Safety for Mind, Body and Soul

We do our best to create the safest possible space with regards to COVID. We require a PCR or Antigen test within 72 hours prior to all guest’s arrivals. We request agreement with our guests to adhere to masking, distancing, and sanitary protocols to the best of their ability on the journey to SoulCentro.

Our professional driver wears a mask throughout the shuttles.

Guest rooms and common areas are thoroughly cleaned daily.

All common areas are open-air, including the ceremony space which is enclosed by screens allowing for excellent ventilation.

Should COVID symptoms arise, we will immediately check temperatures and request quarantine in private rooms.

Sacred sourcing is integral to our code of ethics. And we feel that transparency around medicine is vital for all medicine providers because the conscious relationship to the medicine spirit is an important part of the healing and initiatory process.

The sacrament we share is pure, mature, potent, ceremonially & sustainably harvested from its indigenous environment, and received directly through our sacred relationships.

The medicine we serve is always carefully and ceremonially prepared, free from any chemical toxins, and personally tested in advance by our lead facilitators. We only serve Iboga, sometimes in a base of pure, local honey. We do not serve any other medicines during SoulCentro Iboga retreats—except for high quality, organic, pure CBD post-ceremony to support nervous system health and sleep. We do not add any other plants, substances, or other admixtures to our medicine.

As the Bwiti know: How we harvest, prepare, and carry the medicine matters as much as receiving it into our physical body. Our medicine is respected during every part of its journey to you.

Every guest receives a one-on-one psycho-spiritual consultation pre-retreat with one of our co-founders and lead facilitators, Nganga Gnyangou or Elizabeth Mbeye Bast, who are also onsite 24/7 throughout all ceremonies and the entire retreat. Tending relationships is integral to spiritually and emotionally safe medicine work.

Within the ceremony space, we help to create spiritual safety by honoring the sacred Bwiti ways for protection and purification. The altar is tended with love and devotion, adorned with blessed items and tools. The traditional Bwiti music is a protective technology that guides the energy and moves all that no longer serves with momentum. Benevolent ancestors of the tradition are honored and invited to guide and guard. The space is cleared and illuminated with the sacred torch.

The Iboga medicine is an inherently confrontational and challenging medicine during initial stages of detoxification, when all the contents of the conscious and unconscious mind are brought to the surface to be studied, cleansed, and released.

It must come up to come out.

The SoulCentro team intends to hold safe space for mind, body, and soul to heal. We are present and available 24/7 for our guests, through every part of the process. When projections are intensified, as that is an essential function of the Iboga medicine, we do not take them personally, either positive or negative. Our intention is to offer medicine-informed guidance as we have been taught in the Bwiti and to help redirect the journeyers attention within to study the root of all inner phenomenon.

We do not tell guests what to do with their life. Such answers are between the person and the medicine; we simply help to guide and support the intricate inner process of self-healing with Iboga. Sovereignty, freedom, and personal empowerment are foundational values of the Bwiti.

We support people with their personal decisions and insights resulting from medicine work, and always advise that guests to avoid rushing toward any big decisions immediately after medicine work. Rather, we encourage guests to sit with their answers for some time and pay close attention to their souls. “Malembe malembe,” as they say in the Bwiti, means “slow slow.”

We respect that the time close to the medical work is sensitive, and we do not solicit guests for any other opportunities during this sacred–which should be dedicated to personal exploration.

The foundation of our work is based on trauma-informed principles: transparency, consent, choice, sovereignty, personal empowerment, kindness, equity, collaboration, awareness of the effects of trauma, and cultural competency with regard to diversity and historical trauma. These principles are also valued by the Bwiti tradition.

While the team follows the essence of trauma-informed care, the Missoko Bwiti lineage has fundamental differences from common scripts, paradigms, and protocols of Western psychology in the healing and counseling process.

Western approaches can involve trying to avoid triggers from happening at all, which can be important in the typical container of psychotherapy. However, part of Iboga’s core purpose and essential initial function is to bring our triggers to the surface for healing and release. Unhealed wounds and buried emotions are excavated to make space for the new life that is being called in. Healing with Iboga does not happen by avoiding triggers. Healing with Iboga involves encountering triggers head-on and then moving through them—within a safe space. In this way, we can be truly liberated from the slavery of triggers to create new endings of our own conscious design.

We are in awe of the ceremonial Bwiti healing technologies. The Bwiti tradition has been studied and honed for eons in intimate relationship with the Iboga, to complement and support the medicine, and it can only serve with the full participation, openness, and respect of the guest. We prepare guests to enter a ceremony held by this indigenous way of knowing, requesting that other modalities and traditions be left at the door.

We see that safety is not the same thing as “comfort zone.” Iboga medicine is inherently challenging, confrontational, and uncomfortable—at times. Healing with Iboga can take us out of our comfort zone, yet ultimately it leads to peace and bliss as it carves out all that is not true or helpful to our soul. The SoulCentro team takes every measure to create a safe and inclusive space for guests to do their inner work.

In the traditional Bwiti way, we gather around the sacred fire here in the evenings to study truth together. Every person’s voice and presence is equally valuable. We each share what we know, and also what we don’t know—that which we are still searching for. All emotions and experiences are welcome in this dedicated safe space. Authenticity welcomes growth.

In true Bwiti spirit, Iboga is held in community. Since time immemorial, sacred medicines have been held by tribes. Ceremony loves relationships.

It can feel vulnerable to speak up, to be fully seen, and to see others so fully. And yet, this group process is integral to the authentic Bwiti way of healing, for we are not separate from each other. We are all healing a different piece to the collective puzzle of wellness. We do not heal in isolation. In reality, all of nature is connected. To decolonize ourselves, we live this truth with open eyes and heart.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COMMUNITY PROCESS

We honor the value of preparation and integration. Medicine work is 5% what happens in the ceremony and 95% how we prepare and what we do with it afterward.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR PREPARATION SUPPORT

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR INTEGRATION RESOURCES

We are also committed to maintaining a safe container for all members of our service staff and facilitation team. All participants are asked to review and sign sacred agreements regarding honorable conduct within the healing relationship, retreat time, and ceremony space.

Though our comprehensive screening and preparation generally prevent issues: Any participant exhibiting abusive, harmful, or deliberately disruptive behaviors may be formally asked to leave, with the exception of a genuine crisis related to the medicine work, in which case we contact the appropriate emergency services. We are prepared to provide referrals for transportation and alternate accommodations to participants who will not honor the safety of the container, at their own expense. Abusive communication or giving false information at any point in the healing relationship will not be tolerated.

We reserve the right to decline services or request additional preparation time based on our knowledge of safety issues, experience, inner guidance, and the traditional Bwiti process.

VIEW SAFETY AGREEMENT AND WAIVER >

Safety with SoulCentro begins upon arrival. Guests are transported to our center via our private shuttle with a licensed, professional driver.

SoulCentro is located in a safe, peaceful area with wonderful neighbors, and we still take extra measures including locked gates, security staff, security cameras, and other technologies on the property.

Each private guest room has a door that locks. Our housekeeping staff is thoroughly vetted and more, they are like family, and we have implicit trust in them to attend guest rooms.

Enjoy the sanctuary!

Ethics are integral to creating safety in any transformational space, and they’re even more critical with sacred earth medicines. EXPLORE OUR CODE OF ETHICS >