The Bufo Miracle: Dissolving Generations of Anxiety

How my encounter with the psychoactive toad healed generations of trauma and became my closest direct experience of a real-life miracle.

In the dim, candlelit room, time seems to stand still. My heart thunders in my chest, each beat a countdown to what could be the most profound experience of my life — or the most terrifying.

I'm about to inhale 5-MeO-DMT, from the secretion of the Bufo alvarius toad. It's known as the "God molecule" for good reason. In mere seconds, it can completely dissolve one's sense of self, catapulting consciousness into realms beyond imagination. This is not a gentle nudge towards enlightenment — it's a cannon blast into the cosmos of the mind.

The shaman approaches me on the mattress, a small glass pipe in his hand glinting in the flickering light. This unassuming object is the portal to another dimension. As he nears, I’m acutely aware of the anticipation and fear in my pounding heartbeat. A part of me wants to back out, to tell him that I changed my mind, but a greater part of me knows that there's no turning back now.

Suddenly, the ethereal tones of singing bowls fill the space, their vibrations penetrating to my very core. A facilitator's angelic voice joins in, weaving through the resonant sounds. The music washes over me, a lifeline in the storm of my emotions.

I close my eyes, allowing each note to ground me. My racing thoughts slow. My erratic breathing steadies. In this cocoon of sound, I find a moment of peace — the calm before the plunge.

When I open my eyes, the shaman stands before me. His presence is both reassuring and intimidating, a bridge between worlds. The pipe, containing the crystalline substance that will reshape my reality, is now just inches from my face.

I don’t know what to expect from this psychedelic molecule extracted from a humble desert toad, other than intensity and the potential for deep healing.

Unlike other transformative medicines like ayahuasca or iboga, bufo doesn't come with centuries of ceremonial use. This powerful entheogen, used for centuries by indigenous cultures in the Sonoran Desert region, has only recently gained attention in the wider world of psychedelic healing.

Its recent resurgence is a double-edged sword — immense potential paired with the unknown. And yet, in the past few months, I could feel bufo calling me, driven by a deep desire in my soul to grow my capacity to be with life’s mystery and the unknown.

The cool rim of the pipe touches my lips. The music from the singing and the bowls rises in intensity, as if heralding the imminent dissolution of reality as I know it.

"Breathe deeply," the shaman instructs over my pounding heart and the swelling music. "And hold it in."

I inhale, drawing the vapors deep into my lungs. The burnt, earthy taste is unlike anything I've experienced before. As I hold my breath, the shaman begins to count.

One... two... three...

The room starts to shimmer at the edges of my vision.

...four... five... six...

A buzzing sensation begins to build in my body, starting at my core and radiating outward.

...seven... eight... nine...

The walls of reality begin to bend and warp.

...ten... eleven... twelve...

My sense of self begins to dissolve, my ego melting away like ice in warm water.

...thirteen... fourteen... fifteen.

I exhale, and in that moment, reality as I know it shatters.

The world around me dissolves into a universe of pulsing, greyish hexagons. My body, no longer under my conscious control, begins to move with primal energy. Roars erupt from my throat. My limbs shake with an intensity that would be frightening if I still had the capacity for fear. I'm sucked gravitationally through a vortex that feels intense and yet somewhat familiar — like the most intense peaks of my ayahuasca journeys, but with a smoother and cooler texture.

In this moment, suspended between worlds, I know instinctively that this is just the beginning of a journey unlike any other. The familiar contours of my consciousness fade away, and I surrender to the unknown that lies ahead.

Unlike many other plant medicines, bufo isn't a starter psychedelic. The depth and transformation I'm about to experience will be built upon the foundation of my previous encounters with ayahuasca, iboga, and other medicines. These past experiences have prepared me for the intensity of bufo, an intensity so profound that much of my journeys eludes conscious memory. Some moments are lost entirely, "whited-out" as they say, too incompatible with my usual identity for my conscious mind to hold.

But one journey — the fourth and last during my five-day bufo retreat — stands out with clarity. As a group, we had brought in the intention that our essential nature is bliss. Little did I know how powerfully this intention would manifest.

