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Plant Wisdom: What They Teach Us About Healthy Relationships, Burnout and Resilience · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:05
  Mary: Welcome to No Shrinking Violets.
• 0:07
  Mary: I'm your host, Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist and certified integrative mental health practitioner.
• 0:13
  Mary: I've created a space where we celebrate the intuition and power of women who want to break free from limiting narratives.
• 0:20
  Mary: We'll explore all realms of wellness, what it means to take up space unapologetically, and how your essential nature is key to living life on your terms.
• 0:29
  Mary: It's time to own your space, trust your nature and flourish.
• 0:34
  Mary: Let's dive in.
• 0:35
  Mary: Hey, violets, welcome to the show.
• 0:41
  Mary: Before I jump in, in case you haven't heard, no Shrinking Violets now has Monday mini episodes just me, no guest, giving bite-sized reflections on life hacks designed to meet you right where you are.
• 0:53
  Mary: Each one offers a simple idea to help you shift your thinking, tap into your resilience and live just a bit more rooted and aligned.
• 1:01
  Mary: Follow the show so you don't miss any of my episodes.
• 1:05
  Mary: Okay, speaking of rooted, I am so excited to talk to my guest today.
• 1:14
  Mary: Up until we connected about the show, I was the biggest nature geek I knew.
• 1:15
  Mary: I think that's about to change.
• 1:17
  Mary: If you've ever listened to me before, you know I love plants and I truly believe they can give us guidance to help each of us tap into our own unique essential nature.
• 1:26
  Mary: I have learned so many lessons from plants myself over the past 20 plus years, both as a master gardener and as a home gardener who has planted probably over 1,000 perennials on all the different properties where I've lived that is not an exaggeration and from my time both in my garden and hiking in different parts of the country I've lived that is not an exaggeration and from my time both in my garden and hiking in different parts of the country, I've witnessed both the resilience and the adaptability, community and ecological value that plants bring to the world, and I often use plant narratives to help my clients connect to their own life situations.
• 2:00
  Mary: I think they provide great examples of learning to survive in less than optimal situations, finding the nutrients they need through their unique root systems and sharing their gifts with the pollinators, not only to further their species but to support and sustain other species.
• 2:16
  Mary: Like humans, people do all those things as part of building their own healthy relationships.
• 2:22
  Mary: We draw in nutrients from people, activities and food.
• 2:25
  Mary: We adapt when we have challenges and we connect to others in a symbiotic way to get support and give support.
• 2:32
  Mary: If you've ever heard of the hormone oxytocin, you know that we are literally chemically predisposed to create community, and plants are, too.
• 2:41
  Mary: My guest today.
• 2:43
  Mary: Tigrili Gardenia has a spiritual connection to plants and although I can honestly say that I never feel more grounded and utterly content than when I'm among plants, I think Tigrilla takes this to a whole new level.
• 2:56
  Mary: So let me introduce her so we can all learn more about the amazingness of nature and how we can connect to that to elevate our own consciousness.
• 3:11
  Mary: Tigrilla Gardenia is a nature-inspired mentor, certified life coach and world ambassador for plant advocacy.
• 3:14
  Mary: She empowers people to live authentic, purpose-driven lives in collaboration with the plant world.
• 3:18
  Mary: A citizen of Damanhur, one of the world's largest spiritual eco-communities of Damanhur one of the world's largest spiritual eco-communities, tigriya's journey into plant wisdom began with a life-changing encounter with a musical plant and yes, we're going to ask her about that.
• 3:32
  Mary: Always eager to learn, she studied with some of the greatest minds in bio-inspired sciences, gaining a master's degree in futuro vegetale I hope I said that right which is Vegetal, Future Plants, social Innovation and Design at the University of Florence.
• 3:50
  Mary: Finally, tigrilla is the host of the podcast Reconnect with Plant Wisdom, where she shares ancient and modern knowledge, from biology to spirituality, exploring the wondrous ways plants help us lead a naturally conscious life.
• 4:03
  Mary: And let me just say I don't follow many podcasts because listening to them is part of my preparation for guests.
• 4:10
  Mary: They got to be pretty compelling.
• 4:11
  Mary: However, after hearing just five minutes of her podcast, I hit follow.
• 4:16
  Mary: It literally touched a chord deep inside of me.
• 4:18
  Mary: So I'm so happy to welcome you to no Shrinking, violet Segrella.
• 4:24
  Tigrilla: Thank you so much.
• 4:25
  Tigrilla: What a beautiful and humbling introduction.
• 4:28
  Mary: Oh, you're welcome.
• 4:29
  Mary: You're welcome, okay.
• 4:31
  Mary: So I'm guessing that if some of your vocation is a newer idea for me, my listeners will need a bit of a foundation for our talk today.
• 4:39
  Mary: So could you give us an idea of your life journey and how that path got you to where you are today?
• 4:48
  Tigrilla: Oh, my life journey.
• 4:49
  Tigrilla: Where should I start?
• 4:51
  Tigrilla: So I'll try to give you the detailed and highlighted version, without going too much into the details so that we don't sit here for three hours.
• 5:01
  Tigrilla: I have a very eclectic background and that's the reason why I say it.
• 5:05
  Tigrilla: So I know, notwithstanding the fact that I live in Italy and I am an Italian citizen, I'm also an American citizen.
• 5:13
  Tigrilla: So, as you can tell from my accent, I was born and raised in Miami and we're really North Cuba because I'm Cuban, so it's really North Cuba, and so my original degree actually was in music engineering and electrical engineering.
• 5:29
  Tigrilla: Music has always been a very core essence, very, very deep part of myself, and I work very closely with the arts in general.
• 5:37
  Tigrilla: And when I finished that, I ended up kind of being whisked off to Seattle to go work in the high tech world.
• 5:45
  Tigrilla: At the time, music and audio coming onto the internet was kind of like a craze.
• 5:50
  Tigrilla: It wasn't like it is today.
• 5:51
  Tigrilla: We were just we are where the foundation that made it possible for all the things that we see today in audio and video online.
• 5:58
  Tigrilla: And then eventually I left there, the company I was working with, and ended up at Microsoft and spent years in Microsoft.
• 6:04
  Tigrilla: Throughout the course of that I started to the company I was working with and ended up at Microsoft and spent years in Microsoft.
• 6:05
  Tigrilla: Throughout the course of that I started to again missing that part of the arts and that part of the music world, not just in the technology but also in the traditional sort of arts.
• 6:15
  Tigrilla: I ended up kind of going back into acting and doing theater and things of this nature, and so I eventually left Microsoft and actually founded an event production company.
• 6:27
  Tigrilla: I was producing large events, mostly dance parties, and ended up co-owning a circus and was having all this kind of just really bringing my experiences into this focus of how is it that I help people create transformational moments, moments where they feel safe and secure to be able to allow themselves to try something new?
• 6:48
  Tigrilla: And this led me also on my spiritual journey.
• 6:52
  Tigrilla: I started to, I was initiated into a mystery school and I started to really experience the Kabbalah and other aspects that I eventually went on to teach.
• 7:01
  Tigrilla: So here I am kind of like producing events, teaching and doing all these things, and I ended up my partner at the time really wanted to go on tour with Cirque du Soleil we had met in my circus.
• 7:12
  Tigrilla: He was a tech, and so we ended up getting a job and moving to Europe, and so that's how I ended up in Europe and after I came off tour, I decided to.
• 7:22
  Tigrilla: I was kind of still producing events and I ended up in Barcelona after wandering around for a year or so and decided that I wanted to really stay there and I wanted to focus on building out you know my spiritual practice and you know, again, teaching and such like that was coming through town ended up saying, hey, why don't we go to Italy and go check out this place, dom and her we keep hearing about which was, you know, for us inconceivable the idea of a spiritual community that had built temples and we were like, all right, let's head out and do that.
