Steve Beyer has a law degree and doctorates in both religious studies and psychology. He lived for a year and a half in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas, and has published three books on Buddhism and Tibetan language and religion. He has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the University of California—Berkeley, and Graduate Theological Union.

For twenty-five years, he was a lawyer and litigator at a major international law firm in Chicago. He has been a wilderness guide and a peacemaker and community builder. He 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  received coronación by banco ayahuasquero don Roberto Acho Jurama.

He has worked with ayahuasca and other sacred plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals; and he has undertaken numerous four-day and four-night solo vision fasts in Death Valley, the Pecos Wilderness, and the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. He is  a member of the Society of Shamanic Practitioners, American Herbalists Guild, Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. He has served as an editor of the Journal of Shamanic Practice and as a contributing editor of Ayahuasca.com.

His new book on ayahuasca shamanism, sorcery, and plant medicine, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, is published by the University of New Mexico Press.