Beyond Addiction: Ibogaine’s Passage to Freedom

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Lakshmi Narayan

Presenting Lakshmi Narayan, a multifaceted visionary at the forefront of creative expression and social change. As a graphic designer, brand strategist, screenwriter, producer, and the founder of Awake Media, based in the vibrant landscape of Boulder, Colorado. Lakshmi brings a wealth of experience and passion to her craft.

At the helm of awake.net, a non-profit educational corporation (pending), Lakshmi is dedicated to amplifying voices that inspire personal, social, political, and spiritual transformation. With a remarkable portfolio spanning decades, Lakshmi has collaborated with renowned organizations such as MAPS, the Psychedelic Science Conference, the Timothy Leary Trust, and the Women’s Visionary Congress, among others.

Driven by a profound understanding of entheogens and their potential for healing, Lakshmi’s journey has been deeply intertwined with her personal experiences and professional endeavors. Through her work with Iboga/Ibogaine clinics and addiction recovery clients, she has witnessed firsthand the transformative power of psychedelic medicines.

Join us as Lakshmi shares her insights into the filmmaking process, her personal journey with the Iboga plant, and the urgent message driving her mission forward. Prepare to be moved, inspired, and awakened by Lakshmi Narayan's unwavering commitment to healing and transformation.

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George Monty

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the wind is at your back. I got an incredible show for you today with an incredible guest who's bringing a lot of love and light into the world. Lakshmi Narayan. I just want to take a moment to introduce her as a visionary filmmaker and advocate for healing with a profound dedication to shedding light on the transformative power of ibogaine in combating opioid addiction. She's crafting a documentary that delves deep into the ancient wisdom of the psychedelic plant medicine. Through her lens, she captures the poignant inner journey of those battling addiction, offering a glimpse into the profound shifts that occur within the soul. As the founder of Awake Media, she brings not only her expertise in filmmaking, but also a heightened consciousness and clarity to her work. With a mission to serve those committed to raising individual and collective awareness, Awake Media is a beacon of inspiration in the entheogenic arena. Her and her team of branding and web experts at Awake Media are dedicated to providing holistic solutions from branding and design to web development and social media management, all infused with a deep sense of purpose and intentionality. Thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm great. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Excellent. Thank you. Of course, it's my pleasure. And maybe you can, while I got to fill in a little bit of the background, maybe you could maybe just fill in a little bit more about who you are and kind of the journey that you're on right now. I think the part that everyone is going to be interested in is Ibogaine and addiction. So I'd like to just jump right into that. And so I've been a psychonaut for a couple of decades and worked with many different medicines and had healed things. And it's been a part of my journey. But Ibogaine was... sort of the last really big journey that I did in 2015. And it came into my life because I was creating a website and a brand for an Ibogaine clinic, Crossroads Ibogaine, which was started by Dr. Martin Polanco, who really has helped a lot of people get initiated into Ibogaine. And he offered me and my partner the opportunity to do a journey with Ibogaine, not a journey for addiction recovery, but what they called a psycho-spiritual weekend. So... So we said yes, being the psychonauts that we are. And, you know, we really wanted to, we had heard of it before. And the first time I heard about it, I was told that what it meant for me was liberation. The word liberation is what came, that's what it meant for me. And that was years before it actually came into my life. But I began, my journey was different. beyond amazing because they just had, you know, diagnosed that I had diabetes too. And what Ibogaine did in this fantastic, you know, inner journey, like a dreamlike visionary journey, but while that visionary stuff was happening, which was teaching me about epigenetics and healing and personal will as a really big component of or intention as a really big component of healing. But at the same time, it was taking away my sugar addiction on a physiological level. So when I came out of it, in three weeks, I was able to go on this green juice fast and I cut all carbs and I lost 30 pounds and I was able to reverse diabetes too. And to this day, I don't take any medication. I don't eat sugar, I don't eat carbs. And it's that easy. And it also made me very tuned into my body in a very grounded way. So I can kind of tell the signals that my body's sending when they're very small. I don't have to go into crisis mode or anything. And so I was like blown away when I came out of that. And I thought to myself, why did, and this is what Dr. Randall was talking about. And I was like, why doesn't everybody know about this? The whole world should know about this. It's such an amazing thing because diabetes is a slow killer. But I decided to focus on opiates because that's really the crisis. That's what people perceive as a crisis. And I didn't think that anybody would pay any attention to a thing about diabetes. And I began, you know, they would just think it was another quack plant medicine remedy or something. That's what I thought. So I thought I'm going to focus on the opiate crisis. And so I created, I started interviewing people for Iboga saves. Interrupt me at any time. Uh, beautiful. Please continue. Okay. Um, and, um, As I was interviewing people, I heard some great accounts about what happens. And these were people who had gone through Ibogaine treatment in Mexico for opiate addiction or meth addiction or alcohol or something, usually things like that, or sometimes for suboxone or methadone addiction, because many of them say it's just like you switch from one addiction to another one. which are very hard they're very hard difficult the whole journey is really um it's a journey like a hero's journey because it's difficult to do because you know you have to like get on short-acting opiates and then for a pre-treatment and then you have to go travel to mexico and you're on some you know you have to go through a little withdrawals but you have to take something else to substitute for so that you can transition taper off and And then you arrive for the Ibogaine and the Ibogaine. So it's not like, so you have to, there are, uh, how would I say it? Emotional, um, spiritual and physical challenges that you're going to have to face along the way. And that becomes part of the, that becomes just part of the journey of healing. One sec. Yeah. No problem. Hey, Yeah, it's interesting. When I think about ibogaine, I think about the way in which it changes the way you not only think about yourself, but the way you feel and how it has real life transitions. I was just kind of talking to the people a little bit, but yeah, there are different levels you go through. That's kind of where you left off right there. Right. So and that's really what the journey is. You know, if you're if you're suffering from addiction, you have some trauma. Oftentimes it hasn't been resolved and you have to. sorry okay you have some trauma that hasn't been resolved and you have to um traverse that you have to traverse that journey of healing and reconciliation and that's a part of the healing it may not happen right away right