More people are talking openly about 5-MeO-DMT right now. That wave of curiosity is natural. And because I’ve sat with this medicine four times, I want to share what actually happened.
Not as advice. Not as a recommendation. Just an honest account.
Before I get into it, something I need to say clearly:
Psychedelics are not required for healing. They are not a shortcut to God. They are not the path.
To me, they are amplifiers.
Used with reverence and preparation, they can accelerate insight, truth, and transcendence. Used carelessly, without structure, without integration, without the practices already in place, they can leave you more fragmented than when you started.
What these substances show you isn’t separate from what already lives inside you. They surface what’s been buried. They illuminate what’s ready to be seen. But they don’t do the work for you. And a lot of people enter ceremony hoping for a silver bullet, one profound experience to dissolve years of pain, confusion, or emptiness.
That’s not how it works.
If meditation, breathwork, journaling, and real self-reflection aren’t already part of your life, a powerful psychedelic experience can blow a door open with nothing on the other side to catch you.
That’s why I’ve always tried to feel genuinely called before approaching any medicine. Not because it was trending. Not because someone told me I should.
What Bufo Actually Is
Bufo comes from the secretion of the Sonoran Desert toad. That secretion contains 5-MeO-DMT, widely considered one of the most powerful psychedelics in existence. The synthetic version is the lab-produced molecule, preferred by many practitioners for its consistency and precision in dosing.
I’ve done psilocybin many times. I’ve sat with ayahuasca sixteen times. I’ve worked with cannabis ceremonies and kambo.
Nothing compares to Bufo and 5-MeO. They are in a category of their own.
The First Ceremony
I first heard about Bufo about eight years ago, after moving to Costa Rica.
What grabbed me immediately was something people kept saying:
There is life before Bufo. And life after Bufo.
That stayed with me.
The way it was described, if you have a true breakthrough, you get to feel what it’s like to dissolve beyond the body and touch pure consciousness. Some call it God. Some call it source. Others just say pure love.
I was intrigued. And I knew I needed to take it seriously.
In 2019, I traveled down to Dominical to work with a facilitator who’d been serving Bufo for years. I booked five days. Two ceremonies back to back, because if I was going to do this, I was going to fully commit.
The first ceremony didn’t go the way I’d hoped.
I fought it. I resisted. I held on.
The truth? I walked in expecting something dark or terrifying to show up. Some part of me had decided there had to be a battle before I could earn the love everyone spoke about. That expectation shaped everything. I stayed in my head, drifting in and out, never fully dissolving.
At one point I could hear myself speaking in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. The facilitator and his helper prayed over me. I was only partially conscious and remember very little clearly. What I remember most is the sensation of gripping, refusing to let go.
When it ended, I was disappointed.
I’d wanted the white light. I’d wanted the love.
What I got was a mirror.
The helper said something afterward that I haven’t forgotten: There is nothing to fear. Nothing to fight. You don’t have to earn love. You just have to let go.
That landed, not just as insight about the ceremony, but about my entire life.
I’d spent years operating under a belief I’d never fully examined: that love had to be earned. That peace required proving yourself worthy of it first. That joy came after the struggle, not before.
The first ceremony didn’t give me what I wanted.
It gave me what I needed to see.
The Second Ceremony
The next day, the facilitator suggested something different.
At sunset, just the two of us, we went to the top of a hill overlooking the jungle. Quiet. Still. Sacred.
I knew exactly what was being asked of me this time.
Nothing. No bracing. No waiting for something dark to appear. Just surrender.
What happened next is one of the most profound experiences of my life.
As I dissolved, I went somewhere beyond this realm. A vast white space. No body. No eyes. No physical identity. And even though I couldn’t explain it, I knew I had been there before. It felt like home.
There was love. Peace. Safety. Belonging.
In that space, I understood, not as a concept but as a direct experience, what it means to say we are all one. That every one of us comes from the same source. That we are each an expression of that same light in human form. And that when we leave this body, we return to that place.
That moment changed my relationship to death. Not intellectually. Directly. It showed me that the fear of death comes largely from forgetting where we came from. It showed me that most of what we obsess over here, while real in the human experience, is small against the greater arc of the soul.
