What if the fastest way to calm your nervous system… is to remember you’re part of nature?

In this episode of The Living Conversation, Adam Dietz and co-host Anthony Wright speak with Tigrella Gardenia—plant advocate, coach, and biomimicry practitioner joining us from Italy, where she lives in the spiritual community of Damanhur. We explore plant–fungi collaboration, biomimicry as “learning from nature,” and what changes when nature stops being a commodity and becomes kin.

We also talk about prescribed fire vs. chemical control, “quiet sitting” in the Confucian tradition, Damanhur’s “meditation with your hands,” and a simple daily practice Tigrella recommends for anyone: breathing with a plant—a felt sense of our reciprocal relationship with the living world.

In this conversation:

1. Tigrella’s path: music/tech → performance → plant advocacy → coaching as a “multi-passionate”
2. Biomimicry and why plant–fungi relationships are a foundational model in ecosystems
3. The cost of treating nature as something to control (and what changes when we relate instead)
4. Prescribed fire, Indigenous land relationship, and why ecosystems need human listening—not domination
5. Quiet sitting + learning from the forest (inside patterns / outside patterns)
6. Damanhur: an esoteric community, “meditation with your hands,” art as sacred embodiment
7. A daily practice for reconnection: the shared breath (oxygen/carbon dioxide reciprocity)
8. Seasonal rhythms, hustle culture, and returning to natural cycles (“uptime” and “downtime”)
9. The planet’s “breathing” and the Daoist intuition of reverse and return

Guest: Tigrella Gardenia

Find her online: search “Tigrella Gardenia” (Instagram/YouTube/Facebook) and her website.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Welcome.

And we are here with our guest who is in Italy, Tigrilla Gardenia.

Welcome to Gorilla.

Hello.

Thank you so much for having me.

And you're living on a, or in a community called Damon her which I want to talk with you about.

You are an ambassador for plant advocacy and one of the things that I see that you have studied is plant neurobiology and biomimicry.

Have you gotten involved with anything that where plants and fungi work together?

I have studied and I have worked on some projects especially when I worked on biomimicry projects because the whole concept of biomimicry is how do we look to the natural world world to see how organisms do things and then how it is that I could emulate that or work with that in so many forms.

And of course the interaction between plants as fungi is a fundamental sort of a fundamental model in the natural world across all ecosystems.

Yeah, and I see that you've worked at Microsoft and with Real Networks and Cirque du Soleil and.

Well, how, how shall we learn about you?

Tell us what, what your passion is, please.

Oh, my passion, my passion is working very, very closely with the natural world, specifically plants.

That's really probably the, the thing that drives me more than anything.

But I am a multi potentialite so I've like I'm a multi passionate person and I have so many different passions as you just said.

I mean my background starts in music and music engineering and then it moves through different at Real networks and Microsoft.

So bringing the, you know, bringing music onto the Internet and then onto other types of systems and then you know, performance and Cirque du Soleil plus esoteric work.

And that's the reason why I live in Diamondheart.

I mean it.

I am passionate about helping people express their passions and about more than anything helping you work with the way your natural mind works.

We have a tendency in the human world to try to like kind of pigeonholed and say you should do things this way.

But multi passionates don't work that way.

You know, we have these different ways our minds bring input in and how we connect things from one to the other.

And that's the beauty, that's where the innovation really is.

And so I work with people very closely as a coach and also as a mentor to help them see their, that they are a natural being and that therefore the way that they do things is natural.

And when you learn how to go with that and flow, then all of a sudden can express so much more.

Yep, absolutely.

Well, one of the things that.

In having read your.

Your biography, I wanted to share with you something that changed my life completely.

When I was about five years old, my parents had a cabin that was a little vacation cabin on the St. Croix river between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

you

just turn your kids out into the woods and let them go play.

And I was out in the woods and the smell.

The smell of the red cedars and the house friends were singing.

And I think I had met Demeter at that time because I had this very distinct impression that the forest loved me.

And I. I've never forgotten that.

And so that there's been a real empathy that I have in attending to what plants like, what is possible for us in the natural world.

And Adam, I know you were.

You were involved as a.

A park.

Yeah, it was a resourced ecologist park aid for the state parks for a while.