away what might happen for you is addiction interruption but ibogaine does reliably interrupt your addiction and that's really like the amazing thing about ibogaine that in one in one treatment it can interrupt your addiction to anything from sugar to crystal meth or even fentanyl well fentanyl is a difficult one because you have to taper off of it you know so anyway the ibogaine is a psychedelic schedule one substance in the u.s even though it has been known since 1962 that it can interrupt addiction. And there have been a lot of people like Howard Lotsoff, who was the discoverer that Ibogaine could interrupt heroin addiction. He spent the rest of his life campaigning to try to make it become legally accepted, but it hasn't been. And, you know, we all know the reasons for it. There's this Gordian knot of sociopolitical profit-oriented systems who kind of collude to keep it away because it's a plant medicine that can interrupt addiction, which is a $35 billion industry. Single treatment is a true threat. to those economies. So, so, you know, I'm not saying that people are evil or anything. I think there are very, very good hearted people in all of these systems, but how do you change a system? I don't know. So, but what, so what we decided to, or I decided to do when I, when I was interviewing all these people for Iboga saves, many people would say, I would love to do the treatment, but I can't afford it because it costs about $10,000. You know, it's expensive. It's a two week to two week treatment. And then you also have to have free treatment and integration. If you don't do those three things, it doesn't work. So I kind of pivoted from making a documentary and I decided to start a nonprofit. So my partner and I created Awake.net as a 501 nonprofit. We have been approved, by the way. We're not pending anymore. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. That happened last year in 21. I mean, in 21. And since then, we've been working at creating this platform and building the relationship so that we can offer this program called FEET. And FEET stands for the Fund for Anthrogenic Addiction Treatment. And what we're doing is we're inviting people who are addicted to hard addictions or life-threatening addictions, let's say, to apply for a FEED grant. And what the feed grant is, is a combination of crowdfunding. I call it crowd saving because we really need people to, so $10,000 of a hundred people gave a hundred dollars, you know, it's just like, you could, you could raise this money pretty fast. It's not gonna, it's not rocket science, but it does take generosity and it does take people being able to see the why and building credibility and, you know, building community. It just takes building community. So that's what we're doing on Awake.net, which is a combination of social network, crowdfunding platform, event platform, course. It's got a learning management system so that we can build a network of what I call mentors and masters in the worlds of addiction recovery, entheogens, Ibogaine in particular, because Ibogaine is a very specialized thing. And the people who've been doing it out there, these people are heroes, if you ask me, because they have had to go against a lot of odds to build a clinic. And there are stories of failures and people who start a clinic and relapse and stuff. And those kinds of things do happen. You have to watch out and you have to do your due diligence. So we're trying to create an educational platform as well so people know what to look out for in finding a clinic. and also make a directory of people that, you know, we have visited ourselves and know what they do. And so we're creating best practices outside of the medical system because the medical system doesn't allow it. So we're just doing it. And then we've also got a HIPAA, HIPAA compliant forms, you know, so that we can pre have like, you need to have an EKG and blood test for Ibogaine because Ibogaine, um, It's a very powerful medicine and that's why it can heal this powerful disease or begin the journey of healing of a powerful disease, it slows down the QT interval between your heartbeats during the active phase. So if you have a cardiac history, certain cardiac histories, it can literally stop your heart or create arrhythmia. And so in order for that not to happen, you have to have the EKG and you have to not take in certain patients. You can't be slippery about that line of what's dangerous but you also have to have a fibrillator and a person who knows how to use it in case something happens because no matter what um a lot of people are addicted will lie for some reason about what they're taking you know and they won't admit that they took something right before when they shouldn't have and then it creates um complications that you couldn't predict. So all of these factors come together and make it like important to pre-screen somebody, have the right equipment just in case, have access to ER just in case. And so we're looking for clinics to do all these things, but also clinics who have been doing this for a long time. Like I know people who've worked on, you know, 900 patients with no incidents and, you know, no... And they've learned how to ramp it up and have done their own clinical research to find the answers because the alternative to that answer is somebody dying. Yeah. Yeah, it's such an incredible time to see what is possible. And I'm curious, I want to go back for a minute and talk about your experience of being able to fundamentally change the way you live your life. You know, a lot of people that end up with diabetes, it's a similar thing. pattern the same way addiction is a pattern so can food be obviously sugar is a sugar is an addictive force and what what was it about the process like was it a knowing like once you came out of that process can you explain to maybe the audience what it was like to no longer crave it or did you crave it but you just had the willpower not to do it like what is that process like um So the process was basically I already knew that. Let me see. Well, that's an interesting question. Well, when I came out of it, I didn't crave carbs. So I was able to go on a green juice fast, which would be very hard to do without craving and cheating, you know, or rationalizing to yourself, which is basically what we do. And in this way, we're all addicted to sugar because we're entrained into sugar from like a very young age. But I didn't crave it. And also, as I started drinking the green juice, which is dense nutrition, and it didn't have sugar so that my body didn't have to fight it, my body started to change, my body and mind changed. and the way I felt in my body started to change fundamentally. The shape of my spine changed. Jack said, my partner said, you can have a different body now. You have a new, like it was literally like that. And so it felt so good. I had so much energy. And then the other thing is I had been taking naps for years. I didn't realize it was diabetes. I had been taking naps. And I didn't have to take a nap anymore. I have this sustained energy throughout the day. And it feels so good that I didn't crave it. And then I just didn't want to. And then what I noticed then is that when I did eat sugar, if I ate a pizza or something, even carbs, I would... I couldn't think straight. I would get a little confused, like a little brain fog. And I think what happens is that people get that and then they get acclimated to it and they get some more and then they don't even realize how much of their creative or lucid thinking capacity they've actually lost to diabetes because it definitely affects your thinking. So, and then the sugar, when you take the sugar, it gives you a little high for a moment creatively, you know, Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think it speaks to this idea of