My Miracle in a Molecule
“Why the hell did I come back?” I asked myself.
It was exactly a year ago to the day since my first ten-day ibogaine journey at Beond, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico. Once again, I found myself in the same hospital bed, in the same freezing cold room, wires slithering across my chest, a blood-pressure sleeve clenching my arm, and a needle deep in my vein, depositing electrolytes into my bloodstream.
As I waited for the medicine to come—wishing simultaneously that it would never arrive and that it would just get here already—I retraced my steps down the winding path that brought me back.
Ascending Everest
For years, I’d heard ibogaine journeys described as akin to a Mount Everest ascent. To me, the analogy fits.
To begin with, there’s the duration. Some accounts say that it lasts 12 hours, but that doesn’t seem quite right. For one thing, the metabolite of ibogaine, called noroibogaine, stays in the body for days. It has a half life of between 28 and 49 hours, if not longer. And you can feel the noroibogaine surging through you, as though you’re plugged directly into the universe’s secret power grid. But more than that, the ibogaine journey morphs seamlessly into the integration process, and it’s impossible to tell when one ends and the other begins.
Beyond ibogaine’s duration and intensity (a lot more on the latter below), the completeness with which ibogaine overtakes you distinguishes it from other psychedelics. Whereas other psychedelics typically work on one bodily system alone, most often serotonin, ibogaine’s reach is far vaster. It penetrates, explores, and resets myriad systems: serotonin, glutamate, opioid, dopamine, acetylcholine, autonomic nervous, nicotonic, and endocrine, to name a few. Columbia University chemistry professor Dalibor Sames expresses it beautifully: “[Ibogaine] is so complex that the previous concept of how we understand pharmacology and how we understand psychedelics, it just doesn’t apply.”
To the journeyer, this is no physiological abstraction.
You feel it: a sense of complete saturation, of being consumed.
The Everest analogy fits for another, more unsettling, reason: both journeys can kill. As I wrote about in my account of my first journey, ibogaine prolongs the space between heart beats, and has led to fatal cardiac events in a small number of seekers.
When I started telling friends that I intended to do a second journey, the typical response was incredulous, as though I’d just shared that I’d opted for another colonoscopy. “Wait, you’re going back? Why?”
Rick Doblin’s words about his sole ibogaine journey rang in my head: “Once was enough.”
As I lay back in the hospital bed once again, waiting for the medicine to come, I heard my inner critic hiss in my ear, with a mix of bemusement and concern, “Did you really need to ask the doctors for the highest possible dose?”
It was a fair question, I have to admit.
Had it been hubris, that sometimes pesky part of me that, upon seeing a mountain in the distance, goads me into climbing it?
I didn’t think so. Ibogaine beckoned from someplace far deeper.
Between Ascents, a Full Year of Integration
You see, I spent a year integrating my first ibogaine journey. I took three months off of work, devoting most of my waking seconds to processing all that had arisen and was continuing to arise. Ibogaine had flung open the doors to my subconscious and burst the radioactive bubble that, for over 40 years, had protected my conscious mind from accessing much of my childhood. It had de-flamed the parts of my brain that contained those memories and allowed me to release the pain I’d felt when they were created.
This, it seems to me, is one of ibogaine’s many miracles: it allows the journeyer to safely process and release massive amounts of subconscious information. In our non-ibogaine lives, accessing too much subconscious information too soon can be dangerous, as our ego defenses rapidly and rightly mobilize to keep us from experiencing the pain of what we’ve buried. This is why, in talk therapy and other treatment modalities, we go slowly, welcoming each delicate droplet of buried material with the utmost tenderness.
The integration of psychedelic experiences is a vast, elusive concept with countless definitions.
One that I love is this: integration is the process of welcoming all parts of ourselves into our conscious awareness.
More grandly, it’s the wildly loving, unreserved, unconditional, unqualified embrace of all of our parts, especially the ones we’ve been made to feel are unworthy or unlovable. In this way, integration is a transformation from fragmented to whole.
This was one of the core benefits of my first ibogaine journey. The memories bubbled up from within me so fast that I struggled to keep track of them. Each memory felt precious, like a jewel, and the best way I could think to honor them was to write them down. And so began the process of writing my memoir, which continues to this day. Towards the beginning is a section entitled, “Tectonic Insights.” I consider an insight to be “tectonic” if it fundamentally affected or altered my life narrative, which is to say that it caused me to have to literally restructure or rewrite substantial portions of the memoir. That I have had more than three dozen such insights highlights just how de-stabilizing but ultimately liberating this integration path has been.
To integrate, for me, is to stitch into the fabric of my life arc the parts that, for so long, had been confined to the darkness.
It is to make meaning, untie knots, and bear witness.
It is to rise up out of the ashes as a more whole person on a more authentic path.
