What if the most advanced form of intelligence on this planet has roots, not a brain?
And what if your own intuition works more like a forest than a thought?

In this electric episode of ILA Radio, host Laura Alyn sits down with Tigrilla Gardenia—nature-inspired mentor, certified life coach, engineer, musician, and world ambassador for plant advocacy—for a conversation that will permanently expand how you think about intuition, embodiment, creativity, and purpose.

This episode is full of revelations: how intuition often begins as sensation rather than insight, why music is a form of emotional technology, and how plants model a kind of patient, unhurried intelligence that humans desperately need to remember.

Tigrilla’s life is proof that intuition is not mystical guesswork—it’s a biological, relational, and spiritual intelligence that wakes up when we stop suppressing ourselves and tune back into the natural world.

If you’ve ever felt “too much,” “too sensitive,” or “too multi-passionate,” this episode will feel like coming home. Tune in and discover what your own plantness has been trying to tell you.

For more on Tigrilla:

https://tigrillagardenia.com/

LISTEN HERE

NOTES FROM THE EPISODE
RE: CONNECTION TO THE
ORNELIAN FRAMEWORK

Click below to learn about the different ways of knowing

MIND・Analytic Knowing

TG: “I just gave myself permission to be for a period of time. I said, okay, when do I naturally wake up? What do I do when I wake up? And I discover my natural rhythm. So I guess I would say that the biggest feedback and the, the, a technique is:
Separate out, capturing data, allow yourself to be and capture data.

I mean, I’ve had periods in my life where I’ve literally written what I do every 5 minutes to best understand how my mind works.

And then later try to analyze it and look more at, what are you getting out of it? What is it helping you accomplish? What is it about you that you’re expressing in that? And try to see if the tapestry shows itself there, but separate the two. Collect the data and then analyze it.”

TG: “So I think that when my mind is not ready, it becomes intuition because I can’t put words to it. But once it gets processed into a way that my mind can make an analytical choice with it, then it’s something, then we just give it a different label, but it’s actually all the same thing.”

ARIES・Experiential Knowing

TG: “Now, I would say around 15 years that I’ve actually connected to that fiery energy (being an Aries Rising) where I’ve let go or I’ve evolved the “you’re too much” and it was very much the plants that helped me get there.”

VS: Aries Venus 6h. Using art to spark joy daily. She was just trying to cheer herself up and got featured on the news!

VS: I would crash out regularly. I would get upset over the smallest things. Now I know what real joy is because I’ve done the work. So now I can always bring myself back to center.

VS: Bringing light to the shadows

HM: listen to your heart and take action. don’t get stuck in overthinking/collecting data.

HM: wisdom from fasting

TAURUS・Cultural Knowing

TG: “I’m Cuban…I’m a Taurus (Sun), so I love food. So it’s still hard for me today when I go and I look through pictures of when I was a kid to understand if was I actually heavy.”

TG: “Over time, I started to focus on my intellect. And so, you know, things even now as an, as an adult woman, I still struggle with things like what does sexiness mean? What does femininity mean because I moved everything into the mental capacities. And then over time, luckily opened up the spiritual capacities and all these different pieces, but I really moved everything there. Because I could not trust my eyes to my body, to my intensity or my way of expressing myself.”

VS: (South Node in Taurus) SN- it represents who I used to be. Taurus- it represents

VS: I was an average math student but when learning astrology, I got really good at it. Could astrology be a form of cultural knowing?

GEMINI・Empirical Knowing

TG: “Plants are very refined sensors. When you start to look at your entire body as multiple sensors, of which most of the time we are completely disconnected from that sensor. So, I mean, really, how many of us know what’s in the layers of our aura, or how many of us actually can feel through, um, any of the external or internal senses that we kind of know intellectually that we have, but we don’t really know what that means, or who really feels through their chakras, because most of us have not taken the time to really refine that.”

TG: “It’s something that we’ve never thought about, but we know plants do it. And so once we start to build out the idea that we have more physical senses and then those senses blend into things that today we’ve been thinking about subtly, like telepathy and other pieces, but really it’s just senses that we’ve been bringing online. And then you start to think about those as what’s inside that layers of your aura and you start to build out.”

VS: I grew up gaslighting myself. I can see things that other people can’t see. I had to learn to trust myself.

HM: not eating is a mind game; it misses the sensations

HM: saying you’re going to do something and then following through and doing it is how to start to build trust; the more you do it the more evidence your mind has to trust you again

BODY・Embodied Knowing

TG: “I trust my body to know that there might be something in the field…So I look at it much more as like flow, trust, and acceptance of like, this is where I am right now and I don’t need to justify to you or to anybody else that I have to leave, like, right now.” 

TG: “All these things [signals] are coming. And I now trust because of all this work that I’ve done, that my body can handle it. And my body can filter it, even if my mind’s not ready.”