Then the facilitator asked if I wanted another round.
I said yes.
That second round was different. Not the white light this time, something more visionary. What felt like a glimpse of a possible future for humanity. Peace. Harmony. Unity. A way of living not driven by fear, manipulation, and disconnection. The closest words I have are New Earth. Heaven on Earth. I felt what life could look like if humanity was actually living in coherence, with ourselves, with each other, with nature, with God.
Other medicines often surface the past. Old wounds. Buried pain. Bufo, that day, showed me possibility. It gave me a felt sense of what life could be beyond the patterns we’ve all inherited.
Then in the final round, I sat with my eyes open and watched the jungle as the sun was going down.
Everything felt peaceful. Beautiful. Exact.
I knew in that moment that everything had led me here. Every hardship. Every wrong turn. Every lesson. Every decision. I felt, with complete certainty, that I was born for a reason. That part of my purpose was to help people heal, evolve, and raise their consciousness.
That was the moment I understood what people meant.
Life before Bufo. Life after Bufo.
Because after that, something in me shifted that never shifted back.
The Third Experience, What Chasing Recreates
After something that profound, I felt complete. I didn’t need to do this again.
But years later, back in Toronto, a woman I was in relationship with became curious after hearing my story. Through a mutual friend, I connected with a facilitator who offered private sessions. I was given a choice between Bufo and synthetic 5-MeO. I chose the synthetic, partly curiosity, partly, if I’m honest, still attached to the beauty of that hilltop.
Before we started, the facilitator asked me a question I still think about:
Do you want to dip your toe in the lake, walk in slowly to your waist, or do a full cannonball?
Given how powerful the Costa Rica experience had been, I said, cannonball.
That was a mistake.
I remember almost nothing from the journey itself. What I do remember is waking up hot, sweating, confused, and covered by nothing but a sheet. No idea what had happened. When I realized I had no clothes on, I was stunned.
The facilitator told me that a couple minutes in, I became extremely hot, started tearing my clothes off, yelling, and at one point took a swing at him before going down.
I had no memory of any of it.
That was deeply unsettling. I don’t think of myself as an angry person. What erupted clearly came from somewhere buried, something compressed for a long time that needed release. Whether the dose pushed me too far out to receive anything meaningfully, or whether it surfaced suppressed rage that was ready to move, I’m still not entirely sure. Probably both.
What I know is this: more medicine does not mean a deeper experience.
Looking back, a smaller amount would have served me far better. And what that session really taught me was this, chasing a peak experience never leads where you think it will. Trying to recreate something sacred from the past usually ends in disappointment.
Each experience has its own intelligence. What you received before is not what’s waiting next time.
Expectations block reception.
The Fourth Ceremony, Leading From Surrender
Last year I hosted a retreat in Mexico for ten men I’d been working with for years. These weren’t beginners. They’d done deep personal development work, sat with psilocybin, built real awareness and capacity. Many felt ready for Bufo.
I brought in a dear friend and experienced practitioner, Blaine from Tiger Soul Retreats, to facilitate.
Eight of the ten chose to participate.
Knowing what I’d learned from my own past, I encouraged them not to go all in immediately. Start slow. Respect the medicine. Let it meet you where you are.
Each man had his own journey. Some had profound breakthroughs. Some resisted. Some touched the edge. Some fully dissolved. Watching those men meet the medicine was one of the most moving things I’ve witnessed as a coach.
Then I made a decision.
I chose to sit in ceremony too.
Not because I needed another massive experience. Not chasing anything. It simply felt right to let these men hold space for me the way I’d been holding it for them.
That mattered more than I expected.
As coaches, leaders, facilitators, we’re so often the ones witnessing. We guide, we hold, we support. There’s something deeply healing in allowing yourself to be witnessed.
I asked the men to sit around me. I asked Blaine for a smaller dose.
It was exactly right.
Semi-lucid. I could feel love, connection, a higher dimensional awareness, without being completely dissolved. I could feel the men in the room. The sacredness of the moment. I looked up at Blaine and had the clear sensation that I knew him from another life.
And once again, that familiar feeling. Everything had conspired to bring me here. Back to purpose. Back to mission. Back to service.
