Ep.51 Relationship Advice from Plants | ReConnect with Plant Wisdom podcast

Ep.51 Relationship Advice from Plants

Relationships… we all have them, so why are they so hard to navigate? We can talk about emotional intelligence and personal needs, but I wonder if the struggle is because we have such a limited view of what a relationship even is?

Rather than going to human friends for relationship advice, in this episode, we explore what plants show us about the nature of relationships. Pulling from ecological dynamics, we dive into flow, balance, awareness, and an understanding of the many different ways we can enter into symbiosis with others.

Every relationship, whether a mutualism or competition, has the possibility of creating a positive result, it’s all in how you live it.

Topics Covered about relationships

  • Different types of biological relationships that exist in nature, including competition, parasitism/predation, commensalism, coexistence, and mutualism.
  • You are the only one that can decide if a relationship is healthy
  • Most of our understanding about relationships comes from conditioning
  • Competition is less useful than we may believe

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TRANSCRIPT OF RELATIONSHIP ADVICE FROM 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 everyone, welcome back to episode 51 of Reconnect with Plant. Wisdom, I am Tigriaga Danya.

And today, we’re going to talk. Well, we’re going to get some relationship advice.

From plants. As I record this it’s actually Valentine’s Day. For those of you that enjoyed the day, wonderful for those of you that maybe didn’t.

I’m here for you. So, but I wanted to record this episode because from a human perspective.

We often talk about relationships and when I talk about relationships I just wanted to kind of clear up from the very beginning that I’m gonna be extremely broad in this conversation.

I’m not just talking about romantic relationships, I’m actually talking about all types of relationships and that’s 1 of the first differences.

In the sense of oftentimes when we even hear the word relationship, our initial instinct is to go to the idea of the romantic or the intimate.

But there are many different relationships that we experience in life, just like there’s many different types of love we experience in life.

We have romantic relationships, we have business relationships, we have relationships with family members, we have relationships even with strangers.

We have all kinds of different levels, mother to child, father to child. We have parents, the child in general.

Let’s just be completely open and inclusive of everything. And so we have all these different types of relationships.

That we kind of all lump in one single bucket. And we often think that these relationships need to go a certain way.

We have these definitions for how these relationships are supposed to be, otherwise they’re considered. Negative or bad or they don’t serve or any of that.

And when I started to work with plants and I started to, especially when I was doing my dynamicry journey and I got into from a technical biological perspective the understanding of different types of relationships, I have to say that it opened me up.

To an entirely different way of embracing. Others and like I said when I mean others I even mean other humans I mean other plants I mean other pets and other and other animals and other even other versions of myself because I’m made up of many different personalities and I have to create relationships between all these different aspects of myself.

So this relationship advice from plants is going to be pretty broad reaching. I want to give you some basics.

I talk about this a lot in many of my different programs including Reconnect with the plant kingdom. I go into this as well as in several other programs within the naturally conscious community because Look, relationships make the world go round, right?

How we interact with others, including the others within ourselves. It changes so much our perception of life, our perception even of who we are.

So when we get to the level of understanding that there are more than one, there’s many types of relationships in the sense of the quality of relationship is not always based on the final outcome of that relationship is not always based on the final outcome of that relationship, but is more based on, well, the relationship itself, what’s happening.

So, and this was something that that plants made very, very clear to me. Let me just dive into this because I think it’s important.

When it comes to what we call symbiosis or relationship, from the natural world, this is we’re not even just talking about plants here, we’re talking about biologically speaking, we have many different types of categories.

I actually took a lot of notes. I’m going to be, for those of you that are watching the video, you’re going to see me look down a lot, I wanted to make sure I captured everything that I that I thought was most important for this discussion.

So what I want to do is first outline some of the major categories of relationships because if you’ve never heard me talk about this before this is going to be completely new for you.

And for each one of them, I want to offer you some examples of how we could take that natural intelligence.

