Bufo Alvarius
I deepened my experience with Shamanic medicines when I smoked Bufo, the toad medicine at the end of July.
What is Bufo Alvarius?
"Bufo Alvarius" is a toad that lives in the Sonoran desert in Mexico and from which the organic 5 MEO DMT is extracted, which is a substance that is extracted through its parotid glands, this is a species that hibernates ten months underground and comes to the surface only in rainy seasons to eat and reproduce, it is important to mention that to obtain this substance the toad does not suffer or die, only the toxin is collected and the toad is released, but it is very difficult to obtain it since it comes to the surface a few times a year.
5 MEO DMT (5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) is known by various names such as Bufo Alvarius, Medicina del Sapito, or La Molecula de Dios, but regardless of what we call it and without fear of lying, we can say that it is the entheogen most powerful in the world.
"There are no words" to be able to explain such a significant, revealing, and divine experience. Participants surrender to the experience without judging to allow the release of the greatest amount of accumulated negative energy and thus be able to literally be reborn to enjoy and live fully.
Although the participant loses all notion of time, which may seem much longer, the session usually lasts from 7 to 15 minutes, and at the end of the experience, the participant begins to integrate consciousness and reality again, finding new feelings and emotions that allow them to enjoy of deep joy, peace, and tranquility to put life into perspective as they lived it until then, finding clarity and concentration to focus his efforts on things of true value, starting with oneself.
The toad's medicine favors the healing and regeneration of the body, managing to stimulate the immune system, which allows for accelerating the healing of certain diseases, particularly those created by emotional traumas since most diseases have an emotional root. This means that if we eliminate the origin of the disease, the body will be able to self-heal itself.
For more info: http://encuentrochamanico.es/bufo-alvarius/
"Someone with little or no prior experience with meditative states or practices might simply go completely unconscious, i.e. dissociate, while those with more experience might find themselves in transcendent, out-of-body or absorptive trance states that can be only partially remembered and described afterwards. Body movements, sounds and verbal utterances that are observed by others but not remembered by the subject – also indicate dissociative disconnect, no matter how pleasurable the subjective experience." Excerpt from the book, The Toad and the Jaguar
My personal experience.
This is the most challenging thing that I have ever tried to explain: interpreting my experience with Bufo Alvarius. I am going to steal some expressions from the website the-neixan.me which used the book 'The Toad and the Jaguar' too, in their research for explaining the unexplainable.
"My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source."
I was very nervous before I took Bufo. In the past, I had the opportunity to smoke it three times but I felt too shy and intimidated to do it due to having personally witnessed other people's extraordinary, and at times disturbing, reactions to the toad medicine. But I paid for it and there was no going back. I knew I was strong enough to go through with it and the people around me, many of them I have met at the Ayahuasca retreat before, supported and looked after me. This Sunday felt to be the right time to finally jump into it. I had been preparing myself for weeks in my head and in my heart and it seemed that the elements in my environment beautifully aligned for this transformational journey.
Bufo started to affect me lightly while I was still smoking it from the glass pipe and then when I felt I couldn't inhale any more of this funny-tasting smoke that, by the way, left my throat itchy from the inside, it was time to hold it down for a while but being a non-smoker, I almost immediately exhaled and coughed up the smoke with a frown. Then within seconds, I got swept away by an unnamable vibrational sensation in my body. I heard the facilitator asking me if I wanted more because I left about 1/3 of the substance in the pipe unsmoked but I got so swiftly drifted away by the maelstrom of synaesthetic sensations that I shook my head as to say 'no' and lay down instead. I felt like I got sucked up by the vacuum cleaner into some kind of a vortex that was black and with tiny shiny dots that looked like the starry sky at night. It all happened so fast. I felt a certain heaviness in my head like my head was pulling me to the ground or being heavy with the eternity of the universe. Then I realised I was not actually in it, I was it. I can imagine this place as 'our home' where we go back to after we die and before we are reborn. I don't remember seeing kaleidoscope patterns or geometric forms that many talk about. I was just in this black place, the luxurious emptiness with my eyes closed, where I experienced extremely intense vibrational stimulation in my body that could have been inspired by the sounds of the musical instruments that people were voluntarily playing in the background to accompany my journey. I didn't actually hear the sounds of these instruments but I felt their vibration deep in my body. This could have been the death moment that others told me that they had experienced when they had taken Bufo. They told me this feeling can scare some to the point that their ego starts to fight it but I was not afraid. I surrendered and allowed the sensations to move through my body. In the meantime, I was circling with my arms and was rolling on the floor while breathing heavily, unaware of these bodily movements that took over me. I heard myself breathing very loud under the weight I felt crushing my chest. I also felt a certain tightness in my throat as if I was drowning or suffocating. I remember all I could hear was my very loud breathing but when I watched back the video my friend took of me, it didn't sound as loud as I experienced it. At this stage, I was in such a deep inner experience that I had no control or recollection of what my body was doing as if I hadn't been there. I lost all physical connection and feelings to physical forms such as my body pressing against the mattress or gently bruising my elbow as I pulled my arms under my body. The only thing I felt was that I struggled with breathing and, as I wrote earlier, the heavy weight on my chest, the tightness of my lungs and as if something was obstructing my trachea.
