Plant Medicine Books

Discover the power of natural magic and healing through herbs, flowers, and essential oils in this new guide to green witchcraft.

At her core, the green witch is a naturalist, an herbalist, a wise woman, and a healer. She embraces the power of nature; she draws energy from the Earth and the Universe; she relies on natural objects like stones and gems to commune with the land she lives off of; she uses plants, flowers, oils, and herbs for healing; she calls on nature for guidance; and she respects every living being no matter how small.

In The Green Witch, you will learn the way of the green witch, from how to use herbs, plants, and flowers to make potions and oils for everyday healing as well as how crystals, gems, stones, and even twigs can help you find balance within. You’ll discover how to find harmony in Earth’s great elements and connect your soul to every living creature. This guide also contains directions for herbal blends and potions, ritual suggestions, recipes for sacred foods, and information on how to listen to and commune with nature. Embrace the world of the green witch and discover what the power of nature has in store for you.

In the 1970s two of the most influential thinkers of the psychedelic era gathered what was then known about psilocybin botany and culture and presented it in "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide." Writing under pseudonyms, the McKenna brothers provided simple, reliable, and productive methods for magic mushroom propagation, including black-and-white photographs that showed the techniques of the time. The development of more modern cultivation techniques does not eclipse the cultural contributions of this book. Philosophical asides, whimsical illustrations evoking the mystical nature of mushrooms, and speculations about the relationship of these organisms to humankind provide a lasting legacy. Truly the classic manual on home cultivation, the wisdom of "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide" continues to inspire new students of psycho-mycology--and refreshes psychedelic memories for others.

A clinical psychiatrist explores the effects of DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known.

From 1990 to 1995 Dr. Rick Strassman conducted U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. DMT, a plant-derived chemical found in the psychedelic Amazon brew, ayahuasca, is also manufactured by the human brain. In Strassman's volunteers, it consistently produced near-death and mystical experiences. Many reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences, aliens, angels, and spirits. Nearly all felt that the sessions were among the most profound experiences of their lives.

Strassman's research connects DMT with the pineal gland, considered by Hindus to be the site of the seventh chakra and by Rene Descartes to be the seat of the soul. DMT: The Spirit Molecule makes the bold case that DMT, naturally released by the pineal gland, facilitates the soul's movement in and out of the body and is an integral part of the birth and death experiences, as well as the highest states of meditation and even sexual transcendence. Strassman also believes that "alien abduction experiences" are brought on by accidental releases of DMT. If used wisely, DMT could trigger a period of remarkable progress in the scientific exploration of the most mystical regions of the human mind and soul.

Expanding upon the techniques that shamans use to establish connections to plant spirits, and provide practical exercises as well as a directory of traditional Amazonian and Caribbean healing plants and their common North American equivalents.

This book is an in-depth look at the role of plant spirits in shamanic rituals from around the world.

• Shows how shamans heal using their knowledge of plant spirits as well as the plant's "medical properties"
•  Explores the core methods of plant shamanism--soul retrieval, spirit extraction, and sin eating--and includes techniques for connecting with plant spirits
•  Includes extensive field interviews with master shamans of all traditions

Indigenous healers and shamans have known since antiquity that plants possess a spirit essence that can communicate through light, sound, and vibration. Now scientific studies are verifying this understanding. Plant Spirit Healing reveals the power of plant spirits to join with human intelligence to bring about profound healing. These spirits take us beyond mere symptomatic treatment to aligning us with the vast web of nature. Plants are more than their chemical constituents. They are intelligent beings that have the capacity to raise consciousness to a level where true healing can take place.

Ancient and indigenous peoples have insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves, perceived through a heart-centered mode of perception, not trial-and-error experimentation. Author Stephen Buhner explores this heart-centered mode of perception, helping readers to learn about the medicinal uses of plants, and how to gather information directly from the heart of Nature.