• 7:52
  Tigrilla: So I came here and I met some people and they actually invited me to come and work on a project, which is something that was not done at the time.
• 8:01
  Tigrilla: Nobody, nobody was really in like we've always had lots of people that come here, but nobody that was invited to say, hey, please, please, work on this project with us.
• 8:09
  Tigrilla: And I thought, okay, six months, I'll work on the project, I'll get it set off, I'll kick it off and then I'll leave.
• 8:13
  Tigrilla: Yeah Well, that was almost 15 years ago and I'm still sitting here, so so that's kind of how I ended up in Italy.
• 8:21
  Tigrilla: And then, when I was here, I, you know again, I told you music is my background.
• 8:25
  Tigrilla: Music and engineering are kind of two pieces that are really fundamental to my life.
• 8:29
  Tigrilla: And so I I heard this music when I was walking down a hall and ended up kind of following the music, because it was really strange music, it wasn't like anything I'd heard before and ended up at a box, connected to a speaker, connected to a plant.
• 8:43
  Tigrilla: Wow, and you're kind of like what the heck is this?
• 8:48
  Tigrilla: But as I'm listening to it, I'm staring.
• 8:51
  Tigrilla: So my engineering mind is staring at the box and my like languagey music mind is staring at the plant going, are you talking to me?
• 9:01
  Tigrilla: And the plant was basically through the music, saying yeah, I'm talking to you.
• 9:13
  Tigrilla: And I was just like, so that got me.
• 9:14
  Tigrilla: It kind of was my plant reawakening, the thing that kind of opened me up to realize, oh, my goodness, you're not just this alive in the quoted sort of way, but you're alive like in the.
• 9:24
  Tigrilla: I have an idea and thoughts and other stuff that's happening inside of this, you know, sessile green body, and I just came down, you know, fell down the rabbit hole.
• 9:34
  Tigrilla: I was working on various projects for Damanhur.
• 9:36
  Tigrilla: To begin with, I got moved over to the project of the music of the plants, which was a device that was there and just went head heads down into everything.
• 9:45
  Tigrilla: I could get my hands on all of the understanding from a scientific perspective, because I had always loved science and biology and really getting into who is a plant, what is a plant, and then what is plant neurobiology?
• 9:58
  Tigrilla: What does it mean?
• 9:59
  Tigrilla: Are plants sentient?
• 10:01
  Tigrilla: What are the discussions and the arguments that are happening in there?
• 10:04
  Tigrilla: And at the same time, I had this musical side which was like oh yes, I can understand you in this way, the whole idea of the fact that the base for human beings is musicality.
• 10:16
  Tigrilla: We really interpret the word through the world, through melody, through an understanding of this rhythm, of all these pieces, and that's how language is actually built, it's built on, is actually built, it's built on a musicality.
• 10:26
  Tigrilla: So this music kind of allowed plants to kind of create a language from there of which I could easily understood, and it started to make me realize who plants were, so that, therefore, I could kind of come into a new level of understanding of myself, right, all these parts of myself that I had never thought about and that mixed beautifully with my spiritual background, because being somebody who was a Kabbalah teacher, who had worked very closely with different elements of the kind of plant spirit world, which kind of had this other aspect on top of the biology, right.
• 10:59
  Tigrilla: So now you have the biology, you have the creativity and you have the subtle world that's sitting on top of the biology, right.
• 11:03
  Tigrilla: So now you have the biology, you have the creativity and you have the subtle world that's sitting on top of it, and all three of this for me, just kind of came together and made it really clear Okay, I now see life, I now see where I'm supposed to be headed.
• 11:18
  Mary: Yeah, oh, wow, there's 3000 threads.
• 11:21
  Mary: I want to pull out of that.
• 11:22
  Mary: Wow, there's 3,000 threads.
• 11:27
  Mary: I want to pull out of that.
• 11:28
  Mary: Well, the one thing.
• 11:29
  Mary: So I worked with college students for a long time and the campus where I was I worked at a Penn State campus we had a lot of engineering majors, and so I know electrical engineering is one of the most difficult, oh gosh.
• 11:38
  Mary: Yes, I think we also have this idea that once we choose a path, it has to be lucrative.
• 11:46
  Mary: It's linear, and what you just illustrated is one of the best things about doing this podcast with guests, and I say this all the time that you start, you set your foot on a path and you think you can see where it's going, but you've just you sort of followed these opportunities along the way and you're in such a different place than you ever imagined you could be.
• 12:12
  Tigrilla: Absolutely, and that's exactly why I focus my and this is where, kind of coming full circle to what you just said, I work mainly with multi-potentialites, multi-passionate people, people who have lots of different ideas and interests and passions that they have.
• 12:26
  Tigrilla: You know different careers, different ways of expressing themselves that they've experienced, and most of these are told for exactly the reasons that you talked about.
• 12:35
  Tigrilla: You know, focus on one, or at least focus on one at a time.
• 12:39
  Tigrilla: And the plants really helped me understand what it means to be a living ecosystem and how it's not so much which passion you use in biomimicry, which is a form of design, whether we're designing projects and products or social innovations, where we mimic nature, we look at bio-inspiration of how is it that elements of nature, beings of nature, do things and then how can then we apply that to the projects that we're working on.
• 13:09
  Tigrilla: And when it comes to social innovation in particular, we look at what's called a deep pattern.
• 13:14
  Tigrilla: We look at the expression that a given organism continuously does, whether we're talking about swarms of birds, schools of fish.
• 13:22
  Tigrilla: All of these movements are a deep pattern that have a very set, a set of simple rules, and if those organisms carry out those simple rules, then those behaviors, that pattern emerges and that is the natural state of those beings.
• 13:37
  Tigrilla: And we have a principle that's very, very but basically the same thing, but in an esoteric form, which is connected to your base archetype, the idea that my soul has an archetype, which is how I express myself in every life that I live.
• 13:52
  Tigrilla: But yet I have all these different personalities, which are the same in biomimicry, looking at all the different kind of expressions of the deep pattern.
• 14:01
  Tigrilla: But if I follow the simple rules, my trueness, my true, authentic self comes through.
• 14:07
  Tigrilla: And most people confuse that, thinking that those rules or that that expression has to be the thing you do.
• 14:12
  Tigrilla: But it's not the thing you do, it's the how you do it.
• 14:15
  Tigrilla: That is the same and that's the thing that you constantly express.
• 14:19
  Tigrilla: So it doesn't matter if I'm doing circus arts or if I'm sitting around, you know, designing a condenser microphone, or if I'm doing circus arts, or if I'm sitting around designing a condenser microphone, or if I'm with a group of people and we're having a super in-depth philosophical conversation, or if I'm doing a class on Kabbalah.
• 14:35
  Tigrilla: The truth of the matter is that anybody who knows me and who's watched me throughout any of those years will see that, even though each one of these gives me different input points and different pieces that I can play with for metaphors, for expression, for such, the thing that gets expressed, for me and what you could say, what it accomplishes, is always the same, because that's my deep pattern, and so it's not so much about finding what it is that you do, but it's how do you do it.
• 15:04
  Tigrilla: So then you could take advantage of every single idea finding what it is that you do, but it's how do you do it.
• 15:05
  Tigrilla: So then you could take advantage of every single idea, thought, passion that you might have in order to express yourself completely.
• 15:12
  Mary: Yeah Well, so you fleshed out an idea I talk about often and before I go to that, I'm going to say as a therapist you must have amazing neural pathways because you have so many things that connect in your brain, which is tremendous.
• 15:28
  Mary: I talk about essential nature and it's very spare compared to the lushness of what you just described.
• 15:37
  Mary: So I see in my work that I believe that we all know what we need, but it gets buried.
• 15:43
  Mary: It gets buried by the world.
• 15:46
  Mary: And you know, I think when I was a kid I instinctively went to the forest, like that's where I played.
• 15:53
  Mary: In the forest.
