Plant and Animal Medicines for PTSD and Addiction
UPDATE: This article was written about 6 years ago, just before Lydian and I started working with a curandera in Mexico to learn how to administer sacred medicines. The article shows how much fear and skepticism I had about these medicines and for that reason, I wanted to leave this article up for people to read. It's hard to believe that I wrote this article just 6 short years ago! My life has changed so much and in fact, my life has changed positively on account of the sacred medicines. I can't imagine life without Ayahuasca...and without psilocybin.
I don't know how I would've gotten through the past 6 years without these medicines. When I wrote this article, I didn't know how much Lydian and I and John would need the sacred medicines to get through our everyday lives. Less than a year after I published this article, I'd be in a position where Ayahuasca was my only hope. And Ayahuasca changed me. Without this medicine, my life would be very different right now. Without all of the sacred medicines I've worked with, I would have no hope to solve major health problems for myself, my family, and for other people and I would have no way to hope for resolution of challenging relationship problems within my family. So I've included "updates" throughout this article to explain (briefly) how my thoughts have changed in regard to these medicines in the hopes that people can read another perspective --- my new perspective on my old perspective -- a meta-view that happens only through experience with these sacred medicines.
Several months ago, I spent some time researching and watching people take entheogens to cure a variety of issues. In a narrow alley in a city in Mexico, I waited with a young man named Othello. He was waiting for Matt, a man who administers Sapito (a substance derived from a certain type of toad) to arrive. Matt is not a shaman and he had only a little bit of training administering Sapito, but Othello hoped this substance would help him stave off cravings for methamphetamines. As we waited, I asked him questions.
“How long were you addicted to meth?”
“Five years.” He told me.
“Why did you choose Sapito instead of Ibogaine for your meth addiction?”
“Because Sapito is cheaper. And it works okay, but I’m addicted to Mexican meth.” He said. “I feel sorry for the people up north.” Othello inhaled smoke from his cigarette and squinted at me as he exhaled. “The meth is a lot stronger up there.”
This was news to me. I’d never considered the possibility that the best meth is imported into the states while Mexicans get the lower quality stuff. Paradoxically, Mexicans might actually be lucky to have lower access to high quality street drugs. But Othello went on to talk about how Sapito helped him manage his cravings for meth. It gives him insight, he said, but otherwise he had trouble describing how it worked for him.
I wondered if Sapito was the right choice for him or if Ibogaine might be more helpful, but so little research has been done on these two substances that it’s hard to say. The United States has blocked funding for research so the people (or loved ones) who are affected by addiction have to sort through the propaganda surrounding all naturally occurring psychedelic substances that can’t be patented by the pharmaceutical industry. The propaganda is, of course, scary and prolific. But the little bit of scientific research that has been done on Iboga and Ibogaine has shown a lot of promise that this substance could act as an addiction cure.
UPDATE: Since the time when I wrote this article, a lot of research has been done on ibogaine and a fair amount of research has been done on Sapito and other sacred indigenous medicines. Though I'd only taken Sapito once at the time when I wrote this article, now I've taken it so many times that I can't count them anymore. I understand better now (after decades of experience with sacred indigenous medicines) why some people might choose to work with Sapito for addiction as opposed to working with iboga or ibogaine. I should also note that Kambo is an important natural anti-addiction treatment for opiates and that Ayahuasca can be a valuable tool in addictions as well. Contact Lydian and I at [email protected] for more information about how to work with Sapito, Kambo, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, iboga and ibogaine, and a variety of other sacred indigenous medicines. We offer treatment with these and other medicines in Mexico.
Iboga is a plant that’s native to Gabon in Africa. Ibogaine is a derivative of this plant that’s easier to measure and dose properly. While the plant, Iboga, is used ceremonially in Gabon as a rite-of-passage in the Bwiti tribes, Ibogaine is used in more clinical settings across the globe as a treatment for addictions and PTSD. In the United States, as drug-rehab workers wish for something less addictive than Suboxone for addicts to take to cure their addiction, Big Pharma has blocked the use of Iboga and Ibogaine by claiming that the research to support its safety and efficacy just isn’t there. But the research isn’t permitted and funding has been cut by the same leaders who say that the lack of research legitimizes its prohibition.
