The Day I Was Lobotomised by a Plant
15 minute read
Much has been written in recent times about the benefits of psychedelic/oneiro genic plant medicines in treating addiction and promoting psycho-spiritual development. However, there is one such plant medicine which has, unfairly if not surprisingly, received a bad rap: ibogaine, an alkaloid extracted from the West African shrub, Tabernanthe Iboga.
This is not a scientific paper. This is not a piece aiming to mythologize ibogaine as a one-stop miracle cure for addiction. It is, quite simply, an account of how ibogaine rewires the brain.
Administered at a holistic detox clinic in Portugal—Tabula Rasa Retreat—my ibogaine treatment afforded me a pain-free detox from opiates, giving me the psychological insight needed to curb my addictive impulses.
In other words, this is a piece about the day I was, for all intents and purposes, “lobotomized” by a plant.
What Is Ibogaine?
Among the Bwiti tribes of Gabon, its native soil, psychoactive plants such as the Iboga shrub have been used for centuries in shamanic and initiation rituals.
Ibogaine is one of the naturally occurring alkaloids found in the root bark of the Tabernanthe Iboga shrub.
Often confused as a psychedelic, it is in fact “oneirogenic,” which means the nature and clarity of its visions are quite different to those of say, ayahuasca or psilocybin or 5-MeO-DMT, where reality distorts, and one sees sacred geometry and mandalas in the mind’s eye.
Once ingested, one slips into a state akin to lucid dreaming for the better part of twenty-four hours, where, upon closing one’s eyes, one experiences hyper-realistic visions drawn from one’s own subconscious.
Ibogaine lends itself particularly well to treating substance abuse issues, PTSD, and mental health issues such as anhedonia and chronic depression because, psychologically, it goes straight to the core of one’s traumas, providing deep insights into one’s addictive impulses.
Biologically, it provides a pain-free detox from opiates, cocaine, crack, and methamphetamines in a way no other medicine can: after a mere forty-eight hours, an opiate addict will emerge from treatment with virtually no withdrawal symptoms.
Even though scientific research is still at a loss to explain how ibogaine rewires the brain, here is what is known. It resets the dopamine and serotonin levels back to normal pre-addiction or pre-depression levels, and for months afterwards, keeps drug cravings at bay, giving addicts a window of opportunity to re-structure their lives.
Illegal in most countries, the issues which the scientific community raises regarding the use of ibogaine is that it can lead to potential cardiac and liver complications.
Ironically, so can benzodiazepines and opioids, yet they are legal on account of their addictive nature and gargantuan Big Pharma profit margins.
What mainstream science neglects to say out loud about ibogaine, is that those complications will only usually occur if you previously had any liver or heart issues to begin with, and you undergo treatment without medical supervision throughout.
In this respect, Tabula Rasa Retreat has all its bases covered. Set in Portugal, where drugs were decriminalized in 2001, and with the client’s safety as their prime concern, they have a full, ACLS-trained, in-house medical team, equipped with state-of-the-art ECG monitors and defibrillators.
Clients are asked to provide a Comprehensive Metabolic Panel (CMP) blood test, a Diagnostic Resting ECG, as well as an exercise stress test, to show how the heart behaves when in strenuous activity. Only if no issues are revealed by these tests, and if the initial ibogaine test dose reveals no further complications, can one be admitted for ibogaine treatment.
Wiping the Slate Clean
I first heard of Tabula Rasa Retreat (meaning “clean slate” in Latin) through a high-school friend of mine, Sebastiano. His older brother, Alvaro de Ferranti, had founded an innovative holistic retreat for treating addiction back in 2018.
When I spoke to Sebastiano again casually this summer, I happened to be at the end of my tether. Though I had undergone traditional rehab in 2015 as an outpatient and was free of heroin, I was still taking buprenorphine, an opioid partial agonist.
I was employed in a horrendous, soul-killing job I abhorred, and had started drinking heavily again, regularly bingeing on benzodiazepines to curb my baseline anxiety. I was exhausted: of myself, of the struggle for sobriety, and of life in general. That was when Sebastiano suggested I get in touch with his brother.
In speaking to Alvaro, he said he needed a writer to help produce content for Tabula Rasa Retreat. I showed keen interest in finally collaborating on a project that meant something to me on a personal, creative, and professional level.
Speaking at length about my current life situation, Alvaro thought I could benefit greatly from an Ibogaine treatment, as did I. Since I lacked the finances to pay for the full treatment itself, Alvaro suggested that I help him write the full content for his new UK website.
A few months and forty thousand words later, I was brought in as a full-time member of the Tabula Rasa team and was packing my bags to go down south for my ibogaine treatment.
What Plant Lobotomy Felt Like
Settled in the luxurious, soft bed of my room at Tabula Rasa Retreat, once the capsules had dissolved in my stomach, the first visuals made themselves manifest through a corolla of light fluttering behind my closed eyelids. I was ready to feel how ibogaine rewires the brain.
