Preparing, Trance, and Integration with Inner Signal App
At each phase of the iboga journey, you will benefit from substantially by doing the guided inner child reparenting and self-hypnosis inner-communion practice, as explained in this article. The Inner Signal app makes it easy.
How To Use Iboga
Before you begin to use iboga, it makes sense to do some physical cleansing of pathogens and parasites, because otherwise, the power of the iboga plant will be focused mainly on that aspect of your health, instead of healing your mind and spirit.
The following precautions apply regardless of the dose:
Keep in mind that iboga depletes magnesium, and then potassium levels. It’s good to splash Epsom salt water on your armpits frequently to ensure you are good on magnesium. Electrolyte drinks, coconut water, banana, etc, can all be useful. When your magnesium levels are depleted you can feel chest tightness.
Supplement DHA and EPA before, during, and after iboga (altho high dose EPA may cause atrial fibrillation with high dose iboga at the same time) to get a huge brain boost. Your brain is made of DHA and when iboga tries to form new synapses it fails if DHA is unavailable. EPA is what helps your neurons send signals, so that's also critical. Best sources include algal oil, fish, and pastured eggs (not factory eggs).
Do not operate heavy machinery when you are feeling any effects of any drug, as it can slow reaction time. Iboga especially tends to be disorienting, especially when you first start taking it.
Be careful even with low doses, as they build up in your system. I don’t like rules of thumb, but as a rule of thumb (promoted by a DMT-Nexian named Nobunoni, who ended up in a psych ward for months after his 2nd iboga flood dose in 2 months), one should limit iboga ingestion to less than 40 grams of male bark per 6 months to avoid things like prolonged psychosis. The reason I don’t like rules of thumb is that most people are not average, so just be watchful of how you are reacting, and have friends also monitor you for abnormal behaviors. Female iboga seems safer.
I have personally spoken to people who chewed iboga as a daily supplement in Cameroon, who unknowingly(?) suffered from multiple personality disorder and other psychiatric conditions that are clearly noticeable when speaking with them, although other Africans seem to have no problem taking lots of iboga on a regular basis. One time I started getting a little hypomanic just from 1g of male iboga after not using it for a long time (there was some idea that everyone needs to listen to me). Luckily I was able to catch myself, and I didn’t take more.
Please also check Iboga drug and herb interactions. If you can’t figure out if something will interact, just assume that it will, because iboga interacts with almost everything.
Microdosing & Meso(low)-dosing
There’s a huge debate about the usefulness of true microdosing, because true microdosing, again, means you do NOT feel anything. Studies have shown there is no difference between true microdosing and taking a placebo pill, but those studies are mostly measuring mental health variables and not specifically iboga. When I talk about microdosing below, I am not talking about true, probably worthless microdosing, but rather just beyond that.
Microdosing in my vernacular is when you take a substance in order to feel a threshold effect just beyond placebo. Not enough to really feel high, still functional except maybe can’t drive at first. Microdosing iboga root bark usually starts around 100mg, although it might take a few days to feel anything at that dose for a few days until it builds up at that dose. Some people might need 500mg to feel it, and others (like my mom and 2nd wife—NO, I did not marry my mom😂) might not feel anything when microdosing it.
For maximal absorption, you can use an iboga nasal spray each morning (not at night, as it can produce insomnia) and see if you notice some more peace and bliss after a few days. If you mix it with 10% dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), it will have even better absorption. You could also eat it, but then you will likely need to double or triple the dose to get the same benefit. Here is my iboga microdosing protocol for enhancing emotional resilience.
Low-dose (not micro, but meso-dosing) iboga is another option if you want to feel more of the therapeutic benefit but without going in for the visionary experience. By low dose iboga I am speaking of between 1 and 2 grams of iboga root bark eaten in the morning (but here again, only about half the population is sensitive enough to feel that the first morning). I would not advise starting with more than 1g. You can always take more after you feel it.
Note: I and some of my friends find that micro and low-dosing Tabernanthe elliptica feels nicer than micro and low-dosing iboga. It feels more balanced between male and female, and less “heavy” in terms of disorienting etc. More clear and happy and helpful.
