEAKER_03: And I just want to say this to you guys.
- 41:06SPEAKER_01: I had Huachuma for the first time two years ago.
- 41:11SPEAKER_01: I tell people, I personally think it's the most powerful plant sacrament I've ever touched.
- 41:18SPEAKER_01: Because what it did at the level of the heart, I mean, when you're talking about your heart...
- 41:23SPEAKER_01: I mean, that thing was, it was like so, it's like it cracked so open that it stayed that way.
- 41:31SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 41:31SPEAKER_01: I just like, it's like, Iboga's a lot.
- 41:35SPEAKER_01: I can tell you the durations a lot.
- 41:36SPEAKER_01: I could be crazy.
- 41:38SPEAKER_01: But to me, the depth of Huachuma, because where it's working is like nothing else.
- 41:42SPEAKER_01: So I just want to honor you all for caring that.
- 41:45SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely incredible.
- 41:47SPEAKER_03: Thank you for saying that.
- 41:51SPEAKER_03: Danny has not worked with Iboga, but I've tried to talk to her about it because I do feel like
- 42:01SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
- 42:01SPEAKER_03: There's a synergy too.
- 42:04SPEAKER_03: Not at the same time, but if you're somebody that works with a boga and you appreciate it.
- 42:08SPEAKER_03: And there are people that I know that have had a boga and they maybe had
- 42:12SPEAKER_03: the wrong experience and they're like, that was terrible.
- 42:15SPEAKER_03: But I absolutely loved my experiences.
- 42:19SPEAKER_03: I found it to be one of the...
- 42:22SPEAKER_03: The nights that were deep, they were just some of the deepest, most beautiful nights.
- 42:28SPEAKER_03: And I can't imagine those horrible experiences that people have had,
- 42:32SPEAKER_03: but I understand everybody has their own.
- 42:35SPEAKER_03: So I really connected with Iboga in that way as a beautiful medicine.
- 42:39SPEAKER_03: I never had this fear of it the way that other people have.
- 42:43SPEAKER_03: And so I've tried to tell Danny,
- 42:44SPEAKER_03: because a lot of the dialogue about Iboga comes from people who are You know,
- 42:50SPEAKER_03: selling stories that was the worst night and the music was relentless and
- 42:54SPEAKER_03: the medicine was this, you know, like, no, you don't understand.
- 42:56SPEAKER_03: A boga is absolutely beautiful.
- 42:59SPEAKER_03: It's so beautiful.
- 43:00SPEAKER_03: And then to give the analogy,
- 43:02SPEAKER_03: like when I first had a boga,
- 43:06SPEAKER_03: I was like, This is a little bit like Huachuma in a way, like the vibration of it.
- 43:13SPEAKER_03: It didn't take me to the heart.
- 43:14SPEAKER_03: It really took me into like a different level of consciousness.
- 43:18SPEAKER_03: But I could feel the similarities too in the way that they vibrate.
- 43:24SPEAKER_03: Do you mind if I share as to why I think that specifically happens?
- 43:28SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would love to know.
- 43:29SPEAKER_01: And Danny,
- 43:30SPEAKER_01: for both of you,
- 43:31SPEAKER_01: if you want to come, just please know there's a spot for any retreat you want.
- 43:35SPEAKER_01: You can, yeah, I mean, we're very feminine led.
- 43:38SPEAKER_01: Um, as well too.
- 43:39SPEAKER_01: And so that,
- 43:40SPEAKER_01: I think that helps balance the strength of your logo,
- 43:41SPEAKER_01: but just please reach out if you want to come and,
- 43:43SPEAKER_01: you know, I'm not going to charge you.
- 43:44SPEAKER_01: Of course you do medicine work.
- 43:46SPEAKER_01: Um, so just let me know if you ever want to come.
- 43:48SPEAKER_01: Um, the reason I think that it, it, it's, it,
- 43:52SPEAKER_01: it helps or kind of connects with Huachuma is because for me personally,
- 43:56SPEAKER_01: Huachuma almost gave like a speakerphone to my heart and it allowed its voice
- 44:02SPEAKER_01: to really be heard in such a way that was like, wow, wow.
- 44:06SPEAKER_01: Iboga, in its own way,
- 44:07SPEAKER_01: it sounds crazy to say,
- 44:09SPEAKER_01: but it quiets the mind so you can hear the whispers of the heart.
- 44:13SPEAKER_01: And so to me, the ultimate result is that your heart is able to be heard.
- 44:17SPEAKER_01: And to me, that's what Huachuma did.
- 44:18SPEAKER_01: It just gave it a megaphone.
- 44:20SPEAKER_01: And Iboga worked by quieting all the noise in the mind so that I can hear it when
- 44:24SPEAKER_01: the heart's doing its little whispers.
- 44:26SPEAKER_01: And so to me, the end destination was very similar between the two.
- 44:29SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate what you shared about that.
- 44:32SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's so beautiful.
- 44:36SPEAKER_03: The one thing that I really, I'm a pretty heady person too, just by my nature.
- 44:42SPEAKER_03: I love reading things, learning things.
- 44:45SPEAKER_03: And with Huachuma, I've joked, but I become kind of dumb.
- 44:49SPEAKER_03: Like if you ask me.
- 44:52SPEAKER_03: To do like a simple math problem when I've had huachuma, I can't.
- 44:56SPEAKER_03: I can't even do anything.
- 44:57SPEAKER_03: But in this last iboga ceremony that I had, I was so smart.
- 45:03SPEAKER_03: I was like, what's 108 divided by 12?
- 45:06SPEAKER_03: And just like,
- 45:08SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 45:08SPEAKER_03: savant level math skills that I don't know why I was asking these questions,
- 45:12SPEAKER_03: but I was like testing myself.
- 45:14SPEAKER_03: I was like, you know, this is very different than huachuma.
- 45:17SPEAKER_03: Huachuma, I can't think.
- 45:19SPEAKER_03: Iboga, I can think.
- 45:20SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, when your consciousness is polarizing your heart, you're not using the mind.
- 45:25SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
- 45:25SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 45:25SPEAKER_01: one of the long-term effects of Iboga use,
- 45:28SPEAKER_01: which I have a provider training program for people who are interested
- 45:31SPEAKER_01: in serving it, and what we do is basically a year-long diet with Iboga.
- 45:34SPEAKER_01: Not all the time,
- 45:35SPEAKER_01: obviously there's breaks,
- 45:37SPEAKER_01: but one of the interesting things,
- 45:38SPEAKER_01: and this is scientifically backed,
- 45:39SPEAKER_01: is that the way your neurons communicate is you have sort of a chemical charge
- 45:44SPEAKER_01: that jumps across the The junction,
- 45:46SPEAKER_01: like serotonin or whatever,
- 45:48SPEAKER_01: that activates the nucleus,
- 45:49SPEAKER_01: which sends an electrical charge down the neuron,
- 45:52SPEAKER_01: which signals a chemical charge, electrical, chemical, electrical, chemical.
- 45:55SPEAKER_01: That's how our bodies communicate.
- 45:57SPEAKER_01: Well, when that electrical charge is traveling down the neuron, you have these things.
- 46:01SPEAKER_01: They're called the nodes of Ranvir.
- 46:04SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 46:05SPEAKER_01: And you have this stuff called myelination, which is a fatty substance that coats your neurons.
- 46:10SPEAKER_01: So the better your myelination is, the faster that current moves through your body.
- 46:16SPEAKER_01: And what it does essentially is it jumps from no to ranvir, from no to ranvir.
- 46:20SPEAKER_01: And so the analogy they give is it's almost a hundred times faster of internal communication.
- 46:26SPEAKER_01: So when you're working with Iboga for a sustained period of time and you're having
- 46:30SPEAKER_01: a diet that's healthy and fats,
- 46:31SPEAKER_01: that's why our diets specifically cater around like avocados,
- 46:34SPEAKER_01: salmons, you're mass producing myelin in the brain.