And apply it to our human worlds. Because it’s, we want to adopt what it is that nature is showing us, what our own true nature is coming out as we experience this.

So I encourage you that as you listen to this episode, Give yourself some time for this to sink in.

There is a lot of conditioning around relationships, relationships are supposed to be a certain way of all types, whether it’s, ial relationships or whether it’s romantic relationships.

We have a lot of pressure from the outside, from culture and from education and from our peer group that really put a lot of pressure on what these relationships can be or should be.

So breaking some of those stereotypes is gonna take some time. So just give yourself whether you’re listening to this for the first time or you’ve heard me talk about this before, let it really just sink in and again we have the naturally conscious community to have more discussions around this so please feel free to go over there and to post and kind of let your thinking process share it with us.

Because again, it’s going to take a while for you to break out of the conditioning and then re-set what it is that you internally feel is the most important thing for you to understand about these relationships.

To be completely honest. You’re not going to really even be able to fully understand. Because intellectually you might get into, you might start to be able to break free and like evolve some of your belief systems, but until you get into these relationships themselves, it’s going to be hard for you to kind of apply it all.

So just recognize the fact that this is going to be done in stages and so every single time you hear this, something new is going to come in and my entire goal is to liberate you to give you sort of knowledge from the natural world to help you understand that you are the one who makes a conscious choice of how you want to.

Engage in a relationship. I can’t tell you how to engage in a relationship. I will never tell you whether a relationship is healthy or unhealthy because all of that is based on what you are getting out of the relationship.

What I want to give you are tools to better evaluate based on the relationship itself. Rather than on what some general conditioning gives you and what is being told from you, the idea that there is a positive and a negative in very definitive terms.

My sort of premise here and hopefully that makes sense. And again, if you have additional questions, please add them into the comments or you can message me directly because I know this is a big topic and I can’t get everything in in one.

That’s the reason why every periodically and in many of my programs we touch this because it’s just a very sensitive emotional perspective.

Regardless, even when we’re talking about business relationships, there’s still a lot of nuances that you are the only one that can decide what direction to take those nuances in.

I can’t tell you that. Can do is support you through the process of evaluating them without any kind of external conditioning and beliefs and more from the perspective of where you are right now.

Okay, so let’s talk about the first and probably the one. That is that is the most common that we talk about but in reality is not actually common at all.

It’s like the big the big lie and the big lie Competition makes the world go round.

How many times have you heard that one?

The idea that we’re supposed to compete in order to get ahead. So many people will try to tell you that this actually comes from nature when you go and you look at nature, nature is aggressive, nature is a war zone, nature is all of these types of things.

Yes, and. Not always. Obviously, some form of competition, even though competition from a biological perspective is considered negative negative in the sense that there is a detriment to both sides of the beings that are engaging in that competition.

Actually, the idea that we actually have a positive that comes out of competition is not really true. There’s always a negative on both sides.

It’s just a matter of how far that negative goes. Negative as in good versus bad. I mean negative as in the resulting aspect.

There’s always a loss, something that you lose in the process to this. So competition can be incredibly useful.

I’m not even going to pretend that it’s not because that would be completely wrong. Competition can be extremely useful.

When used appropriately? And for short period of time. And you have to understand that competition is extremely resource intensive, whether you’re talking about 2 rams that are, you know, fighting for territory or whether you’re talking about a plant that is trying to invade the area of another plant.

All of these types of things take a lot of resources. And in the natural world, different than in the human world where we think, oh, well, I’m just going to go to the supermarket and I’m going to go buy some extra food or I’m gonna go get a power bar or smoothie.

I can’t do that in the natural world, in the natural world there is a detriment to self when I use an expel so much energy in order to compete with another.

Therefore, the natural world uses competition, lightly. In other words, there is a decision to use a competitive type of avenue, that competition plays out and then you move on based on the results of that.

