Listening Differently: What Plants Teach Us About Communication, Connection, and Growth with Tigrilla Gardenia

What if your work, your ideas, and even your relationships were meant to function like ecosystems, not deadlines?

In this episode, we sit down with Tigrilla Gardenia, a nature-inspired mentor and plant neurobiology expert, for one of our most surprising and thought-provoking conversations yet. Tigrilla shares her journey from music, technology, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil to living in a spiritual eco-community in Northern Italy and working with musical plants.

Together, we explore what plants can teach us about leadership, collaboration, emotional intelligence, and the relationships we choose at work. From learning how to stop forcing and start flowing to rethinking “negative” traits as misplaced strengths, this conversation invites us to look at ourselves and our work environments differently.

Because maybe the goal is not to fix every part of yourself.

Maybe the goal is to understand where it belongs in the ecosystem.

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Work Besties! Theme Song Written by Ralph Lentini @therallyband

Transcript

Big Question And Guest Intro

Claude F 0:00

What if your work, your ideas, even your relationships are meant to function like ecosystems about deadlines? And what if nature already shows us the blueprint for balance?

Jess K 0:10

Today's guest, Tigrilia Gardenia, is a nature-inspired mentor, a plant neurobiology expert, and honestly, one of the most fascinating thinkers we've ever brought on this show.

Claude F 0:22

She's lived in a spiritual eco-community, worked with musical plants, and teaches leaders how to collaborate with nature.

Jess K 0:30

Stay with us to the end because Tigrilla answers what's one plant-inspired shift you can make this week to stop forcing your life and start flowing with it. This conversation surprised us guys.

Claude F 0:42

Hi, I'm Claude.

Jess K 0:43

And I'm Jess.

Claude F 0:44

We are corporate employees by day, entrepreneurs by night, and work besties for life.

Jess K 0:51

Join us as we explore how work besties lift each other up, laugh through the chaos, and thrive together in every industry. Work besties.

Damanhur And The Music Of Plants

Claude F 1:08

Can you elaborate on this?

Tigrilla Gardenia 1:10

So I live in a place called Dominher. I tend to think of it as a cross between Hogwarts and Oz. Believe it or not, that that exists. And uh we're located in northern Italy, and it's one of the oldest and spiritual communities in the world. Um, uh, in the sense that it is a community that's based on uh a shared project for the reawakening of humanity. And I've been living here for almost 15 years now, which was not on my bingo card for life, but it's the way it happens here. So I have a very unusual background, as you mentioned. My background before coming to Dominic spanned from music and electrical engineering through to working with bands and then eventually working on technology for audio and video online. After a stint working on that, I moved to Microsoft. So I've worked in some big companies relating to technology and then left it all to come back into the arts as an event producer and an entrepreneur. I left the United States almost around 20 years ago now, which is kind of amazing and mind-blowing for me to think about, specifically because I was working with Cirque du Soleil and I used to co-own a circus. And so I've got this like vast background, went into a lot of aspects of marketing also because working with many different types of artists and being somebody who kind of spans from the right brain to the left brain, it was communication is a very big piece of my life. And I also am an esoteric teacher, living in a spiritual community, in a Kabbalist, very quickly throwing it all together to give you an idea that when I come to Dominher, I first come here to work on a project. I was invited to come to the community to spend six months living here, working on their internet strategy and thinking about how well it is that the community wanted to communicate with the greater world after many years of not being as publicly visible as we would have wanted to be. And so I was here working on this project when I heard this music. And I followed the music because music is my life. We tend to think of music as a language, but it's actually the opposite way around. Language is a musicality. And so it's really the music that is the underlying rhythm of all of life. Life begins, creation begins through sound. There's so many different philosophies that talk about this. And so when I followed this music, I ended up with a box connected to a speaker, connected to a plant. And I was like, what the heck is this? And so every little part of me kind of woke up, and all of a sudden, this plant in front of me was using this box, which turned out to be a music of the plants device, to communicate, to express, to really start to enter into a relationship and to open a relational field with me. And this was my plant reawakening. I just fell down the rabbit hole of wanting to understand their environment at such a deep, nuanced level. So much so that I worked on the Music of the Plants project to also launch it into the world at a greater level, and then also ended up getting a master's degree in something called Vegetal Future, which is plants, plant social innovation and design. So really thinking about how it is that plants help us better understand our social environments and how to create the social environments, the business environments, the relationships that are necessary for a successful life that is not based on me forcing things, but instead on me understanding my environment and being able to navigate and create and move with it.

