Episode #9

Laura Dawn :  Welcome Patricia. It’s so nice to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time to drop in with me today. 

Tricia Eastman: Such an honor to be here and to connect. 

Laura Dawn :  Yeah. I’m so looking forward to this conversation, the last time we dropped in, we spent an hour on the phone and I know that there’s going to be so much goodness shared here.

So I’d love to just dive right in. And I think a good place to start would be to ask you the backstory around how you found yourself in a foreign place, like Gabon. Coming face-to-face with the booty tribe and how that led you to being initiated into three lineages. 

Tricia Eastman:  Well, I will say that Iboga, which is from equatorial Africa in Gabon and is a serious type of initiation.

It’s very long, usually several weeks and involves deep cleansing rituals and purification rituals. And then there’s a long period, usually like one week is dedicated to ceremonies. And usually two or three nights working with Iboga, which is the sacrament of the Bwiti, which is considered the Mount Everest of entheogens.

It’s one of the most intense medicines. And also I believe one of the most profound and it took me a really long time to get to the point of going to Gabon to meet with the Bwiti because you’re not only risking malaria. You’re not only risking potential , complications with medical facilities and things like that. Not close by. You’re literally in the middle of the jungle.

 It’s one of the only countries in Africa that is still mostly jungle and where most of the people living which is, it’s a very small amount of people. It’s the size of Colorado, but there’s only 1.4 million people living in the entire country.

And you’re in the middle of the jungle. And if something were to happen to you it would be very hard to get, to get help. And so I took a long time and when I finally got to the point where it was time for me to do my initiations I. I really tuned into spirit and I really asked, and I looked for the signs and yeah,  I won’t say that it was something I wanted to do.

I feel like there’s a lot of initiations I’ve done. And I would say even  my work with the Makiko, which is, from Mexico connected to my lineage, which are the original, like Aztecs and Mayans when I was called to do that initiation, it was the same thing. It was like, my soul said, Oh, it’s time to go do this.

And, obviously my ego is  like Oh gosh, I don’t want to do that. But you know, it was just, it was time. 

Laura Dawn :  So maybe we should back up for a second. So you were working with Iboga before you went to Gabon and worked with it there. 

Tricia Eastman: Okay. Yeah, I worked at it at the clinic in in Mexico. And how long? 2015, six years ago. 

Laura Dawn : And so what called you to initially explore this particular plant medicine? 

Tricia Eastman: It’s quite interesting because I had a couple of friends that started working with the plant. One of them lived with the 10th generation Misoco in Costa Rica, and I was immediately attracted.

And at this time, this is before, microdosing was even a word. This person had given me a small amount of it to microdose with, and I knew that I was supposed to work with this plant. And a year later, I met Martine Polanco who owns a clinic in Mexico called Crossroads, where they do treatments for addiction using Ibogaine, which is the alkaloid from Iboga.

And they put you through a detox that happens over seven days. And at the end, you no longer have cravings for opiates. It’s quite a profound medicine and he wanted to introduce a weekend protocol. For people who wanted to come for psycho-spiritual purposes, where they would go and receive the medicine and then at the end, so you would be in the clinic and then you would go to this beach house and Baja and you would receive 5 MEO DMT.

And so When he started this program, I asked him, do you think that Iboga would cure eating disorders? And I had struggled with eating disorders my whole entire life. And he said he wasn’t certain if it would, but he would be willing to test it out and see if it worked. And he actually put me through the program at no charge.

In a sense, an experiment. And I had the most profound experience ever in my life because I always felt really like there was something I was holding back that, I never fully understood how to love and accept all the parts of myself. And it was after I had this experience where I had this unification.

With source consciousness a point of singularity. And in that space I just started crying and I just bawled for hours and hours in gratitude. Like how could I not completely love myself when I realized that I’m part of all of this beauty, you know, the whole thing, the entire universe.

And it was, one of those really profound transpersonal experiences. And what I did after that was, I said to the medicine, thank you. Thank you. I’m here of service. I want to help others. In, in, that are suffering as I did for so many years. And I left it at that and within less than three weeks, Martine asked me to facilitate the psychospiritual program at Crossroads.

