EP 66 | NATUROPATHIC MIND-BODY MEDICINE WITH DR. SARAH CAMPBELL, MEDICINE MAMI

Sinclair Fleetwood: I am so thrilled to have a very special guest on the show today. You may know her as Medicine Mommy on Instagram. Doctor Sarah Campbell has devoted her entire existence to learning about all the different expressions and modalities of medicine. After completing her Bachelor of Science in Nutrition, she went on to pursue a master’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, and a Doctorate degree in Naturopathic Medicine. She is a primary care physician in the state of Washington, with special interests and external training in mind-body medicine, holistic psychology, Women’s Health, rheumatology, gastroenterology, and helping people understand the deeper inner communications between body and spirit. Sarah, I’m so glad you’re here.

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Thank you so much for having me.

Sinclair Fleetwood: I have been wanting to have you on the show forever. Sarah and I know each other from way back. We met briefly when Sarah was a volunteer at the retreat center where I was coming in to be a manager, and we got to do one retreat together. You were managing the kitchen and I fell in love with her beautiful hair and smile and personality in just a couple of weeks. And then she had to go and we parted ways. But I have been following her beautiful growth on Instagram and she has been touching so many people’s lives. So tell me — how did you find your path to working with natural medicine and plant medicine?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Beautiful question. My journey with plant medicines actually started pretty early. The first ayahuasca ceremony I did was when I was 22. I went through a lot of tragedy early on — my dad passed away when I was 20, and I had all of these very beautiful, tragic, synchronous events happen around his death that made me feel like there’s more here. I was born and raised Catholic, and none of that ever really resonated with me. I started reading — I read this beautiful book called Journey of Souls by Michael Newton. Eventually one of my friends in Chicago introduced me to ayahuasca. I wanted the experience to connect with my dad and get healing around some of the major traumas in my life. After my first ceremony I thought I was never doing it again — even though it was so beautiful. First dose so tragic, second dose so beautiful. And then I went back three weeks later. I did eleven ceremonies within eighteen months. Then I took a break, and the next time I went was in Ecuador at twenty-five.

Sinclair Fleetwood: So when I met you, you were already in school — your first year, right?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I had just finished my first year.

Sinclair Fleetwood: What led you to decide to pursue naturopathic medicine and acupuncture?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Ever since I was nineteen I had been really interested in nutrition — fascinated by how you can change your mood, change so many things, just by what you put in your body. That led me to change my major to nutrition. I was spending a summer in Hawaii doing volunteer work when I got introduced to naturopathic medicine. I didn’t even know what it was, but once I looked into it I was like, this is what I want to do. It all felt very synchronous and right. And then — it wasn’t my original plan to do acupuncture and Chinese medicine. But I got pretty sick in my third year, and naturopathic medicine was not making me well. Once I started doing Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, my body started to heal. So I added on the master’s degree — I only had one year left of my doctorate, and the master’s added three more years. But I’m just about to graduate next week!

Sinclair Fleetwood: Oh my gosh. So how many years total have you been in school?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Bachelor’s is four years. My doctorate was five years because they split the last year in two, and then the master’s was three years, but they overlaid the master’s onto the doctorate.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Wow — nine years. It’s basically like regular medical school, and I don’t think people know that. The investment of time and energy and money and studying is really the same.

Dr. Sarah Campbell: It is. It’s a little over three hundred credits for my doctorate. And we are primary care physicians in most states, so we have to learn all of the standards of care, all the pharmacology — everything that conventional medical students learn — but then also natural modalities on top of that.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Doctors who know about nutrition and plants are so rare. So many of us have been really harmed by the medical industry and are looking for more holistic care — not just “here’s a drug, take this.” So how did your relationship with ayahuasca plant the seeds for expanding into this field?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: A big piece of my work now is including spirituality in medicine — including the mental-emotional lens and mental health, which is honestly kind of a new thing. A lot of times our mental and emotional bodies and our spiritual health aren’t really taken into consideration when talking about health. Plant medicine expanded my lens to say: yes, physical things matter, nutrition matters — but also: how is your emotional health? How’s your mental health? How’s your spiritual health? That’s what truly holistic care looks like. I vividly remember after my second ceremony saying: “I am confident that the amount of healing that took place tonight would have taken me a lifetime to achieve.” I knew from that point that spirituality was always going to be part of my lens.

