THE MEDICINES WE CARRY
Bufo
The medicine that asks us to surrender.
Bufo is a powerful medicine whose experience may unfold within minutes, yet what happens within those minutes can be difficult to measure by time alone.
People may come to Bufo carrying trauma, fear, questions, patterns, or simply a feeling that they are ready to meet themselves beyond the identities and stories they have learned to carry.
Every ceremony is different. Some people remember a great deal. Others return with almost no memory of where they went.
THE MEDICINE
Bufo is sometimes called the “God molecule.”
What does God mean to you?
That word has room to mean something different for every person who sits with the medicine.
For one person, God may mean a presence outside of themselves. For another, it may mean consciousness, creation, connection, or something they cannot name at all.
There are moments within Bufo where the identities we have spent years constructing can become very quiet. The roles. The stories. The fear. The person we believe we have to be.
Some describe the experience as returning to infancy. Others describe returning to themselves. Some experience something they understand as God. Some remember very little.
We do not believe someone needs to name the experience for it to matter.
THE EXPERIENCE
There is a moment when thinking can no longer lead.
Sitting with Bufo can be nerve-wracking. That does not necessarily disappear simply because someone has sat with the medicine before. Knowing what Bufo is and knowing that you are about to enter the experience are two different things.
The experience can move quickly. A person's ordinary sense of self, time, surroundings, or separation may become difficult to locate. There may be emotion, movement, sound, stillness, release, or an experience that feels almost impossible to translate into language.
Someone sitting beside you may experience something entirely different. Bufo does not seem interested in giving everyone the same ceremony.
Courage does not always look like entering without fear.
Sometimes courage looks like being nervous, breathing anyway, and allowing yourself to be supported as you meet what comes.
Bufo · Ceremony
Presence · Support · Surrender
OUR RELATIONSHIP
How BUFAYA holds Bufo.
We do not rush someone past the nerves. We help them become familiar with what is about to happen.
Before the medicine is served, we spend time preparing. We walk through the process together. We practice. We work with the breath. The person has an opportunity to become comfortable with the process and with the people who will be beside them.
Once the ceremony begins, every person is different.
Some need very little from us. Some need sound. Some need clearing. We may work with drums, rattles, bells, or soft music within the space. There may be moments when someone needs physical reassurance or to be held. There may also be moments when the greatest support is allowing them to move through what is happening without interruption.
Within BUFAYA, we work in relationship with the spirit of Bufo and listen closely to what is happening in front of us. We do not enter ceremony with a performance already planned. We allow the medicine, the person, and the moment to inform how we support what is unfolding.
We hold the person. We protect the space. We allow the release to belong to them.
WHAT MAY REMAIN
Sometimes the change comes before the explanation.
Not everyone remembers their Bufo experience clearly. We have witnessed people return without a story about what happened, yet begin noticing something different in themselves afterward.
A jaw that had constantly been clenched may suddenly feel relaxed. A familiar reaction may no longer arrive in quite the same way. Something that once felt impossible may begin to feel approachable.
One woman came to us carrying a fear of driving that had kept her from driving for more than a decade. She remembered very little of her Bufo ceremony. The following day, she found herself driving again on side streets. Months later, she was driving on the highway to attend her next ceremony.
We cannot say exactly what happened inside her experience, nor would we turn one person's story into a promise for another. What we can say is that sometimes a person understands immediately what shifted. Sometimes something changes before the mind has words for it.
Sometimes you are not meant to see everything that happens.
WHEN YOU COME BACK
The medicine may be brief. Understanding what opened may take much longer.
Give the experience room to settle.
There can be a temptation after a powerful experience to immediately explain it, define it, or try to return to it.
Sometimes the quieter work is noticing what remains when ordinary life returns. How does the body feel? What feels different? What has become easier to see? What patterns are still present?
The value of the experience is not measured by how dramatic the ceremony looked or how much someone remembers. What matters may reveal itself slowly.
FEELING CALLED TO BUFO?
You do not have to arrive without fear.
Feeling nervous does not mean the calling is absent. Sometimes it simply means you understand that you are approaching something powerful.
You can be nervous. You can breathe. You can be supported.