The Iboga Leadership Summit Podcast

#10 — Owning Your Crap: What 360 Truth Does to Your Story with Terrence Mickey

In the tenth episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ryan Rich [https://www.roothealing.com/ryan-ghenigho-rich] speaks with Moth Storyteller and creator of Memory Motel Terrence Mickey [https://www.linkedin.com/in/terence-mickey-8943a318/]: author, workshop facilitator, and Bwiti initiate, for a conversation about the deep relationship between narrative, self-knowledge, grief, and the transformative reordering of perception that can occur through Iboga ceremony. Terrence traces a life shaped by stories that started playing out long before he knew he was studying them: a curious teenager drawn to psychedelics but held back by fear, a facilitator working with people in addiction recovery to help them reclaim authorship of their own lives, and eventually a seeker who found himself in Gabon undergoing initiation that would fundamentally alter how he related to memory, loss, and identity. He speaks openly about the inherited weight of suicide in his family, and the slow accumulation of unresolved emotional material that he carried into adulthood, until ceremony offered not resolution in the abstract, but a radical widening of perspective. “You go in as a first-person narrator, and you come out as the omniscient narrator — you see the full three-sixty version of your story, not just the small myopic piece of the pie you've been holding.” From there, the conversation moves through storytelling as both craft and technology of integration: how vulnerability, accountability, and truth-telling form the scaffolding of any meaningful narrative, whether spoken around a fire or performed on a stage like The Moth (a nonprofit group in New York City, dedicated to the art of storytelling). Terrence explores how Bwiti philosophy, with its insistence on radical self-honesty and return to one’s true nature  maps unexpectedly cleanly onto the architecture of storytelling itself. He reflects on writing a book as an attempt to translate an oral tradition into a Western context hungry for meaning but often disconnected from the practices that generate it, and on what is lost when story moves from embodied transmission to fixed text. “In an oral tradition, things don’t die — they live in the minds and hearts of people and get transmitted, recreated. A book is a commodity. The oral tradition is embodied.” This conversation offers the beginnings of what promises to be a much deeper inquiry into how conscious choices around storytelling can modulate identity, perception, and self-responsibility: what it means to loosen identification with a single version of events, how compassion emerges when multiple perspectives become visible at once, and how integration is the process of beginning of a different relationship to lived experience. At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Terrence is looking forward to sharing what Bwiti has taught him about authorship and authenticity within a broader field of practitioners, researchers, and initiates exploring the intersection of Iboga, narrativity and healing. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, bringing together physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and all those called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga. 22-28 June, Libreville, Gabon Details and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/ [https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/] Sacred harp: Papa Boussengue Producer: Ros Stone

#9 — Becoming Hunters of Ourselves: Bwiti, Iboga and Decolonizing Mental Health with Sarah Siegel

