It has been a long time since I have read the only match I can think of for part of that description:
"Alien Earth" by Edmond Hamilton.
It was written in 1949, so the mid-seventies might be when you read it. If yours turns out to be a different story, I would love to find it and read it.
Teak-cutters somewhere around the Mekong River, somewhere around Laos, and natives take a drug (naturally-derived, as many drugs are: perhaps from mushrooms) that slows all of their metabolism, movements, thinking, perception to plant speeds.
I think they not only see the plants' movements, but have much more awareness of, and communication with, them.
I do not remember anything about animals' reactions in the story. It is not meditation, but the drug, that increases communication with plants in this story.
In my clouded memory, I had thought that a sympathetic biologist had taken the drug in an attempt to understand the plants, and was dragged back by other people living in so-called "normal time". (I daresay the plants would have a differing opinion on that.)
But teak-hunters are not going to be sympathetic to plants, and much of the forest gets killed when one of them accidentally releases a plant-disease mold.
I am looking for the story again after years. One teak-cutter may be sympathetic to the plants after experiencing them via the drug. He dies, I think attempting to save the tress from further cutting. Another teak-cutter, I think, becomes sympathetic after his experience.