addiction or even lifestyle. And it's interesting to hear you use the terminology, like I had a new body. And for me... it brings up this spiritual idea of death and rebirth on some level. When you're, if we just look at the idea of being reborn as a metaphor, it's like you have this opportunity to live your life again. And like, when you talk about the renewing process, if I had all this energy, I was more lucid. Like that is a rebirth in a lot of ways, right? Totally, totally. In fact, We've created this program called 10,000 Rebirths. And we want to take 10,000 people. That's the number we're pushing against because 100,000 people died last year. So this is a kind of movement to that. So this is just what we've initiated. You can read about it on Awake.net, 10,000 Rebirths. It's in the menu. And we're inviting applicants to apply for the feed program. And what we're going to do is we will create these crowdfunding campaigns and then we will make partners with people who can share with their communities and start a grassroots movement. And that's exactly what I'm hoping to inspire people to join me in, you know, because it really does take inspiration. But And people who work with Ibogaine will tell you that it's worth all the trouble of taking someone through these things to see them be reborn. It is worth it. And, you know, and for myself, it was worth it because it was like getting a new lease on life. Literally, you know, that spiral of diabetes, whatever. My father died of diabetic neuropathy. So I know what I knew what I would be in for. And so that was really the big message that Ibogaine was giving me, which I'm still digesting, was about epigenetics. And epigenetics is the idea that you might have inherited some genetic imprint or code, but that code doesn't get activated unless it is in certain environments. So you can change the environment and the code will not get activated. So this is really what it was telling me. So when I started to drink the green juice, I was not giving my body substances that would activate the code of diabetes. You know, I was giving it something in the other direction. And my body was like, I could feel it. My body would just like guzzle up this juice. And basically the instruction comes from, his name is Dr. Gabriel Cousins. And he has a, I don't know if he still does. I don't know how old he is now, but he had a center in California. Patagonia and people would go there and they would spend like 11,000 dollars or something and they would have a three-week reset and it was a diet reset where they wouldn't have their normal carb things and they would drink green juice and raw food and you know he would reset their body and so that's what I did I had read about it and I and the rule the rule is really simple just Don't eat sugar. Don't eat anything that creates sugar like fruits. And don't eat carbs that convert to sugar. Everything converts to sugar. So then you're on a keto diet. And the keto diet gives you sustained energy if you read about it. The same thing. It's so fractal to me. When you're able to change your life or when you're able to change your relationship with addiction, be it with food or inner dialogue that isn't serving you or addiction on some level, and you're able to wake up from that, you change every relationship in your life. Like you, by saving yourself, you can save your daughter, your husband, your wife, your aunt, your uncle, because you're back. Like now you can become a viable part of the relationship. And when the people see that, it's like you saving, by saving yourself, you're saving the community because you realize how much more worthy you are and you have a role to play. But for some reason, you've been unable to play it. You've been sick, you've been ill. And I just, I love the way getting back to nature. be it through plant medicine or particularly in this case Iboga, is it restores your relationship to community. It restores your relationship to self. And maybe that's how we move away from this medicalized container of medicine is that we fix ourselves and then we fix our community and then the problem begins to be attacked by all of us on some level. What are your thoughts? yeah absolutely um so I that's why they call it and call the person an initiate having an initiation because the person is initiating you're initiating this movement and um In the Buiti tradition, which is where iboga comes from, iboga comes from the pygmies. It was discovered by a pygmy couple who killed and ate a porcupine who had just been chewing on this bark. And they got high and they... realized that the stomach contents had made them high and then they pass it on to the beauty people who use it as a rite of passage into adulthood so this idea of finding your purpose uh you know and orienting to your purpose iboga is like a it does it very well in fact in a lot of the Cultures and subcultures around iboga consider the iboga to be the tree of life or the tree of, you know, the tree of good and evil, tree of knowledge that is in the Bible, I guess. And so they consider it to be this archetypal tree. And I think this is a really good way to look at it, that it is an archetypal journey and it is the tree of life. And your nervous system is also like the tree of life. And that iboga is taking the energy through your nervous system. And it's just so... It's kind of indescribable. And at the same time, compared to other psychedelic medicines like mushrooms or LSD or ayahuasca, which have... A visionary aspect that kind of takes you over, you know, often. Iboga is more like a lucid dream. It's like you're having a waking dream and you feel very kind of normal. You might have ataxia. You might have a little nausea. Some people have nausea. I was lucky. I didn't have either. It takes you through, though. It takes you through into a visionary. It's called On Origin, which is a dream-like. It's a dream state. So you have this dream-like state, and then you see a series of screens. Everybody sees these screens in some form or the other. And things are being shown to you. There's definitely a feeling of things being shown to you, like sent your way. Somebody is doing the slideshow. Yeah. And it's a mystery, you know, who knows who it is. My theory is that shamans all over the world or people in altered states are able to access other people in altered states. And that's kind of what's going on. you know, in a way where it's not recognizable, but that's what's going on. But I don't know. But that's the whole metaphysical aspect of it. And our culture has separated church and state and healthcare is not a part of spiritual conversations anymore. And so the real healing that happens is that metaphysical connecting with yourself. or connecting with a higher, some people see it as a presence, higher self, not themselves, but as a presence. But either way, hey, just a second. Yeah, of course. Hey, Jack, I'm in the middle of a podcast. Can you please? All right. So anyway, thank you. Yeah, no problem. So let's see. Where was I? Where was I? You were speaking about the idea of the different screens and how perhaps what's happening is the idea of... this dreamlike state. It's like a lucid state. It's a dream state. And then we're able to see different things, but we're not exactly sure what's happening in that mind state, but we are sure that there's a fundamental change in the way you see the world. We're not sure where that transmission is coming from. And sometimes I think it's, it's the, maybe it's, it's the world talking to us. Maybe there's a language constantly being given to us by nature, but we don't have the ability to perceive it. You know, when you look at a plant and you can see it climb up and produce a flower on June 7th at 2 33 PM at a perfect angle at a 45 degree angle, like that's talking to us too, but it