Sidney Simila is The Best Scam Iboga Shaman - Sorry!

If you love drama, and triggering DEEP Psychology, you're gonna LOVE this!

Hello my lovey bunnies!

This is my account of how I was deceived by a fraudulent shaman, and what I learned about vetting spiritual teachers.

Some of you may know that I came to Kenya early this year in order to work with the “most legit” iboga shaman I’d ever spoken to. His name is Sidney Simila. He’s a super talented musician (I have some of his beautiful music here), and he has some special hypnotic powers. I was about to bring folks down to do ceremony with him, but luckily, his true colors became apparent before that ended up happening. (I still plan to help with iboga & haoma ceremonies in 2026, wherever I travel, but not with any shaman, just a humble friend.)

Sidney simila

I am more skeptical of shamans than almost anyone I know (iboga shamans especially, like Moughenda). But I’m skeptical of the ones that I can research. Sidney Simila isn’t a public figure. He keeps a low profile aside from some music. And the people that do know him, including in-person local friends (like his music producer Max Doblhoff) and family, strangely, actually vouched for him, until recently when I met Diane, the Bwiti initiate who now regrets introducing Sidney to iboga:

Predators in Power - Part 1

How We Met

I met Simila via my friend K, who was really impressed by him. K met Simila on the Reddit, where where Simila was/is giving people eloquent, helpful advice on traditional iboga knowledge, general spiritual wisdom, and even relationship advice (“be honest”)! I was impressed with how intelligent and eloquent Simila was, and how humble and spiritually aligned he seemed. He really knows everything about plants, and he could write a whole book on iboga with stuff nobody’s ever written before. But what impressed me the most, by far, was when Simila was the only person on Earth who was able to help K with his extremely bizarre dying bird situation.

The Bird Paradox That Hooked Us On Simila

K and his wife, S, were both experiencing this together while sober: many times per day (sometimes every few minutes when driving), a bird would fly into their door, into their window, into their car windshield, and die. I have never in my life heard of something like this. I was dumbfounded and I couldn’t imagine what the heck was going on or who could help. But Simila had no problem fixing it! He sent a 10-minute-long voice note to K, and after that voice note, no more birds flew into their house/car to die!

I have no idea what exactly really was happening, but unless Simila actually has the power to control birds (which he did mention he had some ability to influence animals), the only other explanation I can think of is that it was some kind of shared hallucination, or else K and S were somehow causing this with their minds, and Simila was able to hypnotize them with that voice note to break out of whatever this insanity was. I did ask K to forward the voice note to me, but he was afraid to do so, as it might cause it to lose its magic.

The 40-Day Fast In the Forest

When I started asking Simila how he gained his magical powers, he told me (and my Turkish twin sis, Hâle), that it happened during his unplanned 40-day silent fasting retreat in a magical forest here in Kenya. As the story goes, he went into the forest and planned to do some meditation retreat with a wise old shaman that lives in the forest. He said he thought he would be eating, as he was never informed about the plan, but the shaman only gave him herbal teas for 40 days. After a few weeks, Simila went crazy and had some kind of ego death that awakened his right-brain mystical side. He began communicating with animals, plants, and angels. This is his shamanic origin story.

This origin story (mirroring Jesus), along with the rock-solid confirmation of his powers, as mentioned before with the bird story, made me believe that this was the person that could really help so many people, if only they knew about him. So, I began advertising him to all my friends. A number of them really loved his music and his talk therapy. I began loaning him funds to restore his grandmother’s old house, so he could offer ceremonies there. And he did restore the house, and we stayed there for a month. Nobody said he seemed weird — except Hâle, who overheard the talk therapy he was giving someone, and said it sounded stupid. Then again, lots of therapies seem stupid to most people, like inner child therapy, but it doesn’t invalidate them.

Now, back to the forest fasting story. Strangely, I thought that K and S knew this story, but later, they told me that they never heard any shamanic origin story from him. And the story came apart on its own one day, because Hâle actually did do a silent fasting retreat (or mostly silent, and more so fasting) while she was here in Kenya, and Simila said, “Wow, I’ve never done a silent retreat, that’s awesome!” I said, “What do you mean, you never did a silent retreat? That’s your main claim to fame is your 40 days silent fasting retreat…” Then he said “Ohhh… true, true.”

How Could I Not See Clearly?

