My daughter Scout was the first to notice. She was twelve when she told me — matter-of-factly, the way kids do — that I'd stopped freaking out over spilled milk. Not literal milk, though that too. The little explosions. The flare of irritation when something didn't go to plan. The need to control every room I walked into. She couldn't name what had changed, but she could pinpoint when.
She was right. And the "when" was Bufo.
A close friend had suggested I meet with a doctor passing through town who was administering Bufo. My knowledge at the time was thin — I knew it was sometimes called the "god molecule," I'd heard it referenced on podcasts and in celebrity interviews, and I had the vague sense that it was intense. That was about it.
So I went down the rabbit hole.
Bufo is actually a group of toxins produced by several toad species, secreted from the parotid gland. But it's the Sonoran Desert Toad — also known as the Colorado River Toad, found in northern Mexico and the American Southwest — that produces something unique among these secretions: the psychoactive compound 5-MeO-DMT.
Various cultures have encountered Bufo over centuries, but it was in the late 20th century that anonymous pamphlets began circulating in the US, elaborating on the extraordinary properties of the Sonoran Desert Toad's secretion. Today, in a guided setting, the dried secretion is vaporized and inhaled under the supervision of a trained practitioner. The onset is almost immediate — within seconds. And then you're gone. Not asleep, not unconscious exactly, but somewhere else entirely, for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour.
It is known, not without reason, as the god molecule. What people mean by that is that it appears to dissolve the ego — the constructed self, the narrator in your head — more completely and more rapidly than any other known compound.
In my case, I have only fragments of what happened after the inhalation. I remember a sensation of frothing — the practitioner later confirmed that yes, there had been a lot of drool. Not dignified. Not cinematic. Just the body doing whatever the body does when the mind steps out of the room.
I came to. I went back to my day. And that's when the real experience began.
For the next two days, I was deeply unsettled. Not in a panic, not in crisis — but in the way you feel when something foundational has shifted and your system hasn't caught up yet. Like the furniture in a room you've lived in for decades has been rearranged in the dark, and you keep reaching for things that aren't where they used to be. I didn't feel bad, exactly. I felt unfamiliar to myself.
That disorientation led me to an integration expert — someone trained to help you make sense of what a psychedelic experience has shaken loose. And that conversation opened a door to what has become, without exaggeration, a life-changing journey.
Here's what I can say about what shifted, knowing that language is inadequate for most of it:
I let go of an enormous amount of pent-up anger, fear, and control. These weren't things I knew I was carrying — or rather, I knew, but they were so woven into my identity that I couldn't distinguish them from who I was. The need to peacock, posture, perform, and please — a pattern I'd built over decades in competitive environments — simply loosened its grip. Not overnight. Not all at once. But the Bufo cracked something open, and the integration work that followed helped me understand what had been released.
The little triggers stopped triggering. The reflexive need to manage how I was perceived quieted down. The volume on everything that used to feel urgent turned to something I could actually modulate rather than react to.
And my twelve-year-old noticed before I did.
I want to be careful here. This is not a recommendation. Bufo is not for everyone, and it is not without risk — physiologically, psychologically, and legally. The experience itself was not pleasant in any conventional sense. The two days that followed were harder than the session. And without skilled integration support afterward, I'm not sure the experience would have been anything more than a strange afternoon.
But with the right preparation, the right practitioner, and the right support on the other side — it was the most significant inflection point in my adult life. Not because of what happened during those twenty minutes I can barely remember. Because of who I became in the months that followed.
This is part of a series on Altitude Global exploring psychedelics, neuroscience, and modern healing from the inside out.