062 | 6 Months Post-Iboga: My Integration Process & 10 Ways My Life Has Changed
“What Iboga taught me is that there’s no one else I’m supposed to be, and that my life is a gift.”
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It’s been six months since I experienced Iboga and to say life is different is an understatement. Iboga was the line in the sand for me.
In short, life is better, simpler, easier and happier. In today’s episode, I am exploring 10 ways that my life has changed after Iboga. I am also letting you in on how the integration journey has been for me.
In this episode, I talk about:
All the ways I have simplified my life
How I am connecting with nature and letting it guide my life
The pressure is off; I can just be myself
How my relationships have improved and changed
Going from spiritual seeking to seeing
Increased self worth and becoming ready for love and partnership
How my relationship to my mind and thoughts has improved
“I now know that there are many things in the spiritual realm that I, as a human being on Earth am not supposed to know. It’s okay to sit with the unknowing, but I do know that I’m here on this planet having this experience as a human, and I know that I wanna enjoy this experience.”
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“I just sleep a lot more now and I don’t feel guilty about it. The pressure is off to be this wellness superstar that does it all before 7:00 AM and I’ve been striving and trying to be that for my entire adult life. And that’s just done. That’s over.”
Where to find Lana:
I was introduced to psychedelics in my early 20s within rave culture, and few years later I began to use plant medicine ceremonially.
Many circumstances aligned leaving me shattered, and I began the journey of putting myself back together. Plant medicine & psychedelics saved me from depression, anxiety, and a life of feeling unworthy. This is now my life’s work and I have devoted myself to sharing psychedelics and plant medicines with others because I have personally experienced how effectively they can catalyze growth, healing and connection.
This idea for Modern Psychedelics came to me during a journaling session in early 2020. I was learning so much about psychedelics at the time (while experiencing the benefits firsthand), and I had a deep desire to talk about these topics with people in the field. Upon launching the Instagram community, the page grew tremendously over a short period of time and continues to have high levels of engagement.
I am a 3x certified professional life coach, and I work with people who want to better their lives by deeply integrating insights from their psychedelic experiences. I believe that we don’t have to spend our entire lives healing, and that the purpose of life is to live in the present moment.
Looking for a professional coach to support you on your psychedelic path?
Look no further! Along with being the host of the Modern Psychedelics Podcast, Lana is a 3x certified professional coach who works with people on the psychedelic path.
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Lana Pribic: Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm really looking forward to today's episodes. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about what life has been like after Iboga. It's been more than six months now, and I think. Often we like hear about what people's life changing experience was like, but then we don't actually know what.
Happened after, like how long it lasted, things like that. So I think it's important to do, and I think I'll do these more often, six month integration check-ins to give you guys updates about how these experiences that I've been having have actually impacted my life in the long term. So as I said on the date of recording this, so it's early June, it has been over six months since I sat with Iboga and my life changed.
I can honestly say now that. This Iboga experience was a definite line in the sand for me, and in today's [00:01:00] episode, I'm going to reflect on exactly what has changed for me, how I'm a different person, and how life is just different.
Iboga is the medicine where the , gifts just keep on coming. The integration process for me was incredibly beautiful and it lasted a really long time, and the medicine like stayed with me for a very long period of time.
It's hard to. Qualify and quantify just how transformational it was. But here are a few of the transformations and gifts that I received from this medicine. I'm gonna outline 10 ways that life has changed for me.
So number one. Is truth and simplicity. So one message that Iboga teaches people again and again is to simplify.
And I have personally simplified so many things in my life from phone apps and social media platforms to my diet and exercise routine to [00:02:00] my mind and the way that I think about things, that's the most important.
One thing is like I no longer feel the need to have these like elaborate mourning routines that were actually draining my energy.
Like I was over complicating my life in these ways by adding so much in, adding so much extra weight that didn't need to be there. But once I could see the truth from the iboga medicine and understand the resonance of truth, life became a lot less confusing and easier to navigate and it. It not only took out the trash, but it emptied the trash can and gave me a fresh start and I got to decide like what I wanted to put in.
So I basically immediately scrubbed my social media account that I followed. I unfollowed like every new age spirituality account that I was following. One of the other ways that I've simplified my wellness is that I just sleep a lot more now and I don't feel guilty about it. I think we live in this like culture of like [00:03:00] shame around how much we sleep, but I've realized that like sleep actually gives me a lot more than like elaborate morning.