Claude F 4:37

Or is it just a particular plant?

Tigrilla Gardenia 4:40

Physiologically speaking, any plant can because the way the device works is the device works with the inherent electrical system of the plant, right? Plants have just the same as we have our neurons that fire, right? So we have electrical charges that come through, plants also have action potentials that are different types. And so this device uses that and works with that piece of it. And what we find though is that some plants decide that they really want to use that, to work with that and to respond and to interact with others. So while all plants are able to make music, not all plants choose to make music. And some will even be making music, and then if the environment in which they're in isn't conducive to that, we'll stop. I'll give you an example. I was giving a tour to our sacred woods temple here in Damenhur, and we used to do this very specific type of demonstration of the music of the plants. At the end of this, I would like to call people to come and have a one-on-one, it was an indoor avocado plant, and we would have like a person just come up and try to touch or have the energy. And this woman came up and the plant just stopped playing. And her friend who started laughing so hard that she fell off her chair. She was just cracking up at the fact that the plant stopped playing when the woman kept trying to like enter into relationship with the plant. And her and I looked at a friend, I'm like, what is so funny? And she's like, she kills all her plants at home. It's as if they know she is a plant killer. It was really interesting because once we said it and everybody started laughing, then the plant started to play. Started again. And it was it was this feeling of like the plant saying, Oh, so what I need to do here is educate you, right? And the communication that I received from the plant was like, we need to educate you. You need to understand that you can enter into a different type of relationship with us. It was very funny.

Claude F 6:28

And do they change the music depending on the mood? So for example, they are angry, it's going to be hard work. And then they are peaceful, it's going to be classical.

Tigrilla Gardenia 6:39

Yes, in the sense that plants definitely modulate the music based on what's happening. So based on the experience the plant is happening, having also the relational field. What we learn by working with plants, and this is an excellent segue into some of the more business aspects of what we can learn from working closely with plants, is that relationships are everything, right? A plant is sessile, plant is rooted into the ground, can't run away. So therefore, the music that you're hearing is one way that the plant expresses the relationships that they're having in that moment. Relationships with the soil, the microbes, any other being, whether we're talking about a human or an animal or another plant that is in there, that part of it, for sure, you hear differences. Because the music is so unusual, it's so different from what we think about as like melodic music, because if you have a plant that has listened to a lot of human music, then you have a human sound that can happen. But if you have a plant that has not listened to a lot, like I had a um people who had a beautiful begonia that when we connected made this amazing music. And it was very like beautiful. You wanted to have a concert with this plant. And I looked at the people who had brought the plant in, they were musicians and the plant lived in their music room. So it was like the plant had had a lot of time listening to human melodies and was repeating that. Where instead, when you hear a plant that maybe has not had that experience, then you hear very different types of melodies that are based on old chord structures that we don't use as humans. So, yes, the music changes. It's just not always what we expect. One of the things that I love about working with plants is that it takes us out of all of our conditioning of a lot of labels that we give things and it allows us to re-see things for what they are rather than the boxes we've created for them. So, using your example of anger is an emotion that has gotten a bad rap. Like it's bad to be anger, and anger is all err, but anger is extremely useful. It's what motivates you sometimes to get things done. It's what also sets up the fact that you defend yourself. Anger has many, many positive uses as well as it can have negative uses. And it's really about finding whether or not anger is useful in that moment. And plants to do a great job of helping us reflect back emotions, but more of is this useful in this moment or is it not useful? If I'm working on a project that needs to die, my anger can motivate me to kill it. My anger can also motivate me instead to propel it into a greater, because I'm like, I know that this thing needs to go forward and I'm pissed off at the people who are not working in it. And it so it's not about constructive or deconstructive, but it's about useful or not useful to the situation at hand. And this is where plants are excellent to help us mirror back that because they are constantly making those types of decisions in an ecosystem setting.