takes a certain state of awareness in order to comprehend that maybe these things are always here for us to see. It's just that we're, maybe we're in the wrong part of the cosmos or maybe we're, we're still children, you know, but maybe we're developing this skill where we can begin to understand the logos or the nature of language or the language of nature, maybe on some level. What do you think? Yeah. I think that's a beautifully said and, uh, Yeah, I think that that is right, that we can't always see it. But I think that on-off nature is the nature of reality. It's on-off. That's why you have this wave particle idea in physics. And we're not meant to see it all the time. And if we did see it all the time, we couldn't function in the 3D world, which is where we are in a body. And so it's a kind of blessed reality. filter we have you know to all and I totally agree with you about maybe it's happening all the time because I've often thought that that psychedelic world is happening behind my eyes all the time and I just sometimes tune into it and I'm able to step into it and that that's what plant medicines that alter your consciousness are spiritual food just like tomatoes have lycopene and it's food for the heart or you know blueberries have antioxidants These plant medicines are on the planet as spiritual food for us to evolve our pineal gland, to evolve our intuitive and spiritual, psychic, perhaps, abilities. you know, it's easy to get lost in those paths. That's not necessarily the way, but they do awaken while you, when you start to take these medicines like ayahuasca, for example, they call it telepathine. And so, yeah, it does do that. It does allow you to commune with other beings. And then after a while you find that if you're, there are moments when you're communing with your friend or your partner or, or, you know, or with someone in a conversation, you just, I'm sure you've experienced that. We've all experienced it. So, um, um, so the other piece that has come into this for me in creating the feed program, which is a nine month program called change your character. And we're inviting different mentors and masters to come in and teach portions of it. And it will, the structure is for us to grow organically as the need grows. Um, But during the nine-month program, I've been a student of the I Ching for a really long time. And the I Ching is based on the same math as DNA, 64 hexagrams with two binary pairs with like three codons. It's the same math that creates the hexagrams. So if you think of the... And then it also, the I Ching is where Leibniz, who discovered the binary code, the 0-1 binary code, which is the, you know, root of computing, got it from the I Ching. So this ancient book in philosophy is actually very relevant to our time because the other philosophical concept that the I Ching talks about is is maleness and femaleness, and that the whole world is built on this polarity of maleness and femaleness, and you need these two poles to be distinct in order for creation to happen. And we as a species are very confused about this idea right now, and it is an idea that needs to come back into awareness at a higher level of coherence with, with what we know from science, you know, and what people have known spiritually for such a long time. And so there's, so, so, you know, the, it's not, and so that's again, where your Ibogaine awakening or rebirth kind of brings you into a sense of self that is beyond gender, perhaps beyond role. Yeah. Yeah, beyond. And then you see that there is something beyond. You are something beyond that. And it's very liberating to have that understanding that you're beyond that. Yeah, there's a certain sense of wonder when you realize that you're part of the whole. You know, this wholeness. And at certain peaks of certain states, you realize that the body in which you have it inhabit is like a receiver and you're, you're playing this role. So you could see how on some level people would be like, if you feel that it's very easy to get lost in there and you kind of lose your way, but you always come back. Like you said, you can't stay at the top of the mountain, but you can get a good look for a little while and see the pathway. But then you got to come back down and start walking again, you know, on some level it's, it's interesting too. When I, when I hear about, when I hear the word initiation or when I, on some level, initiation makes me think of rites of passage. And when I see the lack of rites of passage in this world, especially in the West, it seems to me like maybe that's what's, that's what's making us sick. This, this, this, this sort of prolonged adolescence for humankind. Like we are not stepping up into the roles that were given to us for through the hero's journey or from the elders or from past societies. There's different roles people play. And especially in the West where we decided, okay, our older people are going to go to this home. Our kids are gonna go to this school and you guys are gonna go to work. Like we have, we have completely done away with, with all the rights of past. Now, maybe not all of them, but a large part of that. And I'm, You know, that has to do with food and diet and relationships. And it just seems the further we get away from that, the sicker we become. And isn't it interesting when we turn to our friend, the plant medicine, it kind of snaps us back into that idea. Right, exactly. Well, The Matrix was a movie that was talking all about that idea. Yeah, documentary, right? Right. You're the one, you're Neil, you're the one. And I think part of the problem is that that we live in a secular state and if you look up the meaning of the word secular it means the absence of the sacred so you know this is what I was talking about just a little bit before that church and state have been separated and healthcare hospitals were charitable organizations inside of churches once upon a time but then they became profit profit-oriented healthcare corporations And so the whole it's all about profit and the corrupting factor about something being about profit, especially when it's when human disease is more profitable than human health, is that that's what gets becomes the controlling narrative, if you will, of society. And so you have to change it and you can't change it overnight. Right. But you can't change it. And so that's kind of why we've created awake.net and our building community, building more than one voice talking about this. And, you know, as more and more of us wake up to the idea that you can heal yourself and epigenetics, this idea that both the I Ching and the Ibogaine has been telling me anyway, and Bruce Lipton talks about it all the time, the biology of belief. He talks about how you make your body in a certain way by how you conceive yourself and how you conceive your life and what you expect. Diagnoses very often create a pathway in the patient's mind, and the corrupting factor there is that that pathway can be enhanced and enforced because it's profitable for somebody. And it's very sad to say that, but you know, it's just human nature. You know, these things corrupt in very subtle ways. It's not like you're some evil person, you know, just placing a tiny little emphasis. So I went to see a doctor about diabetes. And when I, and I asked him, I already knew about Ibogaine and I had already done it. And I was already in my on my healing pathway, but I went to see someone just to see what does the system have for me. And I asked him, do you think I can cure my, myself? Do you think I can cure myself of diabetes too? And he said, with my help, you can. That was nice of him. With my help you can. