Ep.49 3 Major Identity Shifts Thanks to Plants

Welcome to ReConnect with Plant Wisdom. I am your host, Tigrilla Gardenia, Nature-Inspired Mentor and Leadership Coach. In this podcast, I share ancient and modern knowledge, from biology to spirituality, about the wondrous ways plants can help you lead a Naturally Conscious Life.

Hello, hello Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of reconnect with plant wisdom. It’s me degree out here. And this This is one of those episodes it’s I just, I get I get asked a lot of questions and I try to gather up these questions and, you know, share as much information as I can. But this one in particular is one of those questions that has been very hard for me to answer because it is all around what changes in you thinks to this work or when you’re working with plants? And of course, this is a extremely intimate question something that sometimes it’s really hard to quantify, especially when you’re working specifically with plants. You’re trying to give a form to something that is form LIS or difficult to put into words.

I mean, that’s the whole point. The whole point of working with plants is that they have this alternative logic this other way of interacting with the world that allows us to step outside of our humaneness, and re enter our humaneness from our planet. So today i i want to share with you three major identity shifts like things that have fundamentally changed who I am, in my opinion for the better, but I let you be the judge of that. So this episode, which is episode 49 is three major identity shifts that have happened thanks to the plants and I’m a little nervous of sharing some of these because again, not all of them are easy to put into words and they are part of a long term process. If you remember in a previous episode when I spoke to you about why I shifted from working on projects, to working with people like more on mentorship and coaching and in the naturally conscious community having that space for us to have these discussions because I recognize that no matter how many courses I was taking, no matter how many experiences I was trying to have none of this was a quick fix. This is all about evolution. This is why you’ll hear that I don’t really use the word transformation very often or even change as much.

I talk more about shifts and more than anything. My favorite word is evolution because we are in a constant state of evolution. And I feel like when we move into this conscious evolution, the fact that I’m guiding the evolution is when I feel extremely empowered to be who I truly am. So these three major for me major identity shifts, things that really changed in the core of who I m are things that I was only able to see yes, I kind of knew I was working on them. Not all of them to be honest, and you’ll see why in a minute. But I really could only see them with hindsight. So, so bear with me and hopefully we’re going to take a nice little journey through my past. But I hope that this will be also stuff that you you can identify with that you can understand because I think we’re all striving to be better versions of ourselves. Right? Yes. In addition to all of the goals that we might have of like, you know, financial stability or changing, you know, some aspect of your life. I think fundamentally every day we wake up and ask ourselves how we can be a better version of ourselves, how we can, you know, move that needle forward, how we can get closer to that life purpose, how we can live in more harmony or whatever words feel super comfortable for you peace for so many people.

I hear so many people lately with anxiety. And so finding that calm that peace, that centeredness and these types of identity shifts that I want to share with you really do go to that they go to things that made him my things that changed in me, that happened over time. So from looking at it right now, it looks like a change from the past to the present. But in reality, it was an evolution. It was just like slow movements until I could sit here where I am today and look back and share with you these things. So let’s start. Let’s start with the first one and the first one is a word. Okay, so actually, before I start, let me give you a background of one piece that might be interesting, because it’s going to come in, in various places. So many, many years ago and one of the first mystery schools I was initiated into one of the pieces one of the kind of pieces of work I don’t know processes. That’s the word I’m looking for one of the processes that we used was to understand what were our four main, you could say desires, in the sense that human beings have four things all human beings have have these four fundamental things that we all do. And therefore to keep that in check we could have four things that we really want or things that think for things that are sort of I don’t want to say biological only because they’re also spiritual things that happen like you know, we take things in, such as breath or information or anything. We take, we get things out of us by excrement or you know, by using that information. So we have this constant.

