First flood
I did my first flood last sunday . I did it for cigarette addiction and mental health issues
i've been stuck on and shuffled about various ssri medications for the last few years , but my
mental health issues - chronic anxiety , obsessive thinking, depression- date back to childhood.
I did have a fairly serious alcohol dependancy , binge drinking mostly , and would abuse drugs intermittently
, normally when i was drunk , but i managed to knock this on the head about 7 months ago, and don't really
have any difficulty with it anymore. Cigarettes are the real killer for me ; they feed my anxiety and depression
but also seem to be the only thing that alleviates them as well . Its a pretty shitty situation , and i as ridiculous
as it may sound , it has driven me right to the edge of suicide , cigarettes! I do feel pretty stupid saying that
but its the truth of how the addiction has affected me; especially on a forum where people are struggling against
heroin and opiate addiction, but i suppose suffering is relative , and addiction.
Anyway i flooded with 4 grams of TA on sunday . The TA is apparently not as strong the stuff you can get from iboga world
and my dose was probably closer to 3 grams , from them. It seemed plenty ! I haven't stopped smoking, in fact , about 8 hours in i had to smoke a cigarette , the craving never left for a minute, and i continued to smoke through the following days. I am not ungrateful though! and i didn't expect Iboga to magically dissapear my compulsion to smoke - i did expect it to take the edge off though, which it didn't- It was a very humbling experience, terrifying , humbling and beautiful, also quite funny to, which i wasn't expecting. I saw some pretty screwed up stuff; it was a bit like having a mental enema ; all the media crap, the noise of my own mind , basically all the junk i had been subjecting myself came pouring out as this kind of mental sludge. And it goes on and on ...... and on.
It didn't nescessarily show me anything i didn't know; like , for instance, the root of all my fear and misery , is this inability to accept death . Iboga didn't give me any consolations about death , or the realities of human life; in fact it seemed to parade around in front of me quite explicitly showing me how depraved and sad a lot of human life is , the suffering involved , the bodily decay.... What it did do though , was open up the possibility that i could be more honest about my fear of death- and life- and not isolate myself so much ; we only have each other in this human game, was its main message , and you should never reject that, it just causes further pain. There is a dignity to human life amidst all the suffering , and that is precisley accepting suffering and death but trying to do so without fear - as much as possible- and showing as much love and understanding to your fellow beings along the way; we're all in it together basically.
Cigarettes continue to bother me though; and i don't think i'll get any peace of mind until i quit, which i hope i will do eventually.
I really want to flood again ! if you'd asked me at about 12 -30 hours i would have said i'd never take iboga again, but now, i want to try again , i feel a great deal of psychotherapeutic value is in this plant, even if my cigarette addiction has to be tackled some other way . it has certainly 'openned me up' in some way , although there is a long , long way yet to go; i only think another flood in say a year would help a great. Also my sitter was excellent , i really thought i'd lost my mind at about 30 or so hours , and if it wasn't for someone experienced and calm i think the trip could have turned unpleasant very quickly.
ok thats it, good luck to everyone trying to work with this wonderful plant