RESEARCH AND MOVIES
We've also studied ayahuasca and plant medicine in books, films, and online articles and these are some of our best recommendations:
Articles
​
For the science-minded, this is the motherlode of all ayahuasca research papers, alphabetized and brought to you by Global Ayahuasca Project
​
From Sean Illing at Vox Magazine, a personal narrative of his experience with ayahuasca at a large center in Costa Rica. He says, "I don’t know what life will be like in six months or a year, but I think ayahuasca was the greatest thing that has happened to my marriage."
​
Inside the Ayahuasca Experience: When Shamanism Meets Psychotherapy
The great trauma and addiction expert, psychologist Dr. Gabor Mate, discusses his personal experiences with ayahuasca both for himself and his patients. He says, "ayahuasca has become in some ways the most exciting of my various healing activities, the one in which I see the most rapidly transformative potential."
​
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/the-ayahuasca-boom-in-the-u-s
The New Yorker's Ariel Levy gives a brief, somewhat humorous overview of ayhuasca's history and recounts her own story of a ceremony in New York: "Ayahuasca, like kale, is no joy ride. The majority of users vomit—or, as they prefer to say, 'purge.' And that’s the easy part. 'Ayahuasca takes you to the swampland of your soul,' my friend Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, told me. Then he said that he wanted to do it again."
​
​
Documentaries
Documentaries: The Song That Calls You Home (2020)
From Shock to Awe (2019, the Luc Cote one, not the other)
The Sacred Science (2011)
Lea and I (2019)
The Last Shaman (2016)
​​
​
Films
Film: El Abrazo de la Serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent, 2016)
​
​
Books
The Fellowship of the River: A Medical Doctor’s Exploration into Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine, Joseph Tafur
Listening to Ayahuasca, Rachel Harris
Ayahuasca in My Blood, Peter Gorman
The Shaman and Ayahuasca, Don Jose Campos
Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, Stephen V. Beyer
Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge, Jeremy Narby
​