Matthew Jeffries

Matthew Jeffries is a retired Army combat veteran, former law enforcement officer and investigator, certified iboga facilitator, and founder of The Iboga Retreat.

I didn’t come to this work through the wellness world. I came to it because I needed help myself.

I spent a lot of my life being the guy who was supposed to handle shit. I served in the Army, deployed, became a police officer and investigator, and got very good at putting things in compartments and continuing to function.

I also got very good at carrying things I hadn’t actually dealt with.

Eventually, the guy who spent years helping everybody else needed help himself.

That’s how I found iboga.

My experiences with iboga and 5-MeO changed the direction of my life. Not because I came home believing a ceremony had magically fixed everything, but because for the first time I experienced what it felt like to put down things I had been carrying for years.

And it felt fucking amazing.

I eventually left my career, sold my house, moved to Costa Rica, trained as an iboga facilitator, and built the kind of retreat I would have wanted when I was the one looking for help.

I’m not a shaman. I didn’t come from the psychedelic retreat industry. I used to wear uniforms, not feathers.

I believe in God and Jesus. I’ve also seen and experienced some things doing this work that the old version of me probably would have called some woo-woo shit. You don’t have to believe what I believe. I’m not here to convert you, and I’m not going to tell you what your experience is supposed to mean.

What I do understand is what it’s like to be the person other people count on while quietly carrying your own shit.

I’ve now sat with people whose lives look completely different on paper, from a hospice nurse who spent her career caring for dying people to a veteran who fought in fucking Fallujah. Different lives. Different trauma. Same human being underneath it.

Sometimes what we’re carrying came from the job. Sometimes it came from the people we couldn’t save. Sometimes it came from people who hurt us or people we hurt while we were hurting.

And sometimes the deepest wound happened long before we ever put on a uniform.

That’s why I’m not interested in comparing rucksacks.

I’m interested in what’s in yours.

I also don’t believe the medicine deserves all the credit for what happens afterward. Iboga can’t go home and apologize to somebody you hurt, repair your marriage, hold a boundary, control your reaction when somebody pisses you off, or keep the promises you make to yourself.

You have to do that.

That belief is why I created The PROOF Model and why I stay with the people I work with for a full year after they leave Costa Rica.

My job isn’t to fix you or convince you that a ceremony changed your life. I’ll prepare you, sit beside you, challenge you, hold you accountable, and be there when you go home and real life starts pulling the same old triggers.

Years ago, sometimes my job was simply to hold somebody’s hand until other help arrived.

In a strange way, part of my job is still the same.

The difference is that this time, the person I’m waiting for is you.

I want you to build enough evidence through the way you actually live that eventually you don’t need me telling you that you’ve changed.

You’ll have the proof.

And then maybe you can stop looking for healing, get back to living, and become the person who holds somebody else’s hand when they need it.

Hurt people hurt people.

Healed people heal people.