• 15:54
  Mary: I gravitated to plants from when I was very young and I think as we get older I thought about, oh, I want to be in floriculture or horticulture.
• 16:03
  Mary: And then it started to be like, well, how would I make money at that, or what's the?
• 16:09
  Mary: You know?
• 16:09
  Mary: And I think we shut, we're shut down by things like that.
• 16:13
  Mary: And I think in the world today, when I talk to people about essential nature, it's really nature.
• 16:18
  Mary: And nurture it's really what's our natural, as you're talking about what's inside our natural way of being.
• 16:24
  Mary: But then I think too, with a lot of my clients they've gotten the nurture part because growing up they had to adapt.
• 16:33
  Mary: So, again, we can think about plants.
• 16:34
  Mary: When they're in a stressed situation, they're going to do their best to grow towards the light, get the nutrients they need.
• 16:41
  Mary: That's what we all do as beings, and I think when they end up in front of me in my office, those things don't work anymore.
• 16:49
  Mary: Either their climate is wrong and I started to.
• 16:53
  Mary: I have a book that's coming around I'm kind of putting it together called Live Like a Plant, and it touches on all of these eight things about a plant's way they live, things about a plant's way they live, and so that idea of connecting inside to what you really want and then looking at how has the environment shaped you and how can you start to go from surviving to thriving.
• 17:15
  Mary: So, with having said all that, with social media and all of this loud, fast stuff that is, I think, is confusing and overwhelming, how do you help people get back to sort of that inner plantness or like that, what you're talking about, who you really are and how to thrive with that?
• 17:36
  Tigrilla: And that's a great question and I'm going to give you an answer that's probably counterintuitive, because this is probably one of going back to that whole authenticity, right, um, the biggest problem with all the conditioning that we have is that most conditioning is intended to kind of make everybody fit into a box, right, society has a set of rules and norms and all these different aspects, and we've forgotten an essential step in there which says so I think I'm supposed to condition, to adapt extremely the way I think to whatever it is that the output is.
• 18:11
  Tigrilla: And if you look at an ecosystem, right, in an ecosystem nothing is wasted, everything is used.
• 18:18
  Tigrilla: So when I think about it from that perspective, I think both my ecosystem has to then engage with the greater ecosystem.
• 18:27
  Tigrilla: That could be my work, my society, my family, my anything that's around me.
• 18:31
  Tigrilla: But there's always, in between two ecosystems, an ecotone, and an ecotone is that division, that space that slowly, gradually moves out of one ecosystem and into the other, and in there you actually have the most amount of innovation, you have the most amount of movement and flurry, because of course, one thing is coming out and it has to somehow adapt itself into something else, or you have two different ecosystems that are just blending in there, and so everything in there kind of gets the best of both worlds.
• 19:02
  Tigrilla: We sort of have to think of ourselves in that way, which means I could take in all the most massive amount of input as possible, right?
• 19:11
  Tigrilla: But what's most important is that within my ecosystem, I have to learn how to process it my way.
• 19:17
  Tigrilla: I have to give myself full permission to design systems and ways of looking at things.
• 19:26
  Tigrilla: That is not based on what anybody else needs.
• 19:29
  Tigrilla: But to get back to this essence of who it is that I am and be totally comfortable with the fact that I don't know, I do math backwards or you know, I have, you know, 75 different systems for tracking what I'm doing in a given day, or I do things in 10 minute chunks because that's all I can do and stuff.
• 19:49
  Tigrilla: It doesn't matter how you do it when you're inside of your ecosystem.
• 19:54
  Tigrilla: What's important is I do it my way, my ecosystem, and then I use that ecotone to test what is it about my system, the output of my system, so not in this case again, how I do it, but what I'm producing from it and how do I blend that into so that by the time it hits the other ecosystem which could be again a friend, my work environment or whatever it's given to them in the way that is necessary.
• 20:20
  Tigrilla: So, in other words, I process it my way and then I test not how I process it, because that's not your problem, you don't need to think how I think but I test.
• 20:30
  Tigrilla: Okay, if I'm supposed to give somebody something blue and in my world this is blue but then, as I start to test it out, they tell me hey, stop giving me orange.
• 20:38
  Tigrilla: Then I'm like okay, so that's orange.
• 20:40
  Tigrilla: So they call that orange.
• 20:42
  Tigrilla: For me it's blue, but they call it orange.
• 20:44
  Tigrilla: Great, okay, let me give you other things and let me test.
• 20:47
  Tigrilla: Now I'm still going to make my color mixes, however, the heck, I mix my colors, but I'm going to then adapt the output for you.
• 20:54
  Tigrilla: Sometimes, though, in that crunch, I could say hey, are you sure you really need that color?
• 21:00
  Tigrilla: Because to me this is blue.
• 21:01
  Tigrilla: Can we have a discussion about it?
• 21:12
  Tigrilla: So, in part, it's getting so comfortable with who I am and how I process things that I can one ask for what I need and negotiate, because in all natural settings there is something that's happening, there's a relationship that's being built and also, when necessary, adopt my output to match what you need, but not necessarily change how it is that I get to that output.
• 21:27
  Tigrilla: Hopefully that makes sense.
• 21:29
  Mary: I think it does.
• 21:30
  Mary: Let me try to reframe it and see if this, because I'll put it into just gardening.
• 21:34
  Mary: So I've lived in different properties and sometimes I've been lucky enough to have the chance to dig some plants up and bring them with me, and to me where I'm putting them in the new property seems pretty much the same, but they act very differently.
• 21:52
  Mary: So it's sort of like they know where they feel the most comfortable, where they thrive.
• 21:58
  Mary: But we can't always have that Like.
• 22:00
  Mary: We've gotten probably 12 inches of rain here in the last three weeks, so that's very unusual.
• 22:05
  Mary: So then now the plants to me are sort of like okay, how are we going to adapt to this?
• 22:11
  Mary: Because this is not our usual what we prefer.
• 22:15
  Mary: So they're adapting.
• 22:17
  Tigrilla: It doesn't change their plantness or what they prefer, but they're learning to survive in a different situation, which and they're learning how to express themselves because, like you said, that plant is not going to change the plant, so I'm still going to bloom, I'm still going to do all these things.
• 22:36
  Tigrilla: Now I could give you a message and say, hey, what you're asking me as a plant, but also as a human being, is too far outside.
• 22:42
  Tigrilla: So if that water is too much to a point where I can't take it in I've tried everything or my weather conditions are so different, it's too cold, I can't you might have a die off.
• 22:54
  Tigrilla: That is a signal to you that says, look, this just isn't going to be.
• 22:57
  Tigrilla: And I think we need to get much more comfortable with the idea that not everything has to be a perfect fit and not everything is a fit at all.
• 23:03
  Tigrilla: Sometimes it's just not going to work, especially if you have only in the case of a plant, if it's only one side that is adapting, then you also have the right to say this isn't going to work for me, because we actually need to adapt both, maybe, instead of putting them in.
• 23:21
  Tigrilla: You know an area where the water constantly hits there is, you know, a partial kind of cover that can be done because you also, as being the one on the other side can recognize.
• 23:30
  Tigrilla: Okay, there's changes, that to be made, but what's most important is that that plant is always going to express that plantness, whether it's the way I flower or the way the shape of my leaves.
• 23:39
  Tigrilla: I can make slight changes, but I'm still that plant, so that I'm recognized.
• 23:44
  Tigrilla: And so I think this is a really important aspect for us as human beings is, most of the time conditioning happens and allows to happen at such an extreme level because we don't really know who we are.
• 23:57
  Tigrilla: And another aspect that I work with with my clients is getting them, in different ways, to feel really comfortable with testing, even in the most mundane things, who you truly are.
• 24:07
  Tigrilla: An example that I often use which I know is kind of silly and probably, you know, for some people makes no sense until you sit with it.