At this point I’d like to simply share a screenshot from my friend Acacea’s booklet on the topic of microdosing iboga:
Safer "Flood dose" (visionary high dose) Protocol
Here are the suggested tests to get from a doctor if you feel they are necessary, but keep in mind that a flood dose of iboga for anyone who is in good health in general is safer than driving to the supermarket if it is done slowly and following this guide.
Pre-Dosing
Write down your questions to ask the Iboga spirit (or questions for your inner child or higher self or God or universe or ancestors). Write down what you want to meditate on during the experience, and what you need to face and overcome to make it worthwhile. As my dad always said, “Always, and in everything, visualize, then expect, the very best. But be prepared to take what you get. The best might come afterwards!”
Avoid all substances, including caffeine, for 24 hours prior to day 1 of dosing. Psychoactive drugs should be avoided for 2-8 weeks prior, depending on the half-life of the drug and its fat sequestration. Ideally, anti-depressants and drugs with protracted withdrawal syndromes should be cleared out for a year before using any psychedelics due to risk of psychosis. As explained before, it’s best to do parasite and pathogen cleansing first so that iboga doesn’t have to.
Prepare your space so it is clean and comfortable. A vomit bucket nearby and a helper to get to the bathroom are essential, as you'll be mostly incapacitated. Note that morning glory leaf can eliminate the nausea. Cream and honey also help a lot. Vomiting too much will cause dangerous dehydration so it should be avoided despite the psychological idea of it being useful as an emotional purge, plus you have no idea what your real absorbed dose is after vomiting. Light and loud sounds will be intrusive while in an iboga trance. Have a bucket within arm’s reach from the bed as a purge is always possible, especially if you take more than a few grams of bark at a time.
Once you start consuming iboga you will soon lose your hunger or interest in food. A few hours prior to the experience, stop taking real drinks of water. You will be well hydrated now but excess water in the stomach when dosing impedes absorption of the iboga alkaloids. Instead, one should take little sips of ZHoly3O to mop up toxins from the parasite die-off, and into that, add raw honey, 5g Magnesium chloride, a Vitamin B complex, 5g L-carnitine + 5g L-citrulline for cardio-protection, as well as 5g of ascorbic acid (Vit C). If you do not stay well-hydrated, your heart is at greater risk of long QT syndrome (LQTS) which can be deadly with iboga. Many drugs also induce LQTS.
The experience is not remotely sociable, and is deeply personal and internal, with the visions taking place behind closed eyelids, like a waking dream state. It is good to have a room you can make dark even during daytime, and/or have a sleep mask for your eyes. With this slower method, one cannot be sure exactly at what point the visions will start, but just be prepared, especially on the second day.
Candle light is soothing if you do need to see. Although you might prefer silence, consider listening to low-volume recordings of Bwiti m’congo harp music, as it is an important component of the rituals in Africa, and may assist with the brain defrag facilitated by iboga. Good Bwiti music playlists can be found on my meditation/trip music page. People who never developed their ego as children and feel like chameleons, may prefer to listen to drumming (which requires good bass on your speakers or real drums), which is also traditional in Bwiti ceremonies.
Iboga does cause insomnia. One night of missed sleep is not a huge deal, but if your insomnia remains, I have some general sleep tips here. What works best for my friend Kevin is to listen to an Eckhart Tolle podcast, which sounds soothing and takes the mind’s attention back away from the intensive inner investigation of the iboga trip.
Dosing
Most people will need to eat a total of between 10 to 25 grams of quality inner root bark, but some might need even more. There is no way of knowing beforehand how much you will need, so stock up on 50g if you can. The safest and easiest approach is to eat 1g per hour, as the effects build up. The Bwiti tribes are known to consume iboga over a few days, so this approach is not a new idea. The first day is a bit heavy but not terrible if you also eat the Beach morning glory leaf. Second day usually feels amazing once you get over a certain threshold amount in your system. You can get stronger effects by holding the root bark powder in your wet mouth for 15 minutes or more before swallowing.
Listen to your body, and most importantly, have a good trip-sitter who has read this protocol and agrees to follow it. The sitter must:
Know CPR and first-aid.
Be able and willing to call for an ambulance in case of respiratory failure or cardiac arrest, but not so paranoid that they call for help when it isn’t truly needed.
Check on the tripper regularly but unobtrusively during the session, most frequently during the first six hours.
Take you to the bathroom when needed, since you will be disoriented.