At that point, you’d be right to call me an idiot for still believing in this guy even halfway. But it didn’t make any sense to me that a scammer would make the most beautiful spiritual music, would demonstrate incredible powers, and all his friends and family that I met seemed to love him. I’m quite sure nobody would love me if I were a scammer.

I grew up with a very trusting family. I was taught that everyone is good, deep down. So it often takes quite a lot for me to stop giving someone the benefit of the doubt. And it is inarguable that everyone is always doing the best they know how to do, so evil is a relative term. Psychopaths don’t know how to feel empathy—although the “dark empath” psychopaths can understand empathy and use it as a weapon.

It wasn’t until this woman Daja came, that everything exploded into the light. Daja is a gifted singer and a gifted inner-child therapist (I’ve taken therapy sessions from her) and (now) a good friend of mine, although I didn’t know her when she first came from Costa Rica to do iboga ceremonies and make music with Simila. He had been playfully courting Daja online for many months (and meanwhile telling everyone he’s celibate). She had a wonderful, healing iboga ceremony (and then another later). One of the themes in her ceremony was that she should marry Simila. I also found out that every woman who has a ceremony with him says they had that vision of marrying him, which indicates to me he’s probably projecting that hypnotically, somehow.

I recall the day that Simila told us that he was planning to marry Daja. It was funny, because he told us this with a tone of voice showing that he didn’t actually want to marry her, but he felt he should. And he took all of us to his Giriama “spiritual mama,” who was a very old shaman herself, highly respected, but she couldn’t see thru him at all. She was encouraging Daja to marry him and have his babies.

And then shortly after, Daja found out he was cheating on her with another woman who came for healing. He apologized, and said it wouldn’t happen again. And then some days later she found another woman he was cheating on her with, and she found out he was telling those women he would marry them, because he didn’t love Daja at all! That’s when Daja’s eyes finally started to open, and mine as well. However, at that point, Daja still thought he was a very good iboga shaman, just not trustworthy around women. And then Simila told me that he actually has sex with women to heal them, not for lust. Oooookaaaaayyyy, playya playa!!! 🤦‍♂️

Simila got Daja pregnant (and we don’t even know how many other women he got pregnant, but it’s at least 3), and she’s about to have his baby now, in December. After speaking at length with Simila’s other baby mamas, she came to the conclusion that he is not just “a good shaman with an honesty problem,” but actually an evil shaman who specifically targets spiritual female musicians to bring them down (reminding me of Sevdaliza’s song, OH MY GOD). Daja just did a four-part video series about him—not naming him, but people understood who it was.

A Con Artist Has No Conscience

Daja starts the first video off by saying Simila is a pathological liar, but that’s not what she meant. He’s actually a con artist, which is the opposite of a pathological liar. He schemes and strategizes. He doesn’t lie about dumb things to get caught and stay stuck in a shame spiral. Unlike someone stuck in their childhood trauma, he’s extremely intelligent and capable of projecting a highly-polished image. And that means he likely can’t be cured, which explains why iboga didn’t cure him. Pathological liars can be cured by simply acknowledging the lie each time: “Oh wait sorry that wasn’t quite true…” And as their friend, you can help by asking them, “Is that the truth part of your brain talking or the false part?”

Iboga is a mirror. If he were lying because, as he claims, he was ashamed of the truth of his life, then iboga would have shown him that shame and helped him face it head on. But since he’s a shark, iboga showed him “you’re a shark.” Which he already knows. There is some Bwiti legend about iboga killing liars and psychopaths (and atheists?), but if that’s true, then he must not have taken enough at one time.

Lessons Learned: Nobody’s Perfect

What I learned from this experience is basically more of the same I’ve been learning my entire adult life, which is that, unfortunately, my parents didn’t teach me how to live in this world. I need to become extremely skeptical of people I meet, especially when I see those people are playing a role. If a spiritual teacher’s feed looks like a magazine editorial—curated, aesthetic, and devoid of specific, unresolved, dangerous conflict, it is not a diary of a soul; it is a Marketing Funnel. Real human lives are grainy, contradictory, and nonlinear. Real humans need others to hold them accountable. Even Buddha needed his monks to hold him accountable on various occasions, like when he taught a meditation on rotting corpses, which led to mass suicide. Even Jesus insulted non-Jews, and was caught outside at night with a naked boy/disciple.