I take things in breath, air, water, you know, knowledge and all this and then I have an output that always happens which is biological functions as well as intellectual function, spiritual emotional functions. These are two examples of things that all humans are all all human to do. And and so for is part of this process. We were a it was about going and identifying the four sort of desires or wants that you have in your life that you want to have and my four wants at that time. Were trust, wisdom, acceptance, and balance. These were the four things I was striving for, I should have actually made these four major identity shifts, because actually all of those shifted, but but one of them is still a work in progress on a certain level. So and I’ll get to that in a minute. So these were my for that I really wanted so much so that I have a pair of beautiful boots handmade, custom made boots just for me. And inside of the soles between the between the outside soul and the inside soul is a piece of paper that I wrote out that had those four desires.

I mean, that was really how far I went to plant the seed of that so that every time I walked with those boots, which I wore them for years, I still wear them now and then I actually would remember these four things. So trust, acceptance, wisdom, balance, okay, four of them. So let’s go to the first one because this was something that I only recognized recently that had completely shifted inside of me and it made so much sense to why I am in a completely different space and I am a completely different person and it’s something that I take a lot of my clients through, and it is acceptance, more, more than acceptance. It is radical honesty with myself. Now, you’ve heard me say this time and time again, I was a relatively negative person in the sense that I see things through their critical illness, and I struggled for years to switch to being somebody that was positive. I thought that the that the answer was that that that negative side of me was bad, and I had kind of labeled it as such.

And I’ve told you various stories across my podcasts of different things that I had tried to do or I had worked on in order to get to this place of radical honesty and, and of acceptance, and especially around the idea that I was this negative person and I was trying to cut that out so that I could accept myself. You also know that I have body dysmorphia. I have a blog post about that and I also have a video interview in my that you can find on my website that I was interviewed for a podcast episode called self love ignited that was all around that. And so, acceptance was a really big part of myself, like I did not accept who I was, I thought I had to cut out a bunch of parts. There was a bunch of things about me that were wrong, and a bunch of problems that were have. And it wasn’t until I started working deep of all the things that I did and I had worked on limiting beliefs I had worked on, I mean, all the traditional things, if you can think of some mechanism, some process some idea of how to work on this problem.

Trust me, I tried it over the years, mantras and you know, crystals and all kinds of different things. And I’m not saying that those didn’t work. They actually did work in their own way. They were working on various levels, but I actually had the problem all wrong. My problem was not that I needed to eliminate things. My problem was I needed to be much more honest with who I am and I had to work on accepting that those parts of me are necessary in order for me to achieve my life purpose in order for me to be the person that I’m supposed to be. And that really only came when I started to work deeply with plants. When I started to understand plants as individuals, but more than anything as part of an interrelated system is part of an ecosystem as part of a whole.

The fact that plants simultaneously are individuals as well as holes alike, as well as a collective they are both kin live this this life really in a state of these two states so seamlessly and understanding when I started to learn about ecosystem services, and I started to go deeper into what is it that plants are capable of and how do plants make decisions and all these different aspects. I started seeing mirrors between how plants, process information, how plants act and react with myself. And I started to see that all of these parts of myself that if I was talking as a human, and I sat down and I listed them I would create a catalog like I would create a piece of paper and I would cut it down the middle and I would say these are my positive traits and these are my negative traits. Have you ever been in an interview where they asked you like what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses? This this is that example. That’s another one that you

hogwash because my strengths and my weaknesses are not based on my individual characteristics I used to use things like you know, again, my strength was my my assertiveness or the fact that I’m I’m determined on something when I get but that’s also can be a weakness. Every single strength that I have could be a weakness because it’s about when I use it, how much of it I use, and when like when, how much and how it gets used. It’s all about the dosage in a lot of ways. So therefore, I started to see this because as a human being I would make this strengths and weaknesses right positive aspects of myself negative aspects of myself, things that I should keep things that I should eliminate, continue. Can you empathize with that because I’m sure that all of you have gone through this. Instead, when I looked at it from a plant’s perspective, that doesn’t make any sense at all plants don’t do that.