Routines and like the pressure is really off to be this like wellness superstar that does it all before 7:00 AM and I've been like striving and trying to be that for my entire adult life. And that's just Done. That's over.
It's also a lot easier for me to make decisions and to act on my choices now.
So number two is nature. I've always loved, okay. I haven't always loved nature that's alive, but I think I've gotten more and more in touch with nature as I've gotten. Deeper on the path with psychedelics. So that's been a part of my journey for a long time. Nature and connection to nature. But Iboga showed me that nature is literally the answer to everything and all of my questions and problems.
And I talked about this in my episodes about Iboga. So part of this is [00:04:00] Because humans, us humans are from nature. We were created from nature. So to allow the laws of nature to guide me is a way to live a very thriving, abundant, and beautiful life. So the more connected I am to nature, the better my life will be.
That's how I feel after Iboga. And this is expressing itself in so many different ways. Being more and more in tune with nature is really important to me. So I'm getting outside a lot more, and being much more mindful of the foods that I eat. Even just like working with medicines in different ways and allowing for more space between the experiences.
So number three, I love this one. I feel like I can just be me. I feel like I can just be myself. I went into Iboga really uncomfortable with myself, especially in regards to my physical appearance. What Iboga taught me is that there's no one else I'm supposed to be, and that my life is [00:05:00] a gift.
I learned through my journey with Iboga that the reason my soul actually separated from me in the first place was because I didn't keep anything between me and my soul. I was outsourcing all of my power to everyone else. I was asking everyone else for their opinions instead of checking in with myself about what my opinion is.
I was trying to be like everyone else because I didn't feel like I was good enough. And I'm saying this all in laughter and lightness right now. But while I was actually living in that place, it was not light and it was not easy. But on the other side, now I'm, it's just pretty simple. I'm just happy to be who I am and to continue exploring who I am and these like deeper layers of who I am and what I'm about and what gets me ex excited and following that.
And yeah, there's just, there's no one else I would rather be than myself. There's no one else I can be other than myself. So yeah, pretty. Simple, but also very embodied.
[00:06:00] So number four is improved relationships and family relations. So my relationship with my dad was a huge source of stress for me before Iboga.
And while I didn't get the healing that I wanted with that within the Iboga retreat, it was about a month after when I was still really deep in the Iboga medicine. I was at home one night chilling. I like. Smoked a little bit of cannabis. I was like making a dinner, had like music playing totally relaxed out of the mind, and all of a sudden I like healed my daddy issues.
It was crazy and I just had this like realization. I had this vision in the Iboga ceremony of my dad and I didn't really understand it. And then in this moment when I was just like out of the mind, I understood what that vision meant. And from that understanding, I actually understood that the root of my problems with my [00:07:00] dad was that we are never able to see eye to eye, and that I'm like basically treating him the way.
I don't want him to treat me. So I. Judge him so much for the way that he lives and the decisions that he makes and how he chooses to live his life. But that's exactly what I don't want him to do to me. But he does that to me. So it just made no sense and I realized that like the healing is in actually just like loving him and accepting him as who he is.
And this is still something I have to continue to practice and do, but at least, I got the healing that I wanted. And yeah, there's a lot more I could share on that, but some of it's pretty personal. The key here is that about a month after the Iboga experience, I got an even deeper level of insight into my problems with my dad.
And right now my relationship with my family, especially [00:08:00] my father, is completely different. It's just a lot more peaceful. We don't argue anymore. I'm learning just to accept him the same way that I want him to accept me. So yeah, it's huge. And like family is also one of the most important things to me in my life right now. And that definitely wasn't the case before Iboga.
And I'm just like, really thinking about taking care of my family building. My own family one day and taking care of my own family one day.
One way that this integrated was I was doing my childhood photo albums one night after Iboga. And I was basically taking them out of the old albums and putting them into this new, beautiful, big one.
And it was a way to like really honor my childhood and to honor myself by putting these photos in this beautiful big album and showcasing them in the nice way. And this was a really emotional and intense experience for me. I. Felt like I was seeing these photos of myself for the very first time. I felt like I was [00:09:00] seeing myself as a child for the very first time.
And yeah, it was really beautiful. Something definitely shifted within me after Iboga in the way that I relate to my childhood, my family, and my inner child. And that area of my life is just a lot more peaceful now.
So number five is clarity. So Iboga is a hunter's medicine in Africa, iboga is used in smaller micro doses on hunts. It makes your hearing and your vision a lot sharper. So in Bwiti the cultural tradition that kind of underpins the Iboga medicine, they say that the two most important things in life are knowing who you are and knowing what you want in life.