Jess K 9:29

It sounds like you're saying we can actually think about plants and how we can model their behavior. So, what's something that a plant does that us humans could be learning from them?

Tigrilla Gardenia 9:41

There's so many different things we can learn from plants.

Plantness And Ecosystem Relationships

Tigrilla Gardenia 9:43

I often say that one of the beautiful things about working with plants is you step out of the human animalness because our human animalness is the one that is responsive, instinctual, that moves. We have this these beautiful things called legs that we rely on so much, but that has unfortunately taught us to run away from our problems. We run away from situations, we run away from everything. Where plants being sessile can't do that. So they've had to learn how to deal with anything that comes their way. You have to understand the environment in which I'm in and how I can potentially react. I use information from the past to make decisions for the future. But plants live in what I call your plantness, which is our present. Where am I today? How do I take in what's happening at its 360 degrees as wide a field as I could possibly do? And then using information I have in the past and deciding what I want to do with the future from it, but I live in, act in the present. So I don't ignore things that are happening by throwing myself into the past of saying, oh, the good old days. And I don't live in the perpetual future of what if, what if, what if, what if. And so plants are excellent at pushing us into that inner plantness, right? When we go and spend time with nature, even physiologically speaking, when I spend large amounts of time in nature, even just 20 minutes immersed in a natural environment, my cortisol level drops. So my stress drops, my altruism rises, my generosity rises, my nervous system calms, my breath starts to enter into a rhythm. All of that, physiologically speaking, in addition to that, it accelerates my own healing in so many different settings. So this is happening to me physically. And then if I allow myself, regardless of what I believe or not believe, to metaphorically enter into this relationship with plants, we start to see the connections, the relationships that are being built. And therefore, I'm starting to get a better understanding of what's happening so that I can stay in the present and I can act from that place. So there's many different aspects that plants help us learn. They also show us that relationships are much more diverse than what we think of. When I think of a business relationship, I might think of my colleague, my enemy, the person that's like wants to get my job and it's gonna like screw me over. I might think of competition. But when you start looking into the natural world, you start seeing that a successful ecosystem has many nuanced types of relationships. And these relationships take me out of right or wrong and allow me to look at them as useful and non-useful. Is this in this moment useful? And you also start to see characteristics that are what makes a useful relationship. For example, uh a competition in nature is always temporary. This idea that we can work in business and have permanent competition is a fallacy. Permanent competition in nature means death because one has to go so far that they end up dying. So we need to get out of that model and step into the model of competition can be good, parasitism can be good, predation can be good when it's done in the right context. And then the question becomes how do I build an environment that has the right context? And am I willing to then switch it up when it's necessary? So there's many, many different aspects that we can learn from having that type of relationship with nature.

Jess K 13:09

So, based off of that, you're saying plant ha plants have this almost like a wisdom of sorts in how they can develop relationships. So, knowing that, how can a plant help us better pick a work bestie or somebody to collaborate with or that partner?