And you know,  I had no experience. I had experienced as a healer. I had a vast background in everything from Reiki to tantra, to Pranic healing, to reading human design. Just I studied everything and somatic therapy and I. I said yes. I would love, and I was trained of course.

So I was, it wasn’t like I was stepping in there with no experience and there’s a whole team of doctors, but when I got in there, I was really humbled at, how little the medicine was being used in a sacred way in what I was starting to learn and understand was the tradition of Bwiti.

And I really wanted to bring the aspects into the clinic, such as the music, such as some of the rituals in preparation and I believed that it actually was part of this experience. And so I started to study that and start to connect to a traditional healers who we’re either in Gabon or in France or in Europe, w or most of them that I connected with lived.

And so and I went on the steep journey of really studying and understanding the tradition so that I could be an integrity myself. And in serving this plant that had given me so much, and at the same time, I also started creating my own retreats and I started creating my own retreats in 2016, which was a year after I started working at crossroads.

And my first retreats were in Mexico, working with. Iboga, we’re working with a traditional, traditionally trained we T facilitators and they brought a Nema from Gabon and he’s the first person that initiated me into booty in the traditional way. And so you went to Gabon, you were, immersed in the BT tribe.

And then did you ask to be initiated? How does that initiation process work? Is anyone who’s, who feels ready and feels the call, or do you go through the full experience that they support you through? And is that the initiation like, do, did you have to receive permission from them to be able to hold the medicine and carry the medicine and serve it in the way that you are now?

I’m really glad that you asked that question because there’s a really blurred line in our community around what it means to be initiated versus, working with Iboga and in Gabon Pretty much any time you go and work with Iboga, you’re doing so in an initiation format. There isn’t really a psycho-spiritual.

Although there are what they call like healings, which are our works that usually are much shorter and it’s not a full initiation. Usually if people are coming to work with the Iboga in Gabon they’re doing so for. And initiation, but I could talk about two hours about why a lot of people wouldn’t be ready for that process.

There’s a lot of different things in the culture that are very different, that are sometimes very hard for Westerners to understand and can even cause problems. Just like some of the basic staff Is  the practice of animal sacrifice, which can be used in the rituals, which could be traumatizing to someone who like, for me, when I started this work, I was just a full devote vegan, although I’ve added some stuff, but I’m still mostly plant-based.

But if I had seen, when I first started an animal being sacrificed, I would have been. Traumatized. But there’s, it goes much deeper than that. There are many other aspects of that. But when you get initiated, that’s like day one of the journey and to become a Nema. Nima means that you can give initiations to others.

That’s typically the destination that someone in Gabon would look at as a benchmark for someone, for serving the medicine. That process takes 10 years. And that’s like minimum, if you ask the Nema that’s that would initiate you, they would say, when the medicine says is when you’re able to have that.

That title.  And there’s a passing of power because there’s a power in the altar. There’s a power in the ancestral lineage. And when you graduate from that process and it’s, that’s not even the right word to use, but when you step into that role, that power gets passed onto you, which allows you to have the power of the bleed T  and so what.

What I got when I went through, my initiations was I received several different blessings from my teachers, which was one blessing was to serve the medicine to others for healings. And so what you can do is. What they would call our psycho-spiritual work that my partner Dr. Joseph  Celia, and I do it, it would be called more healings even, cause we’re not taking people through an initiatory process.

And usually we’re doing a very similar format to what is done in Gabon and, but it’s adapted to really fit a more psycho-spiritual setting. And there’s a lot more preparation and integration, which you don’t really get that in Gabon. And so the first blessing I got was the blessing to have the medicine, which is the most important blessing of all, because you can’t obviously serve the medicine unless you’ve been given the blessing to, to have the medicine.

And then the other blessings that I received were access to different tools and medicines within the Bwiti that allow me to do certain types of healing working with the Akume torch, which is a torch used,  I would call it, I hate to I love making analogies, but. I don’t even think it, it could compare, but it’s like Sage on steroids.

