My brain is going to short-circuit any moment now. 

Check the lock on the front door. Check the lock on the back door. Check the lock in the basement. Touch all four knobs on the stove to make sure they’re fully turned off. Did I check the front door? I’ll just make sure. Call Dad and remind him to take his meds, lock the doors and check the stove. What if this is our last phone call? Talk with him for an hour. Call Mom to remind her to lock the doors and check the stove. Text family chat and remind everyone to lock the doors and check the stove. Okay, you can go to sleep now. Did I lock the doors and check the stove?  I’ll just make sure.

That’s my evening routine. Every day, around 7 p.m., I start to feel uneasy. My body feels out of place. No matter what I’m doing, I feel like I’m doing the wrong thing. I try to focus on what is in front of me: work, friends, partner. But the uneasiness builds into restlessness, and restlessness into anxiety. My attention clings to catastrophe like a magnet and I can’t rest until I’ve done everything I can to prevent it. It, catastrophe: Whatever my mind decides is the worst thing that could happen to the people I love most.

This cycle of fear, obsession, and ritualistic behavior is called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. At my lowest points, I find myself in a state of panic—sobbing, ticking, repeating. A faint voice at the edge of my awareness says: you know you can’t keep going on like this. And I know. In my attempt to protect everyone from everything, I’m harming myself and the people I love. 

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a brain disorder characterized by overactivity in the orbital cortex, sometimes referred to as the “error-detection circuit” of the brain. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist and author of the seminal book Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, writes that this malfunction translates into a strong feeling that “something is wrong,”  leading people affected by the condition to perform repetitive and irrational behaviors to “feel right.” This is a story of how I used iboga, a psychedelic root bark from Central Africa, to attempt to heal myself from this debilitating condition. 

I first heard of iboga in 2018 after a friend returned from a retreat. He described a 36-hour journey in which he was forced to remake every poor decision in his life until he got them all right. Amazing and terrifying, I noted.

I didn’t think about it again until four months ago, when my friend and founder of Modern Psychedelics, Lana Pribic, came to my house in Toronto after returning from her iboga journey:

“Iboga attunes you to the frequency of truth,” she told me with a calmness and steadiness in her voice that I hadn’t seen before. “And when you know what truth sounds like, you can’t deny it anymore.” As someone who struggles with a condition that blurs the lines between truth and fear, I saw iboga as a potential ally in my journey to overcome OCD.

As we sat on the floor of my apartment chatting about her journey, business, and love, there was something poignantly different about her. More than that, there was something beyond her. Something with her. I recognized it as iboga, inviting me to meet. The next day, I reached out to Levi, the Bwiti iboga practitioner she sat with, and booked my trip. Then, I started researching.

I learned iboga is a shrub that has been stewarded by practitioners of Bwiti—a belief system based on ancestor worship and animism—in Gabon, ​​a country on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa.  These practitioners use iboga during their initiation rituals and for healing, spiritual growth, and other health issues. The shrub’s primary psychoactive alkaloid is ibogaine—and it is one of the most long-lasting psychedelics, with its effects persisting for 24 to 36 hours. In the past decade, iboga has grown in popularity in the West for its incredible potential to address opioid withdrawals, granting people a chance at recovery. 

Read more: How Ibogaine Can Help with the Opioid Crisis

After booking my trip, I included a new practice in my morning routine. Every day at 5 a.m., I lit a candle and meditated to traditional Bwiti music played at iboga ceremonies to help clarify my intentions and strengthen my commitment to the journey ahead. As I committed to iboga, it, too, committed to me. One morning after my meditation, I received an email from 23andMe, a DNA testing service that traces peoples’ ancestry. It said they had new information about my African heritage. I opened the app and found what was once defined as  “broadly West-Africa” on my chart now pinpointed to the Congo and Angola.

Through my research, I knew that, although Gabon is the main birthplace of iboga, that the medicine grows naturally in the rainforest that extends into the Congo basin and Angola. In that moment, I felt iboga saying: I am natural to you and you to me. There is no need to fear. It was a message I needed, because the preparation wasn’t easy. Iboga is known for pushing people to their limits. 

