A day with the god molecule

Smoking Bufo Alvarius, Part 1

Hi, friend. Today’s post is a little different. I’ve been exploring more narrative writing. Here is an excerpt of something I wrote to describe my experience with the sacred Bufo toad, which contains 5-MeO-DMT — a short-acting but intense, ego-dissolving psychedelic agent. Let me know if you enjoyed reading it.

This is a two-part series. You can find the second part here.

Today is the day I leave my body.

I grab the door handle and lift myself out of the car. My palms are sweaty. The houses lining the hills to the side of the street look lived in but not well taken care of. Overgrown front yards, cluttered with pots, rusty bikes, and obscure decor. The street is still. The heat blazing. It is late June and I am in LA’s Valley to smoke the secretion of a toad found in the Sonoran desert that contains one of the strongest psychedelic compounds known to mankind, 5-MeO-DMT.

5-MeO-DMT is also called the god molecule. The toad is not deadly, but meeting god requires leaving the body. It reliably induces experiences of unity consciousness in a short but life-altering experience of ego dissolution, often followed by an encounter with the divine.

I swing my straw bag over my shoulder and begin walking up the stairs to the house that will host us. The fabric of my crochet top cuts into my armpits. It is too tight, it is too hot. Why am I here again? Why do I need to do this? Why can’t I just lie on the beach like the rest of my friends on this sunny Saturday afternoon?

A voice interrupts my mental chatter. “Hello angeeeel!” Barb sings from far away.  The sun brightens her deep red curls. She is dressed in all white, like me.

We share a long hug. The hugs in the medicine world are long. Long long. It took me a while to get used to them. In every hug, there comes a natural point when both parties feel it’s appropriate to peel out of it. In ceremony hugs, this is the moment you further lean into the hug. And just when you think now it’s getting awkward, someone will start rubbing you, or let out a heartfelt sigh. 

But hugs with Barb are never awkward. I wish they lasted forever. I could live in her arms. A force I can’t quite name radiates through my body when I hug her. It pierces through any remaining fear that I brought with me. Hugging Barb is like hugging the toad, I’ve heard people say. I might die today, but if I do, at least I will do so in her arms.

I met Barb two years earlier during my first underground Ayahuasca ceremony in LA. She was overflowing with unconditional motherly love, and I was starving for it. We sat on a bench overlooking the Topanga mountains, staring each other in the eyes and talking. The cactus had opened my heart, and Barb’s love was streaming in, penetrating all the places that had stopped waiting for care. 

After an apprenticeship with a Mexican doctor, Barb has since dedicated herself to serving the toad. When she told me that she used to be an investment banker in New York I almost didn’t believe her. Not because she’s not smart enough, but because she’s too smart for that. When I call her with relationship struggles, she’ll set me straight. Sweety, this is your ego. Don’t let it ruin things, she’ll say, and provide instructions on how to be a human guided not by the head but by the heart.

But Barb hasn’t sworn off worldly pleasures. Instead, she dwells in them. She’ll order a glass of red wine, raise it to her nose, and with eyes closed, take a long inhale, a little bit too long, almost awkwardly long, just like the ceremony hugs.  

“Come on dear, let’s get you settled,” Barb says, waving me into the house. There’s something about the way she looks at me that fills me with glitter. The looks, the hugs — I don’t know what it is, all I know is that it’s something. 

I follow Barb into the house. The front yard is stuffed with succulents. Toys are littered across the entrance. Faded paint is coming off the door frame. We walk through the side entrance, which opens up into a wide, wooden deck. A majestic tree emerges from wooden planks. It is the centerpiece of the house.

A sleek, tall, brunette in her 30s comes through the door connecting the porch and the house. Her long, white lace dress reveals her bare, braless skin underneath.  

“This is Sadie, she is hosting us in her beautiful home today,” Barb introduces us. 

The tree is what made Sadie buy this house, I learn. Sadie’s husband and kids are gone for the day. Instead, there are seven of us, all female: Barb and her helper Katerina, a tall, brunette Russian model with soft features who captured my gaze at previous community gatherings. She’s quiet but mesmerizing. Then there’s Sadie, me, and three other girls, all in their late 20s to mid 30s. 

“Let’s set up the space. We’ll get started shortly,” Barb announces to the group. We move the wooden furniture off to the side. I’m happy there’s a task. It gives me a purpose, it frees me from uncomfortable attempts at small talk. Today won’t be a day for small talk, I hope. We’re here to meet god after all. 

Barb fishes a round, fringed blanket with a colorful pattern out of her tote. We spread it out in the middle of the porch and line it with cushions. A colorful Tibetan garland goes on the railing of the porch, coloring the backdrop of the dry Californian landscape. Soft female voices chanting Sanskrit hymns over the sound of harmonium flutes echo through the space.

One of the girls brought sunflowers, one for each of us, which are awaiting on the cushions. The birds are chirping, occasional woofs from Sadie’s dog interrupt the silence. He can’t be on the porch, he’s roaming the fenced garden surrounding it. Dogs sometimes don’t do well with the toad energy, Barb explains when we ask why the dog is fenced off. 