Whether you live in a mountain cabin or a city loft, plant spirits present themselves to us everywhere. Since its first printing in 1995, Plant Spirit Medicine has passed hand-to-hand among countless readers drawn to indigenous spirituality and all things alive and green. In this updated edition, Eliot Cowan invites us to discover the healing power of plants--not merely their physical medicinal properties, but the deeper wisdom and gifts that they offer.

Enriched by many new insights, this guide unfolds as a series of chapters on how plant spirit medicine helped Cowan resolve specific challenges in his own healing journey and in his work with others. In the telling, we learn how plant spirits can directly communicate with and aid all of us, including:

Plant spirit medicine's five-element view of healing
- Ways to assess our own states of health and balance
- Receiving guidance from plants, including those found within herbal preparations
- New passages on community and sacred plants such as peyote, marijuana, and tobacco
- Additional interviews with plant shamans across diverse traditions, and more

Mushroom Wisdom explores the universal aspects of the psilocybin mushroom experience as it relates to spirituality.

Author Martin Ball explains how mushroom use can lead the spiritual seeker to profound states of self-awareness and radical understanding of the nature of the self, reality, and the sacred. Topics include looking into the spiritual mirror to uncover an authentic sense of self, developing witness consciousness to overcome self-limiting concepts and judgments, and removing obstacles of ego and self-induced suffering to trigger the rich experience of spirit flow.

The book also addresses the creation and use of ritual, sacred objects, and the importance of sound and silence. Ball distinguishes between using mushrooms in spiritual work as opposed to simply having a pleasant psychedelic experience. Not a guide to how to have fun with psilocybin mushrooms, Mushroom Wisdom is a serious investigation into deep spiritual nature, drawing on both a wide array of scientific disciplines and ancient shamanic practices.

Create your own enchanting witch’s garden and draw energy from the earth with this guide to cultivating your very own magical ingredients.

A green witch embraces the power of nature, draws energy from the earth and the universe, and relies on stones, plants, flowers, and herbs for healing. In The Green Witch’s Garden, you will learn how to create your own magical space to enhance your witchcraft practice.

With information on how to plan and design your sacred garden and tips and tricks to growing and harvesting magical ingredients, this book will allow you to take control of your practice and more deeply connect with the earth. Let experienced witch and author of The Green Witch Arin Hiscock-Murphy guide you on your path to creating your personal piece of nature.

Hardcover: 224 pages

In this guide to sacred plant initiations, medical herbalist and shamanic practitioner Carole Guyett explains how to commune with plants and their spirits through the traditional shamanic method of plant dieting. A plant diet involves ingesting a particular plant over a period of time so you regularly receive the plant s vibratory energy as well as its medicinal actions.

Adding a ceremonial element to plant dieting offers a sacred initiation by the plant world, allowing you to connect deeply with all aspects of a plant, receive its sacred teachings, and forge a relationship for guidance and healing, benefitting both yourself and others.

Over 30 contributors share their expertise on the chemical, biological, cultural, psychological, and experiential dimensions of psilocybin mushrooms

• Describes in vivid detail the consciousness-expanding experiences of psychoactive mushroom users

• Provides firsthand accounts of the controversial Harvard Psilocybin Project, including the Concord Prison and Good Friday studies

Teonanácatl was the name given to the visionary mushrooms used in ancient Mesoamerican shamanic ceremonies, mushrooms that contain psilocybin, the psychoactive agent identified by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. The rediscovery of these visionary mushrooms by the Mazatec healer Maria Sabina and mycologist R. Gordon Wasson ignited a worldwide mushroom culture that inspired the consciousness revolution of the 1960s.

This book describes in vivid detail the consciousness-expanding experiences of psychoactive mushroom users--from artists to psychologists--and the healing visionary inspiration they received. It provides firsthand accounts of studies performed in the controversial Harvard Psilocybin Project, including the Concord Prison study and the Good Friday study. It describes how the use of the psilocybe mushroom spread from the mountains of Mexico into North America, Asia, and Europe by seekers of consciousness-expanding experiences. It also details how psilocybin has been used since the 1960s in psychotherapy, prisoner rehabilitation, the enhancement of creativity, and the induction of mystical experiences and is being studied as a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

A renowned practitioner of herbal medicine offers a beautiful introduction to adaptogenic herbs, explaining what they are, how they improve your life, and how you can use them for personal wellness.