But in the days after my first ibogaine journey, what became clear to me was that, with one massive layer of trauma vaporized, a deeper layer remained.
I realized that my subconscious contained a sub-basement, and I hadn’t even begun to access it.
The roiling emotions and experiences confined within that sub-basement occurred so early in my life, and had been locked away for so long, that the cellar door had remained intact, weathering even that first ibogaine blizzard.
But the sub-basement’s existence had been revealed, and its hinges loosened.
In between my first and second journey, I spent a full year aware of its existence. It terrified me. Whatever was in there, I knew it was powerful, and I could feel it everywhere in my body.
My cells started to feel like they were on fire, as though my trauma, long embedded within them, had been set aflame.
My friends at the Zendo Project wisely advise that the only way out is through. But I didn’t quite know what “through” looked like here. I knew it included therapy, microdosing, conversations with beloved friends, and somatic practices, but still, the months passed, and my cells remained ignited.
One of my defense mechanisms has always been to flee my body and seek refuge in the endless pathways of my mind. But thanks to my first ibogaine journey, I had started to take up residence in my body. I could feel that I wasn’t alone there. My trauma lived there too, and it was everywhere.
There was no question I needed to go up the mountain once again.
Towards the Apotheosis of My Hero’s Journey
Recounting all of this to myself as I lay in that hospital bed for a second time, I knew it was my soul that had led me back. to Beond.
Still, I was petrified.
I wrote in my account of my first ibogaine experience, “I have no doubt that the depth of my healing is a function of the completeness of my surrender.” Laying in bed waiting for my second journey to begin, I recalled those words and thought to myself, “Is there such a thing as surrendering too deeply?” I had spent literally a year surrendering ever more deeply to this medicine.
My whole life had become a bow to ibogaine.
So deep was my trust that, as I waited for my second journey to begin, I felt as though I had lashed myself to a stake, summoned a Category 5 tornado, and entrusted it to purge me.
As its winds began to rip through me, the movie Inception came to mind. Like the protagonist and his fellow consciousness explorers, ibogaine was taking me deeper and deeper into my subconscious, towards that dreaded sub-basement, to that dream within a dream within a dream. And exactly like in the movie, I noticed that, the further down ibogaine led me, the easier it was to lose track of the fact that I was in my subconscious at all. I was in the deepest reaches of my past, in a world of memories, symbols, archetypes, and dragons.
Enshrouding the sub-basement was a layer of emotion that had been imprisoned within me for over 40 years—pain that I’d felt as a young child but instantly buried. I gasped, and began to sob. At the time, I thought the tears lasted for only a minute. Then, I noticed, to my surprise, that my thick foam eye mask was saturated with tears, as though I’d left it outside in a storm. Indeed, I had. Only after my journey did I learn that I had cried for three hours.
Mercifully, ibogaine had compressed time, causing hours to pass in minutes.
With those emotions released, the fog had been cleared. The time had come for radical action. Little did I know, but I was about to reach the apotheosis of my Hero’s Journey, what Joseph Campbell called the Supreme Ordeal—the journeyer’s darkest, most dangerous trial.
My whole life was a build up to that very moment.
Alone, in the Arena, with the Shadow
Ibogaine constructed a space at the very core of my consciousness, a Roman Colosseum, of sorts. In the audience of that vast amphitheater were my ancestors, looking on, sensing with horror the shadow that was about to enter the arena with me. They recognized it, for it had dwelled within their subconscious, too. Skulking through the darkness, it had snaked its way from one generation after the next, causing untold trauma.
The gladiator match in my mind began, and I began pummeling the shadow. My fists rained down upon it. Pausing for a moment, I saw it look up at me. I saw blood trickling down its face and fear in its eyes. I knew the fateful moment had come: I needed to decide whether the shadow lived or died.
But the split second that thought appeared, an onyx bolt of lightning tore through my consciousness and annihilated the shadow.
I recoiled in terror. I had no clue what had happened. What had I unleashed? What had I done?
Beholding the death of the shadow, my nervous system convulsed and entered a state of shock that lasted for 14 hours. Two towering, foreboding gates slammed shut within me, only I was on the outside, and my feelings, my softness, and my heart—everything I love most about myself—were within.
I had been excommunicated from my inner world.
Terror does not even begin to describe the feeling. I kept thinking that I had spent all 47 of my years on this earth cultivating a loving, trusting relationship with my beloved parts, and now, they believed I betrayed them so savagely that they needed protection from me. They banished me, cast me out. There’s no way they’ll ever trust me ever again, I thought. Severed from them, how could I go on living?
I felt like a creature of the damned, and my damnation took on a biblical dimension.
I felt like Cain after the murder of his brother, punished by God: “A vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”
I felt like the Jews after their escape from Egypt, condemned to wander the desert for their blasphemy.