They don’t say Oh, this trade over here. I’m just gonna get rid of No, they’re like okay, in this circumstance, it’s cold or rainy, or I’m under attack use this. If instead it’s hot and it’s sunny and it’s this use that and the same trait can be used in different ways based on what’s happening. So the plants really helped me understand that there is no such thing as a negative trait. There is no such thing as something that’s good and something that’s bad inside of me. My acceptance is the fact that this is how I was made. If I imagined myself as sessile like a plant is then I have to accept every part of myself. And I have to learn, I have to master the use of that part of me. And this for me was like mind blown. Really mind blown. I don’t have to eliminate anything. I don’t have to think of anything about myself. As bad. Even the worst of my thoughts that come into my head. I want to bring them outside of myself, look at them and be like, where is this coming from? And how can I use this? Where can it be useful?

And when I switch the question into something different, the whole world changes. And this is what I take a lot of my clients through. I had a client who told me once that I was I think I almost cried. I know I think I did cry. I was so touched and honored that she saw me as this and she said I feel like you are the kind of person that as a coach and as a mentor, but even as a friend, I can say anything to whatever I’m thinking and you will help me see the positive and how to use that. That doesn’t mean we don’t go into shadow work. We don’t see negative but negative is not bad. Negative is one side of the coin and how you use but everything is useful. And so getting to that place of acceptance completely makes me feel like in any situation I’m in again, if I think of myself always as rooted and sessile even if I’m in a hostile environment, most hostile work environment or in a situation with somebody, I always look at it as what can I use from this and what direction do I want to grow from this right? I could grow away from it. I could grow toward it.

I could stay and I could you know get rid of all of my leaves and just become my roots and wait until it passes. I can make any decision I want to make I have all the characteristics to use and I can pull from them. But I have to be honest with myself about what I’m experiencing in order to get there. So this was a really big shift for me. Acceptance aka radical honesty with myself and this is one of the hallmarks of my coaching style of my mentorship style is really being I don’t want you to ever have to hide anything, not just for me but from yourself. I want you to feel like you can say it, be it experience it and then let’s put it to use towards what you want to accomplish. So that’s number one. But before we go on to the next point I want to share with you one of our ego conscious business partners

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Okay, so let me give you number two because I of course I’m taking forever to go through these but I just get so emotional about it number two is not balance but flow. Remember I had said my four traits that I wanted to accomplish. One is acceptance. Two was balance. Now I thought of the world in the sense of balance because I am such an emotional person. I solely lead with my emotions. I’m also very logical. So it’s this weird thing. That’s why I was an engineer as well as a musician. That’s why the arts to me always balances science. So I thought of things as imbalanced. Right? My goal, I always use the word balance and I kept thinking about them as equal parts. And so I always want to bring things to be equal parts. But that’s actually not how nature works. Nature doesn’t balance because balance is I mean nature balances sometimes. But balance is just one state balance is stable. It has all these things and that’s the reason why I thought I want to go there being such an emotional person. I thought that I needed to find that stability, but stability limit because you don’t grow instability.

So what I discovered and I think my first you know few episodes of this podcast, talk about this about you know, creating with stability, but also being stable in creation. And so what I realized is that I don’t want to be balanced. I want to follow I want to be able to take in a given situation, and I want to be able to use even taking things out of balance at times what is best useful, what is most useful for that situation, and then bring it back. So I want to actually constantly being a state of destabilization and then stabilization, unbalanced to then balance and then from balanced to unbalanced. And this really happens depending on where I am in a cycle, right? If I’m learning something completely new, I don’t want to be balanced. I want to be completely unbalanced because I want to be able to take all of that in and explore and experiment and everything. Once I have a picture of it. I want to balance it. I want to stabilize it. I want to bring it into myself and I want to integrate it and then once that’s integrated and I’ve reached a new stasis point, then I need to see do I want to use this for a while in the state that it’s in or do I want to destabilize it again, unbalanced it again, in order to learn something new from there, you understand what I’m saying?