The idea of prolonged competition, which we see oftentimes in human dynamics, especially human business dynamics, but even in other kinds, academic environments, or so many environments, leads to a high amount of stress.

And from the natural perspective, high amounts of stress, Good produce something positive in the short term. But ultimately lose to our losing situation because if prolonged for too long you have a detriment and you eventually, well, most of the time you eventually die, to be honest.

If you’re a plant, you run out of energy sources and plough whether and if you’re a you cause harm to your potential future reproduction.

So there’s many different elements in which competition doesn’t want to be sustained. So from a human perspective, if you’re thinking about using competition, your question to be asking is, how long is this competition going to last?

Is it something short-term, like literally a competition, a contest, that is going to give me a burst.

In order for me to accomplish something, there’s going to be a quote-unquote winner and a loser.

And then based on what happens from there, we move forward. But, we turn around, we smile, we hug, and we’re like, thank you, and then let’s go on.

In that perspective, it’s very positive. In the other perspective, prolonged stress. Causes detrimental harm to whatever individual, whatever being we’re talking about.

And so therefore, it’s not really done. So if somebody tries to tell you that competition is what makes the world go round, the They’re lying to you.

Like scientifically speaking, that’s just not what’s happening everywhere. It’s short-term.

It is burst like. And then afterwards you move on from there. Okay, so hopefully that dispels the rumor about the idea that competition is where you should be.

And honestly competition is only one. So one kind of relationship that exists. So let’s talk about another one that often comes up.

So I’m kind of giving you the ones that come up that are like. Hard for people to understand.

Parasitism or prediction, right? In this case, you have a parasite, you have a positive reaction on one hand and the sense of you gain something so it’s not positive.

Language. If you have a different word, please let me know because I hate using positive. I mean the way we depicted is like a plus sign and a negative sign.

And a minus sign and so it applies, but it’s a plus as in like one of this of the 2 organisms that we’re talking about is receiving a benefit and the other organism is actually getting a loss, right?

On one side I am gaining something and on the other side I am losing something. So. We can just imagine many different types of parasites, right?

The parasite is an organism or even a predation in the sense of prey, hawk is trying to get food, and coming down and like eating a mouse or something, that hawk is the predator.

So there’s a net benefit and the mouse is losing He’s life, so therefore that’s the neck, the negative, right?

This is a common relationship that exists at times, we as humans also are parasites or predation or predators, if you think about it, regardless of whether you eat plants or whether you eat animals, it doesn’t matter, you’re still killing another being in order for you to get sustenance.

This is a relationship that We often think of as in, again, plus on one side and negative on the other.

But. It’s actually more complicated than that. Even from a scientific perspective, they’re starting to look at the scientific community is starting to look at whether or not that designation of positive negative is correct overall.

Because yes, it is true that in the case of the 2 individual organisms at play, most of the time there is a net positive or a net gain on one side and a net loss on the other side, when you take a step back and you look at it at the ecosystem level, there’s actually different kinds of relationships that are going on.

For example, it is oftentimes that a predator is what keeps the overall ecosystem in which that predator exists.

In balance. So in other words, buy. In a natural perspective. We’re not talking about industrial agriculture or, you know, animal husbandry and all these other types of things.

Take away the human element for a second. Let’s go back and look at the natural world. In the natural world, when you have a predator animal that lives within the context of an animal that lives within the context of an overall ecosystem, that predator animal that lives within the context of an overall ecosystem, that predator animal usually keeps the actual rest of that population in check so that there is a natural

checks and balance that happens. So let’s take the example of wolves and I’m gonna get this is a plant example believe it or not.

When wolves were taken out of like Yellowstone National Park and many of the parts of the United States, what happened is deer population started to rise.

Dear populations start to rise means that deer eats extremely being herbivores they eat very young shoots of many different plants including plants like Pando, which is a quaking aspen.