On the day of my flight to Costa Rica, I experienced a dose of iboga's heavy-handed love. A series of death-related conversations I overheard at the airport sent me into full-blown panic and paranoia. I sat at the gates for an hour trying to calm myself down. The plane started boarding and there was no way I was going to get on it. In one last attempt at staying the course, I closed my eyes and asked iboga for a sign.

Two minutes later, I opened my eyes to a strange and magnificent sight. Amidst the Toronto winter, three little birds had flown into the airport. They landed by our gate and started to hop amongst people in line, making everyone laugh and pull out their phones.  The song “three little birds, sat on my window. And they told me I don’t need to worry” by Corinne Bailey Rae played in my head. Amidst this moment of collective awe,  I smiled and joined the line.

The following day, we arrived at Iboga Wellness, a four-acre property on rolling mountains filled with native vegetation, orange trees, and iboga plants in the Perez Zeledon region of Costa Rica. The next morning,  over eggs and fried plantain, Levi went through our schedule. First, everyone who hadn’t gotten an ECG at home had to do so with the local doctor. (Iboga causes cardiac arrhythmia, which can be dangerous for people with heart issues and, on rare occasions, has even been fatal, with most cases attributed to unsafe settings.) Then, each person would have a private session with Levi and the ceremony helpers to share intentions, before we reconvened at the fire to begin the ceremony.

I told Levi and the ceremony helpers that my main intention for sitting with iboga was to heal from OCD, a condition that started when I was five years old and my parents got divorced. I remember sitting in the van with all of my belongings, as my dad stood alone at the end of, what used to be, our driveway.  My nanny reached for my hand. You should say bye to your dad, you’re not going to see him very often now.”

After that, I started calling my dad every night to make sure he was okay on his own. I never wanted to be the first to say goodbye, so we developed a countdown system for hanging up. “We’ve been doing it ever since,” I told the facilitators. “In the past 2 years, my worries have intensified. Obsessions around doors being locked and stoves being turned off have resulted in a chain of nightly phone calls to family members, my dad in particular. If at any point he fails to answer his phone when I call, I start to feel like I’m drowning, stuck in the undertow of catastrophic thinking. I can get stuck in this state for several hours unable to sleep or do anything beyond obsessing and performing repetitive rituals.”

I also shared with them two other traumatic experiences that have greatly impacted my life: a history of childhood sexual abuse and an instance of kidnapping. Levi closed his eyes and we stayed silent for a moment, allowing what I had shared to be received. Finally, he broke the silence: “I think you’re going deep and you won’t need a lot of medicine. I can’t say it for certain, but I usually have pretty good intuition about these things.”

We met outside at 8:30 p.m. Chairs created a circle around the fire, eight of them with buckets on the side. Levi sat quietly until everyone took their seats. When he spoke, there was a new presence and timber to his voice. His small, thin frame got physically larger as he spoke to us about the origins of iboga.

“Hundreds of years ago, in the rainforest of Gabon, lived the Pygmy people. They were small African peoples who lived as hunter-gatherers and avoided contact with other tribes. Their profound knowledge of herbs and medicinal plants earned them the reputation of being magical. 

One day, a man of the tribe went out to hunt. He spent the whole day looking for prey, but couldn’t find any. Finally, he saw a small porcupine eating from the root of a plant. He killed the porcupine and brought it to his wife. Exhausted from the mission, he fell asleep before his wife finished cooking, so she ate the porcupine on her own. She fell sick and had incredible, strange dreams throughout the night. 

Upon waking, she told her husband about the experience. Worried about his wife, he shared her dreams with the chief of the tribe. The chief asked him to take all the men of the tribe to the place where he found the porcupine. They ventured deep into the forest, to the plant the porcupine was eating. They harvested the plant and brought it back to the tribe. The chief decided someone should try eating the plant and asked the men to volunteer. No one did.

‘I’ll do it,’ the chief’s wife said, breaking the silence. She ate the plant, fell sick, and had incredible, strange dreams where she met with her ancestors. 