Sinclair Fleetwood: It’s like taking the blinders off and looking at how everything in our healthcare system is compartmentalized and separated — which is the opposite of how nature does it. In nature, everything is connected, everything is in cycles. By the time something is expressing in the body, it has already been through the spiritual, emotional, and mental layers. We don’t understand how to recognize it sooner. So tell me — how do you support people in this process of holistic healing?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I absolutely nerd out about all the physical things — the biochemical processes, balancing hormones, healing the gut. But one of the most important things is allowing ourselves to feel the full range of emotions. We are in a culture that programs us to repress and suppress emotions. A lot of people genuinely don’t know how to hold themselves through the heavier ones. There’s a lot of spiritual bypassing in New Age spirituality — “it’s all love and light, just meditate it away” — and we’re not encapsulating the duality that is the human experience. How can we invite those things in closer? How can we turn up the volume on all of that heaviness and just ask it — what do you have to say? Why are you here? Accepting those parts of ourselves is essential for preventing energetic stagnancy in the body.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Nobody does this work without having lived it. What was your dark night of the soul?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I have two, actually. In my third year, I was at absolute war with my cycles. I had endometriosis, two bouts of ruptured ovarian cysts, five providers — and all of them were like “we don’t know why this is happening” or “it’s fine.” It wasn’t until I looked into Chinese medicine and an energetic perspective that things started to make sense. There’s an amazing book called Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom that explores the energetics of female reproductive pathologies. The energetic root of ovarian cysts is suppressed creation. And there I was — a writer since my teenage years — who had completely stopped writing because I was so exhausted from the program. Once I understood that connection, I made my Instagram. The very next month I had a completely painless cycle and never had another ovarian cyst again. Just having that portal of expression literally healed my body. That was phase one. Phase two came after a pretty abusive relationship, then moving in with an abusive roommate, losing some friends. All of this brought up anger — an emotion I had never been allowed to feel as a young girl. Eventually I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis. Gabor Maté’s work really says that autoimmune disease is rooted in suppressed anger, especially in women. It wasn’t until I tapped into my anger and created safe homes for it that I began to heal. Life kept nudging me — are you angry yet? Are you angry yet? — until finally I was like, yes, I am angry, and this is not right.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Sacred rage. Can we just normalize women being super angry? Rage practices are so powerful and necessary. Anger is a messenger — it’s there to tell you your boundaries have been crossed, that something is not okay for you. It’s not meant to hang around. It wants to flow through you. What are some of your favorite anger-release practices?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I love doing rage ceremonies. A lot of my clinical work is with women with chronic and autoimmune disease, and suppressed anger is often at the root. In those ceremonies you just allow your body to do whatever it needs — free-form movement, dance, stomping, screaming, crying, whatever your body needs in that moment. And I always build in at least half of the ceremony for holding yourself in the tenderness and love beneath the anger. Because when you touch that anger, the immediate response for most people is to start crying. The first time I ever did a rage ceremony I was bellowing — I’ve never cried so hard in my life. So much grief, so much tenderness underneath. Holding that love and tenderness after touching the anger is equally important.

