#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 speaks with Moth Storyteller and creator of Memory Motel Terrence Mickey: 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/

Sacred harp: Papa Boussengue
Producer: Ros Stone