“What happens when we [label patterns] is often an individual's identity kind of metastasizes to that diagnosis. And then that can even reify the patterns.” In this searching conversation, Ros Stone speaks with Sarah Siegel of Waking Wisdom Within [https://www.wakingwisdomwithin.com/], Root Healing [https://www.roothealing.com/] and Bassé Root [https://www.basseroot.com/]. Sarah is a certified alcohol and drug counselor, recovery coach, IFS-trained therapist, chaplain, and co-founder of Bassé Root, for an exploration of trauma, addiction, dissociation, and the profound limitations of the Western mental health paradigm. Drawing from her own lived experience of recovery, Sarah reflects on the ways contemporary psychiatric frameworks can collapse complex human suffering into static identities, often stripping people of context, agency, and meaning in the process. Opening with the story of her own encounter with Ibogaine treatment, she describes both the life-changing clarity the medicine offered and the uncomfortable recognition that insight alone is not healing without a deeper shift in relationship to self, patterning, and truth. “All of my patterns were there. I hadn't shifted my relationship to them. And in the Bwiti tradition, how we're relating to whatever it is we're experiencing is the most important thing. Because that's where we have agency.” The conversation moves through the Bwiti understanding of Iboga as a force of radical self-honesty, the tension between Indigenous healing systems and their medicalization within Western clinical frameworks, and the ways dissociation functions both psychologically and culturally. Sarah draws a parallel between the mechanisms of colonialism and the mechanisms of trauma itself: both operating through erasure of context, community, land, ancestry, spirituality, and relationship. “Erasure is one of the main impulses of colonialism. Erasure of context, of language, of community, of spiritual tradition, of connection to the earth, to plants, to herbs. And erasure is also the main thing that creates dissociation.” Ros and Sarah also explore the staggering WEIRD bias underpinning modern psychological research, the increasingly institutional trajectory of modalities like Internal Family Systems (IFS), the outsourcing of primary human satisfactions into addictive substitutes, and the possibility that many symptoms currently pathologized by the mental health system may in fact be intelligent responses to conditions humans were never designed to endure. This is ultimately a conversation about learning to come home to yourself an ongoing practice of truth, relationship, and remembrance. “Primary human satisfactions are really like sitting around a fire together. That's what we're wired for as humans.” At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Sarah Siegel will join conversations exploring the future of Iboga and Ibogaine at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, recovery work, spirituality, and mental health care. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga. 22–28 June, Libreville, Gabon Details and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/ [https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/]

#8 — Music, Medicine and Sacred Psychoacoustics with Jonathan Weiss

"What was driving my addiction was to numb, to anesthetize myself to the reality that the world was this shallow, meaningless place with just a bunch of sock puppet theater going on for spiritual endeavors." This conversation makes the case for sound quality as an overlooked variable in the future of psychedelic medicine. Ryan Rich [https://www.roothealing.com/ryan-ghenigho-rich] is joined by Jonathan Weiss, founder of high-end audio companies Oswalds Mill Audio [https://oswaldsmillaudio.com/] and Fleetwood Sound, for a conversation spanning psychoacoustics, addiction recovery, sound production within Indigenous ceremonies, and the neurobiological reasons why contemporary music streaming, such as Spotify, can feel so profoundly inadequate (especially) in a spiritual setting. "One could argue that the music is really the medicine, but our mindsets are so screwed up that it requires us to take psychedelics for the sound and music to really get through to us." Opening this discussion, Jonathan shares how participation in the NYU phase two FDA clinical trials for psilocybin-assisted treatment of alcohol use disorder not only ended a long battle with alcoholism but lit up his current pathway, an ongoing exploration into how sound and music function within the psychedelic experience. He explains why headphones create a neurologically unnatural listening environment, what happens to the brain when it is forced to reconstruct the 96% of musical information compressed out of an MP3, and how we’re designed to “hear” music through our whole bodies, not just our ears. Following Jonathan’s highly technical breakdown of where the spirit and energy of the original sound are bled out of commercial sound reproduction, Ryan draws on his learning within the Bwiti tradition to introduce the role of live music as active medicine in Iboga ceremony, which leads to a wider discussion of how Indigenous cultures across the world have always understood what Western therapeutic frameworks are only beginning to acknowledge: that sound is inseparable from the psychedelic experience itself.  Jonathan and Ryan then explore the commercialization of audio and its consequences for how we listen, the neurological superpower of human hearing, the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of sound as the last sense to leave the body, and the differences between hearing and true listening. The episode closes with Jonathan's reflection on the nature of sound itself as energy vibrating at the human scale, and music as the structuring of that energy into a direct portal to the experience of universal interconnection. At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Jonathan Weiss will be in conversation and collaboration with the musicians creating the energetic field for the summit’s conversations. Together, they’ll be exploring what might make it possible to carry the sonic integrity of a traditional ceremony into a Western therapeutic or clinical context. More from Jonathan in the meantime in his bite-sized YouTube series On Listening [https://www.youtube.com/@oswaldsmillaudio]. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and environmentalists, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga. 22-28 June, Libreville, Gabon Details and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com [http://www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com]

