Someone asked me once, very casually, over tea: “You've sat with ayahuasca, you've done kambo — but have you ever smoked the toad?” The way they said it made the question land differently. Like they were quietly checking whether I knew what I was getting into. Bufo, they kept telling me, is something else entirely. Why, I wondered, would anyone willingly sign up to feel like they're dying?

And yet here I am, writing about the night I did exactly that. This is a long piece about Bufo alvarius — what the medicine is, where it comes from, what the ceremony looked like from the inside, and what stuck around afterward. If you're researching whether to sit with 5-MeO-DMT yourself, I'd rather you read an honest account than a glossy one.

What Is Bufo, Exactly?

Bufo refers to the dried venom of the Sonoran Desert toad — Bufo alvarius, also called Incilius alvarius by the people who care about taxonomy. The toad lives in a narrow band of desert across northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Its parotid glands secrete a milky substance loaded with tryptamines, the most notable being 5-MeO-DMT, which is widely considered the most potent naturally occurring psychedelic on the planet.

The secretions are harvested without killing the animal, then dried into small crystalline flakes. Those flakes get loaded into a glass pipe, gently heated, and inhaled in a single slow breath. The effects arrive almost immediately. Total duration is usually fifteen to twenty minutes by the clock. Inside the experience, time is meaningless. People come back saying it felt like forever, or like no time at all, or both.

This is worth pausing on: 5-MeO-DMT is not the same as the N,N-DMT found in ayahuasca. The visual character is different. The emotional terrain is different. Ayahuasca tends to give you a narrative — scenes, memories, conversations with something that feels like an intelligence. Bufo tends to dissolve the narrator entirely. There's no story. There's just whatever is left when the story-maker stops.

Why I Said Yes (After Saying No for Years)

For a long time my answer was a polite no. The reports I heard sounded too intense, too close to actual ego death, too much like the dying I wasn't ready for. I had two kids at home. I had work I cared about. I wasn't running away from anything obvious, and I couldn't find a clean reason to invite something that felt this big.

Then a stranger messaged me about a ceremony happening the following week, on the one open evening between Christmas and New Year — the only unscheduled day in a packed month. I'm not a sucker for coincidence, but my body said yes before my mind could argue. So I went.

If you're considering Bufo, I'd offer this: pay attention to how the invitation arrives. Are you chasing it because you've seen testimonials on Instagram and you want what those people seemed to get? Or has it shown up in your life with a strange quiet insistence that you can't quite explain away? Those are different motivations, and they tend to produce different ceremonies.

The Room, the Facilitator, and the Setup

The ceremony was on the top floor of an old building near a canal in Amsterdam. Steep stairs, creaking floors, about ten of us sitting on cushions in a circle. Sage smoke. A small altar with feathers and a few stones. None of it was theatrical. It looked, honestly, like somebody's living room arranged with care.

The facilitator — I'll call him Raul — opened by saying he wasn't a shaman. “We're each our own shaman,” he said. “I'm just here to sit with you while it happens.” Every actual shaman I've met says some version of this. The ones claiming the title outright are almost always the ones to avoid.

His partner translated from Spanish into English. They explained what the medicine does and doesn't do, what to expect physically, what might come up emotionally, and what they would do if someone struggled. They told us bluntly: the body can feel heavy. The body can feel orgasmic. The ego dissolves. You may not remember who you are. They asked each of us to set an intention.

What the Ceremony Actually Looked Like

People went one at a time. Raul would load the pipe, heat it, and guide the person to breathe out, then inhale slowly and hold. Within seconds, most of them either lay back voluntarily or were gently lowered to the floor. Then came the next fifteen or twenty minutes — completely different for everyone.

Some people went silent and motionless. One person sobbed. One laughed for nearly the entire time. One thrashed for two minutes and then went still and beatific. Raul's response shifted with each — sometimes singing, sometimes waving a feather, sometimes just sitting nearby looking unbothered. There was no formula. He read each person and responded.

