Bufo: Toad Venom and Transcendental Ecstasy

Toad Skin Fractalius by Andrew McLachlan.

Smoking toad venom doesn’t make many bucket lists, but it had been on mine for years. I have experienced plenty of different consciousness-altering states, but the venom of the Colorado River Toad, or Incilius alvarius, commonly called “bufo”, seemed to me like the ultimate frontier. In Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, it is described as “The Everest of psychedelics”. I never actively sought it, but hoped it would one day find me. When I recently met a pair of guides offering bufo ceremonies while traveling in San Marcos, Guatemala, I didn’t hesitate, despite my fear. I knew I would be ready.

I arranged for the ceremony to take place in the garden of my temporary home. The guides spread a beautiful blanket on a stone platform under trees heavy with dragon fruit vines; a visual allegory for the loving nourishment of the land that held us. There was not much ritual involved in the ceremony. Only some incense, reassurance, and an invitation to set my intention. I knew my intention clearly. I wanted to experience universal, unconditional love within myself. I had been traveling solo for over a year that point. A gnawing loneliness had been haunting me for months, particularly around someone with whom I had been swept deeply in love, but who was unavailable to me as a partner. I had resigned myself to ride it out, knowing there was a lesson for me in the pain, but I was getting weary of my looping heartache patterns. I don’t take psychedelics lightly. Our culture tends to medicate away emotions with substances, and I am cautious of using psychedelics as a substitute for real internal work, or what some call ‘spiritual bypassing’. But I was stuck, and wanted a push. I knew there was a deeper love within myself that felt obscured and distant. I just needed to reconnect with it.

With my intention held clear in my heart and mind, I felt little fear approaching the moment of inhalation. Intensity, uncertainty, and excitement were present, but a calm power set in as I put my lips on the pipe. I barely had time to visually measure the brown crystals in the tip before the thick smoke was billowing into me, deep and gentle. I had smoked DMT before, but bufo was so much gentler. No pain in my lungs, no harshness. I took a huge pull of the thick, salty smoke. I felt my entire body immediately begin to hum. The experience set on me so rapidly and intensely, I was not even fully conscious of my entire exhale. 

My vision filled with bright white vibrations of circular fractal arcs, as an all-pervading hum of overpowering intensity crashed onto me, obliterating my senses. For a few moments, I was aware of the guides around me, chanting and waving rattles, their sounds reverberating through the raw fabric of existence with vivid and dramatic power. Then, Gabe as “I” was completely and entirely gone. There was nothing to anchor me to human experience, yet experience itself persisted. There was no fear, no analysis. Nothing to understand or make sense of. No search for meaning beyond immediate experience. Just a naked witnessing of universal potential uncoiling, creating each moment. 

I remained briefly aware of sound in the form of rattles and chanting from my guides, but they were not identifiable to me as such. As the vibrations crescendoed around and within, I unified with an infinite matrix of absolute ecstasy and joy. My experience was no longer bound by human edges. I was living universal and unconditional love in its pure, raw form. No filters of ego, rationality, or reason. Just limitless, transcendent ecstasy. The experience quickly reached the definition of ineffable. For lack of a better metaphor, I had merged with “God”, which I personally define as the universal creative force of nature. Later, I would reductively summarize the experience as a “soul orgasm”.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652).

There was a mysterious irony about having an experience so utterly transcendent of the human body generated by the human body. Here I was, a human, having a non-human experience. It felt deeper and bigger than what my human “I” was designed to reach. There was a first-hand visceral knowing that despite all our power, humans are not the pinnacle of possibility. Consciousness can manifest as things far greater than human experience. I touched that fact with my own feeble awareness, if only by total annihilation of that feeble awareness. 

Not that I was aware of it, but my body was emitting a lot of sound as waves of bliss exploded through me. My body was crying and yelling with pleasure and joy. When the intensity subsided enough for me to become cognizant of my body’s posture, I realised it was lying prostrate on the ground, though it had started upright. My face was sideways, and my mouth bit the rug beneath me in sheer pleasure. A pool of drool, snot, and tears spread from chin to eye socket. As speech slowly returned, only one sobbing cry could escape my throbbing throat: “Gracias, Gracias, Graciaaaas!” Over and over. I was literally choking on my joy and gratitude, and only this simple sound of thanks could form. I was laughing and crying at the same time in a rhythmic undulating loop, pain and joy just relative points like intersecting waves of a sine curve. 