• 24:15
  Tigrilla: I promise it does is like the way I go to the bathroom, and I use it because it's innocuous.
• 24:19
  Tigrilla: Right, it's not, it's not something that's like controversial or anything like that, but I probably go to the bathroom the way my parents taught me how to go to the bathroom.
• 24:28
  Tigrilla: Whether I stand, whether I sit, whether I hover, go to the bathroom the way my parents taught me how to go to the bathroom, whether I stand, whether I sit, whether I hover, whether I lean forward, whether I lean back.
• 24:35
  Tigrilla: It was probably something that was either given to me by my parents completely, or at least formed in the time that I was young, when I had a body of a certain type.
• 24:43
  Tigrilla: I'm an adult, I'm an adult woman.
• 24:44
  Tigrilla: Right now, my body is not the same as when it was, when I was three years old or two years old or one year old, when I learned how to use the bathroom, and so therefore, I should constantly, as my body changes, modify and play with, at a minimum, how I go to the bathroom.
• 24:58
  Tigrilla: Do I lean a little forward, do I lean a little back?
• 25:00
  Tigrilla: Do I raise my legs, do I sit, even at all?
• 25:03
  Tigrilla: All these types of things.
• 25:04
  Tigrilla: Until I get so comfortable with knowing my body that I ensure I don't hurt my back, my bowels are in the best position, I can really release everything that is necessary.
• 25:15
  Tigrilla: We don't do that in areas of our lives.
• 25:17
  Tigrilla: We take in whatever it is that we've been told is morally correct or the social norm or all these types of things, but a plant would never do that Because, as you said, when I get moved into a different environment or when a plant grows a little bit bigger, they have to test their environment, like, okay, I'm bigger, but my pot is smaller, so let me see Can I go over it, can I go under it?
• 25:39
  Tigrilla: Let me play around and stretch and see.
• 25:41
  Tigrilla: Is there more sunlight where I am?
• 25:43
  Tigrilla: Am I crowding myself?
• 25:45
  Tigrilla: Is somebody else crowding me?
• 25:47
  Tigrilla: They have tons of sensors that allow them to take in large amounts of input and this is the part that's counterintuitive and then assimilate that and still stay true to themselves.
• 25:58
  Tigrilla: And so another piece of this is that we don't really allow ourselves to take things in fully and then consciously choose the path we're going to take with it.
• 26:10
  Tigrilla: We instead take a lot for granted that, if my mother taught me that I'm supposed to I don't know say hello when I see somebody on the street, I'm supposed to do that always, instead of knowing that.
• 26:23
  Tigrilla: Okay, if I'm in this town, I say hello on the street.
• 26:26
  Tigrilla: If I'm in this other town, in this other country, I look down because it's impolite to look at somebody in the street.
• 26:29
  Tigrilla: If I'm in this other town, in this other country, I look down because it's impolite to look at somebody in the eyes.
• 26:32
  Tigrilla: If I'm in this town, I smile because that's the way that their norm is, and in this town over here, instead, I don't smile because that's considered not worthy.
• 26:40
  Tigrilla: So we don't give ourselves that space to get to understand and the difference between all of that, which is, how do I like to greet people, like, do I want to be somebody who's walking down the street smiling and having fun, and when do I do it?
• 26:54
  Tigrilla: And so finding that balance so that I'm not insulted when somebody maybe doesn't smile back at me.
• 26:59
  Tigrilla: I know the difference between a cultural norm that's happening over there Okay, that person's not smiling at me because, culturally speaking, this place doesn't smile.
• 27:07
  Tigrilla: That doesn't change that I can't smile because that's who I am.
• 27:11
  Mary: Yeah, yeah, and so one of the examples I've used very simple with that is when there's a plant that needs more light and it leans away from the other plants, the other plants aren't upset about that, they're like that plant's just doing what it needs, and so I think that's really a great example of walking this line between.
• 27:32
  Mary: This is who I am, this is the essence of me, but I'm in a situation where it's in with fungi and all kinds of things under the soil that connects even different species and helps them to thrive.
• 27:41
  Mary: So when you're talking about more intimate relationships, friendships or like even a partner situation, how would you apply this?
• 28:09
  Mary: You talked about it a little bit, but is there anything else, when people are trying to put this frame on it, that you would offer for them?
• 28:16
  Tigrilla: Yeah, a big thing.
• 28:17
  Tigrilla: So I'll add a biological as well as a philosophical .
• 28:21
  Tigrilla: So, philosophy is that there are a series of missing archetypes that we have as human beings.
• 28:28
  Tigrilla: We've lost certain archetypes, specifically around 20 archetypes, and these 20 archetypes are all connected to relationships, relationships of all sorts, giving a much broader definition than the definitions that we hold today as human beings.
• 28:42
  Tigrilla: And we believe that the plants, the plant world specifically, is holding these archetypes for us.
• 28:49
  Tigrilla: They know that we as humans have kind of lost touch with them.
• 28:52
  Tigrilla: They know that we as humans aren't necessarily always ready to reconnect with them.
• 28:56
  Tigrilla: So they hold that memory until we're able to.
• 29:00
  Tigrilla: And then, taking it into the biological, you can look and see, okay, well, how is it that plants are expressing these relationships?
• 29:06
  Tigrilla: And here is where I think it really opens up a big area for us as human beings, because our human understanding of relationships is very limited.
• 29:17
  Tigrilla: We look at things like you know, like you said, family relationships, maybe friendship relationships.
• 29:22
  Tigrilla: We have a lot of definitions and conditioning around relationships, like if they treat you this way, that's bad, and if they do this, that's good.
• 29:30
  Tigrilla: And again, it's not based on what's good or bad for me it's just based on it is that way, and that's probably the difference between a conditioning versus something that you yourself have adopted whether it is the same thing as what society tells you, but you've adopted it for yourself because you've experimented with it.
• 29:48
  Tigrilla: So one of the things that I take my clients through, for example, is just experiment when they have these types of situations, is experimenting with the idea of some of the even most well known of plant relationships and understanding what those really mean and how they show up in your own life.
• 30:05
  Tigrilla: That maybe you're giving a connotation to or giving a definition to, that in reality is not necessarily based on what the relationship is, but the way you're experiencing that relationship.
• 30:16
  Tigrilla: For example, sure, everybody wants to talk about mutualisms right, the idea of win-win situations where both people are getting a positive benefit.
• 30:26
  Tigrilla: But there are, in nature, very, very long term relationships that are commensalisms.
• 30:31
  Tigrilla: One of the organisms is getting a super positive boost from it and the other one is neutral, and there's nothing wrong with that relationship.
• 30:40
  Tigrilla: That relationship can be useful to the overarching environment and to actually even both species.
• 30:46
  Tigrilla: One of them might have something extra to give and therefore it doesn't cost you anything to give it away, there's no loss really, because I'm able to just do it, and the other one is getting a benefit because I maybe can't produce that.
• 30:59
  Tigrilla: So where is it in your life that you might have a relationship where you're not getting anything out of it and the other person is, but that person's not using you?
• 31:07
  Tigrilla: It's better for the overall ecosystem of your life, and so if you take a look back and you look at a bigger picture of what's better for the ecosystem, how does that work out?
• 31:16
  Tigrilla: Or even something like predation, or you know, the predation in the perspective of one of them is actually losing, so I'm actually having a depleting act when the other one is getting a gain, which the truth of the matter is.
• 31:30
  Tigrilla: We all have a parasitic, in particular relationship all of our lives.
• 31:34
  Tigrilla: Most people not everybody, most people have a parasitic relationship which is called the parent-child relationship.
• 31:41
  Tigrilla: Right, the child is a parasite to the parent, but the parent, even though they're having like, it's taking their energy, it's taking their money, it's taking their time, it's taking all these types of things, but the overall ecosystem of the life, which in this case would be the family and your benefits to society overall, contains it.
