Books

Books on plant medicine, consciousness, and integration. Click any cover to find it on Amazon. New titles added regularly.

To Speak for the Trees

Diana Beresford-Kroeger

A memoir and manifesto from one of the world's most remarkable botanists. Beresford-Kroeger draws on her Irish upbringing steeped in ancient Brehon tree knowledge to make an urgent case for the intelligence of forests.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceIndigenous WisdomMemoir

Plant Spirit Medicine

Eliot Cowan

A classic exploring healing through direct relationship with plant spirits. Cowan draws on years of apprenticeship with Huichol healers to offer a path of medicine that goes beyond physical symptoms into the emotional and spiritual roots of illness.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceSpirituality & ConsciousnessIndigenous Wisdom

Ayahuasca: From Serpent to Jaguar

Yves Duc

A thoughtful exploration of the ayahuasca experience and its capacity for personal transformation, tracing the symbolic journey from serpent to jaguar as a map of inner change.

AyahuascaPsychedelics & Plant MedicineMemoir

Thus Spoke the Plant

Monica Gagliano

Part memoir, part scientific journey. Gagliano's peer-reviewed discoveries about plant learning and bioacoustics weave with deeply personal encounters, offering a new framework for listening to the more-than-human world.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceScience & ResearchIndigenous Wisdom

Ayahuasca in My Blood

Peter Gorman

Before ayahuasca tourism, Peter Gorman was travelling the rivers of Iquitos drinking the brew with curanderos. This raw vivid memoir covers 25 years of medicine dreaming: the beauty, the terror, the transformation.

AyahuascaMemoir & Personal JourneyIndigenous Wisdom

Swimming in the Sacred

Rachel Harris, PhD

Rachel Harris turns her attention to the women who quietly guided psychedelic healing work for decades before it became fashionable. An important lineage of underground female elders traced from the Eleusinian Mysteries to today.

Psychedelics & Plant MedicineIntegrationMemoir

Listening to Ayahuasca

Rachel Harris, PhD

Drawing on her own research and two decades of ayahuasca experience, Dr. Harris explores what the medicine offers those struggling with depression, addiction, PTSD, and anxiety, and how to integrate lasting change.

AyahuascaIntegrationScience & Research

The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley

The book that started a conversation still unfolding today. Huxley's precise account of his mescaline experience in 1953 remains one of the most important documents in the literature of consciousness.

Mescaline & PeyoteSpirituality & ConsciousnessMemoir

The God Molecule

Gerardo Ruben Sandoval Isaac

A deep dive into 5-MeO-DMT as a doorway to mystical experience. Sandoval Isaac draws on traditional knowledge and philosophical inquiry to explore one of the most powerful substances on earth.

5-MeO-DMTSpirituality & ConsciousnessPsychedelics & Plant Medicine

Mescaline

Mike Jay

A comprehensive cultural history of one of the world's oldest psychedelics. From Peyote ceremonies of Native American tradition to Huxley's famous experiments, tracing mescaline through art, science, religion, and counterculture.

Mescaline & PeyoteScience & ResearchIndigenous Wisdom

The Psilocybin Connection

Jahan Khamsehzadeh

A scholarly yet accessible exploration of psilocybin's potential to catalyse healing and awakening. Synthesises philosophy, depth psychology, systems theory, and the latest research.

PsilocybinScience & ResearchSpirituality & Consciousness

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Kimmerer weaves indigenous plant knowledge and Western science in this luminous meditation on reciprocity, gratitude, and what plants can teach us about living well. Not a psychedelics book, something rarer: a book that changes how you see everything green.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceIndigenous WisdomSpirituality & Consciousness

The Toad and the Jaguar

Ralph Metzner

A field report from one of psychedelic research's founding voices. Drawing on 30 years of underground observations with Bufo alvarius and 5-MeO-DMT, Metzner documents experiences with rigour, compassion, and hard-won wisdom.

5-MeO-DMTPsychedelics & Plant MedicineMemoir

Anatomy of the Spirit

Caroline Myss

A foundational text in energy medicine and spiritual anatomy. Myss maps the seven chakras, seven sacraments, and Kabbalistic Tree of Life onto a unified framework for understanding how our biography becomes our biology.

Spirituality & ConsciousnessIntegration

The Cosmic Serpent

Jeremy Narby

Anthropologist Jeremy Narby's stunning hypothesis: that shamans access molecular information through altered states, and ayahuasca visions may encode real biological knowledge. Bridges indigenous science and molecular biology.