So the Akume torch is made from the resin of the sacred tree in the jungle. And then it’s mixed with, gosh, probably at least 30 or more different sacred plants in the jungle. And they use this torch for clearing dark spirits out and there’s techniques of how you do that. And so,  I work with that in my work.

And then the other thing is the journeying process, which is part of the Gundai Misoco lineage. And in that lineage, you receive, like certain training to work on the psychology of the individual. And so that’s like very specific because you’re working with someone’s psyche and it takes many years of training and practice before  I would say that you could call yourself someone who could practice that particular type of, of work. And so I also received the blessings for that kind of work as well. 

Laura Dawn : Beautiful. I’m curious about what the format and the framework looks like for an initiation in Gabon. Is it multiple days?

Are you, I can only imagine, and I haven’t told you this yet, but since we last spoke, I actually had my first experience. It was about 24 hours that I was very deep in it working with a facilitator. There is actually three facilitators guiding the journey for me. I worked with alkaloids from the Iboga plant. 

I had a paramedic checking my vitals every 20 minutes for 24 hours. And so I, I definitely thought multiple times, like I could not imagine doing this in Gabon alone right now in a foreign country and just such a, out of my comfort zone element on top of it, it was one of the most challenging and intense and also amazing experiences of my life.

I’m definitely very much so in the thick of integration still, I feel like the biggest reset is happening in my body and my mind. I’m so grateful for the experience. And so I definitely have thought multiple times of what does this look like to experience this in Gabon? 

Tricia Eastman:  Yeah. I just want to agree with you in the sense it’s one of the hardest journeys within yourself and, when you add the other elements of, potentially malaria, potentially other forms, there’s just, the list is endless of tropical parasites and different sicknesses and things like that. And just the conditions are really intense. 

And so I would say that, first of all, congratulations I’m really excited for you because this is a medicine that stays with you forever, such a long time and it’s going to keep working on you for the next year. You’re going to still feel it working on you. There’s nothing like it. Sometimes I even say it’s almost like doing a hundred plant medicine ceremonies in one , or usually it’s over two days, but I’ll let you speak to that and I’ll add something.

Laura Dawn : Yeah. I feel it so much, I also feel very grateful for 20 years of working with psychedelics under my belt to prepare me for this, 10 solid years of ayahuasca journeys I feel like really prepared me for this, what feels like one of the most significant and I’ll use the word initiation in just the context of, passing through a portal into, what feels like a very new chapter of my life.

And I passed through that portal on the Eve of my birthday, into the 37th year on this planet, as I am transitionin in so many ways in my life. And so it was really the perfect time. And I’d been calling in this experience for so long and it was just the perfect alignment and the perfect timing.

And I do feel. So much so that this medicine is going to be with me for a very long time.

Tricia Eastman: Yeah.  It’s one of the medicines that, I think this is why integration is so important because it, number one it really just like humbles you to your core, like anything in there, it some people you’ve even said I feel like I had a labotamy  or something, cause it just it just clears you out. And on a physiological level, it resets the neuro-transmitters, it works on every neurotransmitting system in the body. It reformats, basically, your brain.

It works specifically on the language center of the brain. It works,  it really works on pretty much everything.  There’s studies on it working on dementia and it kills parasites in the body. For instance. One thing that’s really incredible about this medicine is that most people have to take really intense pharmaceuticals to get rid of candida and it clears all the candida out of your body.

So you end up with, no matter how grueling your journey was just this, nothingness of emptiness . It’s really, to me, a very “Buddhic” medicine because you really understand what that feeling of a blank slate feels like. And I think the most important thing is that if you’re going to invest the time and the energy to do that kind of work, to really gracefully approach the integration. And I say this as everyone here is listening, but also to support you in your integration. That everything you do stepping out of the medicine, it imprints into your, into this new blank slate that you’ve just created for yourself.

And so you get to basically, like the slower you take it, the more careful you take it. But the more that you pause and you think before doing something you may have done in the past, that was like maybe led to a specific habitual pattern that you know is not a good road, the better off you’re going to be.