• 31:59
  Tigrilla: And so therefore, even though there's one that is taking more and the other one that is giving more, and so you don't have that situation where there's a negative connotation, but when we see this outside of the parent-child relationship, we oftentimes try to label it as bad.
• 32:16
  Tigrilla: Is it really bad?
• 32:17
  Tigrilla: Or is it just that it's not, you know, is it just something that we've societally normed in that way and therefore, you know you have to ask yourself questions.
• 32:26
  Tigrilla: So for relationships, it's really helpful to kind of take a step back and look at one.
• 32:32
  Tigrilla: What is this relationship for real, like, not emotionally speaking, for a second, first and foremost just to understand it.
• 32:40
  Tigrilla: And then two if I'm looking at it from the perspective of nature, what are kind of some of the guidelines that nature shows me and helps me understand?
• 32:50
  Tigrilla: For example, competition in nature does happen, for sure it happens, but it's not continuous.
• 32:56
  Tigrilla: It has to have a temporary status, because if it's continuous, because both are actually competing and therefore draining each other, they will eventually kill each other.
• 33:07
  Tigrilla: It's just kind of a norm, and so therefore it has to have a purpose.
• 33:11
  Tigrilla: Competition is selective, it's very narrow in scope and it lasts for a determined period of time, and so you could have competitive relationships, even in your life, if they follow those norms.
• 33:26
  Tigrilla: And then you look at yourself and you're like, okay, is this competition have these characteristics?
• 33:30
  Tigrilla: And is this competition have these characteristics?
• 33:31
  Tigrilla: And then, is it better for my overall ecosystem?
• 33:34
  Tigrilla: Does this a kind of competition that boosts me for a second?
• 33:38
  Tigrilla: Whether I win or lose doesn't matter, but it boosts me and, like it, helps me learn something new, it helps me have an experience.
• 33:44
  Tigrilla: And then I step out of it and I reshift that relationship into something else.
• 33:49
  Tigrilla: Whether that be a commensalism Okay, I lost, so you're going to take from me, but that loss doesn't really hurt me or does it turn into something else.
• 33:58
  Tigrilla: And so if we start to look at relationships with these kind of natural lenses, it helps us kind of look at it from the perspective of okay, this could be good, this could be useful at a minimum and I'm going to start to look at things a little bit more expansively of, yes, how does it make me feel?
• 34:18
  Tigrilla: But is that making me feel because of the relationship itself or because some societal construct has taught me that it's that?
• 34:27
  Tigrilla: And if I take that definition out and then I look at it from the perspective of my overall ecosystem, then is it really have that same?
• 34:35
  Tigrilla: Because if it does, then I got to do something to change it.
• 34:37
  Tigrilla: But if it doesn't, how do I then live that in the best way possible and adapt it in order for it to be something that's useful to me or useful to the overall ecosystem?
• 34:50
  Mary: Yeah, that's a great frame because it does take out that idea of something is supposed to be a certain way.
• 34:58
  Mary: It should be this way or it shouldn't be this way.
• 35:02
  Mary: And things are also cyclical.
• 35:05
  Mary: If we think about plants, there are times in the seasons of one year where they have the pollinators and the bees are helping them, and you know, I think our relationships do change over time.
• 35:18
  Mary: So I think that's important to recognize too, because parents do get they get overwhelmed that you know it shouldn't be this hard, or my kids should be ready by now to do X, y or Z.
• 35:30
  Mary: But sometimes those things take a little bit of time, but there's a season for it.
• 35:35
  Tigrilla: Absolutely.
• 35:36
  Tigrilla: And the seasonality is another big element that I often you know that I talk about all the time, which is we forget we're seasonal.
• 35:43
  Tigrilla: And especially right now, in the sort of disconnected, non-nature connected world that we live in, it is very easy for us to forget our seasonality and therefore think that you're supposed to go, go, go all the time.
• 35:57
  Tigrilla: You know, I go to the supermarket and I don't have a relationship with my food.
• 36:00
  Tigrilla: Therefore, I think I'm supposed to be able to get bananas all year round, or I'm supposed to get whatever it might be of produce or food or any time, and in reality what it's done is it's created a false myth that we're supposed to be on all the time.
• 36:16
  Tigrilla: I met up with this wonderful there's a wonderful scholar by the name of Giovanni Allui, who I love very much.
• 36:23
  Tigrilla: His specialization is plants as agents in the art world, and how is it that plants display their agency in the artistic world and in the world of design?
• 36:35
  Tigrilla: He's fascinating and I was just with him in Milan a few months ago and we were having a really great conversation because he was doing a talk about artificial intelligence specifically around plants, and he was talking about how the proliferation right now of these images of these unnatural plants and what is it that they're doing and what is another foundation that they're laying that we don't even recognize?
• 37:03
  Tigrilla: And one of the aspects that we got into that was kind of like an aha moment for both of us was this fact that, without that seasonality in other words, these blooms that you're seeing in pictures all over the place that are always blooming they're always blooming, besides the fact that they're unnatural in their size and in their color and in that way that they grow but just the fact that they're always blooming is reinforcing the cultural myth that we should always be blooming, that we don't have seasonal cycles, that we don't have seasonal cycles, that we don't have moments where we're supposed to like down and take more time for rest.
• 37:36
  Tigrilla: When is the times for us to find our introspection, when is the time for us to be instead producing?
• 37:41
  Tigrilla: And this changes based on myself as well as my location.
• 37:46
  Tigrilla: You know, I still, even though I live in another country, I have a somewhat tropical constitution.
• 37:54
  Tigrilla: In other words, my body naturally needs siesta in the middle of the day because I come from a tropical environment, that it gets so hot and that you can't really think so right after lunch to, about, you know, evening, my mind doesn't work.
• 38:11
  Tigrilla: It's very malleable, it's something that is.
• 38:15
  Tigrilla: It's in much more of a kind of philosophical type mode.
• 38:18
  Tigrilla: I don't do strategy work at that time.
• 38:20
  Tigrilla: I usually actually work with clients because it's my best, most curious time, because I'm just so open, because I'm so relaxed and, you know, my body thinks it's supposed to be hot, and it's for sitting around and chatting with people, it's for having those kind of like let me sit there and just get to know you type of times, because that's how we use that time.
• 38:40
  Tigrilla: And so therefore, it's my time when I schedule for certain kinds of classes, mainly like discussion type classes.
• 38:47
  Tigrilla: If I'm teaching, teaching, I'll do that later on in the evening.
• 38:50
  Tigrilla: But if I'm doing, you know, this type of conversation mode, I love doing it in the afternoon because I'm much more open, and these types of pieces where I do all my strategy work in the mornings, that's when my mind is alert for that.
• 39:05
  Tigrilla: And so it took me a long time, and I, you know, to really get into this cyclical and understand my own cycles, which of course changed throughout the course of the year.
• 39:14
  Tigrilla: Right, there are times when I'm just much more productive.
• 39:16
  Tigrilla: There are times when, instead, I'm more introspective and all these types of pieces, and it's really important for us to give ourselves that space to experiment with that, for ourselves, to learn who we truly are in different parts of the year, and this is why having a coach like me is so useful, or having somebody who is there to hold that space, to hold your hand and to help you also see, because sometimes when you're in it, it's really hard for you to see what's going on and so really just someone who's there who gives you that space and says let's talk about you know your rhythm throughout the course of the last two months, or who can bring up, hey, let's talk about you know your rhythm throughout the course of the last two months, or who can bring up, hey, it's interesting.
• 39:53
  Tigrilla: We've been working together now for a while and I noticed that in the springtime you always do this, this kind of you know, kind of circular thinking or whatever worries that you're having comes up usually around the spring.
• 40:04
  Tigrilla: Let's look at it as a spring thing.
• 40:06
  Tigrilla: Okay, what are the elements of your spring, based on you and your way of cycles that actually brings this up in a constant basis that we can kind of see where it is then how it is that we want to address it.