As the initial annihilating intensity continued to wane, I was able to consciously engage with the experience. The greater I pushed outward with open-hearted gratitude, the more the environment around me lit up and shone back with bliss. Existence was so beautifully responsive! My guides were incredibly attuned to me. I was riding a raw, raging sea for nearly an hour, and each moment I felt their support and attunement to exactly where I was. I am so grateful for their skill, as their presence made the journey safe and possible for me. In going deeper, I knew I was not alone. They could feel the ecstatic love energy radiating out of my body, and kept offering prayers of thanks in Spanish to the Universe for allowing them to assist and witness such joy. 

Bufo is profoundly somatic. It is a deeply physical and emotional experience, not visual and intellectual, as all my previous psychedelic experiences had been. It’s active compounds, bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT, felt very novel, and had little overlap with my experience of more “classical” psychedelics, including DMT. That said, it was hands down the most powerful psychedelic experience of my life, and by far the most pleasurable. It was more of a trip for the body and soul, rather than the mind and it’s eye. I came to understand there is as much knowledge in the physical body as there is in the mind, though it is not always accessible in the same way. I felt my entire body as one electrochemical miracle, tingling volts of bliss and gratitude in every cell and fiber. I had never experienced anything like this. It made the best sex feel paltry, just the faintest whiff of true Samadhi. As my pure awareness re-integrated with my human form, I began to chuckle in bemused disappointment. 

“No queiro mi cuerpo, porque necesitamos cuerpos?/I don’t want my body, why do we need bodies?”, I spoke in a soft laughing voice. There was so much love waiting on the other side of this body’s experience, why would I want to be limited to it? I didn’t want to be stuck in my body again! 

As I spoke these words, I felt I had lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish in a previous life. I was returning to a forgotten ancestral land. This insight arose not from my mind, but from my body, as a feeling. Spanish felt more natural to speak for me than English, it felt tender and soft on my tongue, and more emotionally resonant. My mouth didn’t want to speak in English, switching to it felt cold and alienating.  

My body felt dense, molded in asymmetrical perfection like melted wax dumped onto the stones, cooling to the shape of the ground itself. I felt a beautiful and dark energy from the stones of the Earth, like warm onyx. An incredible grounding centeredness emanated from beneath and within me. I felt physically merged with the power of the land that held me up. I laid still, relishing this connection with the Earth, suckling it’s velvety black fluid hum. As I pushed into the beauty of it, waves of gratitude would arise again in me. The Earth and I were pulsing back and forth in positive feedback loops with one another. The greatest lover I had ever known was within and around me.

Photo by Karen Lewis of State of Mind.

I was seeking to understand universal love within myself, and that is exactly what I found. I became a moment, a pure experience, when the Universal met itself as pure Love. The healing lesson? Love is not mine to lack, or possess. It radiates throughout existence, and I am merely a conduit for it. Even my life experience is not “mine”, in a separate possessive sense. It is the Universal seeking to know itself, distilled as “human”, and shared through me each moment I’m alive. I am merely a nexus of energetic exchange, a brief electrochemical miracle, here to experience and amplify the life-energy of Love. 

Moving forward, my integration work is to embody unconditional Love in each moment, regardless of finding a partner to share it with. I only limit the Love within me by seeking external validation to serve the ego. My journey is not to seek Love out, but to cultivate it within. 

Gabe DeRita is a perennially curious student of life. His background includes a colorful array of experience in business consulting, writing, psychedelic history tourism, communications, bocce league refereeing, and sales. He is a practicing personal development coach serving heart-centered entrepreneurs and individuals, offering coaching and psychedelic integration services. He splits his time between San Francisco, CA, and Philadelphia, PA. You can contact Gabe by visiting Effective Connection.

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