Wisdom From Bufo

We agree to forget, and then we remember.

This was an insight I walked away with after a journey with Bufo in November 2024.

Before the experience, the facilitator informed me that I may not remember any of my journey and that would be “normal.”

His mindful caveat speaks to the mystical nature of all psychedelics.

We don’t truly know what we’ll see, feel, experience, or endure while under the influence.

I feel honored that I remembered every aspect of my journey.

I saw black and white geometrics in a hexagonal pattern after I closed my eyes and exhaled the vapor.

And then my soul soared.

Suddenly, I left my body and was everything at once.

There were no boundaries to my being, only what I can describe as loving bliss — within my visual field was the purest white light I had ever seen, so pure it was almost turning a light pink.

Outwardly, the facilitator said I was speaking, repeatedly saying softly:

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The purity within this portion of my journey was extraordinary.

This is our true nature.

The cosmic joke is that we agree to forget our divinity before incarnation, with the intention to remember it, wake up to how we have been living, and unlearn our cultural conditioning and survival patterns.

All while devoting the remainder of our physical experience to serving in the essence of creation.

After what felt like hours of soaring in ecstasy, I was brought to the awareness of the earthly realm.

My vision was overcome with black, the white now on the periphery, becoming more opaque appearing in contrast to the darkness.

I felt myself saying outwardly, “It’s so dark.”

In the middle of the journey, I requested another inhalation of the medicine.

Before going in, this was offered as an option, should I feel inclined to enhance what occurs in the journey.

I wanted to understand the darkness and help release it, specifically the darkness throughout my ancestry.

I grew up with near-daily violence, beginning with my step-father—who is now deceased for three years, and then my mother—whom I have not spoken to in nearly a decade.

As I grew up, I came to understand that my family had been living trauma patterns from their development and were lost in their fear.

Tara Brach refers to this as a “limbic trance.”

We believe so deeply in our fear that it becomes a default state; we live in survival mode, which distorts our perception and narrows our ability to interpret our experiences from a potentially broader perspective.

After taking another hit of the Bufo, the facilitator helped me purge some of this darkness.

As it lightened, I was able to see my lineage more clearly.

I come from a line of women who accepted cruelty as love, convinced that pain was a necessary and inevitable aspect of love.

Many of the women in my history had lost children—to either domestic violence or unpredictable tragedy.

I chose to incarnate to heal this wound within my ancestry and put an end to this cycle.

No more would violence be tolerated in a romantic dynamic, no more would I mistake manipulation and possession for passion and intimacy in a relationship.

Outwardly, at this part of the journey, I felt myself say, “We agree to forget, and then we remember. It is both a comedy and a tragedy all at once.”

Some of us don’t wake up to our illusions in this lifetime, and that is the tragedy.

When we do wake up, we see the great cosmic joke.

The way creation likes to play with itself, creating challenges for its development and evolution.

We come here to live this human life for the contrast.

Being up in loving bliss was life-changing.

I have not been the same person since. I refuse to be.

However, I am grateful for the ways I have felt my heart break.

I am grateful to feel a depth of grief I had never felt before within this past year.

It has opened my heart so deeply, and I don’t want to close it.

I simply want to explore how much more deeply I can keep opening.

After speaking out loud in the journey, another insight came to me, and that was, “Your baby has always been here.”

A warmth enveloped my heart in that moment; the medicine was alluding to the way that love transcends the physical.

Love cannot be given or taken away; it simply is.

It’s always in existence, whether we choose to see it or not.

We gave ourselves free will as a part of the bargain to forget our essence.

May we use it to keep holding up the mirror to ourselves and polishing it every day.

I felt connected to all the losses my ancestors had felt, and the loss of my recent female cat, Roo, in September.

She died the day after I left a relationship that had turned into another repeat of the cycle of domestic violence within my family history.

She may have transitioned out of her body to sacrifice for my growth, but she remains with me now in the formless.

To this day, I regularly see her in my dreams.

I get to hold her and tell her how sweet she is.

She floats in and out of my periphery on the days I am quieter within.

Next, within the Bufo journey, I was spoken to sternly and loudly:

“LET GO OF GUILT!” I heard a voice roar.

It shook me.

Okay! I thought, in response.

That hasn’t left me either.

I’ve learned one can be discerning without being disdainful.

While compassion is ultimately our bridge to remaining connected to the divinity within our humanity, we must also be discerning about what supports our highest self.

We can do so without being judgmental or critically discriminating.

This is the remembering: we came here to forget our divinity so we could experience the profound joy of rediscovering it.

Every moment of suffering, every pattern we break, every time we choose love over fear—this is us remembering who we are.

If you're reading this, you're likely in the process of remembering.

Trust it.

Trust the breakdowns that lead to breakthroughs.

Trust that your deepest wounds are preparing you for your greatest service.

This is the gift of remembering: seeing that everything—the trauma, the healing, the forgetting, the awakening—is all part of the same divine play.

The cosmic joke isn't that we forgot.

It's that what we are seeking was never actually lost.

It’s always been within.

xo

Rachel