I guess being because it’s 1 key is one giant, 80 thousand-year-old football field size forest of aspen trees because they’re clonal and so these aspen trees who have been living for 80,000 years in a beautiful balance between wolves, deer, and tree are now dying off.

These trees are dying off because the population of deer has gotten so high because there are no wolves that are eating off the tier that we have now an overall net loss to the environment that’s happening.

You see how this works? So parasitism and predation can be a positive force. For the overall system.

If within that context. If instead it is an individual one-to-one kind of relationship, it also can have a benefit.

If in the short term. So in the short term, you have a perspective where maybe one has a surplus.

That is being slowly being consumed. While the predator or the parasite takes advantage of this.

There is one very, very common example of this that we all experience and most people do not think of it as negative, and yet it is a parasite.

Any idea what it is? I’ll give you a few seconds. Actually, while we’re waiting, Let’s listen to one of our eco conscious business partners.

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Did you get the answer? Parents a child. The universal parasitism. Right?

A child is a parasite of their parents for a period of time. How long depends on your culture?

I am not here to judge that. But the point is that it is an absolutely normal parasitism.

The parents actually gets from the perspective of resources a negative, over time they’re giving to this child.

The child is taking, right? So the child is getting a net positive, an increase again while the parents is getting a negative.

But The overall impact to the overall system is a positive. And so as long as there is a flow between these 2 as long as the parent is able to give and the child is is at the stage where they need that in order to survive, there is an overall benefit to the ecosystem, which is in this case the household in which they live in.

So the next time somebody tries to tell you Oh, that’s a parasite that’s living off you in the sense of like that that guy, that girl, that day that you’re dating or that you that experience in business is actually a parasite.

I want you to take a step back. And really ask yourself. Is it a parasite or do I actually even go maybe my overall resources are going lower when I take a step back and I look at the entire organization, whether that’s familial or whether that’s what I need to learn in a relationship or any other aspects.

Home parents, for example, or a stay-at-home spouse is another relationship that in some ways can be considered if you look at it from the strictly economic perspective, a parasite.

But is it? Is it really when you think about the quality of the overall relationship? So I want to encourage you when you’re thinking about parasitism and when you’re thinking about prediction to take a step back and say, it’s not just about it is just the 2 people in the sense that again, It can go on forever.

Even a parent child relationship at some point the child grows up and the child has to leave home. The parent cannot stay as the soul essence of that child, the soul kind of nurturing of that child.

If that goes on for too long and again too long is a girl. But if it goes out for too long, eventually the entire system crashes and you end up in something that is actually detrimental to both of them.

So when you’re looking at a parasitism, relationship. Your question to ask yourself is how How long can I either give?

Or take before this actually moves into stress and being something that is detrimental to me. For you to ask yourself to give yourself space to judge the relationship based on what’s happening.

Another aspect of this that happens in the human world a lot is when somebody is ill. Right? When somebody is ill, they become a parasite.

But again, is that necessarily bad? No, it keeps the overall ecosystem in check. It creates a relationship of solidarity that overall can nourish different aspects of the overall ecosystem in which these people live, which could be either the one-to-one relationship as the entity that is the relationship different than the 2 individuals.

Or whether you’re talking about a familiar or even a business type of relationship. What are the benefits that can step in when you create a solidarity when you are helping it to care for somebody who might be too ill and who becomes a parasite on you.

And for how long can I take care of that on my own before it becomes detrimental to my overall health and the decline becomes more than the benefits that I get from it in other aspects.

So do you see how as just talking about parasitism, predation, and competition, looking at it through the optics of a natural of a more nature inspired approach gives us the opportunity to look at this with a much wider lens and to look at myself both as the individual that is in the middle of this.

Or no and not an or and at the same time the ecosystem member that is involved in what is happening and what is my role in this in order to judge it based on what’s happening and not on some prescribed definition.

So now let’s start removing ourselves from some of the ones that are considered negative and let’s talk about some other words.

The really 2 other ones that I think are the most, actually there’s 3 of them. The third one is relatively easy, I think.