After her experience, the Pygmy started eating the root of this plant to commune with their ancestors, seek spiritual guidance, and hunt. The plant was, of course, iboga.

For many years, the Pygmy kept iboga to themselves. Until one day, they decided to share it with other African tribes in Gabon. The tradition of eating iboga for spiritual growth started to spread, and people started to notice similarities in messages they received from the plant. These messages, shared and kept through oral tradition, is what we call the Bwiti.”

Levi got up and lit the Okume torch, a Bwiti smudging tool made of tree sap. Levi smudged each person and then approached us to serve the medicine.

I was first. He took a scoop of iboga powder and dumped it at the back of my throat. It was dry and sour, the ground root bark scratching my throat as it went down. After everyone received their scoops, Levi gave each person capsules of iboga, a slower-release method. The dosages varied widely. I received one, while some of my friends received as many as 20 capsules throughout the night. I realized this was a deeply intuitive process for Levi.

Read more: Ibogaine and Iboga: Traditional Use, Conservation, and Ethical Considerations

As Levi continued to talk about the Bwiti, I zoned out into the fire and quickly started feeling woozy. I raised my hand to be taken inside to my mattress on the ground. Iboga temporarily diminishes motor abilities, a side effect called ataxia, so we weren’t allowed to walk about on our own. As I laid there, I realized I still had a few minutes of sobriety in me and gave into one last compulsive behavior. I reached for my phone to check on my family, sent them a final text, and laid down, feeling deep—albeit temporary—relief.

When I closed my eyes, I  was met with a green light at the center of my awareness. It emitted vibrations, visual and auditory. The low-pitched buzz sent ringlets outward like a pebble thrown into water. I interpreted the buzz as signaling the beginning of a visionary journey, which I welcomed by allowing it to ring through me. Dizziness and motion sickness ensued. Not unfamiliar with the discomfort of psychedelic trips, I knew to relax into it, over and over again.

The buzz started to change directions, and I thought there was a bee flying around my head. I ripped off my eye mask and looked around. “Whoa, bad idea,” I thought, as the lights in the room traced, making me feel sick. With no bee in sight, I put the eye back mask on, accepting I was dealing with an interdimensional bee.

The visions started setting in more clearly. The expansive darkness was populated by lively African characters playing the music coming through the speakers. I felt like I was in the lobby of an extravagant Las Vegas hotel, with Bwiti performers in place of the usual entertainment. 

The Bwiti band repeatedly played a 16-bar loop, each time, as if, for the first time. After a few rounds, their contagious joy started to become…less contagious. I asked iboga if we could move on. No answer—and so I accepted that this could be it for me: 20 hours of Bwiti entertainment. “It’s not ideal,” I thought, “but I’ll live.”

Slowly, new presences came into my awareness. Cartoon-like fairy voices yelling: “Pick me!” They surrounded the top of my head just beyond my field of vision, and I imagined they looked like tiny flowers.

“Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

“No,” I felt my body say. Something in me knew I shouldn’t. I recalled Levi’s guidance: “If you encounter any beings during your journey, ask if they’re there to help you. If they don’t say yes, ask them to leave. There is no lying in the spirit world, so they can’t say yes unless it’s true.” 

”Who are you? Are you here to help me?” I asked the pick-mes.

“Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

No answer. No chance.

“Please leave,” I said.

“Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

Tired and annoyed, I once again accepted that I might be in for the longest, most annoying circus ride of my life.

I asked iboga for guidance, but it seemed there was no one there. It was like iboga dropped me in a video game and left me without instructions.

After what felt like hours of pick-mes and background Vegas Bwiti, I was tempted to say yes. Maybe this was my way out? What if the way out was right in my face this whole time? But, inside, my stomach twisted at the thought of picking them. So I didn’t. I continued to say no.