Sinclair Fleetwood: The deep, long-term integration work requires you not only to look at your shadow and your anger and the parts of yourself you’ve disowned — but to love them, to bring them in, to welcome them. That’s what wholeness is about. You get to learn how to love yourself when you’re super angry and ugly and snotty and making a mess. I love hearing about this work through the lens of chronic illness. What is going on with most of your clients when they come to you?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I love working with women and I love chronic disease because it’s close to my heart — I have an autoimmune disease myself. These invisible diseases are very overlooked. In conventional medicine, all they do is prescribe immunosuppressants with no deeper inquiry into why the immune system is dysregulated or where the inflammation is actually coming from. That’s the approach I take — stepping back and asking all of those questions. Usually that includes the gut, because so many things start there. Gut health connected to hormone health — that’s huge in my work. And with chronic disease and chronic pain, there’s usually something called mast cell activation, which is very much on the rise but not well understood. I love seeing how everything is connected rather than doing mini treatments for isolated symptoms. Heal the root, and all of those things start to resolve.

Sinclair Fleetwood: It’s so important to stop playing Doctor Google and find someone you trust who can take you to the source. Do people call you Doctor Sarah?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: It kind of depends, honestly. It’s been meaningful for me — I only just graduated a year ago. And my dad was Doctor Campbell, so I’m second generation.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Doctor Campbell! What would you tell people who are feeling really helpless, scared, and knowing they don’t want yet another prescription? How do they step into working with a naturopath?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I have intimate containers — either ten sessions or a six-month journey. Finding a naturopathic doctor is kind of like finding a therapist. You really have to find someone who shares the same lens as you. Do discovery calls, get to know their lens of medicine. And for people who might not be able to afford a naturopathic doctor, I always tell people to focus on the foundations. That’s something I teach in every container because it is so overlooked. We’re always reaching for high-force interventions without taking into account foundational health — clean water, healthy food, sleep, community, connecting with the earth, getting in the sun, making sure you’re eliminating every day, moving your body. Our bodies know what to do. You can spend three months just focusing on foundations before any protocol and you will feel better.

Sinclair Fleetwood: This is all the same stuff I teach in my integration containers. If you want the most fertile ground for psychedelic experiences to root into, you have to take care of the basic stuff. Any healing process, any expansion, always starts with the foundation. And it takes a long time — let’s just say that clearly. We want the dopamine hit of solving things dramatically, and natural healing just doesn’t work that way. Nature takes her time. And often you feel worse before you feel better. But that is part of the healing path.

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Absolutely. Sometimes when you take steps back you think it’s not working. But that’s actually part of it.

Sinclair Fleetwood: It’s more difficult in many ways to do a natural healing path. But you’re healing the root — not just getting a bandage. Your body is actually healing in a way that lasts. I always call it the hydra. What if we just went to the heart of it instead of cutting off heads? Don’t be afraid to do discovery calls with professionals — coaches, doctors, providers, facilitators. That’s what we’re here for.

Dr. Sarah Campbell: We’re trying to create the providers we needed. I want to be the doctor I needed during my own journey — the one I didn’t have.

Sinclair Fleetwood: That’s exactly why I went into this field. When I came out of my initial experiences with plant medicine, I didn’t know what integration was. I had seen so many people who were lost after spending all that time and energy and money coming to Ecuador to do medicine — and then it was like “OK, see you later.” I wanted to close that circle. Education is the unsexy part of healing, but if you don’t know the language, you’re so lost. How do you educate people about spirit on your platform?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Spirituality is the essence of everything I do. All of the quotes I post come from spirit. I go through things in my life, I get these little nuggets of wisdom and beauty, and I put them into my art form of words and share them. I don’t feel like I’m teaching anyone anything — I’m channeling messages from spirit, ancient truths that live inside all of us. People say: “I’ve never been able to put that into words, but that captures exactly what I feel.” It’s woven into everything because it comes from spirit.

Sinclair Fleetwood: I’ll read something you post and think, yes, that’s exactly what I needed to hear today. And I have to ask — how do you keep your Instagram grid so perfect?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: My moon is in Libra — I need everything to be beautiful! I do all my own back-end work and marketing. I started my page with alternating tiles — a white tile and then a colorful tile. So I do a quote post and then a Reel with a cover photo, and every other post just alternates. And I’ve always loved very saturated, colorful nature photos, so that’s become the visual identity.