What surprised me, watching, was how unlike kambo this looked. Kambo is loud — the racing heart, the purging, the heat. Bufo was quieter on the outside. The whole drama was happening internally. That calmed me down a little before my turn.

My Turn

When they called me up, my main fear wasn't death itself. It was leaving my kids without a mother. But everyone in the circle had returned from their own dying, so I figured I could too. I'd later come to think of that moment — the willingness to let go even briefly — as the actual work. The smoke is just the vehicle.

The pipe touched my lips. It tasted like singed hair and something organic I'd rather not name. I relaxed my throat and kept drawing it in until Raul said stop. Hold.

The drop was immediate. I felt myself fall backward into the floor — into the earth beneath the floor — while a warm, overwhelming light filled my visual field. Behind my eyelids, fractals rushed toward my forehead at speeds I had no reference for. Most were drenched in color. Some were stark black and white. Waves of sensation moved through me that I genuinely have no language for. So this, I thought from somewhere, is what dying feels like.

What I learned in those minutes — and this is the only practical thing I can really offer you — is that resistance and surrender produce wildly different experiences inside the same medicine. When my thinking mind tried to assert itself (should I make sounds? should I move?) the colors dimmed and a harsher, more judgmental texture crept in. When I let go and dropped attention back into the fractals, the beauty returned. The choice point was right there, over and over. That's the practice.

Coming Back

I sat up, eventually. Raul was in front of me. We held eye contact for what felt like a long, wordless conversation. My mind was already running its usual program — did I do that right? what now? — but underneath it was a quieter knowing that didn't need anything from me. We bowed. He leaned in and said one word in my ear that happened to be the exact word I'd been working with all year. I won't share it. It would mean nothing to you and everything to me.

The Days After (the Part Nobody Talks About Enough)

For about a week, I felt soft and porous in the best way. More love in my chest. Easier tears at small things — strangers laughing on a tram, my kid drawing something terrible and showing me proudly. Also, oddly, the world felt slightly flat. The colors of ordinary life were duller, as if I now knew about a dimension that wasn't currently accessible.

This is normal. Integration after 5-MeO-DMT can include a kind of homesickness for the state the medicine showed you. Some people report a low or grey period in the second or third week. Some get the opposite — sustained joy, clarity, a quieter inner critic. Most get some of both. If you're thinking about sitting with Bufo, plan your calendar accordingly. Don't book a ceremony the night before a job interview or a wedding you have to host.

Practical Things Worth Knowing Before You Sit

• Screen your facilitator carefully. Ask about their training, their lineage, how many ceremonies they've held, what they do if someone has a cardiac event or panic spiral. A real one will answer plainly. A fake one will deflect.
• Disclose medications honestly. SSRIs, MAOIs, lithium, certain heart medications, and stimulants all interact with 5-MeO-DMT in ways that range from blunting the experience to genuinely dangerous.
• Sit with synthetic 5-MeO-DMT if conservation matters to you. The toad population is under real pressure from over-harvesting. Many ethical facilitators now use lab-synthesized 5-MeO, which is molecularly identical and doesn't involve the animal at all.
• Have an integration plan. A therapist who understands psychedelics, a journaling practice, time off work, a friend who knows what you did and won't judge you. Don't skip this part.
• Don't stack ceremonies. Bufo isn't something to repeat every weekend. Give it months to land before considering another sit.

Is Bufo Right for You?

I can't answer that for anyone else. What I can say is that Bufo is not a beginner medicine, and it's not a substitute for therapy, recovery work, or the long slow building of a life you actually want to be in. It's a brief, extraordinary look at something — call it consciousness, call it presence, call it whatever you want — and what you do with that look is the rest of the work.

If you're drawn to it because ayahuasca felt too long, kambo too physical, or psilocybin too narrative — fair enough. If you're drawn because you want a shortcut past your trauma, please reconsider. There are no shortcuts. The medicine can crack open a door; walking through it is still on you.

For readers who feel quietly called to take this further, a curated selection of 5-MeO-DMT and broader plant-medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Take your time choosing. The right ceremony will still be there when you're ready.