Suddenly, a seed of knowledge was planted in my head. Swipe them. Like swiping up to close an app on an iPhone, iboga showed me I could swipe the pick-mes away. I swiped. One pick-me swooshed away. Filled with excitement, I swiped hundreds of times and rejoiced as they left. Another seed of knowledge entered my mind:

Pick-mes are your obsessions. Your fears and worries. What you normally do is say yes. You pick them. So they come into your mind and rule you. That is the mechanism of your OCD. Intuitively, you know you shouldn’t pick them. And here, you didn’t. You resisted. Then, you swiped them away.

I kept swiping, amazed at the wisdom and tool I had received. When I swiped away the last pick-me, the Bwiti band stopped playing and the lobby scene was gone.

Like a video game, I transitioned to the next level.

Small reflective spheres floated like bubbles in my awareness. I entered the first bubble: a vibrant green landscape in an uninhabited world. I was filled with wonder for a total of 15 seconds before being pulled out of the bubble.

I spotted a new one: a colorful, psychedelic tunnel. I went in, merging with the imagery, until I was pulled back 15 seconds later.

As you can probably deduce, this scenario repeated hundreds of times. Worlds filled with people I wanted to know, nature I wanted to explore, and multidimensional patterns I wanted to admire. All dangled in front of me only to be ripped away.

Heartbroken and annoyed to be stuck in yet another loop, I was gifted a new insight:

It is not only your obsessions that trap you. Beauty and novelty make you fall into the same patterns. These, too, are distractions, attachments.

Putting my new tools to use, I swiped away the next bubble universe before I went into it. It worked. This was the test: to resist even the beautiful and desirable temptations.

The seductive bubbles started to vanish, making space for other things to appear. Things I did not want to see. When they came, I quickly shook my head, making them disappear. No, thank you. But without fail, they would return. 

A rotoscope animation of my dad’s life, from his birth to the present, formed in front of me like a rainbow. At the start of the rainbow, I saw him as a baby. Scenes from his life were displayed on the arc of the rainbow in chronological order. At the end of the rainbow, my dad was in his late years, and I knew the end was coming. Just as life started to leave his body, I shook my head once again. I can’t do this.

The scene came back around. Devastated, I knew I had to watch it. The rainbow of his life formed in front of me again—from birth to old age—and as the arc touched the horizon, he died. I felt sick and breathless, my heart crushed inside my body. But to my surprise and amazement, the rainbow continued to arc beyond the horizon, forming a circle. On the bottom half of the circle, I watched my dad’s life beyond life—his face lit from the inside, glowing with happiness.

I was speechless. I’ve always known death was not the end but seeing it embedded the knowledge in my body. One by one, I encountered all the people I love. I watched their lives and their deaths. We exchanged deep gazes and long, loving hugs. In a whirlpool of pain and beauty, iboga granted me another insight:

Even these images are just the thoughts in your head. Once you accept them, you no longer need to immerse yourself in them.

I swiped, and death went away. I knew now, the way out was to accept my thoughts, then swipe them away. Iboga was testing my ability to stay focused. To not be distracted by noise. To stay attuned to the frequency of truth.

I swiped until the last image was gone. All that was left was the interdimensional bee, the one from the beginning of my trip. I took a deep breath and swiped the bug. Silence. Nothing. I floated in infinite peace. The ceremony was over. 

For the next seven hours, I sat in my bed facing a 180-degree view of the mountains, fluttering between a meditative and unconscious state. As the medicine started to fade, a heavy and tangled yarn of sadness lodged in my chest. I left my room in search of comfort.

James, one of the medicine helpers, was playing guitar in the common area. I sat with him and listened to the angelic, Spanish-sounding arpeggios. He asked me about my trip.

“I know we’re supposed to have another ceremony in two days, but I don’t know how I could possibly do that again. To be honest, I don’t know how I’m here now. It was excruciating and exhausting. I feel like I barely made it out.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I bet you if we asked everyone here if they wanted to do it again, 90 percent of people would say ‘no.’ Do you know what this day is usually called?”

“No.”

“Grey day. It’s common to feel sad and confused,” he comforted me. “It sounds like iboga showed you exactly what you needed to see, so who knows, maybe you don’t need to do it again. But you just came out of a really deep and intense journey and you haven’t slept in over 24 hours. Try not to make any decisions right now,” he said lightly.

