#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, Root Healing and Bassé Root. 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/