Sinclair Fleetwood: That’s why it’s so appealing — it gives you a feeling of beauty and safety, of being nourished. So let’s talk about courses — what do you see as the benefit of taking a course in this space?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: There are two different arenas — passive courses and live launch containers. With passive courses, the benefit is lifetime access. You can revisit the material, relisten and rewatch as many times as you need, go back to a section a year later when it becomes relevant. Containers are a completely different energy — gathering like-minded people from all over the world around a similar topic. The community building that happens in a live container is healing in and of itself. And you can access really beautiful providers for a fraction of the one-to-one price.

Sinclair Fleetwood: It’s such a co-creative way to learn. When you’re sharing what’s going on with you in a container, you’re also helping someone else. It resonates with how medicine ceremonies work — everyone sitting around the fire as a family, all healing together. So tell me — what are your current offerings?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I just put out a new course — kind of a passion project. I am such a nerd about harnessing the power of nature and science for beauty. I would rather nourish the internal roots of our hair, skin, and nails than spend money on external products. People had been pushing me to create a course about beauty from the inside out — all my best-kept beauty secrets, protocols, and supplements. It just launched last week. It’s a passive, lifetime course and I’ll keep adding to it throughout my career.

Sinclair Fleetwood: That’s something that doesn’t get enough attention. Coming through my medicine awakening I started looking at every product — what I was putting on my skin, in my hair. When I started reading about hair dye I was like, this literally causes bladder cancer — especially for Black women. Once I stopped using all of those chemicals, my hair has never been bouncier or healthier. It’s gray now and I love it. Do you have any other courses coming up?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: The gut health container is being relaunched as a passive course in July. And later this year I’m hoping to rerun Womb Remembrance — a ten-week womb container I run alongside a dear friend who has studied under the Shipibo tradition for the last nine years. She does somatic and shamanic journeying, and I teach about the womb from a naturopathic and Chinese medicine perspective. It was incredibly beautiful and transformative when we ran it last year. And on top of all that, I’m moving to Maui on September first!

Sinclair Fleetwood: I heard the rumor! What’s calling you to Hawaii?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: I’m just done with Seattle. The last six years have been a lot of shadow work — it’s been a beautiful place for that, very shadowy energetically. But I’m ready for sunshine and for life to start. Hawaii feels like the womb of the earth — very feminine, very creative. I had a very clear vision during an Inia Dieta in January 2022 — I was dreaming in the lands of Hawaii, on top of waterfalls, writing in a little notebook. And I thought: I’m going to Hawaii after I graduate. Spirit is calling and I’m heeding the call.

Sinclair Fleetwood: How exciting. I’ve never been to Hawaii, but I’ve been having dreams about it for the last few months.

Dr. Sarah Campbell: You have to come visit. I’m moving with my dear friend Danny — we’re getting a three-bedroom, so you’ll have a space.

Sinclair Fleetwood: Medicine sisters! OK Sarah, how can people find you and work with you?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: The bio of my Instagram always has my latest container linked. You can also always DM me. I’ll have much more spaciousness to open up one-to-one work once I get to Hawaii. I have a ten-session container and a six-month journey, and I always have at least three live launch containers per year — so there are many different ways and price points to work with me.

Sinclair Fleetwood: And just following Sarah on Instagram will make your life more beautiful. Her handle is @MedicineMommy — that’s M-A-M-I — which is so clever and I love it. Any last piece of heart wisdom before we go?

Dr. Sarah Campbell: Just bringing it back to the importance of really allowing yourself to feel the full range of human emotions. It gets to be wild and messy and tragic and beautiful and raw — all of the things. This human healing journey gets to be all of those things. Permission to feel all of it. An invitation to feel all of it.

Sinclair Fleetwood: I love that. Everything is here to help you. Thank you so much, Dr. Sarah Campbell. I have so enjoyed catching up with you. I’m so happy you’re moving to Hawaii — what a beautiful place for you to be sharing your love from. Thank you for being here.