Okay.

That was.

That was very challenging, though, because it involved a lot of spraying Roundup on undesirable plants.

So that was.

That was very, very conflicted.

And I saw beautiful things, but I did nasty things in that.

In that regard.

So.

Go ahead.

Oh, sorry.

I was gonna say, and this is one of the situations where that disconnect, like looking at the difference in the experiences, that disconnection to the fact that I start to look at nature as a commodity just completely changes the way that you interact with nature.

All of a sudden, now it becomes something to control.

It becomes something scary.

It becomes something you have to, like, do things to, rather than the.

The actual connection and being able to work together.

Yeah.

The history.

I like to get your take on this, the history of.

Is very interesting because the area I was in, they traditionally Native Americans had used prescribed fire to clear out all the fir trees and create basically a garden of.

Of acorns and deer.

Right.

So my ecology bosses thought that's the way it had to be.

And we're going to use Roundup or chainsaw these fir trees and shoot Roundup into their, you know, core to kill them.

So.

So I'm really curious as to your take on how.

How we should be relating.

What was that healthier way to relate to the landscape and with that as an example.

Well, I think it's wonderful that you brought up prescribed fire, because most people who have kind of moved away from fire Are realizing that part of the reason why is because, you know, again, it goes back to, I'm not no longer a part of the ecosystem, so therefore, I don't understand my role and my function.

But the fact is, humans have been, as indigenous people have been doing, developing.

And because we are members of nature, we are beings of nature ourselves.

Fire is the part that we play.

Like prescribed fire.

The idea of controlled burns is why we have, you know, we have two hands.

We are able to do this.

And so we have lost that piece of recognizing our own function within it.

A forest is actually more functional when the human is involved, but as a being of nature, not as somebody who has to control.

So there's a big difference between roundup that kills a plant and a prescribed fire that actually just brings down to the root systems because it's killing the underbrush.

And certain trees still do survive and continue to thrive and grow.

And there are some seeds that can only grow inside of a fire.

So you need that fire to melt the resin in order for the conifers to come up.

So when you take the human out, like, you know, there's people who say, oh, you know, take the human out of it because we're destructive.

Well, no, the reason we're destructive is because we have forgotten that we're actually part of the forest.

So when we reintroduce ourselves in that listening.

Right.

Because, remember, prescribed fires also meant deep, deep relationship with understanding what was necessary in that moment.

Like, I am a part of the forest, and I know I'm going to fire here, but not over here.

Right.

And there's this relationship.

I'm listening.

I'm looking at how the deer are acting.

I see how, you know, where are all of the cones?

Like, there's a lot of relationship building in that, and that creates something very different from going around and spraying.

It doesn't honor those relationships when we spray because we don't recognize how that tree, who could have survived a fire, actually relates to this bush over here who also has this piece.

Like, there's just all those parts that get lost when we start to introduce these artificial mechanisms.

Yeah.

And it was so nonsensical to me that, like, if we're using poison, it's going to come back to us.

Absolutely.

It's going to go into the water.

It's going to go into the trees that grow.

It's going to go into the food that gets produced.

It's horrible.

And it felt like we were being manipulated by.

By, you know, people who profit from

that well, and that's the problem is that, that when you look at it from an indigenous culture and you look over time, first of all, most people think that, for example, hunter gatherers were living in scarcity mentality, but it's the complete opposite.

They were so connected to the land that they didn't even need to carry a lot of stuff.

Like you could have one fork and like one knife, because I know how to build these types of things and I'm not like running around trying to figure out where the fruit is.

I know where the animals are.

So actually we discovered that hunter gatherer cultures actually had a lot of downtime because they couldn't go around gathering in certain parts of the year and they only hunted maybe a week.

And then they would spend the rest of the month in contemplation, relaxing and experiencing the landscape.

And so that connection made it so that you're actually calm.

That's the reason why, like evolutionary evolution, evolutively speaking, over time.

That's the reason why when we go out and spend time in nature, even just 20 minutes, our cortisol levels drop.

We relax because it is leftover from that deep relationship where being in nature was calming and burns gave us and gave us open spaces so we felt even safer.