My opinion. So we’ve talked about parasitism and predation, we’ve talked about competition.

Now let’s start to talking about different kinds of cooperation. Sort of relationships. Let’s talk about, for example, commensalism.

Consolism is actually one of my favorites. From the perspective of I had not really ever given myself permission to think about commensalism until I really got into the plant world and I started to study biomimicry in the natural world and then I started to really observe nature differently in order to better understand Okay.

How is it that that these come in? So a commensalism is where one organism is getting a benefit.

And the other organism is indifferent. Neither are negative nor positive. It doesn’t really do anything.

In some ways. And this is again similar to the competition. And also the parasitism and the prediction where time really does matter, right?

Remember we were talking about how and predation when you have a parasite like mistletoe missile for those who don’t know the mistletoe you stand under and kiss under for those that don’t know the mistletoe you stand under and kiss under for you know Christmas time or for the holiday season under for you know Christmas time or for the holiday season is actually a parasite.

Lives on trees from the one-on-one relationship between mistletoe and the tree. There is a parasitism.

The mistletoe uses a tree in order to survive. From the perspective of the overall tree health.

It’s another questionable conversation about what is the relationship because mistletoe also keeps those trees in check to make sure that there’s not too many of them and that the trees don’t become invasive or overrun the current ecosystem of their own.

A commensalism can be seen in some ways. Somewhat similar from the perspective of one is getting a benefit, the other one is not getting anything.

One of the most, it’s a very rare relationship to be honest, but it does exist. An example is one of the examples I like to use a lot is the idea of epiphytes, right?

Plants like airplanes that or a bromeliad you see is in certain types of orchids you see these They hang on another tree.

So these are plants that hang on a tree. Now different than a parasite like mistletoe, they don’t take anything away from the tree.

They don’t use the trees resources at all. All they do is just hang out there. They use the tree as a support as if they were hanging on a pole.

Right? They grab all their nutrients from the air itself from the air, from the rain, from all the elements around them.

So positive benefit to the Epiphyte who is hanging onto the tree and using the TREE as support.

0 benefit or loss to the tree because the tree is going to be there no matter what and so who cares if I’m hanging out on it?

But again, time. And in this case, size matter. Time and Size Matter. Now, in the short term, absolutely not a problem, right?

Benefit that’s happening to one. Indifferent to the other and as long as we’re in that sort of realm Perfect.

Commensalisms could don’t have to have a duration. Different than, for example, competition that has a duration.

But similar to parasitism that it really depends on the overall health of the ecosystem.

If you have an epiphyte that gets too big, therefore heavy, another example of a commensalism is a bird’s nest, right?

You have a bird that has now created a nest in the trees. So negative effect to the tree because the tree is going to be there and so who cares if the bird is there positive effect for the for the bird because the bird now has a safe.

Home that is created for offspring. But what happens when that nest? Gets too big or when the epiphyte the bromeliad or the orchid gets too heavy.

The branch starts to get week. And so therefore in the long term and outside of another check some balance that relationship could become detrimental to the tree.

The tree could lose the limb because the limb gets too heavy or it’s weakened and so therefore if a windstorm comes or if there’s heavy rains or heavy snow that can all snap off.

So here you have an example of something that’s seems to be OK, but once it goes out of balance for the overall ecosystem, in this particular case, the relationship between the tree and that particular whether it’s a nest or an epiphyte, then it can go negative.

So these are the things we want to keep an eye on when we’re in the middle of these types of relationships.

I want to see the duration and I want to understand whether there’s a long-term stresses that are happening or whether or not it’s actually okay.

And this is where it’s extremely important from a human perspective, radical honesty with yourself is extremely important because radical honesty is what allows me to really start to take notice when things that maybe I was indifferent to in the past once they linger around for too long become something that instead start to bother me.