It’s really going to stick with you. There’s this beauty that the Bwiti  call “Mubundo” means grace. And what happens is, after your ceremony, you get this runway of Mubundo,  and the idea is take advantage of that. Like the idea is like in Gabon, people are very poor and so they have to save their money or, do some works to be able to go and get initiated.

And when you get initiated. You’ve moved up in society. Like it means something in, in Gabon to be an initiate, and it’s also an entry point into the family. So you’re you’ve become part of the family of Bwiti, and in Gabon you go and you do that so that you can get those chances so that you can increase your luck so you can make a better life for yourself.

And so all of these people who know, they come from nothing. They know that they can make something for themselves when they do this initiation, if they really take advantage of that time. And so I say the same for you and for anyone else out there who, is either working with this medicine or, being called to work with the medicine is that, it’s a great opportunity for you.

And a great blessing. And it’s, and one of the things that was the biggest distinction for me after I did my first works with the Iboga was just really, it really pulled me inward. Like I felt so deeply inward for many months and from a biological level. The medicine actually does that to you.

So literally I was at the Ibogaine conference in  (inaudible)  in 2017, and I can’t remember the name of the doctor, so I apologize, but I’ll share a link or something with you so we can put it in the notes. But this doctor took people who were doing Ibogaine treatments and took pictures of the auric field and showed these people in addiction and their field was all like broken up and wholly and it didn’t look so good.

And then while we were on the medicine, it showed the auric field completely pulled inward. So literally the medicine pulls the, auric field completely inward. And then it regenerates and then after you’re finished, it actually expands the auric field around the body. Now I can’t compare it to like ayahuasca or any of the other medicines, because I haven’t seen those.

Those photography of that before and after. But I would assume that the other medicines would actually expand because many of them are about expansion as very bogus, very much contraction. 

Laura Dawn : It’s really so much of what I’m noticing. Actually I’m grateful  I’m really giving myself so much space for this integration.  I’m slowing down. I’m also feeling so inward. My meditations are so dropped in and so deep right now. 

And I noticed after the journey, I had this very distinct voice, and being able to see a pattern that I had been repeating for so many years. And the voice was like, that’s the pattern. Look at that. Do you want to keep choosing that? Or do you want to choose a new pattern? It was just this amazing witnessing.  

And one of the ways I’ve been describing it is I feel the sense of I’ve been using the word neutrality, but I think the better word is equanimity, is just like this place of non-reactivity of just observing, and so much centerdness in my process right now.

And I’m just so grateful for that. So I’m curious, I’m sure there’s such a wide range of the way that people serve this medicine. I can only imagine, in the experience that I had, there was a paramedic there, we did an EKG before they experience, they were using my body weight as a measure for how much to, start offering me in terms of the amount of medicine, is that very Western? I can’t imagine that they have paramedics in Gabon, checking heart rate?  It must be such a different experience. I was laying in a bed. I couldn’t move for many hours. I was really in it for 24 hours.

Is that a similar kind of setup going to Gabon and having that experience there? Is it multiple days? I’m just so curious. 

Tricia Eastman: Yeah,  what I found,  I just want you  to make a comment about the type of care that you received. And there is a certain percentage of people that have abnormalities of the heart that puts them in a high risk group.

And one of the biggest things you can do in actually makes  iboga once you, cause there’s a lot of information floating around about like safety with the Iboga. And a lot of the deaths that have been recorded are people who are in clinics who had like massive addictions and were using amphetamines and heroin and all kinds of cocktails of different uppers, downers, benzodiazepines, everything.

And, they were kind of, in a sense, on death’s doorstep. And so when a healthy individual comes to this medicine, The things you have to really look out for are specific things related to specific heart condition, certain mental conditions that can be evaluated with proper screening and those that are not, aren’t really going to get the full benefits from the medicine because of these things can be screened out. 

And we do,  in all of our retreats, have a doctor and we do require EKG  because it’s kind of a no brainer. It’s if we can save some lives and I have had a significant amount of people that have gotten screened out it’s surprising.