TG: It was through this no name Dracaena plant (shown in video) that refused to “speak” like other plants that I was led back to my body to really feel the plant.

TG: When I talk I move, it’s how I process information through the body.

TG: “This no name Dracina, who was like, step into your body, I’m going to express to you things about yourself, but you’ve got to move, exaggerated movement, dancing, gesticulating. Get out of your mind and let your body tell you the answer and get into it from a feeling, and don’t worry about whether or not you have the words.”

VS: Discernment comes from knowing what it feels like to feel safe in your body so that you have a baseline.

CANCER・Emotional Knowing

TG: “I think music does that for me. It allows me to go through and use emotion and different senses and the body and the connections and the chakra Adonaiba and like who I am as a astrological being, as a human design, like it just helps me. Not have to feel like I have to use one system while I’m in the bubble of whatever that song is passing me through. And then later I can bring it into whatever, I’m supposed to bring it into, again, using that element. So since I’m a bridge, I can map it from what I feel. I mean, for anybody who’s watching the video, you see, like, I’m moving continuously as I’m trying to get this, because it’s the only way I can grab it from the side of its amorphous, multi-sense, auric, subtle body continuum, and pull it into the world of form deeper so that I can use words to express it.” (Saturn/Mars Cancer)

TG: “music is a different form of information gathering. It allows me to also pass that through my body so that I can experience and feel things in different ways. We often say that music is a language, but it’s actually the opposite. Language is a musicality. Music is what came first. Music is the core essence, vibration, and all of those types of things.

It’s music that has allowed me to process feelings and emotions and experience, even things that I might not have ever experienced.

If I have a song that is about like a shooting. I don’t have to live through the shooting. I can experience it through that and allow myself to process those emotions and go through it.

So I think for me, music really is, is an ulterior source of information because I process things best through speech, the music allows me to use a more complete part of my body and connect into things.”

VS: I never used to cry. I still don’t cry often, but when I do, I let myself feel it fully (Cancer Moon).

VS: I always say that I would rather trust my emotions in the moment and then apologize later if I was wrong, because I have to honor my inner world. It doesn’t feel right to trust the external.

HM: “I always say on my birthday. I don’t need a big thing. I just want to eat whatever I want. I want some type of desert. And I want to be in a body of water.

DM (Cancer Moon): needs that knowing in order to create

LEO・Playful Knowing

TG: music for me has always been a form of understanding, expression, experience, like there’s a lot for me in music. Hence why I went after the music engineering degree, even though I am actually not the best musician in the traditional sense. But I really wanted to be immersed in that entire experience of music. And my mind needs to be immersed in things when I do things.

TG: I was a dancer for 9 years. I love to express myself through dance. I danced every kind of dance but I was bigger bodied. I was in weight watchers at 11 years old.

VS: When I’m going through shadow work, you have to find what you love to do and just do that. (Leo Midheaven) It was my art that kept me grounded and kept me moving forward when I was really depressed. I started with photography.

HM (Leo Stellium): originally wanted to be an actress, switched to degrees in stagelighting and electrical engineering

DM (Leo in Jupiter): using AI as the fire that expands him and his work; listen to hear how he relates it to Prometheus

VIRGO・Somatic Knowing

VS: Chiron in Virgo 11h. Virgo is a sign that has high standards. The high standards helped me not get wounded again. By loving myself, I know and trust that my community will find me.

HM: we are creative beings. you have to figure out the modality that works best for you.

DM (Virgo Stellium): feeling best when in nature; built an app based on intuition and working with AI

SPIRIT・Narrative Knowing

DM: “She says, ‘Myths? We don’t consider these myths. We consider this information. This is all information.”

DM: “if you look at it, everything is just information that we can just utilize in this world”

LIBRA・Aesthetic Knowing

SCORPIO・Revelatory Knowing

TG: “it’s still very easy to anthropomorphize (animals) because I can see their expressions. You can’t do any of that with plants. You’ve got to trust. You’ve got to enter into other parts of yourself. And that really took me out of all of the like self-help, stereotypes, all of the wording that everybody else was using. Like, I couldn’t use any frame of reference. And that just took me off onto so many different directions and completely changed the direction of my life.”

VS: “who I am as a person is transformative because of that Scorpio energy (1h Scorpio Stellium), I also have a lot of ego deaths and rebirths”

DM: discusses his song about Frankenstein and his bride

SAGITTARIUS・Participatory Knowing

TG: “I start to recognize myself as a being of nature, which is physical in nature, and I’m a part of my ecosystem physically, but I’m also a part of a cosmology that involves divinities and other types of beings.”

TG: listen to the story when she first communicated with a plant

TG: “human being exercises their free will, which means making a choice based on yourself, not a conditioned response, not what somebody else taught you. And we maybe make what, one, 2 times in our lives. an original choice, an original even thought. Everything is derivative. And that’s not necessarily bad. But we have to recognize it.”