My Closest Direct Experience of a Miracle

"Oh my god," I say aloud, rocking side to side on the mattress. "This is what I've been wanting all my life."

Within a second of inhaling bufo in that fourth journey, I feel reality dissolve into the now familiar universe of greyish hexagons. But this time, something extraordinary happens — a miracle unfolding in real-time.

A visceral sense of relief floods through my body, focusing on a spot in my back left shoulder — a place I've long felt held my deepest anxieties. It's as if the Universe itself is applying a healing balm, not just to me, but to a wound that has been passed down through generations. I can feel the salve seeping through layers of time, touching the fears of my parents, the struggles of my grandparents, the survival instincts of ancestors I've never known.

The armor in my shoulder — a physical manifestation of inherited trauma and survival programming — begins to dissolve. It's the armor that made me constantly seek safety, that drove me to create legacies, to strive for meaning, to ensure my family always had "enough." All these behaviors, I now realize, were attempts to scratch an itch that seemed impossible to reach — until now.

The relief is so intense, so all-encompassing, that I can feel a part of me grasping at it, not wanting it to ever slip away. But a part gently speaks to myself, "Relax into it." I breathe deeply, feeling my body soften, surrendering to this miraculous healing.

The anxiety I've carried in my shoulder, the constant striving for safety — these weren't just personal quirks, but the echoes of my ancestors' struggles, passed down through generations.

Books like Mark Wolynn's It Didn't Start with You and Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score have illuminated how intergenerational trauma and belief patterns get passed down through families. They often manifest as physical sensations and tensions in the muscles and tissues of our bodies.

For generations, my family lineage has been working and focused on survival. My great-grandparents and grandparents had their assets and belongings taken away by the communist government in China. They had to live on relatively scant rations and whatever else they could secure.

When my parents immigrated to the United States, they’d taken out mortgages on both our house and on the family store. There were years in the 1980s where they had to pay nearly 20% interest rates on their mortgages and were afraid they wouldn’t have enough and would lose their home. Having just closed on a house earlier this month, the idea of paying a fifth of the borrowed principal in a single year sounds horrific. It was a brutal time to survive.

In that moment of intense relief, it's as if the very fabric of my being is being rewritten, and with it, the legacy of fear and scarcity that has been passed down through my family line.

This is not just personal healing — it's ancestral healing, happening in a single, miraculous moment. The relief I feel spreading through my back left shoulder isn't just emotional — it's a physical unwinding of tension that had been held for generations. I can almost hear the sighs of relief echoing through time, as if my ancestors themselves are experiencing this release alongside me.

When the fifteen-minute journey ends, I know with absolute certainty that something inside me has permanently shifted. Some neural, emotional, and somatic circuitry has been fundamentally rewired. The miracles I've only heard about in stories have manifested in my own lived experience.

Unlearning the Fear Response and the Phantom Limb of Anxiety

The night after that journey, something felt different.

I felt a pressure in my head and immediately had the thought that something might be terribly wrong, that bufo had permanently altered me in some negative way. But at the same time, I noticed an inability to actually worry and spiral on the thought.

And that’s when the first implications of what had happened in that miracle moment hit me.

Every time I worried in the past, a contraction would happen in my brain to form the thought pattern of worry. And that thought pattern would then energetically feed the sensation of anxiety in my back left shoulder.

Except now, the familiar neural pathway to form that worry thought pattern no longer worked. I felt the habitual reaching for the worry to feed the sensation of anxiety, but the pathway was defunct. It was like a phantom limb — I could feel myself trying to activate a part of me that was no longer there.

The familiar tug of anxiety in my shoulder became a phantom sensation — reaching for it felt like grasping at the void.

I could see that my mind had generated a story about the pressure in my head, and that this was the point where in the past, I would disconnect from the world and loop in worry. It would create an internal experience where I was frequently disconnected from the world and in an internal experience of debugging what was wrong.