Seinfeld on Ibogaine
In my journal, I wrote, over and over again, “I’ve gone too far. There is no way back.”
By now, over 16 hours had passed since I had taken my ibogaine capsules. I’d been released from the treatment room, and I was alone in my bedroom.
Any emotion I tried to feel appeared as a barbed monster covered in black tar, emerging from some primordial bog, clawing its way towards me.
I tried pacing the halls of Beond, but the monsters kept coming.
I needed distraction, urgently.
And I found it, in the unlikeliest of places: I turned on the TV, and, after a moment of flipping through channels, found Seinfeld. Episode after episode, I clung to Seinfeld for dear life. A flicker of mirth came when, during each episode’s closing credits, I saw the name of a dear friend’s Dad, who was one of the show’s producers. I thought to myself, “If I get out of this, I’m going to start a band called Seinfeld on Ibogaine.”
After several hours, even Seinfeld couldn’t distract me. I went outside and began circumambulating the pool in a clockwise direction. I became the minute-hand of a clock, advancing time as I walked.
And then, at last, I understood. Thank God, I finally understood:
The black lightning bolt that had slayed the shadow had been the emergence of the rage that I’d never been able to express as a child. It had never been safe to do so.
So I’d imprisoned it within me for decades. As I’d pummeled the shadow, my grip on my fury had slipped, and my capacity to keep it at bay had been overwhelmed.
Taking the form of a stab of black lightning, my fury had emerged, and bearing the power of Zeus himself, smote the shadow.
As the truth of what had happened washed over me, I knew what I needed to do. I instantly began to shower that suppressed part of me with love. With open arms, I welcomed it into the light of my conscious mind alongside all of the other parts of me, never again to be alone.
In real-time, I felt my love transform it. I felt fury melt into healthy anger, an emotion that I had never been able to feel.
With that cascade of realizations, the doors that barricaded me from my inner world cracked open, and my inner world embraced me with open arms.
I was, at last, and for the very first time, whole.
As the sun rose, I soaked in the enormity of the miracle that ibogaine had engineered: it had set the stage for me to complete my Hero’s Journey, and it had invited my ancestors to bear witness. But my actions were my own, as was the courage to take them. I have never been more proud of myself in my life.
Deep Breaths and Soft Breezes
Reflecting on my journey, I ask myself: what does this all mean, and how does it impact my moment-to-moment experience of being human?
Well, we shall see. It’s been just two months.
But for now, what I know with perfect certainty is that the trauma is out of my body. The sub-basement is clear and empty.
The sensation is of a soft breeze blowing through a window during the golden hour.
My cells can finally breathe deeply.
My decades-long expedition into the earliest reaches of my childhood is complete. My lifelong struggle to free myself from the unhealthy patterns that originated there is over.
Yes, the onion always has more layers. But none of them are deeper or more foundational than the ones I have already peeled.
I feel as though I’ve set down a titanic psychic weight, which I hadn’t fully known I was carrying.
The Purest Distillation of God’s Love
So, what remains?
Awe.
Gratitude, of course.
And, love.
To me, ibogaine is the purest distillation of God’s love on this earth.
A fellow Beond guest had a similar truth revealed to her. She experienced ibogaine as an incarnation of Jesus Christ, a sacred conduit through whom God speaks directly.
Though my lineage is Jewish, that feels truer than true.
So what does it actually mean that God speaks through ibogaine?
To me, it means that ibogaine liberates us from the stuck energy that disconnects us from our own divinity and the broader divinity of the universe.
Ibogaine is a heat-seeking missile to the parts of our being where stuck energy resides.
That stuckness has myriad causes—pain, trauma, or simply the experience of being alive in a world where we’re often taught that to love is to take on others’ energy rather than let it flow through us.
The consequences of that stuckness are the full panoply of human suffering, Buddhism’s ten thousand sorrows: addiction, violence, hatred, and so much more. They are the root of all wars and conflicts.
With that stuckness gone, flow can return. During my second journey, I was able to identify the exact places in my body where stuck energy had burrowed, and I welcomed ibogaine into them.
When it arrived, it swept through them with pure, white light and brought with it that indescribable feeling of flow, of energy flowing, rippling, and surging, freely.
I directly experienced that forgiveness is flow.
Connection is flow.
Love is flow.
And the release of stuck energy, which ibogaine makes possible, is the doorway to all of it.
Taken together, I see my two ibogaine experiences as a single symphonic masterpiece with two synergistic movements. Ibogaine was the composer, the conductor, and all of the instruments, playing in perfect harmony.
My healing was the music it created, and the sound was pure love.
My hope is that this piece invites the reader to open those sacred ears that are attuned to only one sound and listen for whether this miraculous medicine may be calling you.
Or, calling you back, once again.
Editor’s note: The author discussed writing about his experience with Beond, but paid for the cost of his treatment and did not share this account with them prior to publication.