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so anyway, I, I just, um, So for somebody who comes in with addiction, for example, like one of the interviews that I did, he was shown his death in three different ways. And the first way was he got shot in an alley or knifed in an alley somewhere. The second way was dying of overdose. And the third way was dying at a ripe old age with his grandchildren. And he was asked, which death do you want? Simple question. And there's no doubt what your answer would be there, right? But that's a wake up. And so the Ibogaine will sometimes present things to you in a way where you can't escape it. Like it'll show you the same thing over and over again. Like another person whose brother died of overdose and he found him when he was young in the barn on his family farm. He was shown that scene over and over and over again during his Ibogaine journey. And so then there's no doubt in your mind that it didn't maybe complete the healing, but it said, hey, you got to look at this. That's what it's telling you. I, that, that brings me to the idea that, you know, I read a great quote and I wish I could say the person that said it, I can't think of their name. So I can't, but the quote is along the lines of the world will continue to show you this thing until you learn from it. And I look at my life and example, I remember. And I spent a lot of time at a job that no longer served me. And it was less than who I was. And it was taking away from me all of the things that were important in exchange for money. And like, I was away from my family. I wasn't being a father. I wasn't being a true husband. I wasn't there for the relationships that deep down really mattered to me. And it manifested itself in a way that was misplaced angry. And I was unhappy. And I was, I was shown that like, what are you, how long, how long are you going to live this life? What are you afraid of? You know, but I, I see that as a screen to like, which life do you want to live? And I think all of us are presented with these screens, perhaps it's Iboga or perhaps, unfortunately it takes someone close to you dying or this alternate state of awareness that, that is thrust upon us sometimes. But, but, Gosh, it makes me want to cry when I hear the stories of them, because I really believe the world is speaking to us and it is trying to show some of us like this is the wrong way. You are doing the wrong thing. And I will present you every day with an opportunity to change. But you have to take that step. And when you see something like that, especially through an altered state of awareness where you can see yourself dying and you can see all the pain that it's going to cause. You can't erase that. Once you see that, it doesn't go away. So maybe that's sort of what gives people the profound willpower or the profound inspiration to change, or maybe the desperation to change. it's it's it's mind-blowing to me I'm so when I get to hear other people's stories like that it just makes me want to cry because I think that that's there for everybody I i think that that if you just have the courage to take that step right not everybody not everybody wants to change I know and that's why our whole thing is based on change and it's called change your character but also just to fill out the feet application trauma is going to take some focus and intention because you have to jump through these hurdles before you can because you have to, we need those things. And so not everybody is going to change. Some people are really on a suicide path. They secretly want to die because their pain or secretly or openly want to die and are flirting with death because their pain is so intense. They don't really know what to do. And plus the stigma of being an addict and the things that addiction will quote unquote make you do, you know, whatever it is that there is a lot of stigma. And so not everybody will do it. And then having a perspective on life and death, which is more expansive than the idea that you live just this lifetime, makes the whole thing much easier to deal with as a person in a body. And psychedelics can give you some good long looks at these kinds of existential questions. especially if you do it in a sacramental way. And that's sort of what we want to do. So we created this nine-month pathway. And the first thing is what we call the addiction interruption. The Ibogaine treatment is just to interrupt the addiction. It's still the beginning of your journey, but then the rest of the nine-month program is about process of refinement, of transformation, of integration, of changing your life circumstances, orienting to your life purpose, finding a pathway, and we're creating peer support groups at the same time on a way, a community of elders and a community of peers so that we can heal each other. It takes a village concept. And then we're also making alliances with places, retreat centers who have programs for people to do after, you know, after they do Ibogaine, if somebody wants to go on a, you know, some kind of a farm or a retreat, like a live work situation, anything that would be suitable for someone to go and have a way to live while they reconsider their life, because that's kind of important part of integration. And so we're inviting those alliances, you know, so just reach out on awake.net for that to happen. And I feel like the sooner the better because one person is dying every eight minutes or so right now. Do you think there's a parallel between this sort of awakened idea of plant medicine and the state of the world right now? It seems like this sort of entheogenic or psychedelic renaissance that seems to be happening, maybe it's the circles that we run in, but maybe this sort of awakening, if you will, is because we're in such a dire situation of so many people being ill. I definitely think so. I feel like one time I got this image of ice cubes. It was a really powerful image. It was during a journey. And then the ice cubes are being twisted like a tourniquet. You have to twist it so hard to pop the cubes out of the ice because they're frozen solid. And the image came to me and the message that came with that was, this is how we are. This is how the planet is. People are frozen in these positions and it's going to take a lot of torque for them to pop out of that. And that's what the crisis, and so the, yes, it is the crisis, but the crisis is also because we haven't had access to plant sacraments and to changing our consciousness in a safe environment. You know, if you're going to get arrested, it's not a safe environment. Yeah. For such a long time that the human psyche has developed a lot of strange diseases and and aberrations and, you know, focuses that are just like, not really about really far from just enjoying life as it is, which when you reconnect with that beauty and simplicity of life as it is, it, it's so profound. And, and so, yes, I think plant sacraments are here for that purpose and are having a revival for that purpose. And I feel like it's a, it's a responsibility. I was going to say duty, but it's a responsibility of those who are holders or custodians or stewards of that sacramental experience to orient it correctly so that people don't go off into, people understand that, you know, it's a powerful experience and that's why you have to have reverence for it so that you navigate it properly and um um yeah I think that needs to be communicated and you can only do that if you bring in the sacramental or sacred metaphysical religious spiritual aspect of it more powerfully front and center I love the idea of the ice. Maybe we're just coming out of an ice age, but you know what I mean? We have all these frozen ideas and we're stuck in the past and all of a sudden here comes springtime and the plants are like, hey guys, remember us? But it kind of seems like that's a beautiful metaphor. It was. I heard another great quote that was along the lines of, it was a spiritual teacher saying, and he was comparing the