Ask: “What are the worst personality flaws you currently struggle with?” If the answer is: “I struggle with being too generous, too helpful, too loving, maybe people-pleasing,” then that’s a cover story. A good person can struggle with those things. If the answer is, “I’d rather not talk about that right now, but as we get closer we can discuss that,” then that’s honesty, because most people have a shadow that they have trouble divulging immediately. Even more real would be if they told you something like this, which is true for me still: “I crave romance. I struggle with attraction. I am trying to remain harmless (and so far I’ve been mostly lucky). Meanwhile, women should be wary of this weakness in me if they also have the same weakness.”

It doesn’t mean there are no holy or wise people, but almost everyone has some shadow side, and if they aren’t up-front about what that shadow is, then they can’t be trusted. See if they have any former intimate partners who can talk to you about them in a transparent way, explaining their good and bad qualities. Are they happy to connect you with those ex-partners?

Of course, Simila also understood this, which is why he would often try to reveal shadow parts of himself that were either in the past, or not damning in the present. When he was finally exposed, he even tried to make me believe that he was really trying to be more honest, and it was difficult due to shame (see my article on dealing with shame here). I no longer believe that. But the point is, people always do “limited hangout” shadow reveals. The purpose is either to trick our detective minds into trusting them more, or, maybe they aren’t being manipulative at all, but they simply share as much as they feel comfortable with, hoping you will understand there could be more.

If it weren’t for the fact that Simila loves iboga so much, I might think he’s actually not evil, and just desperately trying to please his id with impossible societal and path dependency constraints (since the truth is shameful). I would have thought, maybe casual sex just doesn’t hit his dopamine buttons. He needs that romantic pull to feel good—like most people, who say extremely romantic wedding vows they actually don’t mean at all, like the vow to stick together “in sickness and in health.” What percent of people getting married would actually love to be married to this person if they were mentally ill, abusive and violent? It’s close to 0%, unless they’re masochists, martyrs or true die-hard Twin Flame believers. I’m a Twin Flame believer myself, but even I couldn’t handle it when my TF got too crazy. I pray for her, and that’s the best I can do for now. Shoot, I almost invited her to come get healed by Simila!

Maybe the final confirmation for me that Simila is a psychopath came from an instagram vid he forwarded to me, which says that “cheaters only cheat because the victims project that fear into the relationship:” (The vid was deleted.)

Here was my public response:

Taboo Psychology (Trigger Warning x infinity)

Before, I said that people should reveal their deepest shadow to us, like the famous “non-guru” guru, Ram Dass, eventually did (after being exposed). But now I’m asking myself, why should people reveal that to us — to gain our trust? To feel less guilty? Do we even want to really know that stuff? What if you found out all of the deepest shadow of all the people you loved the most? Could you handle it well? Look at your own shadow right now — do you even want to know all that stuff about yourself? Because once you know it, you have some obligation to divulge it. If you’re monogamous, do you want to know that your spouse has fantasies about being with other people? (That’s normal, nearly everyone does, unless they’re deeply in love and highly sexually satisfied all the time, and even then they probably have such dreams.)

We all have an id, according to Freudian psychology, which gives us raw, base-nature desires that are often at odds with society’s demands (which Freud termed the super-ego). And thus we form the ego, which we call our self, in order to feed our desires in a way that society approves of… or at least in a way that we won’t get in trouble.

Imagine an ideal society that allows people to be completely open about their taboo desires, without validating them, unless the taboos actually don’t make sense. I could openly tell a parent, “I want to have sex with your daughter!” And maybe they would say, “Of course, but you have to marry her first, if she’s interested, when she’s older.”

The advantage here is that we don’t need to keep any secrets, so we feel the immense relief of authenticity. The disadvantage is, we aren’t able to relate to people in a “normal way” anymore when they know all of our shadow desires. And furthermore, we can begin to identify with our shadow by validating it thru open expression. Whereas before, “perverse” sexual urges were possibly just an ephemeral background story that didn’t harm one’s life, now it’s a public story that can be hard to escape from. On the other hand, a public story that’s controlling might be better than a background story that could be controlling without being aware of it, but it will depend on how dark society perceives our shadow to be, and how forceful that shadow is.