We could see, we were calm, we knew how to maneuver through that.

And today instead we go near woods and we're like, ah, what is happening here?

Until little time passes and then all of a sudden everything calms down again and you're like, why haven't I been here before?

There's like a geological clock, I think they call it, where, you know, human beings have been in touch with nature for 99 of our evolution, just this very last sliver.

Yeah, so Adams in my background is in Chinese philosophy and we studied under the same mentor, Dr. Yu Wu, who was from Taiwan.

My focus has been in Neo Confucianism.

And one of the points that they make is in order to cultivate your awareness, there's a thing that's called jingzhou, which means quiet sitting.

So you study the, the books like the Dao Te Ching and the, and the Yi Ching.

You study the, the works of the masters for half the day and then you go out and sit in the forest for half the day and allow the awareness to expand through the entire forest.

Because that way you.

And one of the things that the, the, the Chang brothers talked about and they said notice the patterns on the inside and notice the patterns in the forest and after a while you will have a breakthrough and notice that those patterns are the same.

What a remarkable insight.

So, and I, and I, I want to talk with you in, in a few minutes and we're coming up on a break here but I know you live in the Diamond Hort community and I want to hear about that.

But how does that.

I'm sure you're aware of the work of Rudolph Steiner and biodynamicism.

So what I'd like to do is.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on a Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Thanks for joining.

And we're here with our guest Tigrella Gardenia.

And how can people contact you?

Tiguerra.

Luckily having an unusual name makes it Super Easy@everything.com, at Instagram, at YouTube, at Facebook.

It's always just one word and it's

T I G R dash I L L A and then G dash A dash R dash dash E dash N dash I A dot com.

Yep, great.

Okay, we're going to take a short break and be right back, so stay tuned.

I'm Anthony Wright and I'm your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Welcome back.

And we are here with our guest Tigarella Gardenia.

And before the break, Tigarella, we were talking about sitting quietly in the forest and allowing your awareness to expand into the forest and noticing the patterns inside and outside.

You are currently talking to us from Italy and from a community that's called Damon Hur.

Is that correct?

Correct.

Then tell us a little bit.

Tell us about Damon Hur and why are you there?

So Dominher is kind of, I call it a cross between Hogwarts and Oz.

That's kind of what it feels like.

That's what it is.

So it's one of the largest spiritual communities in the world.

We're an esoteric community.

So we're an initiatic culture who has like very deep teachings of spiritual physics.

Physics.

But the thing about us is that for us what we call meditate metadataction is really like meditation done with your hands.

The whole idea of building.

So we built what is considered, I don't know, some people call it the eighth wonder of the world.

Others will call it the first wonder of the new world.

And they're the underground temples of humankind.

And so, so we're really a space of a laboratory for humanity, of what it looks like when you live your spirituality, when you live in mission.

We have missions that we car on a regular basis for humanity.

When it is that you are looking at the world through an esoteric lens through a mystical lens, as you were talking about, like that contemplation and what happens when you get together and you build based on that.

So it's.

It's really an amazing place filled with art.

Because for us, it is through art that we divinitize matter.

It is the way that we connect into the sacred.

So sacred spaces, new temples, all of them built completely by us by hand and beautifully decorated with incredible artwork that tells the stories of humanity.

Because we believe that in that construction, whether we're talking about going deep into the underground temples of humankind, where I go deep into myself and my own excavation of who I am, to then the sacred woods temple, which is the temple where we connect with all the living beings of the world.

So everything we were talking about before, about our connection to nature as beings of nature, or whether we're talking about our open temple, a celebration of all the different ways that people express themselves, the diversity of the world, all of this allows us to really create a culture around it and what we call a new popolo, a new people that are connected through shared ideals and through action in those ideals.

But you're also, as a community, attending to the teaching of the teachings of the plant masters.

Absolutely.

I mean, we have.

The beautiful part about Domino is that, you know, our.

Our core is spiritual physics, right?

The idea of the cosmology of the universe, the understanding of the big game of life that we're all playing.

We have a chunk of the mission, right.

Are part of what we consider to be mine, which is the.

The reawakening, the spiritual reawakening of the divine spark of every human being.

We have our piece, right.