The toad has made it into the space, too. It is sitting to the side. The pulverized, dehydrated venom is stored in glass capsules, next to a pile of glass pipes. The toad does not need to die for us to smoke its venom, Barb shares. She procures it through Mexican doctors connected with the local community — they harvest sustainably. 

A few minutes later and the set up is done. Barb lights a bundle of sage and waves it through the room with precision. “Let me clear you one by one, please go inside and I will call you out one at a time. Let’s keep noble silence on the deck from now on.”

We’re seated on the couch inside the modern, bohemian home. Sun rays illuminate sage particles that have snuck inside. I overhear a conversation between the two girls sitting in the corner.

“Pee is so nutritious, I don’t even mind the taste knowing how good it is for me,” one of them says. “I drink mine every morning.”

Another girl nods in agreement. 

I turn toward them. “But if that’s what your kidney has filtered out, why would there be any nutrition left in it?” I ask. 

“Urine therapy is an ancient healing technique”, one of them responds. “Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know that your urine is the best medicine. Because it is completely free. Your kidneys aren’t perfect. They miss things. The nutrients in your urine are the best prevention for cancer. That’s just one of many benefits.”

I nod, eager to move on from the conversation. Eager to distract myself from one of my bigger fears since embarking on this path: too much medicine. Going far and not fully coming back. Living a little too untethered (and drinking my pee, I guess?).

I turn over to Sadie. “Have you sat with the toad before?”

“Yes, but only once”, she says. “It was pure magic.”

My body relaxes. That’s what I want to hear. I don’t have space for horror stories now. We’re getting close to showtime. Through the window, I see Barb floating around, her dress trailing every step.

She walks towards the door and signals the girl sitting closest to it to come out. It’s sunflower girl. Her and I are the only two Bufo virgins in the room. Barb traces the lines of her body from front to back with her sage bundle, then guides her to sit down on one of the cushions. She waves me over. I’m up next. 

As I step out the door, I notice a shift. The music is the same. The crickets are the same. The heat is still blazing, the birds still chirping, the dog still woofing. But something is in the air. I can’t quite name it. Whatever woo woo ‘energetic clearing’ Barb did out here, it did something. The energy feels delicate, raw, I can almost touch it, I can feel it tickle the surface of my skin.

Barb gives me another long hug. The scent of burned sage travels into my nose as she begins her ritual. 

A few minutes later, we are all circled up. The ceremony begins with a round of Rapé, a sacred tobacco sniff from the Amazon that shamans have used for millennia for grounding, energy clearing, and inner connection.

Barb kneels in front of me, holding her Tepi to her heart, the L-shaped pipe through which the tobacco medicine is administered. It’s embellished with colorful beads and geometric patterns. She pours a small amount of pulverized Rapé into the palm of her hand and scoops it up with the end of the pipe. After some blessings, she leans forward and begins syncing her breath with mine.

“Inhale and hold”, she instructs, lowering her head. I take a long, deep breath and hold it at the top. Barb leans further in and places one end of the pipe in her mouth and the other in my nostril, gently blowing the tobacco up my nose.

Tears shoot up. A tingling sensation trickles through my body. I close my eyes and meditate. It is the calm before the storm. 

“I want you to smoke a little bit more,” I hear Barb whisper in my ear. 

Absolutely not.

My eyes are closed. I’m horizontal on my back, disoriented. 

“You are on the verge of a breakthrough,” Barb insists, leaning into my ear. “I can see it. You just have to go in one more time. Trust the medicine.” Her voice is gentle but firm.

Trust the medicine? 

Medicine that, within an instant of inhaling it, dissolved every ounce of my consciousness only to put me into a dark void of sheer terror? For all I know, in the past what I later learn to be less than 15 minutes, I could have been crying out loud and rolling around in pain.

Something was ripping me apart. Sucking me into a black hole, a space that smelled like death and sounded like screams. Trapping me in an infinite loop, where all notions of time and space are dissolved. I was here to encounter my essence, that was my intention for the ceremony. Was that my essence? Terror?

I want to scream and run away and hide, but instead, I muster my energy for the tiniest nod. I’m going back in. I don’t know how to trust the medicine, but I trust Barb. 

I blink my eyes open to catch a glimpse of her. Her eyes narrow as she places her attention on my breath once again, signaling me with her hand to slow my breathing. After a few exhales, she leans in and guides the glass pipe onto my lips. 

I inhale, she counts. 

“One, two, three, four, five…”. I have to hold until 20. 

The alien taste of the toad trickles up my throat.

“Six, seven, eight, nine —”. My body collapses onto the floor. There, the medicine shoots me straight back into the void of terror. It’s black and lifeless, silent screams ring in my ears, but something is different this time. 

A force is sucking me deeper into the void, but there’s something else. Something that’s trying to suck me out of it. An opposing force.

Something wants to come through. 

I let it.

Read Part 2 here:

What's the fabric of the universe?

Photo of a toad (not Bufo) by Maddie Hunt

Note: There is a discourse around the ethics of consuming naturally occurring 5-MeO-DMT, harvested from Bufo Alvarius toads, versus consuming the synthetic compound. Not all harvesting is done sustainably. While I won’t go into the details of the two different options, it’s important to do your research and choose the option that aligns with your values.