But if I am not aware of my own true nature, if I am not comfortable enough with the relationship from the perspective of I am now measuring this relationship for what it is rather than through some societal norm or some other label that’s being given to me, then I don’t give myself a chance to evaluate on a regular basis and consciously make choices of how to continue forward with this relationship.

So it’s not only important for me to be able to recognize where I am, parasitism, tradition, competition, or any other thing, but it’s very, very, very important for you to be able to be honest with yourself about when those measures change when the actual net positive or net negative, the benefit versus the detriment, that starts to shift.

If I am in touch with myself and in touch, because that’s really what plants do, right, plants are extremely aware of their environment and they’re measuring all the minute changes that are happening.

If I give myself permission to change to be aware of these minute changes and to be OK with myself when something changes and my reaction to something changes, then these relationships take on a completely different, a kind of different value in your life and you’re able to much better evaluate whether or not the overall effect to myself as an individual but to the ecosystem in which this relationship is carrying out whether or not that really has a positive or negative

value. And again, positive and negative in the sense of gain versus detriment and how long can I sustain.

Whatever is happening. So it is important for us to be extremely aware. And this is where working very closely with the natural world, especially with plants, helps us kind of bring and reactivate all of what are our true levels of perceptions, all the nuances within us, it enhances our personal senses, right, my ability to sense with the 5 senses that we know of, but it also helps me start to get

in touch with all these other more probably subtle senses that I as a human being have not necessarily allowed myself to get in contact with, but my plantness, my vegetation does.

And therefore, and my, my animalness also, my instinctual nature that comes through when I reconnect into my animalness.

So the natural world really helps us refine our spidey sense, you might say, so that we can better come into that.

Okay, so we talked about parasitism, predation. Competition, commensalism, you can look up all these words too.

There is also coexisting. Co-existing is basically when nobody gets a benefit and nobody gets a detriment.

It’s neutral, right? A commensalism is one side, I get a benefit and the other side is neutral.

Co-existing is both neutral. And again, coexisting could be just fine. Coexisting could work perfectly, right?

I’m in an environment and I’m coexisting with some something or someone else. That doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother this other.

But again, Spidey sense important. Keep an eye on how that goes. If it goes on, it can go on indefinitely.

There’s no benefit or negative impact, so therefore it’s fine. But it’s 1 of those to monitor because it’s rare for it to just exist for a long period of time.

Eventually the ecosystem as the ecosystem shifts. So everything is evolving, everything is changing.

So it’s important for us to be aware of consciously changing conditions in order to ensure that we really are moving and that we’re that that coexistence is remaining as a coincidence and hasn’t morphed into some other kind of symbiosis.

So I say this just because again, in the essence of being aware, we should be aware that coexistence is another type of relationship that exists and one that can change over time.

Last one, which I’m not gonna go into too deeply, although because I do want to. I probably will create an entire like episode just on this because it is the relationship that we all for the most.

And that’s the mutualism. Right? Positive on one side, positive on the other side.

Everybody’s getting a benefit from a mutualism. But mutualisms have very specific types of rules in order for them to be long to have longevity in order, in other words, 4.

You to have a mutualism that lasts over time, which by the way, this is this is the preferred mechanism for so many different things.

Especially because co-evolution is enhanced when we are in mutually beneficial relationships. So when we have relationships in which both sides are getting a gain, you’ve experienced this before, you’ve been working with a business partner or had that that type of intimate relationship or your best partner or had that type of intimate relationship or your best partner or had that type of intimate relationship or your best friend where you both get a bet

every time you hang out together, you learn from each other, you do things together, you feel like, you know, yes, you could have a competitive moment.

Yes, you could have a moment where they’re doing something and they sort of take some energy away from you.

You could also have a moment where you take energy from them, like a mutualism. Over the long term if you look at it from an overall container allows space for all the other relationships to happen, right, for parasitism to happen at times, for commensalisms to happen, all these types of things.