I highly recommend trying to schedule at least a week without obligations to do this properly, rather than rush into it as I did once. An alternative approach if you are strapped for time is to combine a low dose of iboga (like 1g) with a low dose of soma or chrunga + meditation. Careful, too much iboga + ayahausca can be dangerous when combined, but you can slowly consume them bit by bit to get to the level you want. Meditation is always key for the deepest and most transformative experiences and insights.
The strongest effects of iboga can last up to 36 hours, and you’ll be lying down for this time, so best to be on a bed. Dizziness and nausea will strike if you move too suddenly, so move slowly when you need to. These feelings aren’t an issue when lying down on your back, although some people feel like they are rapidly rotating on a merry-go-round while lying down. Don't be surprised if you hear buzzing or other auditory phenomena, or if you are able to see with your eyes closed as if they were open, even in the dark.
The experience finally ends when one can fall asleep, and the dreams are likely to be vivid and visionary. The brain is reset during this time and one should feel good on waking and will be able to move around without dizziness or nausea. A shower or bath is recommended on waking, and you’ll likely be hungry.
Integration
Following the experience, iboga is still working on you. Ibogaine is highly lipophilic, so hangs around in body tissues, gradually being released and converted into noribogaine by the liver. Ibogaine causes a long-term increase in the expression of a protein called glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), a neuroprotective agent that also induces neuronal sprouting. This aspect of long-term effects makes iboga unique. Thus, taking most other drugs in the months after the experience will interfere with this process, but it is common for people to extend the afterglow period with small booster doses of iboga daily or weekly, or to take Soma on some non-iboga days. This, as well as journaling of visions, dreams, and daily thoughts and feelings, helps to keep the lessons in mind. From time to time you may want to go back and read the journal entry to see if you might learn something new from looking at it in a different light.
The Dreaded Iboga Gray Days?
During this longer period of reflection and reintegration of lessons learned, you should feel a prolonged afterglow, and you may still see very vivid tracers made by moving objects.
On the other hand, some people can feel quite blank (emotional flatness, irritability, visual shimmer, poor sleep, or low reward) in the days following a flood (and often on first day of the 2 day flood), but this is normal, as behavior patterns and desires have been wiped clean, and this is temporary phase. It can take a few days (up to a week) to really soar after an iboga experience. Remember to use the sleep tips. You may feel you are in limbo between waking and sleeping. This is an optimal time to do inner-child self-love re-parenting! You can connect in a very deep way now.
If you want to bio-hack your way out of an iboga gray day, one plausible contributor to think about is disrupted glutamate and stress-system rebound, but this has not been clinically proven. Agmatine, NAC, glycine, taurine, magnesium/electrolyte correction, food, hydration, and sleep support are best treated as low-to-moderate-evidence supportive options—not guaranteed reversal tools. New or worsening chest pain, fainting, severe palpitations, confusion, mania, suicidality, persistent vomiting, dehydration, or inability to sleep for extended periods should be treated as medical/psychiatric safety signals, not as “gray day.”
After the experience, healthy eating, regular exercise, exposure to sunlight (especially sunrise) and nature will all augment and work with the healing and help ground you. As already stated, if people are using iboga to treat addiction or change negative behavior patterns, it is very important to enact life change prior to the experience, as this will help you get more from the experience, and make it easier to keep on a new path following the session. Iboga is not a panacea or magic bullet, it can only show you the door, and it is up to you to walk through it.
Iboga is not God, and what it shows you is not truth. It is a mixed bag, like you’d get from talking to even the best therapist, so use your discernment after the experience to keep the good and leave the bad.
More integration advice in this post.
Can you recommend Providers?
People who are trying to use iboga or ibogaine to get off drugs often consider going to a clinic so that they have an all-encompassing supportive environment for detox, although this option is usually very costly. Be careful, because most of these clinics are almost complete scams which are focused only on getting your money.
