Sananga is not a well-known sacred medicine, but if you suffer with alcohol use disorder, it’s one of the sacred medicines you should definitely know about and consider working with. Sananga, also spelled as “Xananga” is a sacred medicine that’s administered as an eye drop with the goal of purging anger from the body via the eyes. This might seem like an improbable way to get rid of anger…until you try it.
Iboga Alkaloids for Anger Release
Sananga is a powerful medicine that contains iboga alkaloids that go deeply into the liver, as a lower octave of the eyes in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to cleanse the liver of stored anger. The eyes and the liver are connected through the meridians and the fascia in the body, after all. The meridians are formed when an ovum is fertilized and it begins to slowly unfold, over time, into a being that’s recognizable as a human. To understand the meridians and how the eyes and the liver are connected directly via the fascia, you have to understand that the meridians are like plants that germinate from an original “seed”, the ovum. When the liver meridian germinates, it follows a path that unfolds with a stem and “branches” that eventually “blossom” into what later become the eyes. The eyes are directly connected to the liver through fascia that acts like the stem and branches of a flower in the body. The structures and organs in the body that “blossom” out of a specific “seed” in the ovum, follow a specific trajectory in order to produce each tissue and each structure in connection (via the fascia and the meridian-based electrical system that flows through the fascia) with other specific structures.
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Sananga makes use of the liver meridian to heal the liver via the eyes. The liver is the organ that stores and deals with anger. Administration of Sananga to the eyeballs produces a powerful burning sensation when the iboga-alkaloids are released into this meridian. People who receive these eye-drops spend about 10 minutes wrestling with the sensation of it. During this time, the brain rewires itself to be able to withstand pain using new and more efficient resources. Sananga is a sacred medicine for anger control as well and as the brain rewires how it deals with pain, it also rewires the body’s tendency to blame others rather than taking responsibility for one’s life.
When Sananga is administered the first time to a person, a low concentration of the Sananga is used. This lower dose when administered again to the same person several weeks later, won’t produce the same pain response because the brain rewires itself to overcome pain in new ways. A higher concentration of the Sananga can be administered after two doses at the low concentration.
No one really likes to work with Sananga, but I’ve always been amazed at how my own body has successfully been able to overcome the pain response and create those new connections. Once you’ve done it the first time, it’s easy to see why the pain is worth the gain. For those with alcohol addiction, Sananga is important as a starting point in the recovery process to release anger quickly. Most people who work with Sananga before they take Ayahuasca for the first time, for example, are much calmer and more confident about their ability to handle Ayahuasca after the Sananga trip ends.
The first time that my husband, John and I did an Ayahuasca ceremony, the ceremony began with Sananga eye drops, Rápe / Rapeh, and a temazcal prior to the administration of the Ayahuasca. Though for me, the Ayahuasca was a really powerful experience, John actually had a more powerful experience taking the Sananga. The Sananga eye drops only last for 10 minutes, but as a man, John was always afflicted with anger prior to his intensive work with the sacred medicines. The Sananga eye drops gave him a release that came complete with psychedelic-style memories of his birth that he replayed as he struggled to overcome the pain produced by the drops.
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Sananga gives people an opportunity to release the biggest and scariest aspects of their anger before going into a 4 to 8 hour trip with Ayahuasca or one of the other sacred medicines. It takes just a few minutes to get through the experience and release a huge amount of anger so that the rest of the tripping process can be about other, more complex emotional content that needs to be released in order for the addiction-behaviors to stop.
That being said, Sananga is not a sacred medicine that you can or should administer on your own at home. It should be administered in a ceremonial context with someone knowledgeable to guide you through the experience.