Adaptogenic herbs, like ginseng, cordyceps, and rhodiola, work to counteract the effects of stresses on the body. Used for millennia in Eastern healing, they have now become popular again. Adriana Ayales, owner of Anima Mundi Herbals, shares her in-depth knowledge of these amazing herbs. In addition to a list of complementary herbs that pair wells with adaptogens, Ayales also lists “master herbs” being researched for their adaptogenic-like chemistry. She offers 30 recipes for food, drinks, and natural beauty cures that can help banish fatigue, sharpen your mind, stimulate your central nervous system, and enhance vitality. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this authoritative guide also provides daily self-care tips for promoting wellness in mind, body, and spirit.

The core essence of these widely available herbs is that they are masterful longevity tonics, popularly known for their ability to protect against the negative effects of stress. In this beautifully illustrated book, Adriana Ayales, founder of Anima Mundi Herbals, shares must-know information on adaptogens and secondary adaptogens. You’ll also find everyday self-care recipes, from warming tonics and lattes to foods like smoothie bowls, to cocktails and spritzers, as well as bath and body products. With this book at hand, you can navigate the amazing world of adaptogens.

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages, their houses perched on stilts on the shores of the rivers that are their primary means of travel. Here in the jungle, they have retained features of the Hispanic tradition, including a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine. And they have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues not only to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art but also to attract thousands of seekers each year with the promise of visionary experiences of their own. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. The visionary ayahuasca paintings of Pablo César Amaringo are available to a world market in a sumptuous coffee-table book; international ayahuasca tourists exert a profound economic and cultural pull on previously isolated local practitioners; ayahuasca shamanism, once the terrain of anthropologists, is the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs. Ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin.

Singing to the Plants sets forth, in accessible form, just what this shamanism is about -- what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery. The work emphasizes both the uniqueness of this highly eclectic and absorptive shamanism -- plant spirits dressed in surgical scrubs, extraterrestrial doctors speaking computer language -- and its deep roots in shamanist beliefs and practices, both healing and sorcery, common to the Upper Amazon. The work seeks to understand this form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and personal memoir.

"Long before ayahuasca tourism became a pastime for rich gringos, Peter Gorman was knocking around Iquitos and the Amazon. He's traveled the rivers and quaffed the brew with the best (and the worst) of them and been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night. This is the intensely personal story of an old-school jungle rat for whom ayahuasca is not just a hobby, but a life-long quest." -Dennis McKenna, Ph.D, co-author of The Invisible Landscape.

Conversations on shamanism and mind-altering plants by filmmaker Jan Kounen, anthropologist Jeremy Narby, and writer/filmmaker Vincent Ravalec.

In the Amazon, shamans do not talk in terms of hallucinogens but of tools for communicating with other life-forms. Ayahuasca, for example, is first and foremost a means of breaking down the barrier that separates humans from other species, allowing us to communicate with them. The introduction of plant-centered shamanism into the Western world in the 1970s was literally the meeting of two entirely different paradigms. In The Psychotropic Mind, three of the individuals who have been at the forefront of embracing other ways of knowing look at the ramifications of the introduction into our Western culture of these shamanic practices and the psychotropic substances that support them.

With rare sincerity and depth, noted anthropologist Jeremy Narby, filmmaker Jan Kounen, and writer/filmmaker Vincent Ravalec explore the questions of sacred plants, initiations, hallucinogens, and altered states of consciousness, looking at both the benefits and dangers that await those who seek to travel this path. Focusing specifically on ayahuasca and iboga, psychotropic substances with which the authors are intimately familiar, they examine how we can best learn the other ways of perceiving the world found in indigenous cultures, and how this knowledge offers immense benefits and likely solutions to some of the modern world’s most pressing problems.