There's tons of cultures out there like the ones that you have all studied that all have a little bit of a piece of that mission, right.

We're carrying it on different ways.

And ours, one of the big pieces is about the reunification of what we call the mother worlds, the plant world, the human animal world, and the world of nature spirits.

And how do we bring these three worlds to back into unity so that we are operating from one whole rather than these separated pieces in it.

So for that we have, like I said, a sacred woods temple, which is our experimental playground where we explore these different connections.

And we have many other spaces and so where we can then work very closely with plant beings, with our co creators, with nature spirits, and understanding with spirals, with many other kinds of beings as well, in order to bring this piece of the mission for us.

So how is that similar to the biodynamicism of Rudolph Steiner.

It's interesting because one of we have a vineyard in Tuscany because we're in the north, we're in the Piemonte region.

But in Tuscany, for example, we do have a vineyard that is a biodynamic vineyard.

And so for us, it's about exploring these different.

Because Steiner definitely had many different aspects of the relationship with nature, with biodynamicism, with even the schooling and such that matches many of the different teachings that we have.

And so for us, what we do is we take that and we experiment with it within a larger cosmology.

We look at it and we unite it into the day to day life and then bring it in and look at, okay, how does this enhance other aspects of life?

Life.

So we definitely have been working on many.

We've had a lot of scholars of Steiner who've come to Diamondhur to visit to explore especially his work with nature spirits, his work, like I said, in farming, his work in schooling.

And then we take that and we kind of plug it into a bigger experimentation to see, okay, what's working, what's not working.

I mean, we say that in Diamond Hur, the only dogma is changed.

Like we're just constantly exploring and changing because that's how life is.

It's always evolving and doing different things.

So Steiner was definitely a friend of Dominher, you can say, and some.

And someone whose teachings we definitely take in and explore quite deeply.

Oh, yeah.

In our country, in the United States.

I can just imagine what the Europeans must be thinking.

What would you recommend to our listeners to do as a daily practice about how to reconnect with the natural world?

This is such an important piece right now because for so many reasons, I mean, we live in a perpetual state of fear, even beyond what's happening.

But like, and I think one of the things that propels certain types of people to these types of actions, unfortunately, is the perpetual fear we live in.

And I am very much convinced that that fear at a low, low, deep level comes from our disconnection with nature.

It's the original trauma.

It is the original trauma when we were ripped out or when we ripped ourselves out to a certain extent from the natural world.

We no longer have a safe space.

We know I'm not that.

Right, exactly.

I'm not that.

And so you're not anything and, and it comes.

And that when, when we move to like even myself, I. I change the way I speak.

From a kingdom which is dominion, right, Where I'm dominating something, to a kin home, the home of kinship, right.

Are about connecting.

So a simple, simple, simple, simple practice that anybody can do is remember that we live in a shared breath, right?

Breath is the foundation of everything that we are.

I take it that this is an important factor for you all too.

Oh, this is wonderful.

Yeah, Breathing, very important, very important.

And so what happens is it is plants that create that oxygen for us, right?

They oxygenate our world, but plants also take in our carbon dioxide.

It is a shared breath.

It is a reciprocal relationship.

It is the fundamental relationship that we all experience mostly unconscious, but for those who are able to take it to a conscious level.

So just taking a few minutes every day to sit anywhere, because pretty much.

But if you can be near a plant, whether that's a house plant that lives with you and shares your home, or even sitting by grass, which I absolutely love, and there's so many other earthing and grounding principles that you get, or by a nearby tree, in your front yard or in a park, just sit and breathe and imagine that shared breath.

Like, imagine that as you take in that breath, that inhale, you're bringing in all of that oxygen, all of the terpenes, the chemicals, the volatile organic compounds that these plants are producing that literally make us feel good, that create cancer killing cells, that activate our immune systems.

And then as you breathe out, imagine that all of that crap that you're living in, I mean, seriously, what is fertilizer made out of?

It's crap.

Like literally.

So imagine that as you breathe out your crap, the plants take that in and use that to nourish themselves and to filter out into it.

And just feeling that automatically, like I said, connects you.

And I guarantee that if you do this every single day, your life will start to change because you now feel plugged into something bigger without having to study.

