Bufo, Tantra & Breathwork: Three Paths of Psychedelic Integration and Embodiment
Updated: Oct 1
Bufo, Tantra and Breathwork are three very different practices.
Yet within my own healing journey and spiritual work, I have seen how the experiences they awaken can sometimes intersect—particularly around self-awareness, embodiment, emotional processing, spiritual inquiry and integration.
Tantra has been one of the foundational practices of my life and work. Breath has always been intimately connected with that practice.
Bufo entered my journey differently.
It opened another doorway.
When Bufo Opens the Bigger Questions
A profound psychedelic experience can sometimes leave us with far more questions than answers.
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What matters to me?
What am I being asked to change?
What am I holding onto?
Who do I need to forgive?
What remains unfinished?
What am I afraid to feel?
What does my life mean now?
For some people, a Bufo experience can feel expansive, mystical or deeply meaningful. For others, the period afterward may include confusion, vulnerability, difficult emotions or uncertainty about how to understand what happened.
And sometimes it contains many of these experiences at once.
This is where integration becomes important.
The experience itself isn't necessarily the completion of the work.
Sometimes it is the beginning.
What Does Tantra Have to Do With Integration?
Tantra is often misunderstood as being primarily about sexuality.
My relationship with Tantra has always been much larger than that.
I understand Tantra as a spiritual and embodied path involving breath, meditation, awareness, energy, movement, relationship with the body and relationship with consciousness.
You don't need Tantra to integrate a psychedelic experience.
But for someone who already resonates with contemplative and embodied spiritual practices, aspects of Tantra can offer another language through which to explore what arose.
Instead of trying to understand everything intellectually, we can ask:
What am I experiencing in my body?
Where do I feel open?
Where do I feel guarded?
What happens when I breathe into this experience rather than immediately trying to explain it?
That shift—from analyzing an experience to becoming present with ourselves—can become an important part of integration.
Breathwork: Returning to the Body
Breathwork offers another pathway.
After an intense experience, it can be tempting to keep searching for another revelation.
But integration often asks us to do something much simpler:
come back into our lives.
Come back to the body.
Come back to the breath.
Come back to our relationships.
Come back to the choices we're making every day.
Depending upon the individual, conscious breathing may provide an opportunity for grounding, emotional awareness, meditation and reflection.
Breathwork doesn't need to recreate the psychedelic experience.
Its value may be precisely the opposite.
It can help us become curious about what remains after the experience.
Fire, Air & Water
I have sometimes imagined the relationship among these practices symbolically.
Bufo is the Fire.
It can illuminate something suddenly—like a match bringing light into a previously dark space.
Tantra is the Air.
Through breath, movement, awareness and spiritual inquiry, we begin exploring what has been illuminated.
Breathwork is the Water.
The breath can invite movement, softening, grounding and integration as we return to ourselves.
This is my own metaphor rather than a prescription for how anyone else's healing should unfold.
Every person's path is different.
Someone else may find their integration through psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, art, nature, prayer, community, journaling, acupuncture or another practice entirely.
Psilocybin and the Integration Process
In the work I was introduced to around Bufo, psilocybin has also been used as part of the broader integration process.
Bufo can be an extraordinarily intense experience. For some people, the experience brings emotions, memories, questions, fears, grief, relationship patterns, or spiritual material strongly into awareness. The days and weeks afterward may become an important period of processing and integration.
Within some psychedelic healing traditions and practices, psilocybin may be approached differently from Bufo and used intentionally as part of continued exploration of material that has surfaced. In my experience, these medicines have very different qualities, and I do not view one as simply repeating the experience of the other.
This is also where practices such as Breathwork, Meditation, Somatic Awareness, Tantra, journaling, movement, therapy, time in nature, and supportive community can become important. Integration is not only about medicine. It is about developing ways to understand, embody, and live with what has been revealed.
Any decision to work with another psychedelic after Bufo should be individualized, approached carefully, and take into account a person's physical health, mental health, medications, personal history, readiness, and the legal context where they live.
When an Experience Feels Difficult
Not every psychedelic experience feels peaceful afterward.
Some people experience lingering anxiety, fear, confusion, insomnia, emotional overwhelm or difficulty functioning.
Breathwork and contemplative practices can be supportive for some people, but they aren't substitutes for appropriate mental-health or medical care.
If symptoms are severe, persistent, frightening, or interfere significantly with daily functioning, seeking support from an appropriately qualified healthcare or mental-health professional is important.
Integration should support stability—not pressure someone to interpret every difficult symptom as spiritual awakening.
Tantra, Breathwork & Embodied Integration
For me, the common thread among these practices is not intensity.
It is presence.
What happens when we learn to remain present with ourselves?
What happens when we listen to our bodies?
What happens when an extraordinary spiritual experience is brought back into the ordinary relationships and choices of our lives?
That is where integration becomes meaningful.
The purpose isn't simply to have an experience.
It is to ask how the experience might help us live with greater awareness, love, responsibility and connection.
Love as Medicine
Through Love as Medicine, I explore psychedelic preparation and integration alongside Breathwork, Meditation, embodiment, relationship healing, spiritual practice and conscious community.
Group experiences, workshops, retreats and online offerings create opportunities to explore these practices in ways that emphasize grounding, reflection and integration.
For individualized private holistic-healing sessions, visit Asttarte Deva Healing Wellness Center.
With love,
Asttarte Deva
Love as Medicine
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