plant medicines to like modern sort of synthetic medicine. And he goes, you know, your drugs make you feel good and then you feel bad. Our drugs make you feel bad and they make you feel good. Kind of an interesting concept, right? Yeah, except I don't think, I don't agree that they make you feel bad. Well, they make you see, like, for some time, have you ever been, like, in a constant state of awareness and you feel, like, maybe ashamed of what you've done? I've gone through all of that, yeah. Oh, my God, I've gone through so much emotional release and tears and tears of pride and shame and guilt. Yes. feeling like bad and wondering how I could be so unconscious I didn't see this yeah I know I have but um I've also learned to reconcile and release and move through it and forgive myself because I found that that's the pathway to feel good because then then the energy and so you can think of a psychedelic experience as being a compressed version of life we're being shown everything even things normally invisible to you in a very compressed, fast way. And, um, so that you can understand how energy moves and changes in the moment. Right. Yeah. And, uh, for me, it was not a skill I had to learn. Like when I went back into doing entheogens, when I did ayahuasca, it was for me a very natural state. I felt familiar with it. I felt like I know this place. I've been here before. I know how to navigate it. And I did. And so that's why I did so many journeys. People have different proclivities. Everyone may not have that familiarity or understand what to do. But at the same time, here's the thing. You have to sort of walk in the middle between recognizing when you need guidance and recognizing when you don't as a human being. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough to ask for help. For me, it's difficult for me to ask for help sometimes. And maybe that harkens back to the idea of the ice cube, you know, like you have to melt a little bit. You have to be humbled to realize, and you shouldn't, you should be able to ask for help. Who's who out there thinks that you should have all the answers? Like that's crazy to think that, you know, like what you should do or the best way to do it. You know, the only way you know that is by asking someone who may be closer to going through it, that has gone through it on some level. Yeah. If you just think of it as levels that we're all in this, you know, different levels of evolution and there's no shame or blame in any of it. It's not like a, It's not like a race. You know, they call it the human race. The human race. Maybe it is a race in some ways. But yeah, I think we need grace, not race. Can I buy that t-shirt on awake.net? That was a beautiful one. Thank you. Yeah, I can put it up there. Yes. That would be amazing. Yeah. It reminds me of the difference between learning something and being revealed. And it seems that on some level, the way we educate ourselves now is by going and sitting in front of an authoritarian figure and learning from someone else's experience, which you can do. But on a deep level, change of awareness, I feel like some of the answers are revealed to you, like you've kind of had the the answers all along, you just didn't know how to incorporate, maybe you could speak to that relationship between learning and being revealed. Yeah, that's a great question. So I think of it as direct experience versus hearsay. When you learn something, it's hearsay. And so at some point in my own journey, I decided that, especially because I was delving into things that I'd never heard of before, like sweat lodges. Once you step into this thing, there are these certain things pathways that open up but I decided I would only accept what I experienced directly and that was the best best advice I could have given myself a best rule because you know then you can learn from people you can hear their experiences and you can say oh I didn't know that could happen and maybe that's you know that opens up a pathway for you to with something you didn't know about that you want but you also don't have to accept anything that you know like for example people will shadow experiences if you have trauma everybody has shadow and sometimes you'll have a shadow journey that you fall into whether it's in real life in some job or something or whether it's um in a in a psychedelic journey um things will manifest and it really the what you what you see them you might see things that are scary you know like demonic figures or you might see something um it really depends on your own cosmology and it's a like a like it's direct experience and but at some point you start to realize that that direct experience is somehow modulated by your thoughts when you're in a psychedelic state so if you see something scary and you panic there's some part of you that knows has enough detachment to know that if I panic right now it's going to get worse yeah And so what you have to do is what are my options? I have to relax. Oh, I have to surrender into this. And then you say, okay, I'm just going to relax because I can't, whatever this is, I don't know what it is. And as soon as you do that, it opens up. It's a panic. It opens up little curiosity perhaps, you know, and then it shifts. And then suddenly the whole thing changes into something beautiful. And that was like your little test. And you realize that there was like an archetypal test and you went through it. And so there are many such tests that appear. And so the concept of a mystery school or some kind of an initiatory rite of passage that is tailored for modern people is really what we'd love to arrive at in a little bit with what we're creating. I think you've already created it. Yeah. We have, we have, but, but, you know, there's, there's just a lot of, there's really just, there's always a lot of things to learn along the way. Of course. Hence the mystery, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It isn't. There's something to be said about sitting with difficult things. And it really gives you insight into the way not only your mind works, but that the way the world works is the shadow cast upon the world by your mind. If you find yourself in a difficult situation, the best thing to do is to not try to push it away. The things that you push away seem to be attracted to you, right? And if the thing that you want, I heard Alan Watts used to say all the time, the only reason you don't have the thing you want is because you want it. Well, if the reverse must be true too, the only reason you have that negative thing is because you don't want it. You know what I mean? In some ways, you're just inviting these things in, but through very difficult states in life, altered states of a consciousness, you begin to understand that thing. Oh, I have this because I say I don't want it, but I'm really holding on to it by saying I don't want it. It's a real fascinating way to get to understand the way your mind thinks, but you have to be willing to sit with very uncomfortable situations. They're so freeing in some ways. Yes, they're scary, but But scary is something that you're not familiar with. If you go to a Disneyland and you see this scary guy jump out at you, you can only go on that ride so many times before you know that's not scary anymore. It might get you once or twice, but I know that's kind of a meandering thought right there. But what's your thoughts on the world works the way your mind works? Well, I think there's some truth to it, but because we live in a world with many other minds, the world works the way your mind works is true for everybody. And so you live in a world that's not completely within your control. And this is why there are some things you just have to accept because you can't change them. Right. But what you can change and, um, I call it, we're all slaves to