At one point I asked for a song, Nahko and Medicine for the People. When it came on, I started singing through tears.
I sobbed. Not from pain. From truth.
The song touched that place in me that grieves the disconnection on this planet. The ways we harm each other. The ways we’ve separated from God, from nature, from truth, from love, from ourselves.
There I was, in full vulnerability, being witnessed by the men I lead.
A few of them said afterward that seeing me not as the one leading, but just as a man in surrender, in tears, in his humanity, was one of the most powerful parts of the entire retreat.
That ceremony reminded me: medicine doesn’t always have to be the cannonball.
Sometimes a smaller dose, the right container, the right people, is everything.
What I Saw in the Fourth Ceremony
There’s one part of that fourth ceremony I need to speak to directly, because it wasn’t just something I saw during the medicine. It’s something I believe is actually happening.
I saw what felt like multiple dimensions of reality.
This human realm, the 3D world where we live in bodies, make choices, navigate fear and love and consequence and relationship.
A realm beyond this one, where what I can only call the higher self witnesses and influences what happens here.
And beyond that, a realm of coherence, peace, beauty, and what I can only describe as Heaven on Earth.
The closest metaphor I have is The Matrix. Not literally. Symbolically.
What happens in day-to-day life is not isolated. The quality of our choices, our integrity, our fear, our love, our consciousness, it has impact beyond what we can see.
What I was shown is that there is a multidimensional spiritual war unfolding.
Light versus darkness, not only in the visible world, but across realms. And what we do here in this dimension matters. Every choice either strengthens the light or feeds the dark.
How we live matters. What we consume matters. How we treat ourselves and others matters. Where we place our energy matters.
Fear, shame, guilt, division, and disconnection weaken us in the unseen. Love, joy, gratitude, integrity, faith, and sovereignty strengthen the forces of light.
That was the message.
This is not just personal development. This is spiritual responsibility.
Not about becoming happier in an individual life, though that matters. About contributing to the collective field. About helping humanity remember who we are. About choosing to live in a way that strengthens coherence and truth during a time when darkness is actively trying to create fear, confusion, and division.
Some people will hear that and think it sounds out there. That’s fine.
But it was deeply real for me.
And it reinforced what I already felt in my heart, this work matters. Faith matters. Integrity matters. Every choice is either feeding coherence or feeding chaos.
If Heaven on Earth is what we want to create, then life has to start reflecting that now.
Not someday. Now.
What These Four Experiences Actually Taught Me
Love is not something you earn. It’s what remains when the fighting stops.
Surrender is not weakness. In many cases, it’s the doorway.
A bigger dose does not mean deeper wisdom.
No ceremony replaces daily practice.
And the real work is never the peak of the experience.
It’s the life built afterward. The integration. The relationships. The decisions. The leadership. The way love gets expressed in ordinary moments. The degree to which insight becomes embodied, not just remembered.
These medicines are sacred tools. They can reveal truth, surface what’s been buried, and open a door to healing and remembrance.
They also require humility, reverence, and care.
This is not something to play with. Not something to romanticize. And not a substitute for the actual work.
A Final Note
If this stirred something in you, feel free to reach out with questions. For those seriously considering a Bufo or 5-MeO journey, I’ve linked both practitioners below so you can learn more and have your own conversations.
But most importantly, remember this.
Healing doesn’t depend on psychedelics. Awakening doesn’t require Bufo. Transcendence is not reserved for those willing to fly somewhere and drink the jungle juice.
Everything essential is already within you.
The capacity to heal. The ability to connect with God, truth, love, peace, and higher consciousness. The path back to yourself.
Medicines can reveal. They can amplify. They can accelerate.
But the deeper path still asks something of you.
Patience. Discipline. Commitment. Honesty. The courage to sit with yourself and do what’s required to become who you’re actually meant to be.
None of us are here by accident. We are here during this time for a reason. There is a collective mission unfolding, and each of us has a role in it.
Heaven on Earth is not a place we arrive at by accident.
It’s a reality we build, through consciousness, integrity, love, and the choices we make every single day.
That is the work. That is the path. That is why we are here.