It's that mystical piece, right?

It's the.

All I do is allow my breath to move me and then see where it takes me.

That's wonderful.

Very, very beautiful.

And so simple, right?

As a background in meditation, right?

One of the first things we all do as meditators is focus on the breathing because it's always with you.

You can always yoke yourself back to that and to connect it with the plant world.

The purification that happens, the relationship that happens, is really profound.

I appreciate you for that.

I also wanted to maybe take A bigger step.

And look at.

Because I remember from the documentary Planet Earth with David Aschenberg that the planet breathes, the seasons breathe.

And this relates very closely to Taoist philosophy.

And of course, I mentioned meditating Buddhist philosophy.

Taoist philosophy says the reverse.

And return is the movement of the way.

So breath goes in.

Breath.

Sorry, Breath comes in, breath goes out.

Tides go in, tides go out, seasons go up, seasons come back down to winter.

So I just wanted to make a note of that and maybe get your take on it.

But especially the sense of that the planet breathes when, when, when the, you know, deciduous trees lose their leaves, it's like, what would that be?

Inhale.

I don't know.

And then, and then when they come back is like, exhale.

Can you say something about that?

Yeah.

So I'm glad that you brought up this piece because I think that that's the next step, right?

When you start with the breathing and then you connect back in, you start to realize a few things that again, just naturally come to you.

One of them is the fact that we all have seasonal flows, right?

We all have our uptime and our downtime, and that happens within a day, it happens within a month, it happens within a year.

And so we are not meant to be on all the time.

This whole hustle culture is crap.

It hurts us.

It is terrible because it's not our natural way, right?

I naturally have a cycle throughout the day.

There's moments when I'm more awake.

There's moments when I'm more sleepy.

There's moments when I'm more open to, like, conversation and relationships.

There's moments when instead of more like heads down and doing that is a natural piece of the cycle.

And when I breathe and I start to work with natural beings, specifically plants, I start to see these cycles in action and I start to recognize and allow myself to recognize them within myself.

For example, I'm.

I'm a napper man.

I need my nap during the day.

There is a point in the day where my mind no longer works and trying to push through it is not going to work.

If I allow myself to nap, then, for example, like I did today, my afternoon was so productive in certain things because that's what my normal cycle is.

And then you start to expand that you start to feel their cycle throughout the year.

You start, you know, the months, all of these different pieces.

You start to feel the relationship with other beings, the lunar months, the what's happening in the astrology.

And all of a sudden, now there's a flow and a relationship that you start to build.

And again, this brings the sense of safety because now, all of a sudden, I am no longer fighting my nature and thinking discipline and something is wrong with me.

Instead, I'm like, oh, this is just the time of day when I normally get sleepy.

And that's totally natural and it's comfortable, and I feel safe in giving myself permission to do things.

So I think that that piece, as you were just saying, is like, you start with the breath because it is the basics, and you start with the breath with other beings, and then you naturally, the next time you take the breath, you're like, well, wait a minute, I'm not taking the breath of this one plant, but of all of these plants.

And then, oh, my feet are on the ground.

And all of a sudden I can feel that electromagnetic energy, which is what comes from that grounding.

Like you said, you feel now the pulse of the earth, which is an electrical pulse that triggers my own neurons and my own electrical pulses inside of me.

And so it just keeps expanding without having to theorize about it or mentalize about it or even just, like, plan for it.

It becomes this thing that creates a field of understanding and of safety that we move through.

And I think this is really just fundamentally a piece that we lost in this disconnection.

I'm sure our listeners can feel the.

The need for that and.

And, you know, the need for that maybe within themselves or with other people and how, you know, wouldn't we all like to feel safe?

Wouldn't we all like to feel connected?

All right, well, we're coming up on another break.

I'm Anthony Wright and I'm your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Thanks for joining the Conversation.

And our guest is Tigrella Gardenia.

And how can people contact you at Tigrella?

Super easy.

You can contact me at Tigria Gardenia on just about every platform you can imagine.

Or Tigregarden.

That's T I G R I L L A and then Gardenia, the beautiful flower.

G A R D E N I A.

Great.

All right, we're going to take a short break and be right back, so stay tuned.