- 46:38SPEAKER_01: You're myelinating all your neurons.
- 46:41SPEAKER_01: Which is when you have Parkinson's or MS,
- 46:44SPEAKER_01: for example, all that's happening is the myelination is dying.
- 46:47SPEAKER_01: So the signal's not traveling.
- 46:49SPEAKER_01: And so what happens is you become hyper-efficient in thinking,
- 46:54SPEAKER_01: which is why the integration is so important.
- 46:56SPEAKER_01: Because if you don't use that in the right way,
- 46:59SPEAKER_01: you can ingrain unhealthy habits,
- 47:02SPEAKER_01: which is what I call the double-edged sword of Iboga.
- 47:04SPEAKER_01: But to what you're saying is, yeah, man, it's literally increasing your aptitude in your mind.
- 47:10SPEAKER_01: I mean, the optimization community, they haven't even found out about Iboga yet.
- 47:14SPEAKER_01: Wait till the optimization community finds out it's going to be flooding in for that.
- 47:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 47:20SPEAKER_03: That's a whole nother thing that will probably happen at some point.
- 47:24SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 47:26SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that.
- 47:27SPEAKER_03: I am part of a group that is,
- 47:30SPEAKER_03: you know, they're doing microdosing with Iboga, but they're really interested.
- 47:34SPEAKER_03: I'm not anything other than a bystander.
- 47:37SPEAKER_03: They added me to their group chat.
- 47:40SPEAKER_03: But a lot of the research they're sharing is really about Parkinson's and working
- 47:45SPEAKER_03: with people with TBIs and traumatic brain injuries.
- 47:51SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 47:52SPEAKER_03: Even just in a microdosing type protocol, there's a lot that can be done.
- 47:59SPEAKER_03: But what are your thoughts on microdosing?
- 48:01SPEAKER_03: Because it is a little bit further away from, let's say, like a ceremony.
- 48:05SPEAKER_03: It's more like moving more towards a medicine maybe.
- 48:10SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts on that?
- 48:12SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I can mail you guys if you want.
- 48:14SPEAKER_01: I have a microdosing protocol.
- 48:16SPEAKER_01: I specifically craft it, has three different protocols.
- 48:19SPEAKER_01: One is therapeutic.
- 48:20SPEAKER_01: One is more of like a spiritual thing you can try with it.
- 48:23SPEAKER_01: It's pretty cool.
- 48:24SPEAKER_01: And then the one is for neurocognitive development,
- 48:26SPEAKER_01: basically to help develop your concentration and attention faculties.
- 48:29SPEAKER_01: I can send you that.
- 48:31SPEAKER_01: I'm a big proponent of it.
- 48:33SPEAKER_01: But we have people who microdose that are more for therapeutic.
- 48:37SPEAKER_01: Maybe they got off antidepressants to come to the retreat and they're looking
- 48:40SPEAKER_01: for something because they're used to taking something.
- 48:43SPEAKER_01: It could be a lot of reasons.
- 48:45SPEAKER_01: Some people it's for neurodegenerative stuff going on.
- 48:47SPEAKER_01: I have people who are microdosing their parents who have Alzheimer's.
- 48:51SPEAKER_01: But what is really interesting about the microdosing is that the majority
- 48:58SPEAKER_01: of people I have who microdose with me are therapists.
- 49:02SPEAKER_01: And the reason why they're starting to use it is because when you skip
- 49:06SPEAKER_01: from microdosing to subtly macrodosing,
- 49:09SPEAKER_01: what happens is the gifts of iboga begin to activate without all of the movement.
- 49:16SPEAKER_01: And if you think about what they use it for in Gabon, they use it to go hunt.
- 49:20SPEAKER_01: And so before we go into the forest to collect herbs or whatever it is,
- 49:23SPEAKER_01: we'll take iboga and we'll go into the forest.
- 49:26SPEAKER_01: And what they say is it turns you into almost like a stalker in the jungle.
- 49:30SPEAKER_01: You see everything.
- 49:30SPEAKER_01: You're super present.
- 49:32SPEAKER_01: Right?
- 49:32SPEAKER_01: Your mind is silent.
- 49:33SPEAKER_01: Your default mode networks suppress.
- 49:35SPEAKER_01: So you don't have that dialogue going.
- 49:38SPEAKER_01: Imagine you're a therapist in a room with a client and your brain is totally silent.
- 49:43SPEAKER_01: And so you're having that limbic communication with the person.
- 49:45SPEAKER_01: You're able to pick up on everything.
- 49:48SPEAKER_01: And so...
- 49:49SPEAKER_01: We have people who microdose it for sort of medicinal values and things like that,
- 49:52SPEAKER_01: for neurodegenerative stuff.
- 49:54SPEAKER_01: And then I have a whole group of people who are now using it
- 49:56SPEAKER_01: to support their therapeutic practice, which is absolutely beautiful.
- 50:00SPEAKER_01: And what we're working on right now here is we have a group of investors.
- 50:04SPEAKER_01: We're actually trying to turn this into a medical model similar to
- 50:08SPEAKER_01: an Ibogaine clinic, but with Iboga or PTA that treats behavioral addiction.
- 50:14SPEAKER_01: Specifically,
- 50:15SPEAKER_01: and sort of with the same approach is that you can use this
- 50:20SPEAKER_01: in smaller macrodose amounts and have a therapeutic discussion with someone.
- 50:25SPEAKER_01: And that client will have so many deep,
- 50:28SPEAKER_01: profound insights without all of the bog experience and the risk.
- 50:33SPEAKER_01: And the therapist will be extra dialed in.
- 50:36SPEAKER_01: And so we're actually working on this right now down here in Costa Rica.
- 50:38SPEAKER_01: And thankfully there's a new president here who's more pro-psychedelics.
- 50:42SPEAKER_01: And so I could see in the next four or five years this being a reality.
- 50:46SPEAKER_01: Wow.
- 50:48SPEAKER_01: What is a behavioral addiction?
- 50:52SPEAKER_01: Gambling.
- 50:53SPEAKER_01: Gambling.
- 50:54SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 50:56SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been sitting at a desk and then you pick up your phone and look at it
- 50:59SPEAKER_01: and then like, Every day.
- 51:01SPEAKER_01: That's considered in the DSM-5TR, right?
- 51:05SPEAKER_01: That's an addiction.
- 51:07SPEAKER_01: So that's a behavioral addiction.
- 51:08SPEAKER_01: It's not really talked about.
- 51:10SPEAKER_01: And this is why I say that what we really treat here, like I said, is an addiction to suffering.
- 51:16SPEAKER_01: That to me is the number one behavioral addiction I've seen,
- 51:19SPEAKER_01: is people become addicted to creating suffering in their life.
- 51:22SPEAKER_01: And you can talk at this about the stress hormones being produced as a result of
- 51:26SPEAKER_01: that suffering and how those are actually addictive.
- 51:29SPEAKER_01: But that's the number one addiction.
- 51:30SPEAKER_01: So what I'm trying to do is have this as more of the psychospiritual retreat and
- 51:34SPEAKER_01: then have sort of a medical model that treats people
- 51:37SPEAKER_01: with severe behavioral addiction,
- 51:39SPEAKER_01: like gambling disorder, stuff like that, anxiety disorder.
- 51:42SPEAKER_01: That's why I said more people would be better off working with Iboga than Ibogaine.
- 51:47SPEAKER_01: And if you had a clinic that was designed for behavioral addiction that kept sort of
- 51:51SPEAKER_01: an eco-psychology,
- 51:55SPEAKER_01: quasi-spiritual-based foundation,
- 51:56SPEAKER_01: but with a medical model oversight,
- 51:58SPEAKER_01: I think you'd have a real success that we don't see in the clinical space right now.
- 52:03SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
- 52:06SPEAKER_03: How much of the addiction do you think is also a loss of connection and spirituality
- 52:13SPEAKER_03: in the sense that these plants...