• 40:19
  Mary: Well, so two things occur to me as you're talking through all of those things, and one you mentioned blooming, and I think it comes down to, a lot of times, this comparison, because now, with social media, we always have a point of comparison anytime we open our feed or whatever.
• 40:36
  Mary: So I think about the corpse flower, and the corpse flower blooms maybe once every seven years or 12 years, and it's amazing, people come from everywhere to see this.
• 40:47
  Mary: And then there are other plants where they'll bloom.
• 40:50
  Mary: Some of my plants will bloom the entire summer.
• 40:53
  Mary: They're just different plants.
• 40:55
  Mary: So I think sometimes, if we will compare ourselves, well, I only wrote one book and this other person wrote five.
• 41:02
  Mary: Or I only raised one child and my friend has three and seems to be doing just fine, but I don't really want three, and so I think that idea of blooming as kind of thinking about what are we putting into the world, that's also based on who we are and the flavor of what we decide to do.
• 41:19
  Mary: We don't have to compare that to somebody else's blooming, because we're unique.
• 41:26
  Mary: And the other thing you brought up that I talk about all the time is the cycle of rest, and we think I'm going to push through this, I shouldn't have to rest.
• 41:37
  Mary: Or I'm looking at Susie over there and she seems to be able to power through her day, and then she's going out at nine o'clock at night.
• 41:41
  Mary: And I think it's that idea of, if we think about bulbs, so tulips or daffodils, they'll bloom for a few weeks and then they go dormant until next spring.
• 41:52
  Mary: We just appreciate that they've done that, but they have to recharge.
• 41:56
  Mary: Or in the winter here all the leaves fall off the trees and we don't think, oh my God, look at those trees, they're so lazy because they're just dropping their leaves.
• 42:06
  Mary: And these are cycles that obviously the plants just know.
• 42:12
  Mary: It's in their literal DNA.
• 42:15
  Mary: So that's, I think, an idea where, when we feel tired, instead of just honoring what we need, we then look at the other person like well, she's not resting, so or I'll just push through this instead of listening to our bodies.
• 42:30
  Tigrilla: Right, right, I think you said it well when you said it's in our DNA, in the sense of the plants, it's in their DNA.
• 42:36
  Tigrilla: It's also within our DNA and I think that that's the hardest part for us to understand because, again, we tend to look at ourselves, because Homo sapiens are all one species.
• 42:46
  Tigrilla: We try to look at ourselves in bulk, but even that is only because we don't allow ourselves to differentiate and individuate.
• 42:54
  Tigrilla: I mean, we have held back our evolution in so many different ways.
• 42:57
  Tigrilla: Every single time a child is born or an adult gets something that changes the way that they are fundamentally in a plant, we would be like, oh wow, you just put out blue blooms and you're normally a white blooming plant.
• 43:10
  Tigrilla: Amazing, right.
• 43:12
  Tigrilla: We would think of it with curiosity, with amazement, and wonder If a human being did something similar, then all of us, if somebody, if I was all of a sudden born with my hair in this color, I would most likely be looking for the gene to eradicate it.
• 43:26
  Tigrilla: Because human beings don't allow themselves to evolve, we truncate ourselves and we label everything as disease.
• 43:33
  Tigrilla: Everything that is outside of the norms, that is disease, and we don't think about it from the perspective of wow, what if my best evolution is that thing, because if I am and if my hair is this color, it's kind of like the whole Wicked story, right?
• 43:47
  Tigrilla: Or the Wizard of Oz story.
• 43:48
  Tigrilla: Elphaba is green, so what?
• 43:51
  Tigrilla: Maybe that's the best thing for her skin, maybe that's the healthiest way that she is and rather than us, as humans, would be trying to eradicate that and get rid of it.
• 44:02
  Tigrilla: What if we were to look at it with curiosity and say, wow, very cool, you're green.
• 44:07
  Tigrilla: I wonder what the benefits to green are Like.
• 44:09
  Tigrilla: What is it that's going to grow now?
• 44:11
  Tigrilla: And how is it that you're going to evolve because you're green?
• 44:14
  Tigrilla: Yeah, and this is another piece of it that we just don't realize what is natural to us, because to a certain extent, it's been bred out of us.
• 44:22
  Tigrilla: We have been told that either you fit into these boxes or there's something wrong.
• 44:28
  Tigrilla: Instead of saying uh-uh, like this box, not useful to me, I'm going to go over here.
• 44:36
  Tigrilla: I'm going to make my own little playground.
• 44:37
  Tigrilla: I'm going to fiddle out and figure out who I am and especially, to take all that time throughout our lives to find my cycles.
• 44:41
  Tigrilla: So what if you need 10 hours of sleep a day?
• 44:44
  Tigrilla: Well, I only need five, no big deal.
• 44:47
  Tigrilla: Great, take your 10 hours of sleep time.
• 44:50
  Tigrilla: That just who you are.
• 44:51
  Tigrilla: That's who you are.
• 44:52
  Tigrilla: There's a difference when it comes from trauma, there's a difference when it comes from avoidance, and I think that those are the differentiating factors that we need to find out, which is, yes, we do not want to live our lives based on avoiding things.
• 45:05
  Tigrilla: Plants don't avoid things.
• 45:07
  Tigrilla: Plants figure out how to use what they have, how to to make the best of it, how to create it or how to get somebody who's going to recycle it, and I think that if we were to take those models, then that would make our lives so much more enriched, because then I know that I'm using everything that I am, even if what I am is very different from what is out there in other worlds.
• 45:31
  Mary: Yeah, well, I think as humans, we think that our best feature is our ability to think and reason, and that it is sometimes.
• 45:40
  Mary: But that's why I think all of the things that we're talking about are so important to reconnect to, because you can't think yourself out of your essential nature.
• 45:51
  Mary: We're comparing and we're doing all of those things that are actually defeating us.
• 45:58
  Mary: One thing I want to mention quick for people who are listening just audio Tigrida has beautiful purple hair, so let y'all know it's actually really beautiful, thank you.
• 46:12
  Mary: So one of the things I also talk about a lot is and of course, this thread has been running through everything you've said, but I talk about women and having these limiting narratives, and this is sort of exactly the sweet spot of what we're talking about.
• 46:26
  Mary: So what else can you offer kind of on that topic?
• 46:30
  Mary: How to take up your space and recognize that this is a narrative I've been told I don't have to live it.
• 46:38
  Tigrilla: Absolutely, and I love this.
• 46:40
  Tigrilla: I mean, I work across the spectrum but of course, the majority are women and I love working with women specifically because, when we look at things, like you know, the whole ecofeminism movement is the fact that there are very similar narratives between the blindness that we experience, or the plant disparity disorder the plant blindness that we experience, and what we experience also in the course of women.
• 47:03
  Tigrilla: There's a wonderful article out there.
• 47:05
  Tigrilla: It was written by Prudence oh, my goodness, why can I just blank out on Prudence's name right now?
• 47:11
  Tigrilla: It'll come to me in a minute and Monica Galeano, called the Feminist Plants and it's about the water lily and it talks very in-depth and uses the metaphors of the water lily to help us understand these narratives that you've been talking about, relating to the fact that the water lily is supposed to look like this super delicate plant but in reality it is a very, very strong plant that holds an entire ecosystem up below it.
• 47:40
  Tigrilla: So below key is this super strong veins and rigid structures that hold everything up in order for you to be able to kind of step on the water lily and the water lily to not snap and create, plus the way that the leaves grow, creates below an entire ecosystem that is able to flourish thanks to what the water lily has to offer.
• 48:07
  Tigrilla: And yet this plant, like many plants, have been deemed delicate, fragile and all these different aspects that again are those narratives that we've created.