The following day, I woke up with the birds and ran downstairs to work out, feeling strong, powerful, and full of life. “James was right,” I thought.

We had breakfast as a group and then went on an excursion to the beach. We talked, swam, and basked in the sun until late afternoon. Being sober was so nice.

I was standing in the ocean looking back at the shore when it suddenly hit me: “I think I can do it again.” I chuckled at the extreme change in heart, less than 24 hours later.

Ahead of the second ceremony, I completed my OCD checklist early to prevent added stress. But, as nighttime approached, anxiety sunk in and the mere thought of eating iboga made my whole body choke. 

The flow of the night was the same. Levi talked for a bit, smudged us, then went around to serve the medicine. This time, I was last. As he stood in front of me with a spoon full of bark, my throat closed and I started to cry. “It’s for your own good,” he said calmly. “This medicine has never hurt anyone.” I breathed in deeply, trying to calm myself down.

“Don’t worry. I’ll give you less,” he said. I opened my mouth and washed the bitter earth down with kombucha.

As I settled into my mattress, iboga’s presence inhabited my veins, my skin, and my nervous system. Like an MRI, it scanned my body, stopping and sending vibrations into specific areas. After spending a few seconds in one area of my body, it continued on. A good amount of time was spent on my brain. Scanning, buzzing, cutting, healing. Breaking neural pathways of OCD and allowing my mind to regain flexibility.

There was no fear, no gruesome images of death, no loneliness. After the procedure, iboga bathed me in an ocean of love. From this ocean, emerged the spirit of tenderness, a glowing purple figure. Tenderness taught me to speak lovingly to myself and apply physical touch to regulate my nervous system in times of acute stress, a refreshing departure from my usual tough-love approach. This therapeutic experience lasted until morning—and I returned to my room feeling cared for like a child.

I woke up light and free. The night before, I felt iboga break the inflexible brain patterns that enslaved me. Without them, it would be easy to say no to my obsessions and resist the compulsions. Maybe, I thought, I’d have no obsessions at all.

But nighttime crushed my hopes. My youngest brother was out with his friends and anxiety around his safety sent me into several checking rituals. I tried to self-soothe like tenderness taught me: speaking gently with myself, caressing my own cheek, and playing with my hair—and, although this felt nicer than how I would have treated myself before, I was up worrying until my brother got home at 4 a.m.

I felt absolutely defeated. Like I was given a taste of freedom, only for it to be ripped away. I spent the day at the beach, surrounded by beauty and incredible friends, feeling like a failure. In the evening, after we had returned home, I sat in the common area with Chad and told him what had happened.

“I feel like I messed it all up. All that work for nothing.”

“You didn’t mess anything up. This is part of the healing. I know it would be nice if iboga fixed you up in a night, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t really happen. Iboga doesn’t heal you, it shows you exactly what you need to do to heal yourself. Now that you know the path, you have to walk it.”

Chad was right. Iboga gets us the job. But it’s up to us to go to work every day.

So I’ve been going to work. It’s been one year since my ceremony and even though I’m not “cured,” I've made incredible progress. In the summer following my iboga journey, I skipped my phone call routine for the first time in two years. I went to Burning Man and I had no contact with my family for a week. I was okay. And better yet, they were okay. When it comes to OCD, the biggest difference between pre- and post-iboga is the amount of energy that I have to dedicate to healing. OCD is an exhausting condition. It ran me into the ground. Any energy that wasn’t taken up by my job was spent on running scripts and lists in my head.

I still have those same scripts and lists, but it’s as though iboga gave me a much larger tank to run off of. I now have the energy to dedicate to actively trying to heal my OCD. And the progress, albeit slow, is visible.

I’m currently sitting in my bed at 9:45 p.m., searching for a conclusion to my story. Even in this moment, as I’m writing, I feel the urge to go downstairs and check my stove. But I checked it before coming into bed, and once is enough. So, for now, I’m closing my eyes, taking a deep breath, and swiping it away.

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