- 52:16SPEAKER_03: You know,
- 52:16SPEAKER_03: of course there's molecules,
- 52:18SPEAKER_03: there's physiological effects, but it goes beyond that, doesn't it?
- 52:24SPEAKER_01: What people are experiencing and
- 52:25SPEAKER_03: connecting with.
- 52:27SPEAKER_01: Yes, and you are spot on.
- 52:28SPEAKER_01: And I actually have the data to prove this now.
- 52:30SPEAKER_01: So I told you I've been collecting data from our retreats.
- 52:34SPEAKER_01: One of the things I do is,
- 52:36SPEAKER_01: so before you come, you fill out something called a life satisfaction questionnaire.
- 52:40SPEAKER_01: And that is a clinically validated questionnaire that all clinical psychologists will use.
- 52:44SPEAKER_01: And it basically measures how satisfied you are with your life.
- 52:48SPEAKER_01: And then I have a form that a researcher
- 52:51SPEAKER_01: on our medical board helped me put together,
- 52:52SPEAKER_01: which is an interactive one that basically changes.
- 52:54SPEAKER_01: So if you come with OCD or you come with a behavioral addiction,
- 52:57SPEAKER_01: because we don't treat substance addiction outside of alcohol,
- 53:02SPEAKER_01: if you come in with one of those, the form molds with you.
- 53:05SPEAKER_01: So you're going to fill that form out before the retreat,
- 53:08SPEAKER_01: one month after, three months after, and 12 months after.
- 53:11SPEAKER_01: Obviously, we know that all the metrics you want to see are going to decrease, right?
- 53:16SPEAKER_01: Like you're going to see life satisfaction going up and you're going
- 53:18SPEAKER_01: to see addictions,
- 53:19SPEAKER_01: things like that, behavioral tendencies, OCD patterns all go down.
- 53:23SPEAKER_01: But to speak to your point,
- 53:24SPEAKER_01: what I was curious in was the same thing was what is the spiritual component come
- 53:27SPEAKER_01: in?
- 53:29SPEAKER_01: And so there's a questionnaire they use called a mystical experience questionnaire, an MEQ30.
- 53:34SPEAKER_01: Three days after our guests leave, I have you fill out an MEQ30.
- 53:38SPEAKER_01: And what that does is it rates the level of spiritual experience you had in your process.
- 53:44SPEAKER_01: So I know that some rates are going to go down,
- 53:46SPEAKER_01: the ones we want,
- 53:47SPEAKER_01: and I know the other ones are going to go up like life satisfaction.
- 53:49SPEAKER_01: But what I was curious in is,
- 53:51SPEAKER_01: are the people who are reporting higher mystical experiences Also
- 53:56SPEAKER_01: the ones having higher sustained life satisfaction and lower rates of
- 54:01SPEAKER_01: the depression coming back.
- 54:03SPEAKER_01: And what the data is proving is yes, to exactly your point.
- 54:06SPEAKER_01: It's a lack of connection to something beyond themself that's actually really
- 54:10SPEAKER_01: in themself that's always been there.
- 54:13SPEAKER_01: That's really the sickness is we forget what we really are.
- 54:18SPEAKER_01: Wow.
- 54:20SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I just had that as my own personal observation of my own self, which I have dealt with.
- 54:29SPEAKER_03: I would say addiction,
- 54:30SPEAKER_03: my biggest addiction is like tobacco in the past or things like, nothing serious.
- 54:37SPEAKER_03: But a lot of what the tobacco was really serving was just an emptiness.
- 54:44SPEAKER_03: And actually,
- 54:45SPEAKER_03: I did have success with the first time I worked with the Boga,
- 54:49SPEAKER_03: I just stopped like all tobacco.
- 54:51SPEAKER_01: It binds to the acetylcholine receptors, that's why.
- 54:55SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I just didn't want it anymore.
- 54:58SPEAKER_03: But since then, I haven't worked with iboga as much as other plants.
- 55:03SPEAKER_03: But I think ayahuasca and huachuma do the same thing because both of them,
- 55:07SPEAKER_03: for me, they're just reconnecting to something that's already there.
- 55:14SPEAKER_03: This god inside or spiritual dimension which can get lost.
- 55:19SPEAKER_03: And then there's the plant...
- 55:22SPEAKER_03: Just to speak to myself, but the tobacco plant actually is connecting me to that.
- 55:28SPEAKER_03: But it's doing it in such a way that it becomes addictive versus,
- 55:32SPEAKER_03: let's say,
- 55:34SPEAKER_03: working with a plant like iboga or huachuma,
- 55:37SPEAKER_03: which I don't need the tobacco to get there.
- 55:44SPEAKER_03: I appreciate you doing that research.
- 55:47SPEAKER_03: That actually...
- 55:49SPEAKER_03: That's so good because a lot of people are so focused on the chemical,
- 55:56SPEAKER_03: the physical chemical things.
- 55:58SPEAKER_03: There's that phenomenological experience part too.
- 56:03SPEAKER_01: Would you be okay if I shared something?
- 56:07SPEAKER_01: It was something that I think is really about kind of this topic,
- 56:10SPEAKER_01: and I think it wraps it up really well.
- 56:12SPEAKER_01: I wrote my second book recently.
- 56:14SPEAKER_01: It's called Living Beyond the Mind, The End of Personal Suffering.
- 56:17SPEAKER_01: And in the start of the book, I tell a story about my childhood.
- 56:21SPEAKER_01: And what I talk about was my biological mother's funeral.
- 56:25SPEAKER_01: It's this memory I have where I was sitting there and I had a flower in my hand
- 56:29SPEAKER_01: and I was rolling it.
- 56:30SPEAKER_01: I still remember this to this day.
- 56:31SPEAKER_01: It's clear as day.
- 56:31SPEAKER_01: I was three years old.
- 56:33SPEAKER_01: It was 1987.
- 56:34SPEAKER_01: And I was rolling this flower back and forth, just looking at it.
- 56:37SPEAKER_01: And I felt something land on my shoulder.
- 56:40SPEAKER_01: And I looked over and I had a little suit on,
- 56:42SPEAKER_01: you know, like a little kid suit, the little shoulder pads.
- 56:44SPEAKER_01: And there was a drop of water.
- 56:46SPEAKER_01: And I looked up and I remember seeing my cousin, Jimmy, who was crying.
- 56:50SPEAKER_01: And I said to him, I said, Jimmy, why are you crying?
- 56:53SPEAKER_01: And he says to me, because I'm really going to miss your mom.
- 56:56SPEAKER_01: My mom was a heroin addict, HIV positive at the point of conception with me.
- 57:01SPEAKER_01: So we had a very troubled life.
- 57:03SPEAKER_01: She was a sex worker as well.
- 57:04SPEAKER_01: And she died of AIDS when I was three years old.
- 57:06SPEAKER_01: So this was her funeral.
- 57:08SPEAKER_01: And so he says, I'm really going to miss your mom.
- 57:11SPEAKER_01: And I remember looking down at the flower and I looked up and I saw all
- 57:15SPEAKER_01: the people around the, some were crying, some were supporting others.
- 57:18SPEAKER_01: There was a whole like symphony happening of all these things.
- 57:22SPEAKER_01: I remember seeing that and I was so confused because I knew she was in the flower.
- 57:28SPEAKER_01: And so I looked up to him and I said, but she's in the flower.
- 57:31SPEAKER_01: And I started spinning it towards his face to try to show him.
- 57:34SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't understand why everybody was so sad.
- 57:38SPEAKER_01: And so what I say in the book is, I think in the Bible, it's Matthew 18.3.
- 57:43SPEAKER_01: He says, truly,
- 57:44SPEAKER_01: I tell you, in order to enter the gates of heaven, you must be like that of a child.
- 57:48SPEAKER_01: When we were children, we had that connection, man.
- 57:51SPEAKER_01: And we remembered, my mom's not gone.
- 57:53SPEAKER_01: She's in this flower.