Tigrilla Gardenia 13:26

So, my work bestie is actually a plant. She's off-screen. Her name is Noelle. But for example, before Noelle, who's a Christmas cactus, I worked with Spider Plant. That was Spider Plant's name, capital S, lowercase P, Spider Plant. Spider Plant was my first business like partner. And Spider Plant was influential in my business and in the work that I do. I literally created the first courses and started my coaching career with Spider Plant. Spider Plant was chatty, talked a lot, and was more of a healing plant, was the one that, especially during COVID, really wanted to share healing perspectives through music. I say this because one of the things that I learned, especially at the end when Spider Plant shared with me that Spider Plant's time to work with me was over and was coming to an end, and that it was time for me to start working with Noelle. And Noelle instead is a very quiet plant. It does not chit-chat. Noelle is more about embodied feeling, trusting instincts, and working with understanding something at a much deeper level. And it took me a while because I was kind of upset with Spider Plant that Spider Plant was like, nope, we're done. And I was like, what are you talking about? This whole process started about six months before Spider Plant ever passed. Spider Plant was like, I just want you to know that I'm passing you over to Noelle and then I'm gonna go. And I was like, what are you talking about? You're fine, like you're totally healthy. No, no, just trust me. We're gonna do this and I'm gonna pass you over and I'm gonna pass on. And it was very traumatic for me because a lot of my business had been built with Spider Plant. And the reason I tell this story is because it's important for us to understand that relationships, especially in ecosystems, are always changing in some ways. And so to give ourselves permission to really form the relationships that are best for what's happening to me in that moment, it's about giving yourself that permission to create different types of relationships that help you based on where you are and what you need. So right now I rely and I work closer with Noelle because Noelle is teaching me about scaling, is teaching me about trusting my instincts in a different way, is about, I joke and I say, have you ever watched Hamilton? Talk less, you know, smile more, like speak more with less words, be more, be more mindful. Like there's a whole series of lessons that I'm slowly learning and that were only possible thanks to the work I did both with Spider Plant as well as with this other plant. And that's the same for my human relationships. The same thing is happening. I see the parallels. I have part of a team that I've worked with for many years, and some of them are sliding a little to the background as these new people are coming in. I'm seeing where are the different relationships and because some of them do similar things, but I'm seeing the nuances with such clarity. And I very much believe that that's because of this relationship that these plants have helped me get away from the emotionality of which emotions are great, but I've been working with this person so long, I can't. But instead, like, how do I maintain this relationship, this working relationship with this person, but bring her into the things she's super talented in and then move over here and give space to somebody else who does something similar, but with a variation that I want to nourish and I want to bring into my business too. So plants help us start to see all of those little nuances that sometimes we try to block into, and it makes it more difficult for us to have relationships with people who do similar things, but with just slight different pieces that could be a huge step forward in helping us remember what is it that I want to accomplish and how do I get the best performance out of the people because I'm valuing their differences.

Claude F 17:13

How did you communicate with Spider-Man? No, it's not Spider-Man, sorry. Spider Plant. Spider Plant.

Tigrilla Gardenia 17:21

If Spider-Man wants to come visit too, I'm okay with that.

Claude F 17:24

Hi So Spider Plant was telling you, I'm done with you. Now work with Noelle. Obviously, Spider Plant doesn't have words. So how did you feel? Was it like the feeling like in your mind, in your core?