With my previous survival patterning, that was the way that my consciousness would try to create a feeling of safety: be on alert to find the thing that was wrong and then direct awareness and attention toward fixing it. Having something to worry about and fix created a sense of control, but it would just be an illusion. I could always find something wrong, and so safety in my body would always feel elusive. It was the thought pattern that created the experience of never enough.

In that moment of healing, lifelong patterns of anxiety and hypervigilance — ingrained over generations — had been disrupted, leaving space for it to be overwritten with new patterns of safety and trust.

On the advice of the shaman earlier that day, I shifted my awareness into gratitude for everything that was going right. How amazing it was that I could be living this life, having this experience. Five years ago, the idea of engaging with any mind-altering substance or medicine created deep fear. How fortunate I was to be introduced to this path of healing. Within moments of tuning into gratitude, the fear and need to worry about the uncomfortable sensation in my head went away.

It was as if the Universe itself had healed a wound that I'd carried all my life, one that traced back through generations.

Rediscovering the World Anew

It’s been two weeks since that last miracle journey — and it’s clear in contacting the outside world that I've crossed a threshold into a new way of being. There's a predominant experience that "I've made it." All my life, and tracing back generations, my ancestors and I have struggled to survive. Finally, we can rest.

I can finally exhale — not just for myself, but for all those who came before me. I've created safety for myself, and in doing so, opened the door for my future generations to start from a place of security rather than scarcity.

I can feel how, from this place, safety is a given, not something to reach for. I can see how the old pattern of finding the thing that’s wrong could never actually get me to the safety I wanted, and I’m noticing sooner when that old pattern wants to resurface. In its place, I’m nurturing and rewiring a new pattern: when something feels off, relax into gratitude for everything that’s going well and right and remember the safety that’s already here.

"I'm ready to rediscover the world in a whole new way," I’d said to the group in the closing circle, tears welling up in my eyes. "And I'm so grateful to do that with my baby that's along the way."

This gift of a new perspective has transformed how I interact with people and the world. In the past, my trauma led me to move through life as if I were covering my eyes, hiding from the world. Now, as I step into this new chapter carrying the sense of safety I've always sought, it’s like I’m seeing people and reality for the first time. I feel a renewed desire to experience the world and discover its possibilities. And I’m more excited to be a father than I’ve felt.

In the past, I've hesitated to share about my plant medicine journeys broadly. I've sat with ayahuasca nearly twenty times, and each series of ceremonies has felt like an operating-system level upgrade to my experience of life. My iboga journey earlier this year tapped into a new level of nervous system rewiring.

These experiences felt sacred, personal — something to be kept close to my heart and shared only with close friends. Part of me feared the world wasn't ready, that it wouldn't understand.

But after this experience with bufo, where I've felt the reality of miracles, it no longer feels in alignment to keep this to myself. Because I know that out there, there are seekers like me, seekers who want to know that more is possible and who I trust will find their own way.

I'm also aware that bufo isn't a starter psychedelic or for the faint of heart. There were so many intense moments where I leaned into important lessons I’d learned and cultivated with my mind, body, and nervous system — without which, the experience would’ve been incredibly challenging.

In a way, I’d been preparing years for this journey. I felt immensely grateful for my prior ayahuasca journeys that taught me to surrender to intense energy, my experience with iboga that helped me tease apart my mental stories from my sensation from story, and my somatic meditation and practices that helped me direct my awareness to my body.

What feels important to share is this: for those who feel a deep enough desire and devotion to be and know freedom, love, and truth, miracles are indeed possible. My body, which once kept the score of past traumas, now holds a new story — one of safety, trust, and inherent well-being.

This journey has shown me that healing is possible, that the weight of generations can be lifted, and that we all have the capacity to rediscover the world anew. It's like getting a chance to hit the reset button on life — scary, exhilarating, and profoundly transformative all at once.

As I integrate this shift, I'm filled with a mix of gratitude, hope, and a bit of awe at the whole experience. I know there are seekers out there like me, wondering if more is possible. And while everyone's path is unique, I hope my story can be a little beacon of "holy shit, change really is possible" for those who need it.