- 57:55SPEAKER_01: It's simple.
- 57:56SPEAKER_01: And then we forget.
- 57:59SPEAKER_01: And so this is the reason why,
- 58:00SPEAKER_01: going back to the words about medicine and healing,
- 58:02SPEAKER_01: I try to stay away because healing,
- 58:04SPEAKER_01: by definition, implies a lack or a return to wholeness.
- 58:08SPEAKER_01: And in my humble opinion,
- 58:09SPEAKER_01: I've never met someone who's not whole,
- 58:11SPEAKER_01: even the people who come here with terminal diseases.
- 58:14SPEAKER_01: And so it's about, to me, it's about remembering.
- 58:17SPEAKER_01: And so I try to use the language at the retreat that sort of incites that sort
- 58:21SPEAKER_01: of thinking because that's what the guest really goes home with.
- 58:25SPEAKER_01: That's the impression they leave.
- 58:26SPEAKER_01: Now that makes its way to the limbic brain.
- 58:28SPEAKER_01: And now all of a sudden their narrative is I'm whole and I'm just on this journey
- 58:32SPEAKER_01: of remembering.
- 58:33SPEAKER_01: So now when I approach a Huachuma circle, I'm doing it from a whole new place.
- 58:37SPEAKER_01: My foundation is totally different.
- 58:39SPEAKER_01: That's really what we're trying to implant or impregnate in the psyche of people here.
- 58:43SPEAKER_01: At least that's my work I'm trying to do.
- 58:48SPEAKER_03: Yeah, wow.
- 58:48SPEAKER_03: I love that story.
- 58:49SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
- 58:50SPEAKER_03: That's such a beautiful image.
- 58:56SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, you know, not to...
- 59:00SPEAKER_03: Not to compare, but to share this very same kind of thing because I was eating pomegranate.
- 59:06SPEAKER_03: I must have been the same age.
- 59:08SPEAKER_03: And it had nothing to do with the death.
- 59:11SPEAKER_03: So it wasn't that scenario.
- 59:13SPEAKER_03: But I was eating the pomegranate seeds and I told my dad, I was like, what's inside there?
- 59:19SPEAKER_03: You know, there's something magic in there.
- 59:21SPEAKER_03: And he said, it's God.
- 59:24SPEAKER_03: Wow.
- 59:25SPEAKER_03: Wow.
- 59:27SPEAKER_03: And I just, I don't know, like for me it was like, whoa, yes it is.
- 59:33SPEAKER_03: You know, and that made perfect sense back then.
- 59:36SPEAKER_01: Bossy.
- 59:39SPEAKER_01: Bossy and yow yow to that one.
- 59:41SPEAKER_01: Thank you for sharing that.
- 59:44SPEAKER_01: I can't wait for my daughter to ask me now.
- 59:46SPEAKER_01: I'm going to use your pop's line, so thank you for that one.
- 59:49SPEAKER_03: She's going to ask me that one day what's in here.
- 59:50SPEAKER_03: I'm going to look at her and be like, God.
- 59:51SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 59:52SPEAKER_03: God.
- 59:55SPEAKER_03: Wow.
- 59:56SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 59:58SPEAKER_03: Well, I don't know.
- 1:00:00SPEAKER_03: I'm just presencing that feeling right now.
- 1:00:04SPEAKER_03: Dani, you got anything?
- 1:00:08SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I have a question.
- 1:00:11SPEAKER_00: So, Hamid,
- 1:00:12SPEAKER_00: you and I have talked before about iboga and you talk a little bit about parts work
- 1:00:16SPEAKER_00: and that and how it's like all the parts kind of come together and they make
- 1:00:19SPEAKER_00: a general...
- 1:00:21SPEAKER_00: Suggestion or something for your life versus with Huachuma.
- 1:00:24SPEAKER_00: It's like the heart part is like, this is how we need to do it.
- 1:00:26SPEAKER_00: Megaphone on.
- 1:00:27SPEAKER_00: Everything else kind of gets really quiet.
- 1:00:30SPEAKER_00: And so, Troy,
- 1:00:32SPEAKER_00: I'm curious,
- 1:00:33SPEAKER_00: what do you think the mechanisms are that help us unlearn how to drive,
- 1:00:39SPEAKER_00: so to speak, and sort of get in there and...
- 1:00:43SPEAKER_00: Help us create another foundation and untangle all of those things that we think we are.
- 1:00:48SPEAKER_00: Is it psychological?
- 1:00:49SPEAKER_00: Is it spiritual?
- 1:00:50SPEAKER_00: Is it chemical?
- 1:00:51SPEAKER_00: Neurotransmitter?
- 1:00:52SPEAKER_00: Maybe all of it?
- 1:00:54SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:00:55SPEAKER_01: It's a really beautiful question.
- 1:00:58SPEAKER_01: I personally, going back to the Don Miguel Ruiz analogy, I think it's a faith thing.
- 1:01:04SPEAKER_01: It's an issue of faith.
- 1:01:06SPEAKER_01: And I'll give you a quick example of something, and I think this will speak to it.
- 1:01:10SPEAKER_01: I had a woman come here who had a very, very difficult childhood.
- 1:01:17SPEAKER_01: She grew up in Germany, and this won't be too much information.
- 1:01:21SPEAKER_01: I'll share just the overlay of it.
- 1:01:23SPEAKER_01: Long story short is her parents had an opportunity to move to the USA In order
- 1:01:28SPEAKER_01: to start a new life for themselves, but they couldn't bring her.
- 1:01:31SPEAKER_01: And so she was left behind with the guy and this guy was abusing her
- 1:01:35SPEAKER_01: while she was left alone with him for a long time.
- 1:01:38SPEAKER_01: And so in the ceremony, this came up, this memory of her being harmed by this person.
- 1:01:48SPEAKER_01: And I said, how do you feel knowing that you were left with this person, right?
- 1:01:56SPEAKER_01: How do you feel about that, right?
- 1:01:57SPEAKER_01: Just trying to get her to get in touch with that because she seemed a little trying
- 1:02:01SPEAKER_01: to move away from it.
- 1:02:02SPEAKER_01: And she said to me that the story about her parents,
- 1:02:06SPEAKER_01: she started telling me about how her parents were poor and they had this opportunity
- 1:02:10SPEAKER_01: and this is how they got to go.
- 1:02:12SPEAKER_01: And so I stopped her and I said, wait, why did you say that?
- 1:02:16SPEAKER_01: And she said, what do you mean?
- 1:02:17SPEAKER_01: And I said,
- 1:02:18SPEAKER_01: why was it that when I asked you how you felt,
- 1:02:21SPEAKER_01: you explained to me why your parents left you?
- 1:02:25SPEAKER_01: Why didn't you tell me how you felt?
- 1:02:27SPEAKER_01: And I could see her wheels start to spin.
- 1:02:30SPEAKER_01: And she's like, well, I don't know.
- 1:02:31SPEAKER_01: I guess I've never really thought about myself first.
- 1:02:36SPEAKER_01: And then I said, what religion were you when you were raised?
- 1:02:38SPEAKER_01: And she said, I was raised Catholic.
- 1:02:41SPEAKER_01: I said, aha, what's the fourth commandment?
- 1:02:44SPEAKER_01: And she says, I'm not sure.
- 1:02:46SPEAKER_01: I don't remember.
- 1:02:46SPEAKER_01: I said, it's honor thy parents.
- 1:02:50SPEAKER_01: And so what's happening in a lot of times,
- 1:02:52SPEAKER_01: especially in this woman's case,
- 1:02:54SPEAKER_01: is that her parents leave her with someone who's harming her,
- 1:02:56SPEAKER_01: which she's obviously not happy about, right?
- 1:02:59SPEAKER_01: Your own parents pick this person and this person's harming you and they left you.
- 1:03:03SPEAKER_01: There's a lot for a kid to hold in that.