AyahuascaScience & ResearchIndigenous Wisdom

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan

The book that brought psychedelic research into the mainstream. Pollan's meticulous reporting on psilocybin and LSD helped shift public understanding of what these medicines are and what they might offer.

PsilocybinScience & ResearchMemoir

This Is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan

Three plants, three altered states, three very different cultural stories. A beautifully readable examination of why humans have always sought to change their consciousness.

Mescaline & PeyotePsychedelics & Plant MedicineScience & Research

The Light Eaters

Zoë Schlanger

A groundbreaking work of science journalism revealing that plants can learn, remember, and communicate, blurring the line between intelligence and instinct.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceScience & Research

The Fellowship of the River

Joseph Tafur, MD

A medical doctor's honest account of discovering the limits of Western medicine and finding healing in Amazonian plant ceremonies. Explores how PTSD, depression, and chronic pain may respond to what conventional medicine cannot reach.

AyahuascaIntegrationScience & ResearchMemoir

The Ego Trip

Kimon de Greef

Investigative journalism on the doctor who marketed Sonoran Desert toad ceremonies as ancient ritual and built a global following around 5-MeO-DMT. De Greef traces the extreme dosing, the deaths, the fabricated origin story, and the race to turn the molecule into a pharmaceutical. A necessary counterweight to the more celebratory books on this shelf.

5-MeO-DMTPsychedelics & Plant MedicineDiscernment & Harm Reduction

A World Appears

Michael Pollan

Pollan's follow-up to How to Change Your Mind, this time on consciousness itself. He moves between neuroscience, philosophy, plant sentience research, artificial intelligence, and psychedelic experience, asking what each can and cannot explain. Skeptical rather than credulous, and honest about how little is actually settled.

Science & ResearchSpirituality & ConsciousnessNature & Plant Intelligence

Beyond Ayahuasca

Roman Hanis

Two decades of study with Indigenous elders in the Peruvian Amazon and Andes, written as a coherent path rather than a collection of ceremony stories. Hanis argues that ayahuasca is a doorway and not the destination, and that the real work is the discipline built around it. Practices and self-inquiry prompts throughout, so it reads as much like a manual as a memoir.

AyahuascaIndigenous WisdomSpirituality & Consciousness

Tryptamine Palace

James Oroc

Oroc's account of encountering 5-MeO-DMT from the Sonoran Desert toad, and his attempt afterward to make sense of it through physics, mysticism, and years in the Burning Man community. Part trip report, part speculative theory about what an experience of unity might actually be. Worth reading for the first-hand writing more than the science, which runs well ahead of the evidence.

5-MeO-DMTPsychedelics & Plant MedicineMemoir

DMT Dialogues

Edited by David Luke & Rory Spowers

In 2015 a group of researchers spent three days at Tyringham Hall in England arguing about DMT entities, the pineal gland, plant sentience, and whether any of it means what it appears to mean. This book is the record of those sessions, with contributions from Rick Strassman, Dennis McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Jeremy Narby, Graham Hancock, and Robin Carhart-Harris. The disagreements between them are the best part.

Psychedelics & Plant MedicineScience & ResearchSpirituality & Consciousness

The Veteran's Guide to Psychedelics

Matt Zemon

A preparation and integration workbook written specifically for veterans, developed with the Heroic Hearts Project and clinically reviewed by a VA mental health researcher. Journey logs, reflective exercises, and plain guidance on what to expect in both clinical and ceremonial settings. Practical rather than philosophical, which is exactly the point.

IntegrationPsychedelics & Plant MedicineDiscernment & Harm Reduction

Planta Sapiens

Paco Calvo

Calvo runs a lab studying plant behaviour and makes the case that plants do something worth calling cognition, without pretending they think the way we do. Careful about the evidence and clear about where it runs out. A good corrective if the plant intelligence conversation has started to feel untethered.

Nature & Plant IntelligenceScience & Research

Dreaming Reality

Vladimir Miskovic & Steven Jay Lynn

A neuroscientist and a clinical psychologist arguing that consciousness cannot be explained by studying the brain as an object alone. They put current neuroscience alongside the inside-out maps drawn by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Christian mysticism, working through dreams, ego death, sensory deprivation, meditation, and psychedelic states. Academic in tone and heavier going than most books here, but rigorous in a way the field needs.

Science & ResearchSpirituality & Consciousness

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