our perception. How we perceive is we're enslaved to that, but we can change our perception. So trying to find a different way to perceive something. And I think psychedelics has taught me this, that you go in, you know, sometimes you'll have some burning questions. and you go into a journey. And when you're in the journey, the burning question just seems completely utterly trivial and has no relevance for you at all, because you've transcended the identity that had that question. And so at that higher level of identity, you may have different questions or a different way of looking at the world. But once you have that, if you can bring it back into your way of seeing in the world. And that is a very doable transition. It's not, you don't have to be a shaman or a sage. You can just say, I saw in that state of mind that I could look at this thing and not feel all these feelings about it, that it was like, oh, that person was shitty to me because that's the role they were supposed to play in the big drama of my life so that I could learn this lesson about codependence or you know whatever the lesson might be there are moments where you see that there's a symmetry to the characters in your life and what happened and that even a really bad thing that happened to you kind of happened because you created it and you know it you may never even admit it to yourself but you kind of know it, you know? So we all have these private reconciliations that we do, but it's going to make you a different person in life. It's going to make you a better person. And it's going to make you a person who doesn't crave filling that empty ghost or hungry ghost or whatever, like Gabor Mathis calls it, hungry ghost in your belly with substances, with consuming things so that you can feel complete. And that's really what's going on at a very fundamental level. And so you can't interrupt addiction and expect it to last without creating a pathway for redemption to happen. And then you have to define what is redemption. And it's really what you want is you want to redeem that person back to being a functional and brilliant or inspired or whatever member of society that they are capable of becoming. And if you do that, you're going to have a more powerful society and more creative, more whole. It's like if we think of us as one body, like in a hive, if a part of it is diseased, it's affecting everything. It has to eventually. I'm curious if you could speak to the... Myself and I think a lot of people listening may have never had access to iboga or done iboga but a lot of my audience is familiar with psilocybin and I'm curious I i have this idea and I since you are familiar with both of those environments I'm curious if you could maybe talk about it or speculate on it and it's this idea that sometimes in a really high dose of psilocybin you bump up against the ineffable and it's so clear and you could you could touch it you know the idea is so clear that you could touch it and you could say it but shortly after that It's gone. And you don't even remember what it was. But it seems to me like that is a seed being planted. It was so clear you were given the idea and then it's gone until maybe a year later, something begins to manifest in your life. And maybe that ineffable is the seed that creates the change in your life later. And I'm wondering, is that something similar that happens in iboga? Iboga sounds to me to be a different mechanism of action where you're actually seeing the things in front of you. But maybe you... Is there some similarities and some differences between those two seeds being planted or the way the change happens? Well, both of them, it's an energetic shift. You suddenly have higher frequencies, higher energies running through your body. And that's what awakens the higher consciousness. So both of them do that. Both of them, in my experience, the energy shoots up your spine. And literally with both, you have it. I think with psilocybin is a little different. I've only done iboga once, so I don't know. There could be other experiences of it, but in my experience, both do the same thing in terms of helping you to transcend to a different state of consciousness or showing you, like putting you in an altered state so you can understand things that you couldn't understand before. Psilocybin... Yeah, you can definitely. And I think they can both connect you with the ineffable. That's why people become so passionate about it once they've done it. So I would not. I would just say that it's a little different. Iboga is like a grandfather. They call it the grandfather plant. And they use the roots when they're really ancient is when it has the most ibogaine in it. It's literally like this grandfather energy, like stern and senior energy. You feel it? Yeah. And psilocybin can be a lot of things. It's more playful and light. It can also be consuming. It can just be enveloping. It can be very visual and liquid. Ibogaine, not so much like that. And I have had an ineffable experience, but I've had it many, many, many times with psychedelics. And so that's what happens. When you have it enough times, you realize that that entheogen entheogen means generating the divine within that the divine is within you that's what you realize after a while it's within you and you can feel it sometimes in your pores and in your cells you can feel it radiating or you can you experience it all these ways and that's the direct experience that heals you that we're talking about And people have different languages for it. Or some people are uncomfortable with calling it God or whatever, and they call it something else. But the energy experience is the same. And it has profound effects on your understanding of who you are. and what life is. And a lot of times, you know, some of those understandings are so ineffable, as you see, that you don't talk about it. You don't talk about it. You don't know how to. But it has changed your life. And other people realize that something has changed in you. And you have a look in your eyes where you're not hungry for answers. You know, you know something. It gives me, it makes me excited. And I'm so thankful to get to hear people's experiences and play a part in hearing people's stories and just listening on some level. It's so powerful. like I believe with all of my heart, it has the power to combat the corruption of greed and the system that we're in on some level, but it's a pretty big fight, right? Like when you look at this billion dollar industry and you look at this medical container that they're trying to build around this powerful force, it can seem kind of daunting at times, right? I've been daunted a couple of times as I took this on. I have. And I've, I've seen that those were dark passages that I had to go through in order to be able to, because then I had to question my motives and whether I had the strength to do it, whether the, and every, each time I would say, okay, well, let me just open up to the next step and let me see what happens. And, you know, I think we need to have courage. that's what I think about being daunted and about doing the right thing. And the way I feel is if our governments and systems are not doing the right thing, it's up to we the people to do it. And here I've created the structure for you to do it inside of, please come. That's kind of what I'm saying is, hey, we can do this together. If you get together and if you just sign up as a $10 a month member on Awake, you're going to contribute to the feed program running running and you know we can and there's some of you will be able to give a little bit more and whatever it is the the joy of saving a life for that person for you for their family it's really immeasurable it's immeasurable and the idea that our lives are being mined for profit in a way is unsettling. And so then