In 2013, a Rolfer who helped me with a lower back issue I was having told me that she was going to Costa Rica to do an Iboga ceremony. She wanted to cure a sugar addiction and she was also hoping for a spiritual epiphany. When she returned from her trip, the verdict was still out on how she felt about her inner journey.
“It was hard.” She said. “It was really awful actually.” She told me as she massaged my lower back. She said that she was uncomfortable for much of the Iboga trip and she wasn’t ready yet to rate it as a positive experience. But though this woman who had worked previously as an RN, had worked carefully to find an Iboga ceremony that was watched over carefully by nurses and doctors, she hadn’t stayed on-site for a week or more afterwards to process her experience. Many of the Ibogaine clinics in countries outside of the U.S. that work with PTSD and addictions require patients to stay for a week or longer to ensure that they have the opportunity to fully process and integrate their experience in a positive way.
UPDATE: It is possible to do microdosing with iboga and slowly increase the dose over time to prepare for a full iboga ceremony. Many people find that working with iboga in this way is more powerful and productive in terms of their intention. Again, contact Lydian and I for more information about how to do iboga microdosing in Mexico: [email protected].
Over the past 3 years, I’ve been observing, researching, and writing about entheogens like Ayahuasca, Sapito, Peyote, and Iboga. I’ve observed ceremonies in both Peru and Mexico and I’ve talked to a number of people on different continents about their views regarding entheogens and the healing process. Last year, I tried Sapito myself.
My experience with Sapito was mixed. Initially, I was really excited about the effects even though the trip itself and the 24 hours afterward were somewhat nightmar-ish, but over the past year, I’ve had a few panic attacks (a brand new experience for me) that I’ve related back to my Sapito session. Having never had panic attacks before, I looked it up and found that I’m not the only one who develops panic in the year or so following a Sapito session. But despite this, I can’t say that Sapito is all bad. In fact, I can also say that I’ve had a lot of stress in my life this year and that the Sapito may have rearranged some of my internal wiring such that I’m experiencing this stress in a different way. But I wouldn’t recommend Sapito to people willy-nilly because of this re-wiring effect. I mean, re-wiring can be the goal, but such a thing is never easy. And when I say I wouldn’t “recommend it” what I mean is that if someone sought it out on their own, I’d be interested in their results and it wouldn’t surprise me if it changed their lives, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any negative effects that happen afterwards. That’s all. For me, I felt like I dissolved and like I didn’t exist anymore which is impossible to accurately explain in words. My session lasted for 45 minutes and then for about a month I would occasionally feel like I was dissolving. My panic attacks involved the sense that my spirit was leaving my body and that I couldn’t quite get my mind and my corporal existence to sync up.
UPDATE: This year, I finally figured out why I developed panic attacks after Sapito. It took me almost 8 years of research and some personal trauma to put the pieces together. Me and my family had moved to Mexico less than a year before I took Sapito that first time. On our trip from the U.S. to Mexico to move, we stopped in Tijuana to have our mercury amalgam dental fillings removed. For me, having these fillings removed was excruciating and traumatic. I had had some poor dental work done prior to arriving in Tijuana and as a result, the whole experience was frightening and difficult. After these procedures were completed, we continued past the border to Guanajuato where we took up residence as a first step in moving to Mexico. Right after I took Sapito that first time, I had nightmares. In these nightmares, my tongue was cut from mouth and then I was thrown from a dam into the water below and I drowned. Then I'd wake up with a start. The nightmares happened nightly for about a week and then they stopped. About a month after the Sapito session, our family went back to the states to put on an annual Halloween event and then return to Mexico. We would stop at the border to get our temporary residency visas. The first panic attack that I had occurred when I got in the car with my husband and daughter to go back up to the states. I had never had a panic attack. As someone with a master's in psychology, I knew what they were, but I was shocked to be having one myself. They intensified as we neared the border, but then, after we got back to our home in the states where we put on our Halloween event, I was okay. The event was always an incredibly stressful thing for me, but I had no panic attacks during the entire Halloween event. Then, on our way back down to Mexico, I started having inklings of panic again. When we arrived in Laredo, Texas to do our temporary residency process, I struggled the entire time with panic attacks. I was barely able to get through the interview. I had trouble walking from point A to point B in Laredo. I felt incapacitated. It made no sense