Probably at some point in your life, you thought about suicide. Maybe just a background thought. Maybe you forgot about it and moved on. But what if you told everyone, “Hey, I had a suicidal thought today.” And then they said, “Yeah, me too…” And then you said, “Should we make a suicide pact together?” And they said, “Sure!” I could give countless examples like this, and they sometimes do play out even in today’s society. But if you swing the pendulum too far the other way, you can’t actually heal from these shadow thoughts, because you’re ignoring them completely.

Predators like Simila thrive exactly because good people are afraid of their own shadows. He weaponized my desire for “Twin Flame” romance (telling me to write a daily journal to my twin flame, Bee), and my desire for “Holiness,” because he knew those were my blind spots.

Regardless, some folks are too dark or too desperate to be open about it in a way that doesn’t cause harm. And almost everyone has taboo desires that they either practice to internally release via wisdom, or find a community that accepts those. It’s like when you hold a very stinky fart in, so that it will become less stinky when it comes out a few hours later, out of compassion for others in the room. That reminds me of the first Buddhist monk I met, at Bhavana Society, in West Virginia. He told me, “Never hold your farts in. They’re just natural. People should understand.” Welp, not many people joined that monastery! It was literally just him and one other monk in the whole big stinky place. 🤣

Societal Deal With The Devil

Science tell us that 1% of people are born as psychopaths, in every society. That means they have no moral compass, no fear, no empathy, and only a drive for power and pleasure. Such people are incredibly dangerous, but they’re also incredibly skillful at civilization-type things that most people would never want to be skillful at, like cutting people open (surgery), enforcing laws without question (police), making laws that are too complex to even read (politicians), and making profit paramount (corporate boards and CEOs).

Most of us are not savage enough to deal with psychopaths the way that tribal societies do, by banishing or killing them. So, we have decided to live amongst them instead, even allowing them to rule us, in a bid to feel ourselves as more soft and peaceful, and maybe also to avoid the possibility that we could be banished or killed if others thought we were psychopaths. The unintended consequence is that the psychopaths at the top of society spread their influence subversively to the point where we all become, at best, numb to the banality of evil, and at worst, sociopaths ourselves.

As Hâle says, the most important thing we can do in this life is to not stand idly by in the face of evil, and to call it out when we see it. But we need to be cautious in how forcefully we do that, because we won’t live long if we go too far out of bounds.

And keep in mind that the Dark Empaths are not just underground anymore. They are designing the very mainstream protocols for psychedelic therapy:

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Trust, but Verify

Ok then, psychology and society are a bit of a terrifying rabbit hole, but aside from that discourse, let’s go back to Square One, trying to understand how to vet our teachers and healers.

Let’s say you go to the doctor. He tells you that you have cancer, and you need chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, despite a dismal chance of survival. Many people would say, “oh, ok, go ahead, you’re the DOCTOR!” But others of us might do our own research on cancer. We trust that this doctor is probably saying what he thinks, but we verify whether he’s actually right or not. The danger here is that we might be out of our league, and liable to fool ourselves. But how will we know until we investigate and confer with our intuition and with the minds of others?

If a spiritual leader/healer/teacher gives off an air of sainthood, we must apply the foundational scientific maxim: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And that evidence is not just one-dimensional, because people are multidimensional. Maybe the person is able to quote Osho very well (like Sadhguru, who plagiarized him), but do they have Osho’s fleet of Rolls Royce’s? (that was a joke…) What I should say is: do they practice what they preach? How can you find out? The only way is through relationship. And often, it takes intimate relationships to reveal the darkness. Thank you for your service, Daja!

Always:

• Check for verifiable credentials, if applicable

• Speak with multiple past clients independently

• Watch for love-bombing or special treatment

• Notice if origin stories change

• Red flags around sexuality/romance

• Observe how they handle being questioned

Resources for Victims of Spiritual Abuse

• Tears of Eden: A community specifically for survivors of spiritual abuse, offering online support groups and “The Uncertain” podcast that explores difficult topics related to abuse in evangelical churches.

• Reclamation Collective: A 501(c)(3) organization offering virtual support groups for those navigating religious trauma and spiritual abuse, plus a directory of religious trauma-informed therapists.

• Sacred Wilderness: A nonprofit that provides resources and funding for care for those spiritually abused within church or faith settings, with a focus on storytelling and advocacy.

• Spiritual Abuse Resources: Connected to the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), offering webinars, e-books, and educational materials about spiritual abuse in religious contexts.