A low, droning white-noise hum commenced, and I heard distant chanting. It took me a few minutes to realize that the sound was happening inside my head.
In the near distance, I started to see some discernible movement, and it soon became clear there were about five or six men chanting and doing a tribal dance around an open fire. The images were incredibly clear, crisp, three dimensional and life-like.
The face of an African shaman rose from the flames. Opening his mouth, lips drawing back and wrapping around the back of his head, the face came towards me with its giant, gaping mouth. I bolted in bed as I felt myself be swallowed.
When I came out the other side, the ship wheel hung on the bedroom wall was spinning so fast it was a blur of crackling blue light, and it seemed to come off the wall and settle horizontally in front of me, slowing down. I was now looking upon a small, circular amphitheatre with stage curtains at the back.
These two little cartoonish figures ran centre stage from each side, took a bow, and drew back what seemed like red velvet curtains. I laughed and whispered “wow!”
A small hole opened in the ceiling of my room, which I could somehow see through closed eyes, and these lines started coming out of it. I shuddered in anticipation, not knowing what was coming for me.
They seemed to be roots, extending all over the ceiling, and coming down the wall. They crept up the bed, and I clearly saw the soles of my feet open multiple little mouths, where each of the tendrils and tap-roots entered my body.
I could feel the plant slowly making its way up my legs, as if under my skin; my whole body rippling with electricity. I recall using my hands to check if there was any movement under the skin, and once I’d established it was all part of the visions, I put my blindfold back on and focused on the dimly lit amphitheatre.
On the left were two skeletons poised for a game of chess with a young boy, and when I willed my mind to approach, I saw that the young boy was the twelve-year-old me.
I was playing with the smaller skeleton, while the taller one loomed behind it with a menacing stoop, occasionally pointing an accusatory bony finger at the young me.
After a few moves from both of us, the taller skeleton leaned down and intervened, picking up a bishop and executing a blatantly cheating move to knock off my queen. The twelve-year-old me stood up and kicked the board up into the ether, after which a Happy Tree Friend type character carrying a scythe swooped down on a rope from the left and decapitated the taller skeleton, whose head rolled off to the side.
The young me then started dancing joyously with the other smaller skeleton, and the ship wheel began spinning so fast it created a kind of twister which sucked up the smaller skeleton despite my young self’s best efforts to hold on to it. The wheel slowed, and the image directly in front of me, on one of the spokes, presented a stunning, rugged mountain landscape.
Willing myself into the image, I flew over mountains, volcanos, swamps and dense rainforests, and was struck by an intense feeling of belonging, but also of newness—the newness of planet earth billions of years ago; a planet far before sentient life on land.
When I was airborne, I noticed I had what seemed like 360º vision in all directions at once. It was as if I was a giant eyeball which could see everything around it simultaneously; which yes, was as disorienting as it sounds!
All of a sudden, I felt myself hurtling towards a rolling, tumultuous ocean at breakneck speed, as if my whole being was a meteorite.
I hit the water’s surface with a loud smack, floating down to the ocean floor, deeper and deeper into the absence of light, past strange, Palaeozoic-era underwater beasts that looked at me with a non-menacing curiosity.
Wondering what this had to do with the origins of my pain and traumas, I heard a high-pitched whirring sound seeming to come from somewhere inside my skull and heard a series of taps and clicks, mixed with the sonic fuzz of radio static. It seemed there was a voice trying to come through the static, but it wasn’t speaking in any sort of language I recognized.
Somehow, this new language was translated in a thought that formed in my mind right after the buzzing stopped.
“You don’t need to interpret any of this right now. All you need to do is lie back and relax. Enjoy the entertainment while we clean you out.”
Feeling a wave of warmth wash over me, I felt a deep sense of love. It felt as if the plant itself had spoken to me. It knew what it was doing, and I trusted it implicitly.
At one point, I felt as if someone had plugged my brain into an electrical socket for a serious defragging. Sparks crackled inside my skull, and it was as if I could feel my synapses firing. This is amazing, I remember thinking. I was, quite literally, being lobotomised by a plant.
Over the next twenty-four hours, I travelled back in time to what I feel may have been past lives. From the dusty, sandy streets of ancient Egypt, as a farmer; to 18th-century London, as a child in an orphanage; to being part of a tribe of aborigines.
I also had a chance to be with my father, who had passed away three years ago. In a wordless language which I nonetheless understood in terms of feelings, I was told that he was sorry for the pain him and my mother had unknowingly passed on to me; that it never was my cross to bear, even though I always felt it had been.
I was also afforded a very visual, internal view of my body as I travelled through various organs; from being inside the throbbing muscle of my heart, to being projected out of its ventricle at high speed throughout the body, hurtling along with blood platelets through the vast, crimson tunnels of my veins; right down to floating in the breathy alveoli of my lungs.