- 1:03:05SPEAKER_01: But instead of being able to be honest and real about that,
- 1:03:08SPEAKER_01: because of their faith in the fourth commandment,
- 1:03:12SPEAKER_01: they're not able to be authentic in that moment.
- 1:03:16SPEAKER_01: And that dissonance in her body resulted in severe arthritis.
- 1:03:22SPEAKER_01: I mean, just imagine being angry right now and your jaw's tight,
- 1:03:25SPEAKER_01: your physical length,
- 1:03:26SPEAKER_01: and you can never let that go because you can never just be authentic
- 1:03:29SPEAKER_01: with how you feel.
- 1:03:31SPEAKER_01: That was happening to her for years.
- 1:03:33SPEAKER_01: And she started cursing out a storm about her parents.
- 1:03:37SPEAKER_01: How could they do that to me?
- 1:03:38SPEAKER_01: How could they pick this person?
- 1:03:40SPEAKER_01: Like who would even be, like she went to a whole thing.
- 1:03:43SPEAKER_01: And I literally watched her hands go from like this to like that.
- 1:03:47SPEAKER_01: And now she's our psychiatrist on our medical board.
- 1:03:50SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:03:51SPEAKER_01: And so, I mean, it's wild to think about how mental it is.
- 1:03:59SPEAKER_01: But in my humble opinion, yes, there are spiritual things happening, energy things.
- 1:04:04SPEAKER_01: If you solve the problem of the mind, 99.9% of the things disappear.
- 1:04:11SPEAKER_01: There might be something you need a shaman for, sure.
- 1:04:14SPEAKER_01: But I can tell you right now,
- 1:04:16SPEAKER_01: the Buddha was right when he said that suffering is,
- 1:04:19SPEAKER_01: it has a source,
- 1:04:20SPEAKER_01: and that source is the human mind, and the good news is there's a way out.
- 1:04:23SPEAKER_01: He was right.
- 1:04:25SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:04:28SPEAKER_00: Wow.
- 1:04:28SPEAKER_00: Wow.
- 1:04:30SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
- 1:04:30SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking a lot about my mom as I hear you speaking.
- 1:04:35SPEAKER_00: And I've been wanting to bring her into ceremony of some sort
- 1:04:40SPEAKER_00: because I do feel like there's something that she can get in there and untake all.
- 1:04:43SPEAKER_00: And I feel like Ibogu would be a good place for her to start before because,
- 1:04:46SPEAKER_00: of course, my first thought is like, huachumafoundation.
- 1:04:51SPEAKER_00: She could do something with Iboga first and she has rheumatoid arthritis.
- 1:04:56SPEAKER_00: She just got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's.
- 1:04:58SPEAKER_00: So she's really going through a tough time and has been taking SSRIs for a while.
- 1:05:05SPEAKER_00: But I feel like it's just the suffering.
- 1:05:06SPEAKER_00: I'm like addicted to her own suffering kind of in a way.
- 1:05:08SPEAKER_00: And I can see how it's creating these ailments in her body.
- 1:05:11SPEAKER_00: But I also believe that there's a way out.
- 1:05:14SPEAKER_00: And you even mentioned Alzheimer's earlier in this.
- 1:05:16SPEAKER_00: Now you just mentioned arthritis again.
- 1:05:18SPEAKER_00: So and I feel like I say this because I don't think my mom is the only I think
- 1:05:22SPEAKER_00: that we're in a culture now where all of these diagnoses are coming up
- 1:05:25SPEAKER_00: and it is like a product of the mind and creating autoimmune diseases and all
- 1:05:29SPEAKER_00: of these different things going on.
- 1:05:30SPEAKER_00: So I just say that kind of vulnerably,
- 1:05:32SPEAKER_00: but also because I think that my mom is probably not the only parent or
- 1:05:35SPEAKER_00: the only person out there looking for relief in some way.
- 1:05:38SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it's just relief from her pain or like physical pain.
- 1:05:42SPEAKER_00: I think it's relief from her own mind.
- 1:05:43SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 1:05:45SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:05:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 1:05:45SPEAKER_00: So anyway, thank you for sharing all that.
- 1:05:48SPEAKER_01: I have a room with two beds in it, two queen beds overlooking the property.
- 1:05:52SPEAKER_01: And it's second floor in a tree line with your name on it for you and your mom
- 1:05:56SPEAKER_01: when you want to come.
- 1:05:57SPEAKER_01: Please.
- 1:05:58SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
- 1:05:59SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
- 1:06:00SPEAKER_01: Open invitation.
- 1:06:01SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're very welcome.
- 1:06:02SPEAKER_01: The one thing I want to say about the Parkinson's and all of that,
- 1:06:06SPEAKER_01: it's a really important thing to know.
- 1:06:08SPEAKER_01: Parkinson's individuals, they need the Ibogaine.
- 1:06:12SPEAKER_01: And so because iboga has a small amount of ibogaine and that gets metabolized in
- 1:06:16SPEAKER_01: the liver,
- 1:06:17SPEAKER_01: if you're treating someone for neurodegenerative disorders,
- 1:06:20SPEAKER_01: you really want to use a tincture because it's sublingual and it bypasses the liver.
- 1:06:25SPEAKER_01: So you get a higher amount of Ibogaine into the system from the iboga.
- 1:06:29SPEAKER_01: So just to keep that in mind,
- 1:06:32SPEAKER_01: as you go forward,
- 1:06:33SPEAKER_01: if you're working with anyone who's microdosed or you know someone
- 1:06:35SPEAKER_01: and they're doing it for a mental issue like that
- 1:06:40SPEAKER_01: or something physical like Parkinson's,
- 1:06:42SPEAKER_01: make sure they're doing sublingual with tinctures.
- 1:06:45SPEAKER_01: Or they can use TA or PTA, which is just extracts made in a tincture form.
- 1:06:49SPEAKER_01: But they can't ingest because if it goes through the liver,
- 1:06:52SPEAKER_01: they're going to lose a majority of the Ibogaine.
- 1:06:55SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 1:06:57SPEAKER_00: And another question is the antidepressants and SSRIs and all of the things
- 1:07:02SPEAKER_00: that like so many people are on these days.
- 1:07:04SPEAKER_00: Would you,
- 1:07:05SPEAKER_00: is this something that people would have to come off of totally before working
- 1:07:08SPEAKER_00: with Iboga?
- 1:07:09SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 1:07:09SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:07:10SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:07:11SPEAKER_01: 14 days is really the number we try to hold with everyone.
- 1:07:17SPEAKER_01: 10 is safe, but 14 days for sure.
- 1:07:20SPEAKER_01: That's for most things.
- 1:07:22SPEAKER_01: The one thing you can come on on are like HRT, like hormone replacement therapies.
- 1:07:26SPEAKER_01: You can.
- 1:07:28SPEAKER_01: That's a simple one.
- 1:07:29SPEAKER_01: There's a few other medications,
- 1:07:30SPEAKER_01: but anything that affects the QT interval is Anything along those lines with,
- 1:07:35SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 1:07:35SPEAKER_01: working with your transmitters because iboga is binding to like a majority
- 1:07:38SPEAKER_01: the receptors across your brain.
- 1:07:39SPEAKER_01: It's the serotonin,
- 1:07:41SPEAKER_01: the dopamine,
- 1:07:41SPEAKER_01: the acetylcholine, the sigma receptors, the opiate receptors, the glutamate.
- 1:07:45SPEAKER_01: And so it's working as like a holistic plan across your brain.
- 1:07:48SPEAKER_01: And so you can't have anything else going on in there.
- 1:07:51SPEAKER_01: That's the one caveat for safety.
- 1:07:53SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:07:54SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 1:07:54SPEAKER_00: That makes sense.
- 1:07:56SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 1:07:56SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
- 1:08:00SPEAKER_03: I know this question is going to lose like half the listeners,
- 1:08:03SPEAKER_03: but I have to ask because you mentioned TA,
- 1:08:05SPEAKER_03: which is total alkaloid or TAE, total alkaloid extraction.