Plant Partners At Home And Work

Tigrilla Gardenia 17:41

This is another great question that I think most people are even afraid to ask that question. Almost all of us have a connection to nature because we are nature. And all of us have had experiences, whether we've ignored them or brushed them off, but we've all had them. You're walking down a street and you see a beautiful flower and you stop for a second, or you turn your head and there's this tree. You don't know why you turned your head, but there's this majestic tree that just captures your attention and you just sit there for a second. So we all have these moments where nature speaks to us. For some of us, it's just a feeling, right? And we either give in to it or we ignore it. But as you work more, if you allow yourself to believe, if you trust in that part of you of saying, okay, something turned my head, let's assume for a second it is that tree. And then you say, What do you want to communicate with me? The answers will come. And there's many different ways. I have a creativity group that's specifically dedicated to help us expand that sense. And so based on what the artwork, you'll start seeing answers come up. Another beautiful way is, of course, the music, because music expresses emotions. When I listen to music, things and understandings come to me through the music. This plant behind me instead only works through movement, only through dance and movement. And you'll notice I gesture a lot. And it's like as if the answers come to me, I can feel like I'm I'm gripping them into the from the air or from the from the plant like that is sending them. Take the human out for one second. But plant communication is through chemicals like volatile organic compounds that the you breathe in are actually ways that plants communicate. Colors, there's so many signals, electrical signals, electromagnetic energy, what you feel when you put your earth your feet flat on the earth, on the grass, and that that charge that comes to you, what they call earthing, is an electromagnetic relationship. So plants actually have physiologically many different ways that they're communicating with you. And it's up to us to get out of the way and allow that to come in. And for some, it's gonna be automatic I'm gonna enter into a relationship and then I'm gonna write, or I'm gonna draw, or I'm gonna dance, or I'm gonna just listen. And over time, you start to develop different plants have different techniques, different ways that they like to. So Spider Plant was very much about the music. I could understand what Spider Plant wanted to tell me when I listened to the plant music that was made. And over time it became a dialogue. I could hear that plant speaking to me where this plant I have to move. And when I move, grip concepts, they stumble around words for a long time because they're they have to fit into the body and they have to kind of get in there. And then from there, I can bring them out in different ways.

Claude F 20:23

Let's say I have four plants at home. Which one do I know that is my friend?

Tigrilla Gardenia 20:29

I'm glad that you said that because that was another piece that I hadn't said. Not every plant obviously wants to work. Where I'm sitting right now, in front of me, there are probably 20 plants. Of these 20, only one, two, three, four are the ones that I quote unquote work with, right? In that way. So it's not that every plant wants to be your best buddy or wants to work with you on these types of things. So what I encourage people to do is first of all, breathe. The moment you stop and you breathe and you recognize that all the breath you're taking in includes oxygen that's being put out by these plants. And then when you breathe out, you're nourishing this plant with your carbon dioxide. It's not just them taking care of you. You're taking care of them, even just with your breath. There's a circularness. And from that space of here are four plants in front of you, four friends, you start that breath. And then from there, just asking that question and allowing yourself to gravitate towards who wants to work with you. I guarantee that something will pop up. Somebody is going to step out in some ways. That could be a small tap, that could be an idea. Oftentimes plants will work with your memories. So you'll have a memory of something, and then you'll be able to associate that memory back to that plant and to the situation. So they open our senses. And this is because we as humans only think about the five senses we have. And they're, again, limited, right? Plants do this consciously to the same five senses, plus another 15, physiologically speaking. Speaking, plants have the ability to show us how to expand our ability to receive, how to expand our ability to give. And so from there, you'll you'll get that sensation of this one over here is where my eye just keeps going. So I'm gonna start working with that plant and I'm gonna just try and see what happens.

Claude F 22:18

We said at

Leadership Coaching Through Biomimicry

Claude F 22:19

the beginning that you coach leaders in the business setting. How do you incorporate a plant to your coaching?