• 48:17
  Tigrilla: And so working, in this case, closely with a plant, not just as an observer and as a model which is one way to work with plants but literally as a mentor, like having those deep plant conversations of being able to spend time with a plant in long periods of time, help you to kind of reestablish who you truly are, because the plant will help you understand your true nature in a very different way, kind of starting from the bottom up rather than from the, I guess maybe from the inside out rather than from the outside in you might want to be able to think about.
• 48:54
  Tigrilla: So there's a lot of comparison or comparison is not the right word I want to look at.
• 48:59
  Tigrilla: There's many external models that you can look at just by understanding, and that's why there is an entire field of ecofeminism and that is fascinating to learn about, because then it puts into perspective many of the views, uh, of the fact that you know plants are supposed to be like, seen, controlled.
• 49:17
  Tigrilla: Um, if you think about most gardeners present, company excluded but most gardeners are really control freaks, to be honest.
• 49:25
  Tigrilla: They want the plant to grow exactly where I want you to grow, in exactly the way I want you to grow, and I'm going to measure and I'm going to take care, I'm going to do everything and I think I'm taking care of you, but in reality I'm just controlling you.
• 49:36
  Tigrilla: And so the liberation of that wildness actually one of the episodes in my podcast, actually the episode that's out this week is all about that is all about the wildness and the liberation and the understanding that my true way of looking at things and of being with things is beautiful in and of itself and I don't have to control when instead, what I have to do is give myself that space to express.
• 50:01
  Tigrilla: So there's many different ways that working very closely with a plant, where you see the difference between the way they've been personified to the way that they actually are, and even just taking a plant in your home and literally spending time maybe just two minutes a day really looking at that plant, will help you see a wildness in the expression that, when I take a step back, I think is beautiful because obviously they're in my house, I must think is beautiful.
• 50:29
  Tigrilla: But when you come up close and you spend time looking, looking at the leaves, the soil structure, how do the stems grow, and everything You're like, oh my goodness, this is like a little like a craziness of expression that is happening and it helps then for you to start to in that relationship, in that reconnection back to your true nature, to the fact of I am nature you start to see in a reflection just the same as when we have people in front of us, we see the reflections of ourselves in those human people when we do this with plants, we start to see the reflection of ourselves in plant people as well.
• 51:05
  Tigrilla: And that is a very gentle also way of going back into this relationship.
• 51:11
  Tigrilla: It's a very gentle way of getting to know myself.
• 51:15
  Tigrilla: I often say that what I do with my clients is I take you out of the human narrative completely by pulling you out of it and pulling you into your plantness, so that you really connect to that presence inside of you.
• 51:27
  Tigrilla: If I think about my animalness, which is the fact that I as a human being, I'm an animal from the perspective of my instinctual nature, that expression of myself that comes through that part, which has most likely been stifled, just the same as we would do it to many animals that we've, you know, tried to control and stifle.
• 51:43
  Tigrilla: But if I step out of it because sometimes it's too hard to just hit things directly and I come into my plantness, which is presence, it's mysticism, it's deep knowledge and understanding, even just through the mirroring of being with a plant and allowing that slow reflection to seep into me, the expansion of my senses, where I grow out, the extra senses that I've shut down in my humanness, and I approach it not from the human world, the words, the thought process, the mindset, the journaling, all of that stuff.
• 52:18
  Tigrilla: Take it all out and approach it more from your plantness to just be in it, sit in it, let it kind of seep into you, reconnect back to your body, as if I can't run away from anything, I just have to be in it.
• 52:32
  Tigrilla: Then, when you get really comfortable with where you are there, when you step back into your humanness, I guarantee that none of that conditioning shit will bother you anymore because you've not had to process it.
• 52:46
  Tigrilla: That's where the arts is such a great way of doing things, because we often work with plants in my online community, in through the arts, because the arts first gets me back in touch with my body, whether I do dance or movement or gesture, just letting myself get really in touch with it.
• 53:02
  Tigrilla: But also by drawing I draw.
• 53:04
  Tigrilla: I can feel things in color, in expression, in movement.
• 53:09
  Tigrilla: Nobody's looking at any of these drawings.
• 53:11
  Tigrilla: So we have, like, for example, a writing and creativity group which is really just about getting back into that planty expression.
• 53:17
  Tigrilla: That defies human logic.
• 53:19
  Tigrilla: Because if I journal, it's too easy to just reinforce the things that you already think.
• 53:24
  Tigrilla: But if I connect with a plant and then I draw from it or I move from there or I allow myself to just sit in it, then all of a sudden I get out of the language constraints that often have been built and I start to build other networks and other expressions of self that by the time I step back into that human world, then I'm not kind of falling trap into anymore.
• 53:53
  Mary: Yeah, that's a great way to connect because I think that is something that can confound us, like, how do I do this?
• 53:59
  Mary: And I think it can be a little scary because you know, you use the word wild and what are women told?
• 54:04
  Mary: You know, stay small.
• 54:06
  Mary: And you know, one of the things I love about everything you just said is that's how I chose the name for this podcast no Shrinking Violets because here they're a native plant but they tend to spread pretty voraciously and people don't like that because then they're in their lawns.
• 54:26
  Mary: They think it came from around England, where men would say a woman is a shrinking violet, meaning violets at night.
• 54:33
  Mary: They close up because exactly what we just talked about a minute ago, they're resting.
• 54:38
  Mary: That doesn't mean they're weak.
• 54:39
  Mary: They look very dainty, as you're talking about the water lily.
• 54:44
  Mary: They look very dainty.
• 54:45
  Mary: They're not.
• 54:47
  Mary: They are very tough.
• 54:49
  Mary: They're also the host plant for the great spangled fritillary butterfly, which is beautiful.
• 54:54
  Mary: So they create this beauty.
• 54:57
  Mary: So it's just that exact thing of underestimating something by what we think it is, by looking at it, and you know.
• 55:07
  Mary: So that so resonates with me, because that's exactly why I've called my podcast no Shrinking Violets, and I have had more than one woman talk to me about.
• 55:16
  Mary: I had this challenge and I just kept telling myself no shrinking violets, and it gave me this ability to stand in that space.
• 55:25
  Mary: I love that.
• 55:26
  Mary: Yeah, so I could talk to you for another hour.
• 55:31
  Tigrilla: Wait, can I share something just really quick on that, because I feel like it's just very connected.
• 55:35
  Tigrilla: Yeah, and this is kind of going to exactly what you're talking about with violets, because it's the same premise.
• 55:40
  Tigrilla: For example, I have a spirit wild plant quiz which allows you to.
• 55:44
  Tigrilla: It helps you identify a spirit wild plant that wants to connect with you.
• 55:48
  Tigrilla: A wild plant is basically a weed, so it connects with different wild plants, and I think that those types of relationships for us, especially as women, are extremely important for us to have.
• 55:58
  Tigrilla: It doesn't matter who the plant is really, but especially if you can do a wild plant, somebody who has experienced this type of expectation on them as a plant and to a certain extent, plants are like I don't give a shit what a human says about me, I'm still going to do whatever I want to do because that's who I am, and that's why I think that these types of plants whether we're talking about violets or dandelions or cattails, any of these types of plants that have been habitually kind of treated in a way where we think, oh, your wildness needs to be stomped out, have treated in a way where we think, oh, your wildness needs to be stomped out are wonderful partners to help us better understand.
• 56:36
  Tigrilla: What does resilience look like, what does connection look like, what does it look like to be adaptable but yet not shrink away, as you were just talking about?
• 56:45
  Tigrilla: And so I think that sometimes it's hard for us to kind of imagine, you know especially depending on you know what your own background is it's like, oh, what do you mean by connecting with a plant in this way?
• 56:55
  Tigrilla: And but I think that if we're going to one of the guests on my podcast and I had a really beautiful conversation about eco she's an eco psychologist and we were talking about the fact of how the original human trauma you know, we try to think about the original sin if you look at the whole Christian religion but the original human trauma is our disconnection to nature, because it's that disconnection to our true selves.