But the overall overall lookout is this positive or beneficial piece on both sides. And that’s the reason why it’s so, it’s so favorable of a type of relationship because it is a relationship that is most robust.

It is the relationship where you feel like your experience and the most from it and then at the same time you’re able to go through all the other relationships as necessary because you have this safe container that is the overall mutualism.

But the mutualism has some rules. And and I’m not going to go into them too deeply right now because like I said, I want to do an entire episode completely just about mutualisms and I talk about mutualisms in many different programs of mine like I am plant my five-day challenge to embody your plantness.

But I just want to say on mutualisms is that a mutualism is not just made of the fact that in this particular moment somebody offers something to me and I offer something to them and we both get a benefit out of it.

That’s 1 piece of it. But in order for it to be a long-term mutualism, we want to make sure that that is sustainable over time and those are really the details about it.

In reality, all of these insights, all of these different kinds of relationships. Have a time element connected to them.

And we have to remember that. Basically, life is continuously changing. So never assume that a relationship that starts in one way is going to stay that way and also taken to consideration that relationships that might from a cultural perspective seem negative.

Could be extremely beneficial if they’re taken in the right time amount of time, if they take the right amount of time.

So in other words, there are no. Single definitions that work for all. It’s really all about making a conscious choice.

Being aware of what is happening and what I am experiencing in this moment. Looking at the time element and whether or not I have the resources, resources can mean my emotions, my emotional capacity or emotional intelligence, resources can be time and money and all different kinds of resources.

It could be energy, it could be mental space, it could be anything. But do I have the resources to sustain this for the amount of time necessary if I’m getting a negative and then when will I start to get a net positive and does that net positive come directly from that organism or does it come through the overall ecosystem that gets nourished in some ways?

These are some of the questions that I encourage you to ask yourself as you’re trying to evaluate whether or not a relationship that you’re in is actually positive or negative for you?

Is it a beneficial relationship or is it a detrimental relationship? Because ultimately co-evolution, which is when we evolve ourselves based on what’s happening is a direct sort of result of all of these different elements that I’m asking you.

Alright, I wanna go, let me look through my notes really quick just to make sure whether or not I touched everything.

I mean, ultimately my question to you is, What I want you to take away from this is how might what you understand and learn from nature, how my what I’m connecting to in my own natural intelligence and my own true nature.

How could I use this to optimize the relationships that I have? In order to create healthy relationships in the long term.

In other words, relationships that either benefit me directly while I’m in it. Or over time create a benefit for me from an evolutionary perspective.

So my evolution or from the overall system and ecosystem that gets created, right? My, my environment, does my environment get a benefit that I eventually benefit from or am I getting a benefit directly from what’s happening and how are my resources in in the process.

So play around a little bit with these concepts. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are as always in the naturally conscious community.

We have spaces where you can come and have these discussions. Like I said, I talk about this in Reconnect with the plant kingdom.

I also talk about it in IM plants. There’s many different aspects where I touch on this element of relationships and I encourage you to kind of take a step back from my relationships and say, if I’m only using my awareness to understand.

And discern what this relationship is and I leave behind any of my cultural or familial or friends-based definitions.

How would I categorize this relationship and what does that mean for me going forward? How could I have have more tools at my disposal to create healthy relationships in the long term.

So I look forward to hearing what it is that you come up with and if there is any way that I can help you to create mutually beneficial relationships in your life.

You know where to find me. I’m all over the place. It’s all in the show notes.

And I look forward to coming and talking to you next week. Bye!

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.


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About ReConnect with Plant Wisdom podcast

Ancient and modern knowledge from biology to spirituality about the wondrous ways plants help you lead a Naturally Conscious life.

ReConnect with Plant Wisdom is available on Youtube and all your favorite podcast app, or follow along in the Naturally Conscious Community. And tell your friends!!!

Opening and Closing music by Steve Sciulli and Poinsettia; Editing by Goddess Rocio Mendez.

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