"In my experience, there was no self, no body, no time or space, but there was being. There was also consciousness: I could remember everything afterwards. Even though “I” wasn’t there, there was observation and recording going on. And there was certainly bliss, joy, ecstasy unimaginable." the-neixan.me
Edward, one of the participants who I asked to record my Bufo experience, said that the medicine helps to release negative energy in the body and the form of release can be anything from crying, laughing, screaming, moving, breathing, shaking, etc. Whatever your body needs, will do.
"For most people who enter a Bufo Alvarius session, life afterward is not the same as it was before. The substance heals the brain structure, reconnects and repairs neurons. It mobilizes the last deepest blockages in our soul and smoothens them every time we enter this state of connection. The journey is short, very deep and straight to the heart of existence. Light and dark, good and bad, construction and destruction come together in a single immense, creative energy that cannot be defined and at the same time contains everything. There is a possibility of experiencing the complete dissolution of the ego and entering from duality into singularity. Pure presence and pure love are experienced." encuentrochamanico
You can watch the video of my Bufo experience below. Unfortunately, my friend only recorded me until the moment I returned to my body and regained consciousness a.k.a. this vortex spat me out as fast and suddenly as it had sucked me in. But part of the whole experience was also me looking around the tent with the eyes of a newborn, smiling wildly while feeling so much beauty within and around me. As the medicine facilitator had explained to me before "Bufo resets the nervous system. It's like restarting your life with a white page." In the video, you can see how the people around me supported me by holding space and helping me clear my airways by doing the same. I believe that energetically we were all connected and those who were more sensitive, could feel what I was going through. Likewise, in the past, I could feel many Bufo takers' feelings in my body too. At times I felt it so intensely that I chose to leave the tent to be able to keep my distance.
After my breathing normalized and I regained consciousness, I still felt vulnerable, shaking inside of my body, feeling the vibration of my being, slightly uncoordinated, no way I could have stood up right away. My friend wanted to give my phone back. He wanted to put it in my hand and I suddenly didn't know what to do with it. I couldn't hold it. My hands felt surreal. I couldn't speak either. I said something with a very croaky voice to him to put the phone down because I don't know what to do with it. I needed to lie down and just be this strange, happy feeling. This vibration of depth, connectedness, and beauty. Hard to describe with words. I also remember being happy and appreciating that I could feel the ground. I flattened my chest against the floor, spread my fingers and lay my palms on the wooden floor being so happy to touch the ground. Like I was a shipwreck who finally reached land and was happy to survive. I also mixed this feeling with being proud and joyful to be on this planet and felt excitement about getting to know the many places, animals and plants on Earth.
So at the end of the session, there was this clean, beautiful feeling overwhelming my body. I think this is what past life regression does too. The therapist takes you back to the trauma experience and guides you out of the situation so that you can overwrite the negative emotions with positive ones. If you feel peace after the trauma, you overrode the negative experience with the positive one. This way the neurons reconnect differently/ reset the nervous system, and that creates the changes within the body and then the sign of transformation follows in the physical form too. Because the internal transformation shows up externally too. With the new program, you will choose differently and you will be attracted to new things/ people in your life that is more in alignment with the new you.
After my ride with Bufo ended, I tried to explain to myself where I was and why I couldn't breathe properly. The 'not being able to breath' experience had been brought to me by Ayahuasca last year when I asked the medicine to take me back to my birth experience. I interpreted this struggling sensation in my body as the umbilical cord being tightly around my neck. My baby body was also stuck in the birth canal for a longer period of time and probably had already started to breathe in that state and inhaled a lot of amniotic liquid. Just by what my mum told me about giving birth to me, I gathered the information that I was born not breathing and that my birth experience was traumatic. The human brain doesn't remember such early experiences but the body does. The body keeps a record, information is stored in the cells, about everything it happened to it. A traumatic experience teaches the nerves a program that helps to run the body with a newfound solution, an abnormal way from defense or in the name of survival. I believe Bufo is powerful enough to correct these 'mistakes' that the neurons learned and as it is said "Bufo reconnects and repairs the neurons and the brain structure".
P.S.
On my way to the retreat, I listened to the radio in the car and the first song was: Voyage, voyage by Desireless. I turned emotional at the feeling that was signalling to me that I was not going to be alone much longer. These were the last days of me renting a car on my own and I should fully embrace the wind of independence and freedom because I was heading toward a new beginning I hadn't known of yet. I also gathered a feeling of someone charging toward me to be together with me, although I had no physical evidence of someone being interested in me romantically. It all played out energetically while I was driving through the volcano park in the centre of the island. TBC...
If you are interested in joining this soulful, healing retreat with shamanic medicines (Ayahuasca, Bufo Alvarius, Kambo) in Tenerife, the heart chakra island, find out more at the following links or feel free to turn to me if you have any doubts or questions:
Until next time ♡