really finding your flow is about being in tune with your natural rhythms. It’s about understanding where you are at any level. So I can look at this property in my personal life. I can look at it and something that I’m building or I’m creating or something that I’m learning I can look at it and sense of where I am with the seasons. Where is my natural cycle where I take things and I flow with them in whatever direction and supposed to flow and so balance is one part of the flow process, right but it is not the end all be all of everything. It it was not the goal that I thought that it should be. So in this particular case, one of my four words got 86 out like I cut it out, and I realized that I was trying to accomplish the wrong thing. And for a personality like mine, who’s a multi potentially multi passionate, so many different ideas. Balance is boring. So balance is good as an as a step in the process.

But if I stay in balance too long, then I get bored. And I start being disruptive and destructive to what it is that I’m trying to accomplish. If instead I think of myself as constantly looking for the flow, then I could work with my natural bodies rhythms to see when am I supposed to be moving? And when am I supposed to be still when is what I am working with supposed to be equal of equal weight. When instead is it actually better? For me to give more weight to something and not a thing else. And this is an extremely important aspect for me when I was working with teams. And when I work with team dynamics like when I’m doing facilitation or I come in to work with a group for something. You know, the similar is the acceptance where I am radically honest with myself of what I’m feeling with the group dynamic and what then asking myself this part that seems to be coming out this personality or this characteristic of myself that is coming out or this trait that I want to use. What is it how can it be best applied to the group? How can it be most useful?

It’s the same thing with the balance. When I’m working with groups. I look at the group and it’s not about giving an equal voice to every person. It’s not about equality. It’s about equity. It’s about really looking at each member of the group and seeing what are the functions that need to be given a little bit more of a spotlight in this moment, knowing that I’m going to give a spotlight to the others. This isn’t about permanently putting him in those place. And that’s where inequality really comes through. Inequality is when you permanently put things into positions where one is out of completely out of balance with the other but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about following. I’m talking about moving things into balance and out of balance. I’m talking about giving weight to something because in that moment is most useful to you and then taking down and then changing and shifting the weight in another moment and it wasn’t until I started to look at ecosystem services and eco tones the space between ecosystems where there’s a greater amount of volatility, and where I started to look at how I was going to be building my own ecosystems and what was my role as a person who is an ecosystem.

Because I myself also made up of personalities and emotions and talents and all these things which are all part of my personal ecosystem, but I also then interact with various ecosystems around me and how do I flow in and out of that, and if it wasn’t for the plants I would have never understood this concept. I mean, really, plants helped me as I as I walked through forest as I learned biomimicry principles. As I got into the idea of ecosystem services, I really started to understand again the reflections as you know, I live in community and the whole reason that I love living in community is because I’m constantly being challenged, to see myself through the eyes of others and to see aspects of myself in the actions of others. When I started working with plants, that whole realm exploded because now I didn’t just have human mirrors to help me on my path. I now have plant mirrors and all other types of organisms true because when I’m looking at an ecosystem, obviously I’m not just looking at the plants. I’m looking at water and I’m looking at microbes and I’m looking at animals and I’m looking at so many other aspects. So really this natural understanding that everything in nature flows, flows through seasons, it flows through space, it throws through time, that helped me recognize that I was a being that should always be in flow.

The last one is a bit of a big one. So bear with me for a second because I want to kind of narrow it down as to what this really changed from those four. Remember I said it was wisdom, trust, acceptance and balance. And the last one really was about that trust to a certain extent, right. The wisdom is wisdom, right wisdom for me is about I guess really this touches both wisdom and trust in different ways. But trusting myself meant being in the moment and honestly I didn’t live in the moment. I used to live in the distant past. So through my nostalgia and my memories and thinking about what things had happened. And I would very often live in the in the future. What could happen where did I want to become? I very rarely lived in who I was today. And now and the reason for that was because, as you know, I was looking at myself as a negative person who hated her body who had all kinds of other situations who just couldn’t seem to put pieces together. But walking through the sacred Woods temple once at domine her I was walking through the temple I have a tendency to very much meander when I go through in sacred spaces like that. And in forests of all sorts. I don’t really do the hiking and walking fast.

