Initiations in Gabon, Africa

The beginning of the end — of so many things — fell in July of 2015. A dream I’d had for three years — after awakening from a veil of drug addiction in 2012 with assistance from the visionary plant medicine Iboga — finally came to fruition.

I had saved the money to travel directly to the source of this sacred medicine, Gabon, in Central West Africa. It is the birthplace of Iboga, and home to the Bwiti.

I embarked knowing I would be heading into two of the greatest initiations in my life.

The first was to be a Full Initiation into the Bwiti. This village culture has used Iboga as its main teacher and gateway into studying life and oneself for generations, a wisdom passed to them by the Pygmies centuries before.

The second was to be a Women’s Rites of Passage, an initiation long forgotten in Western culture, which serves as a bridge from girlhood to womanhood. I was 28 years old at the time, and still very much a little girl — a space I equated to the decade I lost to drug addiction, a decade where, instead of growing and maturing into a woman, I remained prisoner to my own undoing.

While at that time, in 2015, it was quite rare for a Westerner to travel to Gabon and complete a Full Initiation, it was even more unheard of for one to complete a Rites of Passage. Myself and the women I journeyed there with became among the first nine Western women to ever experience this inititation.

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