So knowing who you are and knowing what you want in life. Iboga really helped me to see who I am and what I am. And. What I am not. [00:10:00] And because of that, it's been a lot easier to focus on what I really want rather than what I'm supposed to want. And I'm at peace knowing that I'm taking steps every day to create the life that I want for myself.
I know that I'm like on the hunt for what I want in life, and there's. Again, a lot of peace around it. Like I don't feel rushed. I feel really confident in myself. I feel really confident in the steps that I'm taking every day and the life that I'm building, and I've really been able to release this like pressure to have it all figured out and to have it all here.
Now I know that, you know the beauties and the journey, but. The clarity piece, like I wouldn't even be able to be taking these steps with such confidence if I didn't have the clarity around what those steps were. I think when we are like confused or when we are maybe doing [00:11:00] something, we. Think we should be doing or doing something for reasons that aren't like really aligned with who we are.
It can be really hard to take action on those things. I see this a lot with coaching clients and in the coaching container, just like getting really clear on like where is this desire to take this action coming from? Yeah, the clarity has been really beautiful.
Number six, I feel like my spiritual seeking has gone down a lot.
A lot. I. Used to be a seeker and now I'm a seer. So I dropped the K from seeking. I think Iboga really simplified my spiritual journey. I feel like I used to be this like spiritual mutt. I was just like literally a mutt like a dog. Just like if you can imagine like a mutt, like dog on the street, like just like looking for food and like looking everywhere and like just like confused and not knowing, like that's literally who I was [00:12:00] with my spirituality.
Just searching for answers everywhere outside of myself trying to ascend out of this reality. Now we know how much I like love being here on Earth and how much I love Earth. I've really embodied and taken on a lot of the Bwiti teachings that were taught to me during the retreat.
And the Bwiti tradition's really experiential. It's experimental. We're taught not to take things that we read or hear at face value, but to confirm things for ourselves. So I now know that there are many things in the spiritual realm that I, as a human being on Earth am not supposed to know.
I'm simply not supposed to know what happens after death. Nor will I ever know what happens after death. It's literally impossible to know what happens after death. Sure. We can [00:13:00] speculate and theorize and all those what are they called? The people almost die. Near death experiences. Yeah, all those near death experiences reports like maybe, but how can we actually ever really know until we can confirm that for ourselves?
So that's one example to one of those big spiritual questions that I think if I kept going down the path I was going down, I would've gotten completely lost and absorbed in that. And now I'm just like, I'm not supposed to know that. I'm never supposed to know that it's okay to sit with the unknowing, but I do know that I'm here on this planet having this experience as a human being right now with all of my senses, and I know that for a fact, and I know that I wanna enjoy this experience.
So yeah, my spiritual seeking is just like really chilled out a lot. I'm just like, Wanting to be a human right. It's not that I don't believe in [00:14:00] spirit. I absolutely do, and I'm highly driven and motivated by spirit. It's just I'm not so lost in it anymore.
Number seven, I'm ready for love. Like I'm so ready for the first time in four years, my heart is like open to falling in love again and open to partnership with someone.
I really know my worth now. Like I know my worth. I know what I have to offer. I know what I want, and that's the most important thing. I know what I want in a partner, and I'm no longer willing to contort myself or sell myself short in order to be with someone just because you know they're gonna.
Raise my self-worth. This is a pattern that I used to have in past, not even romantic relationships, like in friendships too. I literally used to surround myself with people because they elevated my [00:15:00] self-worth and to, feel complete in some way. And I don't, I'm not seeking that anymore.
Like I feel complete in myself. I feel complete in my soul. I feel connected with my soul. I just, I love and appreciate life so much and I just wanna share it with someone else. So something that actually happened after Iboga, I ran into my ex for the first time after three years of no contact, and we had an amazing, beautiful conversation where I got a lot of closure and like fucking, of course this happened right after Iboga, but.
I think like since I was so attuned to truth in that moment, I was able to hear his truth from him for the first fucking time. That was like beautiful because it allowed me the opportunity to change the story. So I was able to change the story from I wasn't [00:16:00] lovable and this person didn't love me to something that was actually more true.
And that was like incredibly healing. And now as a result, it's becoming very clear to me that the next step, the next like school for me, the next phase of my evolution is in romantic relationship. I feel like I've taken myself very far on my own and I'm ready to grow with someone else now and just go really deep in love with someone.
