Stephan Beyer

Steve Beyer -- scholar, adventurer, and expert on both jungle survival and plant hallucinogens -- is the author of Singing to the Plants, “the best book on ayahuasca yet” and “the most comprehensive examination of Amazonian shamanism ever written.” Steve studied wilderness survival among the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and sacred plant medicine with traditional herbalists in North America and curanderos in the Upper Amazon, where he studied the healing plants with doña María Tuesta Flores and received coronación by banco ayahuasquero don Roberto Acho Jurama.

With doctoral degrees in both religious studies and psychology, Steve lived for a year and a half in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas, and has undertaken numerous four-day and four-night solo vision fasts in the desert wildernesses of New Mexico. He has studied the use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals.

Steve has been described as a bridge between the modern world and the traditional teachings of Amazonian shamanism; he has been a tireless interpreter of the teachings of ayahuasca and advocate for the sacred plants. “I think the plants love us,” he told an interviewer. “I have no idea why. We certainly have done nothing -- at least recently -- to deserve it. I think that they want us to be human beings again.” And he adds: “All we can do, I think, is to ask ourselves how the sacred plants want us to live, how we can walk this medicine path in a sacred way, in right relationship.”