BUFAYA

The Medicines
We Carry

Medicine often begins with a pull.

Sometimes you hear the name of a medicine and something in you becomes curious. Sometimes it keeps appearing in your life. Sometimes you cannot explain why you feel drawn toward it, only that something in you recognizes there may be something there for you.

We believe that calling matters.

Each medicine carried within BUFAYA has its own way of working. Some work deeply through the body. Some bring us into relationship with emotions, memories, patterns, or parts of ourselves we have avoided. Some help clear what has become heavy. Others help prepare and ground the body before deeper ceremonial work.

Knowing the medicine is part of knowing how to approach it. These are the medicines we carry, the ways they have traditionally been worked with, and the relationship we have come to understand through sitting with them ourselves.

Ayahuasca

The medicine that asks us to see.

Ayahuasca comes from the Amazon and has been carried ceremonially for generations. Her work can be deeply emotional, physical, and personal. She may bring forward memories, patterns, grief, fear, relationships, or parts of ourselves that have been difficult to look at clearly.

Purging can be part of the experience, though the work is not limited to what leaves the physical body. Ayahuasca can bring us into contact with what we have been holding and create space to meet it differently.

The ceremony can be intense. What happens afterward matters just as much, which is why preparation and integration remain an important part of how we hold this medicine.

Kambo

A medicine of clearing and reset.

Kambo is an Amazonian medicine known for the intense physical purge that can accompany the experience. The ceremony is often shorter than other medicine work, yet the body may move through a great deal in that time.

Kambo contains a complex mixture of bioactive peptides. Within traditional and contemporary practice, people often approach the medicine through the understanding of physical and energetic clearing, reset, and preparation.

This is deeply physical work, which makes preparation, screening, hydration practices, and an experienced practitioner especially important to the way the ceremony is held.

Bufo

Brief in time. Expansive in what it can open.

Bufo is one of the most powerful medicines we carry. The experience can unfold very quickly, sometimes moving a person beyond their ordinary sense of self and into something that can be difficult to describe afterward.

For some, what happens within those minutes changes the way they understand themselves, their lives, their trauma, or what they believed was possible for them.

The ceremony itself may be brief. Integration may not be. This is why BUFAYA does not treat Bufo as a quick experience. What is opened in ceremony deserves time, support, and space afterward.

Mapacho

A medicine of grounding, clearing, and preparation.

Mapacho is sacred Amazonian tobacco and holds a very different place in medicine work from recreational or commercial tobacco.

It can be worked with for grounding, clearing, protection, prayer, and preparation. Within BUFAYA, Mapacho can also offer a place to begin for someone who feels called toward medicine but is not ready to enter a psychoactive ceremony.

Its work can be subtle compared with Ayahuasca or Bufo, yet subtle does not mean insignificant. Sometimes the first thing a person needs is not to go deeper. Sometimes they need to clear enough space to become present with themselves.

Sananga

A return to the body, the breath, and the present moment.

Sananga comes from the Amazon and is traditionally administered through the eyes. The experience is brief and intense, immediately asking for presence with the body and the breath.

We often work with Sananga as a grounding and clearing practice, including in preparation for deeper ceremonial work. There is something very immediate about it. The mind has less room to wander when the body is asking you to stay present.

Sananga also carries a traditional relationship with vision and clarity. Its deeper teaching includes understanding those traditional uses, the experience itself, and how this medicine is approached with care.

The medicine is only one part of the work.

What we meet in ceremony does not stay inside ceremony. The relationship continues through the way we prepare, the way we listen, the way we integrate, and the choices we make once we return to our lives.

The MedicinesWe Carry