- 1:08:09SPEAKER_03: So I'm familiar with these things, but also ebogain.
- 1:08:16SPEAKER_03: Is there in your mind or experience a difference between Ibogaine extracted from,
- 1:08:24SPEAKER_03: let's say,
- 1:08:24SPEAKER_03: the iboga plant versus the other plants that have iboga or ibogaine in it versus,
- 1:08:31SPEAKER_03: I guess, there's synthetic available now, things like that.
- 1:08:36SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you can get Iboga from obviously the Tabernacle Iboga where it's first found.
- 1:08:41SPEAKER_01: You can get it from something called Vokanga Africana,
- 1:08:44SPEAKER_01: which actually makes more sense because it has around 10 to 13% Ibogaine.
- 1:08:48SPEAKER_01: So if you're treating someone with Ibogaine, you might as well get it from Vokanga.
- 1:08:53SPEAKER_01: And then, yes, you can make it from synthetic sources now.
- 1:08:56SPEAKER_01: There's two main ones they're doing.
- 1:08:58SPEAKER_01: This is my chemistry background.
- 1:09:00SPEAKER_01: I won't go too deep into it here, but two ways you can do it.
- 1:09:03SPEAKER_01: One way is if you're familiar with brewing beer, you have basically a bunch of sugar.
- 1:09:08SPEAKER_01: You give it a yeast.
- 1:09:09SPEAKER_01: The yeast eats the sugar and the byproduct is ethanol.
- 1:09:14SPEAKER_01: That's how it works.
- 1:09:15SPEAKER_01: What they do is they genetically modify the yeast strain so that the byproduct isn't ethanol.
- 1:09:21SPEAKER_01: It's a different precursor molecule, which they then convert into ibogaine.
- 1:09:27SPEAKER_01: So that's one way.
- 1:09:28SPEAKER_01: And the other way is through is just a simple chemical process starting with
- 1:09:31SPEAKER_01: a chemical called pyridine, which you can then convert into ibogaine.
- 1:09:35SPEAKER_01: So yes, you can make it from synthetic sources now.
- 1:09:39SPEAKER_01: And absolutely,
- 1:09:40SPEAKER_01: you can even tell the difference between the iboga trees that are grown
- 1:09:44SPEAKER_01: in Gabon versus Cameroon.
- 1:09:47SPEAKER_01: You can tell the difference between ibogaine that comes from iboga to bokanga for sure.
- 1:09:54SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, the spirit is...
- 1:09:57SPEAKER_01: The spirit's alive in each of those, and it changes based off how you touch it.
- 1:10:00SPEAKER_01: In Gabon, they say that Ibogaine is Iboga without the soul.
- 1:10:04SPEAKER_01: That's how they refer to it.
- 1:10:05SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the molecule itself still has a consciousness, right?
- 1:10:09SPEAKER_01: It's like, why does H2O stick together?
- 1:10:12SPEAKER_01: There's an affinity and attraction.
- 1:10:13SPEAKER_01: That's a form of consciousness.
- 1:10:15SPEAKER_01: So the molecule itself is conscious,
- 1:10:16SPEAKER_01: but when you put the consciousness of all the alkaloids together together, I mean,
- 1:10:22SPEAKER_01: imagine going to talk with your spirit guides and there's one, which is cool.
- 1:10:26SPEAKER_01: But now imagine there's 14.
- 1:10:29SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
- 1:10:30SPEAKER_01: That's literally what it's like.
- 1:10:31SPEAKER_01: And so as you start to do that, it changes.
- 1:10:34SPEAKER_01: And then the regional changes too, because the spirit of the land comes into it.
- 1:10:38SPEAKER_01: The spirit of the people who are taking come into it.
- 1:10:39SPEAKER_01: The essence of everything involved filters into it and then is expressed in your journey.
- 1:10:44SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, everything is super different.
- 1:10:48SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's amazing.
- 1:10:50SPEAKER_03: That's sort of the same discussion we have sometimes around huachuma,
- 1:10:54SPEAKER_03: which is,
- 1:10:55SPEAKER_03: you know,
- 1:10:56SPEAKER_03: every cactus is different,
- 1:10:57SPEAKER_03: where it's grown,
- 1:10:58SPEAKER_03: the people who grew it,
- 1:11:00SPEAKER_03: and then people who associate huachuma with mescaline,
- 1:11:04SPEAKER_03: and they just think,
- 1:11:05SPEAKER_03: well, this is mescaline, and it's like, well, it's not actually the same.
- 1:11:10SPEAKER_03: It's the same thing as saying, you know, iboga is...
- 1:11:15SPEAKER_03: Evil game.
- 1:11:16SPEAKER_03: It's like one part of it.
- 1:11:18SPEAKER_03: It's that.
- 1:11:20SPEAKER_03: The color red isn't the rainbow.
- 1:11:22SPEAKER_03: Entourage.
- 1:11:30SPEAKER_03: I wonder if you can talk about the nonprofit a little more that you've started.
- 1:11:38SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's called Sacred Roots Foundation.
- 1:11:41SPEAKER_01: My wife and I started it.
- 1:11:44SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it's pretty straightforward.
- 1:11:47SPEAKER_01: When we came into the Iboga space,
- 1:11:49SPEAKER_01: we saw a place that was quite destructive,
- 1:11:56SPEAKER_01: quite unsafe, and completely lacking reciprocity of any kind.
- 1:12:02SPEAKER_01: And so I apprenticed under those things.
- 1:12:06SPEAKER_01: I learned what not to do.
- 1:12:08SPEAKER_01: And when the day came where we started doing our own thing,
- 1:12:12SPEAKER_01: the first thing we committed to was to never touch,
- 1:12:15SPEAKER_01: to never be financially benefiting from working with people with Iboga.
- 1:12:19SPEAKER_01: And so what we did is we opened a non-profit as an adjunct to Root and Wisdom,
- 1:12:23SPEAKER_01: which is our Iboga retreat.
- 1:12:24SPEAKER_01: Our Iboga brand is Root and Wisdom.
- 1:12:26SPEAKER_01: And the adjunct non-profit is Sacred Roots Foundation.
- 1:12:29SPEAKER_01: And what we do is we take the proceeds from our Iboga retreats.
- 1:12:32SPEAKER_01: We put it into the non-profit.
- 1:12:34SPEAKER_01: And then with the non-profit, we do Restoration Acts in Gabon.
- 1:12:38SPEAKER_01: For example, one of the projects we're doing right now is called Smile Gabon.
- 1:12:41SPEAKER_01: We just pay for the dental work of children out there.
- 1:12:43SPEAKER_01: There's kids who are getting cavities,
- 1:12:45SPEAKER_01: the cavities turn to a blood infection,
- 1:12:48SPEAKER_01: and then they end up passing away from things like simply going to the dentist.
- 1:12:51SPEAKER_01: That's Smile Gabon.
- 1:12:52SPEAKER_01: We did another one where we had a guy go out to different indigenous communities,
- 1:12:59SPEAKER_01: the Babongo, like the real indigenous people who still live out there.
- 1:13:03SPEAKER_01: And what they do right now is they make palm wine and they sell that to each other.
- 1:13:08SPEAKER_01: So alcoholism is running rampant out there.
- 1:13:10SPEAKER_01: And so what we did instead is we taught them how to beekeep.
- 1:13:13SPEAKER_01: So we paid for a guy to go out there and teach all the different tribes beekeeping.
- 1:13:17SPEAKER_01: And so now they have honey as a sustainable source of trade.
- 1:13:22SPEAKER_01: Commercialization and capitalization isn't really necessary out there.
- 1:13:26SPEAKER_01: They don't need that.
- 1:13:27SPEAKER_01: So what you have to do is you have to ask them what they need and then help bring
- 1:13:31SPEAKER_01: a solution with your funds.
- 1:13:32SPEAKER_01: And so that's one of the ways we did that.