#7 — Hyperdimensional Healing, Ibogaine and Parkinson's Disease with Tobias Erny

In the seventh episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit Podcast, Tobias “Edzing Nzame” Erny shares details of his most recent research into Iboga/ine as a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease with summit co-organiser Ryan “Ghenigho” Rich. [https://www.roothealing.com/ryan-ghenigho-rich] The latest paper, celebrated in this episode, is part of an ongoing study in which participants are microdosing [https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Ibogaine-for-the-treatment-of-Parkinsons/9926827043801891] to manage the condition, sometimes with miraculously effective symptom reduction.  Tobias Erny began his career in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry of Basel, Switzerland, before his first encounter with Ibogaine in 2006 interrupted an addiction and opened a door to the spiritual, healing potentialities of Iboga/ine and lit up his pathway towards ethical, respectful clinical research of the Ibogaine molecule within the wider context of Bwiti and Iboga.  In 2008, Tobias began working with the traditional plant medicine Iboga and went on to become initiated into the Dissoumba-Fang tradition of Bwiti, regularly returning to Gabon to deepen his understanding. Alongside the team at Nachtschattenverlag (publisher of Albert Hofmann and Stanislav Grof in the German-speaking world), he published the German standard reference on Iboga, organized conferences, and lectured at universities across Europe. As Co-Director of the Global Iboga Therapy Alliance (GITA) [https://ibogaalliance.org/], a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about Iboga and its alkaloids through sustainability initiatives, scientific research, education, and knowledge transfer, Tobias sits at the centre of the global conversation around this medicine. Tobias describes the difference between Ibogaine and Iboga as the difference between exploring your own psychological bubble, and something outside of it arriving to guide you through yourself. Ryan and Tobias move between the nuances of conceptualistions of Iboga as a “hyperdimensional ally,” and a “teacher who gives homework and won't offer the next level of teaching until you've implemented the last.” The conversation holistically draws together spiritual and clinical perspectives, especially in its exploration of whole-plant Iboga, plant-derived Ibogaine and synthetic Ibogaine. Tobias shares details about the largely unmapped world of Iboga's 30 to 50 alkaloids and why he believes the healthiest future of all varieties of Iboga-related medicine depends on treating the experience not as a pharmacological intervention but as a spiritual awakening that can reconnect us to nature and ourselves. "The honest wish to change is rewarded by the spirit." At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Tobias Erny will bring the rare perspective of a scientist, a provider, and an initiate. His contribution will focus on microdosing, Parkinson's research [https://www.akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/aop/article-10.1556-2054.2025.00478/article-10.1556-2054.2025.00478.xml], and how Western medicine might begin to engage more effectively with the Bwiti tradition in researching its sacrament. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, researchers, farmers, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga. 22-28 June, Libreville, Gabon Details and tickets:www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com [http://www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com]

#5 —Avec de la Spiritualité, Les Lois Seraient Superflues avec Quentin di Constanzo

Quentin reflects on how his early fascination with reptiles, forests, and living systems shaped his understanding of cultivation as a dialogue rather than a domination. He explains why many industrial agricultural models fail: they prioritize yield, uniformity, and speed at the expense of resilience, diversity, and ecological balance. Together with Raphael Nicolle, the conversation explores how true genetic work requires patience, deep observation, and respect for time scales that exceed human timelines. Quentin shares why landrace preservation is not nostalgia, but a critical response to genetic erosion driven by globalized markets. The discussion also draws strong parallels between plant cultivation and traditional spiritual systems: both require lineage, transmission, and responsibility. Just as Bwiti cannot be reduced to a technique or product, living plants cannot be reduced to isolated molecules or traits without losing something essential. “When you reduce a plant to a molecule, you stop working with life. You start working against it.” At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Quentin Di Costanzo will bring a rare, grounded voice on cultivation, biodiversity, and ethics. His contribution will focus on how to protect living genetic heritage while navigating scientific research, modern agriculture, and global demand — without repeating extractive patterns that have already damaged countless plant lineages. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists — and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga. 22–28 June, Libreville, Gabon Details and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com [http://www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com]