what you say about, you know, how do we do it? And it's daunting. I think, no, I think we need to communicate to those who are uninitiated why we are so passionate about it. What is so amazing about it? How it expands your intelligence and your own sense of life in the body and evolves you as a human being. These are the reasons why we're so passionate about it. And if you, that person who's, putting up a wall somewhere to this happening legally or in drug policy, whatever it is, or lobbyist or whatever. If you as an individual could understand the wealth that psychedelic journeys can bring to your life, you're going to want to do it. It's not about converting you to Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity or psychedelism even. And it's not that, it's that no matter who you are and where you are, these medicines will open doors for you inside your own self and allow you to have richer relationships, allow you to heal things that may be impossible in the current healthcare dynamic to heal and allow us to make a better world. It's really quite simple. it's not rocket science, but, um, we need a lot of media about it. And that's what I realized is that, so I've again, for example, is still banned in library, uh, searches, you know, lots of college because it's still on some band list of scheduled substances. If you go on AI, like, uh, Bing.com, any of these AI platforms, and you try to create an image using iboga, psilocybin, or any of these plant medicines, it's banned on AI. So that tells you that no matter how we, who are in the psychedelic frontier, think that it's this renaissance happening, we've got a long way to go to actually touch a lot of people. And so I urge people to sign up on Awake and you can blog from your profile. And if you have things to say about healing and about psychedelics or about transformational wellness or all the things related to that, culture, politics, spirituality, I think it touches every part of life. Please do it so that we can collectively have a collective voice that is transformative because that's what it's going to take is a collective voice. Um, so anyway, I think awake.net is trying, we want to do a lot of things because all those things are necessary for that kind of change to happen. And, um, the first thing we're looking for is people to apply for the feed program and people to donate to the feed program. Those are, those are our two, um, calls to action, or if you know somebody who is a philanthropist or corporate donor who might be inspired by what we're doing, we ask you to please reach out. Reach out to me, lakshmi at awake.net. The site is up. It's running. It's beautiful. Is there a scheduled forum on there? I know that anybody can go on and sign up and start blogging and become part of a community. I can see it hopefully already growing after this podcast. Maybe you could speak to some of the other things that are happening. I know that you have a blog on there. Some other people have blogs on there. Is there a place for a forum where people can go and maybe have a trip report or they can have their questions answered in time by people? Or what are some of the things that people can do on there that we haven't talked about? And what are some of the things you may be setting up for people to do on there if they go and visit? Yeah, thanks. So I'm creating a podcast called The Ibogaine Evangelist, and that's starting on May 24th. And every other week, we're going to be interviewing experts and experiencers from the Ibogaine world to talk about preparation, navigation, and integration, these three main categories. And There's another podcast called The Mushroom's Apprentice on there by Shona Holm, and she talks about journeys and transmissions and poetry and the place of poetry and shamanism. And then there's Jack Cross, who is a co-founder of Awake, and he has a blog called The Polemics of Jack, which is about entheogens and language. When he talks about it, it will blow your mind, but it does take attention, I would say, to... to dive into that material, really mind-blowing about language and the English-Latin alphabet. And then there is Dr. Andrew McLean-Pagon, who is a psychiatrist and physician. And he started a blog called Gaia's Pharmacy, and it's about plants, not just psychedelic plants, but plants in general. And so he writes these posts that are about a particular plant, building up to an encyclopedia of plants there. Anybody who wants to join, can write a blog from, from their profile. But if somebody, but the blog series that we're promoting, like the ones that I just talked about, these are part of the mentors and masters program. And they're kind of by invitation only. And we're, we just want to bring some really transformational teachers together. And so we are curating that part of it. Yeah. I think that the structure of it is beautiful and the people that are, I think it speaks volumes of what the future looks like when you can see the foundation being built. And it seems to me like that foundation, it's steady. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah. I appreciate it. Absolutely. I feel like our time flies by so fast, you know, and especially when we're talking about such powerful things and life changing things and hope and promise and what the world can be. But I'm really thankful for your time today and I'm really thankful for what you're doing. But before I let you go, we've spoken a little bit about Awake.net, but maybe before I let you go, you can talk about where people can find you. What do you have coming up and what you're excited about? Okay. So you can go to awake.net and sign up as a free member and look around. You can read about addiction there and our program called 10,000 Rebirths to End Addiction. You can reach me at lakshmi at awake.net, L-A-K-S-H-M-I at awake.net. Email me if you have anything you want to talk about. And we have an event coming up on May 26, which is a Sunday, which is called Bard in Bardo. It's going to be a really fun event. It's a psychedelic poetry and it's going to be hosted by Shona Holm. And I will be there and Jack and a few other people, anyone who wants to share poetry, which really is a big part of what can happen during a psychedelic journey or a series of journeys or at some point in your own relationship with it. And it's so wonderful when it happens because what's happening there is you are writing your own words of truth and that's what poetry is in the end at that level. And so it really imprints on you and is so meaningful. And so please come. It's a free event. So please come to it. Also, the Ibogaine Evangelist will be starting May 24th. So those are the two coming up events. Fantastic. What is the is the initial podcast for you? Are you going to have multiple guests on there or is it going to be you streaming for the first one or what's that? What's the first one going to look like? The first one is going to be a conversation with Anders Beattie. Anders is a Ibogaine counselor from England, and he's really very, very good at working with people who are preparing to go on an Ibogaine journey. So we're going to talk about what that is and talk about the archetypal journey. That's the first one. That's so awesome. I can't wait to check it out. Well, hang on briefly afterwards, Lakshima. I still want to just talk to you briefly afterwards, but to everybody who partook today and is listening tomorrow or in the future, go down to the show notes and check out awake.net. There's so much cool information on there and there's a really cool community of people that are going out of their way to build a better tomorrow. And I hope that you will go down and you've been invited. Go check it out. I hope you have a beautiful day and that's all we got, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha. Thank you.