And in Gabon you would go to the medicine. There would not be a doctor onsite, but these practitioners of the medicine, these Nema and Nema combo, which is kind of the father of the village, the highest level of Bwiti that you could get, they’ve been working with the medicine for, 10, 20, 50 years, and they’re so connected to the spirit of the medicine.

And when I work with the medicine, it talks to me, it tells me what dosage to give certain people and tells me certain things about that person that I need to watch out for. However, I need to listen, and I need to be present within myself to be able to receive those things. Now, most people, unless they’ve had a really high level of experience and training working with that medicine probably wouldn’t get that information.

So I would say that in Gabon, the people who are working with the medicine, there are very little deaths. There are deaths though. A lot of the deaths have to do with other complications, such as malaria which is very common. 

We actually lost one of our friends who went to Gabon during our initiation in 2018. And he was in a different village than us. And he contracted Malaria and he didn’t make it. Yeah in Gabon  they give you very large quantities of medicine. Although there are different types of initiations and works that do work in lower dosages and there are specific lineages that aren’t necessarily trying to,  for instance the Bwiti from the jungle, which is a lot of the like Mitsogo, the tribes that are referred to as the pygmy tribes, such as the Bobongo, the Gonde Misogo, which is the tradition that I’m  initiated in.  Those are Bwiti from the jungle. And in those traditions, they are trying to create a death experience like an ego death, in a sense.

So like they’re trying to create the condition of having this profound, mystical experience. And so they give you as much medicine as they can. They actually even stick a pin in you, and if you can’t feel the pin, then they know you’ve had enough medicine. Like they, they keep feeding you medicine.

Basically the book Daniel Pinchbeck explains it the best “breaking open the head until you kind of crack open.” And of course. With that level of training they are pushing some very dangerous edges, but most of the time, people make it through those experiences, but they’re quite intense.

Laura Dawn : I had someone tell me that they went through this experience in Gabon and there was a lot of water involved, that they had water poured on their head for multiple days in a row. I was like, Whoa, that’s intense! 

Tricia Eastman: Yeah. 

Laura Dawn : Have you heard of that? 

Tricia Eastman: Yeah, so in, in most of Bwiti initiations and ritual, there are different forms of bathing rituals.

And the idea is that the bath rituals are designed to return you back into that clean state. Like when you were in the womb and prepare you to receive the medicine. And many of the times that you’re doing those rituals, you’re making confessions. So you’re confessing all the things wrong that you’ve done.

And most of them are things that we’ve done to ourselves. So, really going through and the more thorough  these confessions that you’ve made, the easier your journey is going to be with the medicine. So they, you start off and there’s many different herbs and you go into the jungle and when you work with the plants and the jungle, it’s very important to get permissions and all the Bwiti  that I’ve worked with have to take that very seriously. And I do as well. And what that means is that there’s very specific divination techniques, right? And you ask permission to take certain plants from the jungle and you’ll go to different trees and you’ll harvest different barks.

And within all of these plants are the sacred spirits called the genies, and the genies are what are doing the healing on you when you’re doing these, these bathing rituals. So they’ll be different clays, red clay and different plants. And there’ll be prepared in a specific way with specific ritual and music.

And usually a candle is lit to have the element of fire. Yeah. And you’ll go in and you’ll clean yourself and you can also make prayers to the spirits of the water. 

 In Bwiti, they believe the water spirits are the mermaids. And so we’ll call them the mermaid spirits and the mermaid spirits will assist in the cleansing of the individual.

And then after your , when you go through these rituals, there’s like different, like for instance, when you’re doing the preparations, there’s the smoke baths that you receive called Efulu, where they wrap you in blankets. And it’s like your own personal sweat lodge, except for way hotter. And you literally have a fire underneath you and they’re burning different  things like sacred plants, that creates smokes to clear the darkness out and and the women, yeah, I don’t know what the men wear, but the women wear all black. When they’re, when like a sarong and then you have all these blankets around you and you do that, and you alternate between that and the baths. 