- 1:13:34SPEAKER_01: And then the one we're working on right now is with my village.
- 1:13:37SPEAKER_01: What's happening is as the city grows,
- 1:13:41SPEAKER_01: The boys in particular are going into the city being tempted by the Western life
- 1:13:46SPEAKER_01: and not coming out because now you get a job.
- 1:13:48SPEAKER_01: Now you can start drinking a little bit.
- 1:13:49SPEAKER_01: There's women running around.
- 1:13:51SPEAKER_01: It turns into a whole thing and they never end up coming back to the villages.
- 1:13:55SPEAKER_01: And because it's an oral tradition that has to be passed down,
- 1:13:58SPEAKER_01: basically the tradition itself would die without people to pass it on to.
- 1:14:04SPEAKER_01: And so what we help them do is buy a large chunk of land further out into the forest
- 1:14:09SPEAKER_01: where they can build a traditional school where the kids can basically have
- 1:14:13SPEAKER_01: to practice their buiti and live.
- 1:14:15SPEAKER_01: And so we already purchased the land.
- 1:14:17SPEAKER_01: And the first thing we're doing right now is building a house for Mama Moconza.
- 1:14:20SPEAKER_01: She's the female shaman.
- 1:14:21SPEAKER_01: Again, I'm using that word.
- 1:14:23SPEAKER_01: I apologize for using that word.
- 1:14:24SPEAKER_01: It's just that people are going to get what I mean.
- 1:14:27SPEAKER_01: And then next, we're helping develop the roads.
- 1:14:29SPEAKER_01: And that's what we do.
- 1:14:30SPEAKER_01: We run the Iboga retreats.
- 1:14:31SPEAKER_01: We fund the nonprofit.
- 1:14:32SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people donate, which is amazing.
- 1:14:34SPEAKER_01: And then it just kind of goes.
- 1:14:36SPEAKER_01: So it's full circle.
- 1:14:37SPEAKER_01: Obviously, we pay for our staff.
- 1:14:38SPEAKER_01: We take care of our place.
- 1:14:40SPEAKER_01: But my wife and I have just committed to never touching, which sucked for a while.
- 1:14:43SPEAKER_01: But I sold my condom before I left to do this work.
- 1:14:45SPEAKER_01: So it funded us for a number of years.
- 1:14:48SPEAKER_01: We didn't have to like, we live, you know, obviously simple lives.
- 1:14:51SPEAKER_01: But it's just one thing we never want to do.
- 1:14:53SPEAKER_01: I don't ever want this to be transactional.
- 1:14:55SPEAKER_01: I don't want to take your money and give you Iboga.
- 1:14:59SPEAKER_01: This has never felt right for me.
- 1:15:00SPEAKER_01: And this is the way I'm balancing things.
- 1:15:02SPEAKER_01: The work or what happened I saw in the space when I came in.
- 1:15:06SPEAKER_01: I don't think that if I saw it this way,
- 1:15:08SPEAKER_01: I would necessarily do that because it's really a difficult model to work through.
- 1:15:14SPEAKER_01: But for us,
- 1:15:14SPEAKER_01: it ends up working now because we're getting enough to sustain our lives
- 1:15:18SPEAKER_01: from other things.
- 1:15:19SPEAKER_01: We've done like my book sales and speaking things and stuff like that.
- 1:15:22SPEAKER_01: And so this has become its own sort of system that exists on its own.
- 1:15:27SPEAKER_01: And that's what the nonprofit was for to sort of support that.
- 1:15:31SPEAKER_03: That's so beautiful.
- 1:15:33SPEAKER_03: So you serve is there, you know.
- 1:15:39SPEAKER_03: Simple, man.
- 1:15:40SPEAKER_03: Simple.
- 1:15:42SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 1:15:43SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 1:15:43SPEAKER_03: Well, what else is on your heart?
- 1:15:45SPEAKER_03: Is there anything else that you'd like to share?
- 1:15:48SPEAKER_03: Just give you the opportunity if there's anything you'd like to share
- 1:15:53SPEAKER_03: that we haven't touched on.
- 1:15:56SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, really for me, it's, you know, I'm in my last year of my doctoral research project.
- 1:16:01SPEAKER_01: So I'm writing my dissertation right now.
- 1:16:03SPEAKER_01: I'll have that done soon in clinical psychology.
- 1:16:07SPEAKER_01: We just put an offer on a hotel in the South from here.
- 1:16:09SPEAKER_01: So we're trying to build an integration center.
- 1:16:12SPEAKER_01: The one piece we're missing to our,
- 1:16:13SPEAKER_01: what the work we do is,
- 1:16:15SPEAKER_01: you know, when people go home, we support them with integration support.
- 1:16:18SPEAKER_01: It's part of your package, but we don't have a place where we can, like they could go to.
- 1:16:23SPEAKER_01: To actually have care and sustain practices focused around their integrative journey.
- 1:16:28SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah,
- 1:16:29SPEAKER_01: our group of investors are helping us acquire a hotel in the south
- 1:16:32SPEAKER_01: of Costa Rica right now.
- 1:16:33SPEAKER_01: So we're developing something called the ILP, the Integrative Living Program.
- 1:16:36SPEAKER_01: It's designed to be a center for anyone, like if someone came from Huachum experience.
- 1:16:41SPEAKER_01: They come to this place and it's just a center designed to help
- 1:16:43SPEAKER_01: and support their integration process.
- 1:16:45SPEAKER_01: That's what we're putting on now.
- 1:16:47SPEAKER_01: And then the next step is I want to open a medical center, which goes back to the TA question.
- 1:16:53SPEAKER_01: TA is just, if you take Iboga, and this is available online, so I'm going to say what you do.
- 1:16:58SPEAKER_01: You put in an acid, you mix that for a while, we'll get into the details.
- 1:17:02SPEAKER_01: You add a base,
- 1:17:04SPEAKER_01: all of the alkaloids of Iboga are going to drop to the bottom and the water is going
- 1:17:07SPEAKER_01: to go to the top.
- 1:17:07SPEAKER_01: And you're going to be left with something called total alkaloid extract.
- 1:17:11SPEAKER_01: Now, if you take that,
- 1:17:12SPEAKER_01: and again,
- 1:17:13SPEAKER_01: this protocol is online,
- 1:17:14SPEAKER_01: so I'm not spilling anything brand new,
- 1:17:16SPEAKER_01: and you wash that with an organic solvent,
- 1:17:19SPEAKER_01: what will happen is all the plant material will go away and you'll be left
- 1:17:22SPEAKER_01: with purified total alkaloid extract.
- 1:17:26SPEAKER_01: Ibogaine is technically a purified total alkaloid, right?
- 1:17:32SPEAKER_01: It's purified and extracted.
- 1:17:34SPEAKER_01: What I do is I extract all of them.
- 1:17:37SPEAKER_01: And I purify them.
- 1:17:38SPEAKER_01: And the reason you do this is because at a medical center,
- 1:17:42SPEAKER_01: you might not be able to serve a plant, a tree bark to somebody.
- 1:17:47SPEAKER_01: It might not have the batch-to-batch consistency to suit the medical needs.
- 1:17:50SPEAKER_01: I hope it does.
- 1:17:51SPEAKER_01: I mean, imagine how it would be if they allowed stuff like that.
- 1:17:54SPEAKER_01: But the next best thing,
- 1:17:55SPEAKER_01: in my opinion, is PTA because it keeps the full spectrum of the plant together.
- 1:18:00SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if you guys are familiar with any alchemical processes,
- 1:18:04SPEAKER_01: but the difference between a tincture And something called a spagyric from
- 1:18:08SPEAKER_01: an alchemist perspective is that a tincture is just you wash out the plant material
- 1:18:13SPEAKER_01: and you capture it in your alcohol.
- 1:18:15SPEAKER_01: A spagyric is you remove the essence, the spirit.
- 1:18:18SPEAKER_01: You wash everything out and then you bring it back in on the back end.