Most spectacular of all visions was a glimpse of a possible future, where the Large Hadron Collider had accidentally created a catastrophe which ripped apart the entire fabric of space.
Everything in space began to be pulled into a super-giant black hole. I saw entire galaxies collide with each other to form the most incredible supernovas; the spewing corollas of hyper-giant suns snuffed out in a microsecond. Mere moments before the astounding crunch of eternity folded into nothingness, the field of vision of what I was seeing stopped abruptly, much in the manner of an old 1950s television set being unplugged, with a fading pinprick at the centre.
I blinked once. Then again. No more visions. Just like that, my plant lobotomy was complete.
Why Tabernanthe Iboga Is Called a Teacher Plant
Once fully recovered from the less pleasant effects of the Ibogaine—namely, the purging and the ataxia (intense dizziness and difficulty moving)—I felt exhilarated, completely new. In less than forty-eight hours, this intelligent, generous teacher plant had not only provided me with a completely pain-free opiate withdrawal, as it had occasioned some deep thinking.
The above account leaves much out for the sake of brevity, but highlights some of the pivotal moments, which I shall unpack here.
Regarding the vision of the twelve-year old me, Ibogaine took me back into one of my two instances of major trauma which paved the road for all my subsequent addictions and fear of attachment.
When I was twelve, my parents had a live-in housekeeper, Elisabete. Her son, also twelve, was Rodrigo (both names have been changed). Both Rodrigo and I became increasingly close friends, to the point where we became, at the time, sexually involved. For the record, it was completely mutual. That was not the trauma point.
When his mother discovered our tryst, though she concealed it from my parents, she became poisoned with a muted yet seething hatred for me she made no effort to hide when they weren’t around. Her visceral reaction and complete ban on my contact with Rodrigo deeply tainted my self-image. Soon after, they would both leave, under the vague justification of “problems back home.”
From that day on, the suffocating phenomenon of “internalised homophobia” set in, and I began to exhibit all the textbook symptoms.
It was around that time I started to binge-eat and gain a considerable amount of weight. My grades at school began to suffer, and I would regularly miss days, unbeknownst to my parents. I began to be bullied because of my shy nature and my weight. Difficulty maintaining close friendships. Negative body image and low self-esteem. Defensiveness. Shame. Constant self-justification to others. The sense that, if anything bad happened to me, I deserved it.
A second event which would set my self-hatred in stone would happen around the age of sixteen, where this time I regrettably manipulated another boy I knew into trading sexual favours for access to my computer games and my drum-kit.
I had buried this event so deep in my subconscious, that it was only shortly before my ibogaine treatment, as I was taking ibogaine tincture, that the memory came back to me in a dream. I never even mentioned it in my journals back then, where I wrote extensively, and still possess.
The thought at the time must have been: how could I, who suffered bullying, have done this to another person? For the next few decades, I would run from myself, seeking out situations which would punish me.
By my mid-teens, weed, alcohol, and LSD had become regular indulgences. Heroin only came into my life in my early twenties as a way of not having to deal with my repressed sexuality, and although I came out as gay at twenty-six, I never quite got rid of the heroin seed until the age of forty. I am now forty-six.
Ibogaine afforded me the deep insight and levity of self-forgiveness. No matter how much I wished to apologise to the boy I had so thoughtlessly manipulated, there was no way to find him or make contact. Even if I could, what would I say?
Though the past is written, unchangeable, and having done enough self-flagellation over the years, now I know—I am so much more than that one event.
After the treatment, I finally felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Quite literally, it was the weight of pain, both my own, and that which I had inherited from my family’s toxic relations with each other, which I had always tried to fix, albeit unsuccessfully. My levels of baseline anxiety and sadness were gone at last, and I felt ready to thrive instead of just survive.
As I stepped back into my life, with all its triggers and stressors, I no longer found myself feeling compelled to either drink, use benzos, or opioids. It has been two months, now, and the lightness is still present. My gratitude to Alvaro and our Tabula Rasa Retreat Team knows no bounds.
Though I am still a work in progress, I have since made key changes in my routines towards a much healthier, more spiritual approach to life. Recovery, you see, is not just the absence of drugs. It is also not just about how ibogaine rewires the brain. It is how you re-evaluate and change your life to make space for a better you.
Ibogaine, as well as other alternative plant and animal medicines provided by Tabula Rasa Retreat had also shown me that physical death is not the end; that everything in the universe is so much more deeply connected than we know.
For millennia, we co-evolved with plants, yet it only took our species a few hundred years to forget the miracle of natural healing, to lose trust in our body’s own capacity for depth, self-love and regeneration. That not everything that happens to us reflects who we are, as much as it is built on the lies we are told about conditional love. That we are, in fact, completely enough.
For further information visit www.tabularasaretreat.com or call PT +351 965 751 649 UK +44 7961 355 530