Number eight. Decreased mental clutter and more presence, decreased mental clutter and more presence. So my relationship with my mind has changed for the better. There's a lot more peace and spaciousness, and I can relate to my thoughts as thoughts, not the truth. So in Bwiti, we confirm truth through our six senses.
Thinking thoughts is not a sense. Thoughts are not a sense, thoughts are not [00:17:00] real. So I know that the mind is a tool for me to use, but it's not my master and I'm noticing that I can more easily see thoughts as this like they just don't have as much power over me anymore. Whereas, Oh my gosh, like five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, I was completely convinced that if I had a thought it was true.
And if I had a thought, that created a feeling within me that it was true. But in Bwiti, we're taught that we confirmed truth through at least three of our six senses. So having a feeling or a sense about something is not enough to confirm it as true. So that's something that's really helped me to just like ground down into reality.
The voice in my head has changed. I'm a lot kinder to myself. I feel like It's not I feel like that voice that [00:18:00] used to never shut the fuck up is gone. There's not like agony in my mind anymore. So yeah it's all good up there. I feel like really mentally the best I've ever felt, which is the whole reason why I embarked on this journey with plant medicine was to address my mental health.
And I can honestly say like my mental health is incredible now as someone who used to really struggle with anxiety and depression.
Number nine, happiness.
I would say like happiness and peace. So cuz sometimes even when you're not happy, you can still be at peace with not being happy. It's something that I'm learning right now, but I'm just the happiest I've ever been. Right now. I'm just like embracing all of life's experiences. Even the ones that you know, are more challenging, they just, I don't know, they just don't feel as challenging anymore and.[00:19:00]
It's funny, I think this kind of ties into the simplification point that I made earlier, but a lot of the things that I spent my entire life thinking would make me happy have fallen away. And I've realized that isn't the key to my happiness, and I'm really learning to find joy in everyday life and to enjoy every moment and to like simply just enjoy.
Being alive. Do I sound like I'm like on L S D or something right now? Cause I'm not. I swear I'm not. This is just my life now. Like I'm actually just so stoked about waking up in the morning and living another day. I don't know. Is that what happiness is like? Is that what happiness is? I don't know, but all I know is that I'm just like happy to be alive on such a beautiful planet.
And I just look for every opportunity [00:20:00] to find gratitude. I think Ayahuasca showed me like inner peace is the most important thing in your life and nothing should like, Take you away from that. I was like, I knew that, but I didn't have the tools from Ayahuasca to actually live that.
And I think the Bwiti way really helped me implement that.
So the last thing I wanna touch on, there's so much more but intuition. So intuition for me is understanding. The frequency of truth, and I have a much greater access to that. I think my friend Victoria, who got me interested in Iboga, said it the best.
She said, there is a frequency to truth, and I just understand that now I understand when something is like not on that frequency and when something is. [00:21:00] Iboga is truth serum and it helps you understand that. So I don't spend as much time going back and forth anymore. I'm able to take much more decisive action because I'm not confused and not agonizing over things in my mind.
And even during coaching calls with my clients, I feel that I have a much greater access to intuition. And into sharing any insights that are coming through for me during our calls with them. That's not at all to say that like in a coaching session, everything that I say is truth. That's.
That's not what I'm saying. That's not the way it is. It's just that I'm able to really feel into a different like level of understanding than I was able to previously. I just feel like I'm not in my way anymore. I think if I had to summarize everything that I just said, I just, I feel like I'm not getting in my way anymore and I can just.
[00:22:00] Live the life I wanna live. So yeah, I think that's a great way to summarize it. So there you have it. The 10 things that have changed in my life since Iboga.
So if you guys are thinking about this medicine, Go back and listen to episode 45 and 49 if you haven't already. Or maybe you wanna revisit them.
That was when I shared my trip reports. There's an interview with Levi that you can go listen to and another one coming up with him. And I also recently wrote a full review blog post on Iboga Wellness Center, which I'll link.
In the show notes. All right, you guys. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. If you wanna leave a review of the podcast, I would absolutely love that It helps so much. If you leave a five star rating and review on Apple, please screenshot. You are rating and either di yam it to me on Instagram at modern psychedelics, or send me an email of the screenshot hello modern psychedelics.net, and I would love to [00:23:00] send you the modern Psychedelics integration journal for free.
All right, take care. Sending you lots of love. Bye.