- 1:18:22SPEAKER_01: That's why an alchemist was different from just someone waking up every day making a tincture.
- 1:18:26SPEAKER_01: And so what I do specifically is I make PTA and I use an alchemical process to bring
- 1:18:35SPEAKER_01: the spirit back in.
- 1:18:37SPEAKER_01: And so it's the closest thing I could make to what's perfect, which is the planet.
- 1:18:42SPEAKER_01: It's the closest I think I could get to that.
- 1:18:47SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:18:48SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we're trying to do with the medical model.
- 1:18:50SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 1:18:52SPEAKER_01: Yeah, consistent dosing.
- 1:18:54SPEAKER_01: And I mean, next thing you know, yeah, this is what we're doing at the Medical Model.
- 1:19:00SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
- 1:19:00SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thank you for sharing about your projects too.
- 1:19:06SPEAKER_03: Feel free to share the name of your retreat center,
- 1:19:09SPEAKER_03: how people can find you,
- 1:19:11SPEAKER_03: anything like that that you'd like to...
- 1:19:13SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's Root and Wisdom is the name of the retreat.
- 1:19:18SPEAKER_01: People always ask why,
- 1:19:19SPEAKER_01: and I say, well,
- 1:19:20SPEAKER_01: because Iboga's a root,
- 1:19:21SPEAKER_01: you're going to eat it,
- 1:19:22SPEAKER_01: and you're going to have a bunch of wisdom
- 1:19:24SPEAKER_03: by the time you leave.
- 1:19:25SPEAKER_03: So it's like...
- 1:19:27SPEAKER_01: We can chat about whatever.
- 1:19:48SPEAKER_01: And I can answer any questions you have.
- 1:19:50SPEAKER_01: That's the easiest way to contact me.
- 1:19:51SPEAKER_01: And then I have a coaching brand called Authentic Empowerment
- 1:19:55SPEAKER_01: where I teach basically a program that's based off my recent book.
- 1:20:00SPEAKER_01: And the essential tenet is that if the mind is a source of your suffering,
- 1:20:04SPEAKER_01: then really all you need to do is understand how to live beyond that.
- 1:20:08SPEAKER_01: I know I make it sound simple,
- 1:20:09SPEAKER_01: but I have a process I teach
- 1:20:11SPEAKER_01: which helps people cultivate something called self-reflectiveness in
- 1:20:14SPEAKER_01: a clinical term, but it's really just how to live beyond your mind.
- 1:20:21SPEAKER_03: Beautiful.
- 1:20:21SPEAKER_03: Well, I hope people who are listening really, if they're feeling called, reach out to you.
- 1:20:27SPEAKER_03: You're the first person we've had who has spoken about Iboga.
- 1:20:31SPEAKER_03: And I personally...
- 1:20:33SPEAKER_03: Feel like I would want to come to your center and work with you.
- 1:20:39SPEAKER_03: Please, open invite for you guys, please.
- 1:20:41SPEAKER_03: Yeah, one day.
- 1:20:43SPEAKER_03: I would love that.
- 1:20:44SPEAKER_03: And we didn't even talk about sound,
- 1:20:46SPEAKER_03: but I did look and I know that you have some albums out there and maybe even like
- 1:20:50SPEAKER_03: a book on sound.
- 1:20:52SPEAKER_03: And that's a whole other question.
- 1:20:56SPEAKER_03: I appreciate you, man.
- 1:21:03SPEAKER_01: I think sound in one sentence is like,
- 1:21:09SPEAKER_01: it's just so fascinating to me that like in quantum physics,
- 1:21:12SPEAKER_01: we have this thing called the Big Bang, right?
- 1:21:15SPEAKER_01: We have the sound of Om, of Brahman.
- 1:21:18SPEAKER_01: In the Aboriginal tales, the world came from the telling of three stories, which are sounds.
- 1:21:23SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's so many different lineages that have no connection to each other,
- 1:21:28SPEAKER_01: that have some sort of reference towards sound being an aspect of creation.
- 1:21:33SPEAKER_01: And so when I...
- 1:21:34SPEAKER_03: In the beginning was
- 1:21:35SPEAKER_01: the word.
- 1:21:35SPEAKER_01: When I learned...
- 1:21:37SPEAKER_03: Exactly, man.
- 1:21:38SPEAKER_03: It's like, what are they talking about?
- 1:21:40SPEAKER_01: And so that's really how my fascination started.
- 1:21:43SPEAKER_01: I just went down a rabbit hole because of that.
- 1:21:46SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
- 1:21:48SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I do a lot of things with sound.
- 1:21:53SPEAKER_03: I'm giving a talk in October and it's called The Note That Created the Cosmos
- 1:21:58SPEAKER_03: because it is about this universality of creation.
- 1:22:06SPEAKER_03: Maybe we are just part of the harmony ourselves.
- 1:22:09SPEAKER_03: We're part of the song of the universe.
- 1:22:11SPEAKER_03: Basi, man.
- 1:22:13SPEAKER_01: Basi, man.
- 1:22:14SPEAKER_01: There's another Basi moment.
- 1:22:16SPEAKER_01: Basi.
- 1:22:17SPEAKER_01: Yao Yao.
- 1:22:20SPEAKER_00: Got it.
- 1:22:22SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're going to have Iboga soon.
- 1:22:24SPEAKER_01: If you start saying Yao Yao, that's in the field.
- 1:22:30SPEAKER_00: I feel like I wanted to say this whole call.
- 1:22:32SPEAKER_00: I was like, is it Yao Yao?
- 1:22:33SPEAKER_00: Yeah, anyway.
- 1:22:34SPEAKER_03: I'm so glad you did.
- 1:22:35SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 1:22:37SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 1:22:37SPEAKER_03: Well, Troy,
- 1:22:39SPEAKER_03: it's so good to meet you and maybe we'll have another call one day and get more into
- 1:22:43SPEAKER_03: the sound things.
- 1:22:44SPEAKER_03: But in the meantime, yeah, just...
- 1:22:47SPEAKER_03: So much gratitude for you taking the time and to stay in touch with you.
- 1:22:53SPEAKER_01: We'll be in touch.
- 1:22:55SPEAKER_01: Please, if you guys can,
- 1:22:56SPEAKER_01: send me the name,
- 1:22:59SPEAKER_01: all your information,
- 1:23:00SPEAKER_01: so that when I have people who want to experience huachumafoundation,
- 1:23:03SPEAKER_01: we have quite a few.
- 1:23:04SPEAKER_01: I only have one guy I recommend him to right now,
- 1:23:06SPEAKER_01: and he's usually in Spain, so they have to go all the way out there.
- 1:23:09SPEAKER_01: It'd be really nice to have another point of contact.
- 1:23:12SPEAKER_01: And then, yeah,
- 1:23:13SPEAKER_01: if y'all ever need anything or if you ever want to come,
- 1:23:15SPEAKER_01: I mean that open invitation.
- 1:23:17SPEAKER_01: Obviously, no charge.
- 1:23:18SPEAKER_01: You just get here and we take care of you and your mom.
- 1:23:22SPEAKER_01: That means a lot.
- 1:23:23SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:23:23SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
- 1:23:25SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we'll do that.
- 1:23:26SPEAKER_01: I'll send you our info.
- 1:23:28SPEAKER_01: Voila.
- 1:23:30SPEAKER_01: Well, you two have a beautiful day.
- 1:23:31SPEAKER_01: Let me know if there's anything you need for me.
- 1:23:42SPEAKER_02: This podcast episode was a production of the Huachuma Foundation.
- 1:23:47SPEAKER_02: If you would like to be a guest on our show, email us at huachumafoundation at gmail.com.
- 1:23:54SPEAKER_02: If you would like to learn more about us or support our mission,
- 1:23:58SPEAKER_02: please visit huachumafoundation.org.
- 1:24:02SPEAKER_02: And most of all, remember to plant more, worry less.