Tigrilla Gardenia 22:28

Mainly I work on the level helping the person develop their own relationships with plants. And so how does that person create these types of relationships? There's the plants you work with at home, in your office, in your walk home. There's so many different ways. And so it's about opening yourself up to these relationships and then developing them. If there is a plant that calls to you, kind of like Noelle calls to me, then how do you develop that? So I do that piece. And then a lot of it is about ecosystem design and ecosystem services, thinking about co-creation with plants. So plants as partners. And then the other thing is plants as mentors and models, looking at it with a biomimicry eye, which is how do I look at the way ecosystems are built, the way plants look at their environment, and then how do I look at my teams in that way in order to create successful teams that are not based on discipline. And also for myself. Many leaders come from I was originally maybe an individual contributor. I went up the ranks, I've moved through different perspectives. My leadership is based on the fact that I have a lot of different interests. I am a multi-passionate probably being. I'm usually creative, but my world is based on discipline because that's what society teaches us. And discipline doesn't work with that mind, especially if you're neurodivergent, right? But an ecosystem does. An ecosystem says, oh, you're a plant. You can have lots of different things going on. So how does that work? And how do I then use those and apply those principles into myself so that rather than thinking about myself in a disciplined way, I instead start to see how my mind works and where am I nourishing the ecosystem in that. Remember, it goes back to that whole what's useful, not what is destructive or con or constructive. It's what is necessary in that moment. So I work on both of those fronts. I would say that the first thing I try to do with my clients is I want you to feel as comfortable as possible with understanding who you are, imagining that nothing is wrong, bad, or something for you to eliminate or transform or any of those crappy words that I can't stand. I want you to just imagine that you are natural. And how do I use my nature in order to create the best team that I could possibly create? Because that's what I what an ecosystem is, right? It's teamwork. There's no garbage can in nature. I can't throw something away if I'm nature. Everything I create that is maybe an output has to be an input for somebody else. So that's those are the two kinds of ways that I work with people. Thank you.

Jess K 24:59

We had opened today

The Shift From Forcing To Flow

Jess K 25:00

asking how we can stop forcing and start flowing. What's your plant-inspired answer to that for all of our work bestie community to think about?

Tigrilla Gardenia 25:10

The the most important lesson is what changes in you when you realize that everything about you is natural? And so it's about learning how to master your talents in their full range from constructive to destructive. So I use the terminology you have to learn the dosage, the duration, and the direction. When is it that I'm supposed to use it? How much of it am I supposed to use? And then how am I supposed to use it? But it doesn't matter if it's constructive or destructive. I always say I'm the most positive negative person you could ever imagine. My mind is super critical. I spent, yeah, 25 years of my life trying to get rid of my quote unquote negativity and critical self, thinking that it was judgmental and it was bad and all these things that we live through. Until the plants taught me that critical part of you, you've just been using it wrong. It's actually a superpower. You can spot a hole in a project plan in 10 seconds. You can identify all of the different things that need to get done at a micro level that other people don't see. You see problems that are created that others have been trying to fix and you know when to tell a project it's not gonna work. Just freaking kill it right now because you understand that. If it comes out as critical in the sense of like judgmental, then that's a different story. There, that's not useful. But if it comes out as like, hey, did you see this right here? And you assume that it's because you can see it, because you have a superpower, not because they're stupid, but because they have different superpowers and they've been creating other things that you can't do, you plug that skill into it. So imagine if all the things you're trying to get rid of, if all your like limiting beliefs that you've been thinking are wrong, instead are just where do I plug that in? How do I use that more effectively? And that's really what the plants have taught me. Ecosystems are about that. Finding every single characteristic I have and seeing where I can plug it into the system.

Claude F 27:03

Yeah, I love this uh ecosystem idea.

Jess K 27:06

It goes back to everything. I find it fascinating too. I've never heard someone say the most positive negative person out there. That's cool. And having being critical is a superpower. I love that because it's so true. I think with every area of opportunity, it's there's a positive spin on it that you can leverage it for. It's not truly a negative, it's your strength that you can define in a unique way, which you've really inspired us. So thank you. I know I was really interested in chatting with you because I find nature so calming and really educated us on how that is true, but it's also speaking to us and we can hear through that and how it isn't just one-sided, we're all in this together.

Closing And Share

Claude F 27:49

So if this episode inspired you, share it with your work besti one of Tegrilla practices. We want to celebrate your growth with you.

Jess K 28:00

Till next week, work besties, keep supporting each other. And remember, whether you're swapping snacks in the break room, rescuing each other from endless meetings, or just sending that perfectly timed meme. Having a work bestie is like having your own personal hype spot.

Claude F 28:16

So keep lifting each other, laughing through the chaos, and of course, thriving. Until next time, stay positive, stay productive, and don't forget to keep supporting each other. Work