• 57:17
  Tigrilla: And so when you connect into a wild plant in particular, whether it be grass or whether it be any of these others that I mentioned it gives you an opportunity to really see what does resilience look like and where are the places that sometimes it is too much.
• 57:34
  Tigrilla: I mean talking about grass in particular.
• 57:36
  Tigrilla: I mean, come on, sometimes you're like dude, can you please not come here, like, really not here, like, can I ask you to please just grow over there, right?
• 57:45
  Tigrilla: But also a plant that has been kind of you know is a status symbol plant, because the whole reason that the lawn exists, going back to England, is because I have so much land as a landowner, had so much extra land because I had so much money.
• 57:59
  Tigrilla: I don't need to use the land for agriculture, I'm just going to let it be a lawn and that is going to show my wealth and that is going to stifle everything that could grow there in order for me to show who I am and my wealth.
• 58:12
  Tigrilla: Again, another parallelism to what happens to many women and what happens to many people in general, where it's like you just become this like object that has to behave in a certain way to show a status, and you even do that to yourself sometimes.
• 58:26
  Tigrilla: So I highly recommend that it doesn't always just have to be a metaphor.
• 58:30
  Tigrilla: It can be, but it also can be a living relationship in which you start to learn from these plants and you start to work with and exchange stories and experience different aspects of yourself through this deep connection that the plants help you recognize of your natural, wild self.
• 58:50
  Mary: Yeah, okay, so this is perfect because I took that quiz, so now and I'm going to, of course, put it in the show notes and I'll give you in a minute more of the chance to talk more about what you do but so give us right now a down and dirty on.
• 59:05
  Mary: I'm a dandelion, so can you give us a little quick summary of what does that mean?
• 59:12
  Tigrilla: So it's beautiful because a dandelion very similar to what you were talking about relating to violets.
• 59:16
  Tigrilla: In that perspective, dandelions are highly adaptable, but yet always true to their own nature.
• 59:21
  Tigrilla: Right, I am going to create the self sense of self that I am strong enough to be able to break through, concrete but yet also completely nourishing.
• 59:31
  Tigrilla: Every single aspect of a dandelion is able to nourish another.
• 59:36
  Tigrilla: And also, I have adapted myself so that I can move quickly through the things that need to be moved for right, the fact that I go from beautiful yellow flower right To seed head and those seeds do not need me to do anything.
• 59:50
  Tigrilla: I just need to stand there because my seeds will take flight by themselves.
• 59:53
  Tigrilla: Right, they're wind powered, as opposed to a different kind of flower that might have an ejection type seed where I have to put a lot of energy into it.
• 1:00:02
  Tigrilla: So the fact that right now, you're in a phase where the reason why you're connecting is because you're prolific, you're being able to like, take of yourself, nourish others without really adapting, to a point where it's no longer you, but yet adaptable enough to be able to move around into different things.
• 1:00:20
  Tigrilla: And also the perspective that you're at a place where you can go into the next generation, whether the next generation of your work or the next generation of life, knowing that the message is going to continue to carry on, it's going to move into other locations and it's going to completely continue to nourish and root wherever it is that it lands.
• 1:00:40
  Mary: Ooh, I love that.
• 1:00:41
  Mary: I love that because you're right, dandelions are very maligned, especially here.
• 1:00:46
  Mary: They have a very deep tap root so you can say, oh my gosh, it's so hard to get rid of them.
• 1:00:51
  Mary: However, that means they're very connected, you know.
• 1:00:54
  Mary: They're pulling in nutrients from very deep.
• 1:00:56
  Mary: So, oh, I love being a dandelion.
• 1:00:58
  Mary: So thank you for that little summary.
• 1:01:01
  Mary: So I will put that link so people can do their own little quiz.
• 1:01:04
  Mary: And you mentioned a lot of the things you do.
• 1:01:07
  Mary: Can you give us also kind of a recap of how people can connect with you and what you can help them with?
• 1:01:13
  Tigrilla: Yeah, so I work one-on-one with people in the sense that I have one-on-one practice as a mentor and a coach and it's all those aspects that I talk about really working very deeply with the person to help them find their true essence and how it is that they work so mainly neurodivergent, multi passionate individuals that are really looking to understand their authentic selves and then find the way that that gets expressed, communicated and create relationships with others of other forms.
• 1:01:42
  Tigrilla: And the other piece is that all of my work, even my one on one work, always has a community aspect to it, because I live in community and so I know how important it is for us.
• 1:01:51
  Tigrilla: All.
• 1:01:52
  Tigrilla: Ecosystems are made of many, many diverse types of plants and also animals and all different kinds of species.
• 1:01:58
  Tigrilla: So even if you're working one-on-one with me, there's always a component that's inside of my naturally conscious community, which is my online environment, and in the naturally conscious community we have lots of pieces.
• 1:02:09
  Tigrilla: There's a free part that just allows you to express and to you know it's more.
• 1:02:13
  Tigrilla: It's kind of like a private Facebook.
• 1:02:15
  Tigrilla: It's a private environment because I do think safety is extremely important.
• 1:02:20
  Tigrilla: We're in very delicate evolutionary forms and when we're working on these types of things, even just understanding human plant relationships.
• 1:02:28
  Tigrilla: There's a lot of questions that we don't have answers to yet.
• 1:02:31
  Tigrilla: Like what does it mean to kill a plant to make my clothing or my house?
• 1:02:35
  Tigrilla: Like?
• 1:02:35
  Tigrilla: We want to be able to get into these super, super deep conversations and screw up, like I wanted to.
• 1:02:41
  Tigrilla: You know, do this thing and I realized I stepped on a plant, or I accidentally went out of town and couldn't find somebody to take care of my plants and I killed them and I feel terrible and I don't know how to deal with that.
• 1:02:51
  Tigrilla: So we want to have an environment where you can not only explore yourself personally, but your relationship with all of these plant allies, in sometimes modes that we don't really know what it's like, or we want to be able to say that with all calm, and so you have a free area, as well as two other well, actually three other membership levels that include because I am a multi-potentialite many different ways for you to express, and that way we have plant-inspired masterclass discussions, which are deep dive conversations on a specific topic, and other courses, mini voyages we have a lot of different things in there to give you an expression and then, as part, if you're working with me one-on-one.
• 1:03:43
  Tigrilla: You also you get everything plus a dedicated group of peers which we meet every single month, and again, that gives you the opportunity to not just think about things for yourself or maybe make realizations, but put them into practice with others that you feel safe with, so that you can first express them in a way that feels safe and you can like stretch and play and explore, and then, whenever you're ready, you take it out of the environment and into your day-to-day life and explore and then whenever you're ready, you take it out of the environment and into your day to day life.
• 1:04:12
  Mary: Oh wonderful, so beautiful.
• 1:04:13
  Mary: I definitely am going to be checking out more of your stuff, but, yeah, I'm so excited to start to go through some of your podcast episodes too, because it's five minutes and I was like, oh yeah, I got to follow you.
• 1:04:25
  Mary: So thank you so much for being here today.
• 1:04:28
  Mary: This has been fabulous.
• 1:04:30
  Tigrilla: My absolute pleasure and thank you so much.
• 1:04:32
  Tigrilla: It here today.
• 1:04:32
  Tigrilla: This has been fabulous.
• 1:04:33
  Tigrilla: My absolute pleasure and thank you so much.
• 1:04:34
  Tigrilla: It's always great to speak with a fellow plant ally.
• 1:04:37
  Mary: Yes, thank you and thanks everyone for listening.
• 1:04:39
  Mary: If you enjoyed this episode, please comment or give the show a quick rating.
• 1:04:45
  Mary: Or if you want even more plant wisdom, click the link in the show notes to join my email community and receive my weekly musings on plants and their lessons in your inbox each week.
• 1:04:52
  Mary: And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.
• 1:04:58
  Mary: Thank you.