at the time. HOWEVER, now, having spent some time studying trauma (and also experiencing trauma firsthand) I see the connection... I had been exposed to a trauma in Tijuana via my dental experience which was very painful and scary. During the procedure, I had opted to not have sedation and, to get it done more quickly, the dentist numbed my entire mouth, both the top and the bottom of both sides of my mouth to remove the mercury fillings at one appointment. I didn't speak Spanish very well at this time and I couldn't communicate very well, but also, they put a rubber dam in my mouth. Then I couldn't breathe and my entire face was numb and I couldn't communicate easily using language. I sat up during the procedure at one point and panicked. The entire team stood back, not sure what to do. I made a gesture for a pen and a woman hurriedly searched for one in a drawer. I wrote "sedation" on my hand. The dentist said it was too late for that. Trauma gets stored in the body in the autonomic nervous system. This is what happened to me. Trauma is encoded symbolically into the body in a language that is uniquely its own. For me, the trauma was encoded symbolically as having my tongue cut out of my mouth (such that I couldn't speak). Then, I was thrown off a dam (the rubber dam, I suppose) and I suffocated and drowned in the water below. Getting my tongue cut out of my mouth certainly symbolized the pain of the dental procedure. This traumatic experience had been encoded into symbols that became stored in my body. When I did Sapito that first time, this trauma rose to the surface and it became conscious or semi-conscious. At that point, I had panic attacks that were triggered by border crossings because I'd had my dental work done at the border. I put all of this together recently while taking psilocybin mushrooms to try to overcome a more recent trauma that had to do with my daughter and my son-in-law who left suddenly to return to Myanmar (a country in the midst of civil war) when she was 7 months pregnant. I was taking the mushrooms because I was aware that I was traumatized by this situation and I had a sense of how trauma can shut down the whole body and cause physical illness. I was taking the mushrooms to work through the trauma when it was explained to me very clearly that the panic attacks I'd experienced years before were actually my body trying to communicate about that dental trauma with my conscious mind. It's important for people to realize that if they work with a medicine like Sapito that might bring trauma to the surface that it might be necessary to take multiple doses of Sapito to get past the trauma completely. Another dose of Sapito probably would have cured my panic attacks, in my case, for example. As it was, the panic attacks mostly went away because I didn't cross the border into the United States again until I had taken Sapito and a number of other sacred indigenous medicines many times.
Matt, the guy who administered Sapito for Othello, was the person who administered Sapito for me too. His thoughts on Sapito and Ayahuasca was that there was no need for a shaman. This is a current trend in the realm of entheogens. People who administer these “sacred medicines” claim that you don’t need to worry about set or setting in order to get something out of using them. And from my own experiences with LSD, Sapito, and Ayahuasca, I would say that this is only partially true. When I woke up from my Sapito experience, a local curandera was there and she wrapped me in a blanket and swaddled me tightly. I overheard people talking and I didn’t understand that they were NOT talking about me at first. So my brain was really suggestible and I was wide open. I overheard someone say something about “one of the wise ones” (in Spanish because I was in Mexico) and I interpreted this phrase as something that had to do with my Sapito session. My brain worked with those words, folding them up and unfolding them like an origami flower. In the wrong environment, if someone said something flippantly at the wrong moment, my mind could’ve latched onto that and worked it into a lather that overshadowed the other elements. So, in my opinion, a supportive environment is important. It may be true that icaros aren’t a requirement, but I wouldn’t personally take Ayahuasca without them because I know from experience that my brain toddles off into wild jungly terrain without some kind of musical corral.
UPDATE: I have since taken Ayahuasca a number of times without icaros with spectacular results.
So it’s important to consider the context and the motive of the person who administers an entheogen. Matt often describes his substances as “loving”. In Facebook posts he’ll say, “That Sapito was the most loving experience EVER, right?” Groups of followers chime in with all kinds of statements about the “lovingness” of the experience and I can’t help but feel wary of the linguistic framing of such things. Maybe that’s my marketing background speaking, but calling a substance of any kind “loving” seems like a form of black magic in a way. I realize that DMT creates a sense of connection, but my Sapito experience was decidedly NOT loving. In fact, after about 24 hours of processing and nightmares, I’d summed up my Sapito experience as a recap of a past life where I got my tongue cut out of my head.