When considering iboga clinics, you need to ask some key questions, just like you would interview any other medical provider. What are their stats for 6-months post-treatment success, for example? What was their worst patient experience and how did they learn from that? What do they know about traditional iboga dosing protocols and why do they choose to use different protocols that are not as well validated? How do they do their dose calculations? If they use the body-weight dosing formula, you absolutely must avoid them, as it is based on a myth. Here is a guide to selecting a trustworthy clinic, although that guide does not explain the problem of single-day dosing.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of the clinics focusing on drug addiction interruption are still using the modern, misguided and dangerous ibogaine bolus dosing protocol, based on a bogus body-weight dosing formula. This is what makes iboga seem dangerous, and necessitates a medical team to hopefully prevent you from dying.
A huge dose of the main alkaloid all at once can be quite hard for the heart, liver, and brain to process. Thankfully, such a practice is unnecessary, since iboga has reverse tolerance, unlike most drugs. But if you decide you need medical staff to ensure your safety (even as their protocol compromises it), the best ibogaine clinic that I know of is pangeabiomedics.com located in Mexico and vouched for by iceers.org. I don't get any compensation for advertising them.
Especially since large doses of male iboga (or ibogaine) can cause mania for many people, having the support of a clinic, therapist, and a legit iboga shaman, is optimal if you can find one that will agree to spread the dose over two days. There are some itinerant providers who travel to help people dose iboga for free or by donation, but in this case there is even more risk of dealing with someone that is not adequately trained on safety, or who may even be trying to take advantage of people sexually or in other ways. Always seek out honest reviews first.
Avoid any so-called Iboga Retreat Centers which are branches of the sociopath known as Patrick Moughenda (which isn't his real name, he is not even really African) and his Iboga House (of Horrors). I know two people who went to Moughenda's retreats and both of them got the impression he's some kind of childish scammer. I also know two people who trained under him (Chor Boogie and his wife Elizabeth Bast, neither of whom I could recommend), and they both realized he was a scammer after spending $50k USD each.
Avoid iboga therapists with strange beliefs about it that they got from their own un-integrated iboga experiences, like my ex-friend who I used to recommend, Sonia Hsieh.
For a traditional Bwiti ceremony in Africa, or for an underground sitter within USA, contact us for a possible referral. If you'd like to get help from a real medical doctor who provides relatively affordable unlimited remote consults and help with doing your own iboga flood (with a friend to sit for you) then check out Richie Ogulnick.
Alternative Supplements & Remedies
Many addictions can be treated simply by removing the pathogens and parasites which are actually causing the cravings. Here is my guide on that.
Balancing supplements help achieve homeostasis with regard to various neurotransmitter systems, neural networks, hormones:
SR-17018, the blockbuster miracle cure for opioid acute withdrawals. This web app guides you through the use of SR-17018 based on the most thorough research yet done, and also includes advice on: Matrine powder (Sophora flavescens extract) from LiftMode is helpful for opioid receptors. Another beneficial herb for this is Corydalis yanhusuo (or even vaping the pure tetrahydropalmatine extracted from yanhusuo, which is like a non-addictive heroin). Also in this guide is guidance on microdosing naltrexone to help opioid withdrawals and cravings (as well as MCAS and many other conditions). That was key for my friend Kim who still had bad PAWS after finishing SR-17. You can buy naltrexone from AgelessRX.
Cerebrolysin, which cured 100% of 62 heroin addicts of their cravings.
Vitamin C mega-dosing for dopamine and opioid receptors (see this study, try 100g of vit C, ideally the liposomal form from Aurora, or else vit C powder in 3 liters of water with some glycine and monk fruit, taking frequent small sips throughout the day to bowel tolerance, unless you can afford IV vit C.
Benfotiamine, niacin, and other b-vitamins can help a lot.
Full spectrum CBD, CBG, cannabis root oil, and/or ultra-micronized palmitoylethanolamide for the endocannabinoid system.
Syrian rue, lithium orotate, muscimol, Beach morning glory leaf, and/or high dose niacin for GABA receptors
N-Acetylcysteine Ethyl Ester (NACET) can also help with glutathione production and especially for dopamine receptor re-sensitization. Can also help people who lost the “MDMA Magic.” Some people may need to use liposomal glutathione if they don’t respect well to NACET.
Soma, or Hillbilly (or similar happy) mushroom microdosing for serotonin receptors and general health (also a parasite cleanse)
Consults
Paid subscribers can do by-donation consults with me. If you can’t afford to donate, that’s fine, just Contact me and I will get back when I have time.
Very solid info regarding microdosing and integration. Need to try the supplements suggested here 😁