And you do quite a few baths. Yeah. Usually do, depending on the initiation, but you could do like easily 10 baths in a week, that’s a little more on the extreme side, but I would say at least one in the morning and one at night. At least several times before you go into the initiation and then you also take “vimitif” plants, which make you throw up and you do all of that for a week. Usually a week, it could be longer in preparation to work with the Iboga and go into the initiation sequence. Those are different and there’s different rituals and different things within that sequence. And of course the bathing rituals are also used. Like when a baby is born. Yeah. The village, the first thing they do is they take them to the river and they perform this ritual to, to clean the baby.

Laura Dawn : And so in your practice in, within a more Western model, are you also using some of these plants, these other plants that are native to Gabon? And how do you feel about bringing these plants that are non native and non-local to the places that you’re serving them? Is that a consideration for you?

Tricia Eastman:  Yes. So, right now Bwiti is  one tiny country and Iboga only grows in that country. It only grows in an equatorial region at sea level. There’s a very specific soil consistency, a very specific environment. And so every day I think about the future of Bwiti and how even my.

Actions could impact the future of team to make sure that I’m doing it in a good way. And I ask, I, obviously when you ask permissions to take certain plants or if you’re asking your Nema or Nema Combo, the person that initiated you for permissions to have certain plants like to send you certain plants they’re also, asking those permissions as well.

And so some of the things that I use, one of them is called its nickname is pygmy paste and it’s like this mixture of different clays and herbs. And when you’re doing the ritual of journeying, the individual doing the psychology, the psychological work that, that I was talking to you about earlier, we put that on the forehead to open up the third eye and it helps to enhance the visions and help the person to, to journey, and it’s prayed with.

And so I use that  in the ceremony. And then I use the Akume torch, which is the torch from the residence of the Akume tree. And that comes from the jungle in Gabon. And then I use the clays that are used in Gabon for the bath rituals. 

It’s okay to harvest any plant from any region. And what you’ll find is that okay, most of the plants are the same species, but it’s the version of your local region. And so if I was going into the woods, I live in the Malibu mountains and I was asking for permission, I would go to the tree and I would take a machete and I would just take a little chip of bark.  And if the chip lands outward than it means I have permission  to take medicine from that. A

nd I would just shave a little bit of bark and it’s okay to use local plants to make up the medicines for the baths. And the genies are there, that they’re the ones doing the work. So it doesn’t matter whether they’re genies from Gabon or they’re genies from Costa Rica where I do retreats or Ibiza or, wherever Mexico. 

And then the other medicines that I use from Gabon, of course, the plant Iboga and Iboga is a plant that I am concerned about the future of its sustainability. It is considered a national treasure in Gabon and it’s protected. But there is a lot of things happening in the black market.

A lot of elephant poachers that are selling medicines online. And, the sad part is a lot of people that are getting stuff online, aren’t even getting real medicine. So who knows what you’re taking and whether it’s safe for you to be ingesting it. 

Yeah. One thing that we have to look at not to digress too much is like, when you have shows, like Hamilton’s Pharmacopia where one episode reaches like millions of people and, they’re promoting it by putting billboards up in the New York subways and all over Los Angeles.

That is not the way to necessarily I don’t feel like medicine should be displayed in that way. I think there’s, like talking about it, one-on-one having a conversation on a podcast is one thing but we do have to start thinking about the future an d I’m really  concerned with,  I do feel like this medicine is going to become more popular. 

It’s definitely not for everybody, but I do feel it’s definitely gonna grow because the whole psychedelic movement is just moving at such an insane pace. And I’ve already seen how the toads have been decimated in the snore because of, ESPN running cartoons with Mike Tyson showing him smoking a toad and having a psychedelic experience and all of these things.

And so the thing I would say most importantly is, I’ve been involved with conservation projects with Bufo Alverious, I’m been involved with conservation projects with peyote, even though that’s not a medicine I work with. Because it’s,  I feel like it’s not a sustainable medicine and I feel like there’s alternatives and we need to keep that medicine for the indigenous peoples that use it in their sacred ceremonies.

But I’ve also been working with blessings of the forests, which is the on