UPDATE: In fact, most of the sacred medicines are "loving" but with a necessarily hard edge for situations that warrant it. I have been scolded many times by magic mushrooms for example. The scolding was necessary in order for me to look at things that I didn't want to look at.
So I have to say that I’ve never done Iboga or Ibogaine, but I’m intrigued by the things I’ve read about its powerful effects on curing addictions or PTSD. According to the literature (both online and in books), it seems that a fair number of heroin, meth, cocaine, and alcohol addicts (just to name a few) can be cured by one Ibogaine treatment. But I can’t speak from personal experience on this one. Rather, I’m compelled to continue looking into Ibogaine for addictions because a magic bullet like that is just the sort of thing that Big Pharma would want to push out of the United States. Since so many people of all walks of life struggle with addiction, Ibogaine qualifies as a potential cure that’s worth writing about.
The other entheogens I’ve mentioned like Sapito and Ayahuasca have their place in terms of healing as well, but their functions are more complex and less straightforward. I’ve watched people do Sapito sessions and often they walk away with a completely different way of looking at the world. And honestly, that was my experience too. My view of existence was entirely changed. And that part of Sapito wasn’t negative. In fact, I have no regrets about having done Sapito, despite the panic attacks and the sense that I was having my tongue cut out of my head. But it’s impossible to talk honestly about Sapito without mentioning these negative aspects of the experience. The negative stuff is the meat of it. Without the terror and the nightmare, these substances can easily graduate to become street drugs that people take for pleasure. And unfortunately, pleasure doesn’t teach us much as humans. So for those who are in the market for making change, it’s important to seek out a loving environment (set and setting) because these sacred medicines are not always going to be “loving” themselves. Doing a substance like this is not something to be entered into lightly. Choose a facilitator who provides a good set and setting for the experience.
UPDATE: Obviously, now that I have experience working with these medicines intensively, I can say that these initial experiences that I had are common and that I didn't know back when I wrote this article, how to create an Intention and how Intention works when a person is taking a medicine like Sapito, Ayahuasca, or Iboga. I had a lot of fear about these sacred medicines. I didn't want to work with them because I didn't want to work with myself. But, at one point, my pain surpassed my fear and I started working intensively with these medicines. Now I don't know how I got through life without them. But it's interesting for me to read my initial thoughts on sacred medicines and to also consider how far I've come in terms of how I think about them now. People have to give themselves permission to feel fear and to be skeptical. Our minds are useful. We need our minds, the part of us that is tame and domesticated. But we need the wild part of ourselves too -- the part that doesn't have language. Most of us have been so thoroughly tamed down by society that all we have left is our minds chattering away, trying to solve all of our problems (often without success). The tame part of us is disconnected from the Big Picture. It knows the rules and it tries to follow them, often to its own detriment. The wild part of us, in contrast, is connected to the Big Picture. The wild part of us can sense our loved ones from afar. The wild part can sense danger and it knows how to shake trauma off so that we can heal and grow from negative experiences. When I wrote this article, I was a tame American. I was totally disconnected from the part of me that's wild and that knows itself as a human that's wired to communicate with and know plants and animals and all of the other things that exist on earth. It took a major trauma that made me into a zombie to push me over that threshold to where my PAIN WAS GREATER THAN MY FEAR of these medicines. I believe now that the trauma was there to ensure that I'd work with the sacred medicines.