I just meander through it and I often sit and I just look around and take it in my favorite thing in the world to do on snow, on grass on dirt on whatever is to just lie down in a dense forested area or any kind of woodland area at all, or underneath a tree and look up at the canopy and just let myself kind of melt into a sort of digitality to just allow the self to dissolve and to step deeper into who I truly am. And when I when I did this once in the sacred Woods temple, I in that state of as corny as it might sound corny, I think is becoming my new 2024 word because so many things that I’ve reached have are like, the stereotypical things that we look for, like they’re the archetypes that we’re looking for, and I was like no, I don’t need to get there. Yeah. Yeah, I did. So really melting into that oneness. I realized that I was fully in that moment. In that moment. I was present.

I wasn’t thinking about the past and I wasn’t thinking about the future. I was just living in where I am today. In the moment, and this was i can’t i i Still today can’t really put the words into it. Only to say that it was the most peaceful feeling I’ve ever had. And it is a it is a piece of me that it’s a piece a piece that I carry with me now. Always at one level. Yes, I can get anxious. Yes, I can live in the future of who I’m becoming. But there’s a sense I was just journaling about that this morning. There’s a sense of peace even when I’m planning for the future. There’s a sense of peace of where I am today. Even when really hard, difficult things happen. There is a piece of where I what is happening to me in this particular moment. And I don’t know how to put this into words other than to say that it is a peacefulness that comes probably as a result in some ways from that acceptance and that flow of whatever is coming my way. It’s going to come anyway. So just enjoy where you are right now. Just really live in this moment.

Find that acceptance with who you are with what is happening to you with looking at it from the perspective of evolution of growth of where I can where, where, why it’s not even aware or why it’s more like this is and therefore all I can do is take it in and be with it. Just be with it. And this is probably the third most and most important shift that has happened to me. i Today Live in the moment. I love the moment I still think about the past, and I still dream about the future. But I don’t live in those spaces. I live right here right now in whatever it is that I’m doing and and that is is precious to me like that is what has completely Yeah, that that that is living. To me. That is living. I still struggle with putting it into words. So I hope that you can feel what I’m saying to you. That’s that’s the best I can do. I just hope that you can feel it. But know that that is probably if I was to say where one of the most important places that you know I want to take my clients or that I help my clients reach besides all of these other pieces in addition to all these pieces, the acceptance, the flowing, that whatever it is that they want to get to but the idea that you live here and now you live in the today, and yeah, and that’s that’s where the peace comes from.

The peace comes from knowing that I can deal with whatever comes my way, whatever that might be. And I have thought about because of situations around me I have had to deal with some pretty major things. But there’s a piece that right here right now this is where I’m supposed to be. And this is what’s supposed to be happening to me and all I can do is go through it. I don’t I can’t afford it. Because if I’m a platinum sessile I can’t run away from it. I can’t pretend that it’s not happening. All I can do is just be in it. I can be and and so that’s it. That’s the major shift. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these. I mean are these things that you’ve experienced yourself? As always, these are conversations we’re constantly having in the naturally conscious community. So I welcome you to come in and share your experiences share what it is that the plants are teaching you today and if you feel like any of these is where you want to be with your life, and I can help you get there. Please reach out. I can’t emphasize enough that this to me is purpose. This is life and I am here for you. No matter what is happening no matter what you’re feeling in this moment. If you’re ready to take that step to go one step further to become to be the person you really want to be. Then I want to help you get there. Alright, that’s it for me now.

Thanks for listening to this episode of reconnect with plant wisdom, Intro and Outro Music by Steve Shuli and poinsettia from the singing Life of Plants. So join me to give you like our Dania and my plant collaborators next time on reconnect with plant wisdom