I watched an Ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon Rainforests of Peru several years ago. A shaman presided over things and sang icaros, which were so much more powerful and amazing than I ever could have imagined after having read about them and watched videos of them. While watching the ceremony was powerful on many levels, a naturalist, our guide in the rainforest told me that “often women will take off their clothes during the Ayahuasca ceremonies”. He asked me why Americans want to come to Peru to do such a thing. He’d watched numerous Ayahuasca ceremonies and his sense of it was that doing Ayahuasca was a lot like becoming drunk on alcohol. And, the next day, when I asked one of the participants some questions about his experience with the plant medicine, he said that “it felt really loving”, but mostly he’d just seen a lot of colors and geometric shapes. Based on my reading, this made me question whether he’d actually taken a real Ayahuasca brew or if the stuff he’d ingested had maybe been one of those cheaper versions of Ayahuasca that give people hallucinations, but that fail to bring about the insights that Ayahuasca is supposed to offer. Our naturalist viewed the Ayahuasca industry in Peru with suspicion and since I trusted our naturalist with our lives in the Amazon rainforest, his suspicions made me correspondingly suspicious.
UPDATE: I left out the fact that during this Ayahuasca ceremony, I had visual hallucinations that were very similar to the hallucinations that I experienced later in my life when I took a powerful brew of Ayahuasca and peyote combined together. Again, I want to point out my own skepticism that I had back then -- a manifestation of my fear of these sacred medicines. Ultimately, I was afraid of myself.
I know that there are ayahuasceros who alter their brew to make some extra cash. An American can’t just go out to the Amazon Rainforest and hope for the best when shopping for an Ayahuasca experience. Ayahuasca is an interesting entheogen in that it’s supposed to “teach” the person who ingests it. It can teach people how to cure themselves and others. It’s the Mother. Iboga is the Father. Ayahuasca, according to this broad dichotomy, is “loving” while Iboga is “chastising”. These subjective describing words do very little to help people prepare for the experience of taking these substances. And that’s not to say that Ayahuasca and Iboga aren’t valuable because I believe they are, but that it’s important to seek out ayahuasceros, a shaman, curanderos, and other legitimate healers who enjoy their craft more than they enjoy the money they make from administering these plants. Americans can be easily duped into signing up for the first Ayahuasca retreat or Ibogaine treatment facility they see online just because access to these sacred medicines is so restricted in the United States. And this political fact can set people up for a bad experience right out of the gate. But there are plenty of legit healers out there who truly want to help humanity overcome what ails them. And I believe that part of the journey toward healing has to do with the search for the right healer or the right facility to administer these substances. For people who are suffering from PTSD or addiction, it might be wise to find several treatment facilities or facilitators and visit them all before committing to a particular one.
UPDATE: In reality, a person has to choose an Ayahuasca or Iboga experience based on their gut -- the part of themselves that is wild. In people who are really sick, addicted to a drug, in a toxic, traumatic relationship, or suffering from a mental illness, the wild part of the person has been "imprisoned" (so to speak). This can make it hard to find an Ayahuascero or curandera using gut / intuition. Also, when I wrote this article, I didn't really know what I was talking about, but rather, I was trying to formulate an excuse for why I shouldn't have to work with these medicines. Not long after I wrote and published this article, Ayahuasca came looking for me and I was 100% ready to take it. In fact, I signed up not just for Ayahuasca, but a dose of Xananga / Sananga, rápe / tobacco, and a 3 hour temazcal prior to the Ayahuasca. It was a life-changing night that saved our family. When you go looking for these sacred medicines with the proper intent, they look for you too. When you're ready, even if you're sick, addicted, or traumatized, just remember -- your gut / intuition may not be functioning optimally, but you're not along. Consciousness is so much bigger than what we try to live out and play out in every day reality.
Find a facility or a person who makes you feel comfortable and at ease because set and setting are important when you’re opening up your mind to clean out all the garbage. While I’m a big fan of plants and I think that they can love and be loved, when I’m looking for a healer of any kind, I seek out healers who make me feel loved and who can create an atmosphere of love. The entheogen may be loving, but if the healer only cares about the bottom line, the experience might be negatively affected by that.
Such a quest might involve phone calls, emails, and hitting the streets to ask questions in-person to find the right healer in a foreign country. Often the search for something this powerful and important ends when the healer finds you. The search itself is a powerful symbolic gesture and a part of the “opening” process that can lead to healing.
UPDATE: Please note again that Lydian and I offer the following sacred medicines at our facility in central Mexico, just north of Mexico City:
- Kambo
- Sapito
- Ayahuasca
- Psilocybin mushrooms
- Iboga microdosing (when available)
- Rápe snuff
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