TG: When I started work with plants, I started to understand this concept of no waste in an ecosystem. (NN)

TG: “Everything is useful. Everything. So, even something that we think of as bad. You can’t throw it away in an ecosystem. There is no garbage can, right? It becomes food for someone else.

And that got me to start thinking about some of these parts that had been labeled as too much and intensive. Wait a minute, if they’re useful, how are they useful? Where can they be useful? And what is the amount of them that I should use? What’s the context in which they should be used? How long should I use them for?

The plants really helped me understand. Plants really brought me back into this perspective of everything about my body is natural, everything about my mind, everything about my divine self is all natural.”

VS: I was so in tune with Mother Nature. I could hear the animals speak. I would hang out with the trees.

VS: We need to have fundamental classes: astrology, emotional intelligence, the clairs, etc..

HM: Nature teaches us to just be.

HM: Could it be that after being human, the next step up is to reincarnate into a tree?

HM: I can feel it through my heart — the tree’s age, its message, maybe just a whisper of gratitude or peace.

DM: I hug trees. I talk to animals. All animals love me. I love nature. I go to the park once a week. Everything is alive. I like to be connected.

SOUL・Reflective Knowing

TG: I often say to step into your plantness, which for me is the awareness thats helps you step out of the human mind.

TG: I approach life from my rooted plantness, and then once I am rooted and aware and present in my environment, I then step back in, and find flow. It’s about flowing between my feminine containment and my really animally masculine movement. How do these 2 flow without me having to get rid of any part of myself?

DM: Shadow work is continuous. You have to go deep.

CAPRICORN・Rational Knowing

TG: “One rule.When I know my deep pattern, I don’t need all these stupid rules that tell me how I’m supposed to like do my to-do list or when I’m supposed to focus.

I threw discipline out the window. I hate the word discipline. Do not believe in it at all.

I threw out this whole idea of being scattered. I threw out all these things. I was like, one rule man. I just need simple rules, very, very simple things, and then boom, everything falls together.”

TG: “I’m a music engineer and electrical engineer by training and then I worked in software development. I worked at like Microsoft for a long time.”

HM: I have a master’s degree in electrical engineering

HM: even though something makes sense to do on paper doesn’t mean that you should do it if your heart is not in it

DM: uses reason and intuition together simultaneously

AQUARIUS・Archetypal Knowing

TG: “I do have a master’s in vegetal future, which is plants, social innovation and design.”

TG: “When you’re doing social innovation, you look in nature for what’s called a deep pattern, and a deep pattern is an expression that gets used by the relationships of the organisms and the organisms have this like major pattern that they always follow.”

And in Dominher, we talk a lot about what’s called the element, which is that your soul has an element that it expresses. And no matter how many lives you’ve had. You could have different personalities that invoke that element in different ways, but the element is always the same.

And that was the clue, the deep pattern.
And it was like a realization that all of my different passions, lead are all funneled through, doesn’t matter which one I’m using at the time, or even if I’m jumping from one to the other, they are all the tools that I use to express my deep pattern, or this element.”

VS: I like AI. I enjoy being ahead of the times. I’m not afraid. I grew up watching the Jetsons. I would love a life like that.

VS: Tarot called me. I have always been drawn to symbology.

DM (Aquarius Rising): On the intro to my second album, I don’t speak in words, I speak in shapes.

“I’m speaking in metaphors and pictures because that’s how we see things; that is our fastest way of communication”

PISCES・Spiritual Knowing

TG: “So if it comes from some censor and or being that I have a relationship with, it will most likely come in words. So when I 1st started to work with plants, a lot of it was word because I am clair audience, so a lot of it is words.

If the relationship is not there yet or I’m just learning or I’m good, then it’ll come through other senses, and that’s the hardest to trust.”

TG: “I pick up information from many sources—from people, the morphic field, and the larger cosmology—so my intuition keeps refining itself. When I can name a signal, it becomes its own thing; when I can’t, I call it intuition. Movement helps me process what I can’t yet understand with words. I think sensations like anxiety or overwhelm are often sensors bringing in information. If I move with them, my body can use that data and guide me—even if I don’t know why I’m being pulled in a certain direction.”

TG: “I’m connected to a divinity that I work with very closely. I am also connected to multiple plants.”

TG: “To me, intuition is the thing that I’m not exactly sure where it’s coming from, but I know it’s coming.”

TG: “It’s positive in the sense of how is it useful? It’s looking at even the ugliest things I do can be useful. So it’s about really understanding that you don’t have to look at everything with rose colored glasses.

You just have to understand what you’re supposed to do with it. If I’m supposed to build or am I supposed to break? Am I supposed to pull things in or am I supposed to pull like throw things out? It doesn’t matter which one it is. All of that can be positive direction, evolution, while still being very disruptive and very destructive.”

VS: I could look at people and know what they were thinking. I do think that clairsentience is equivalent to intuition.

VS: Intution is calming. Anxiety is alarming.

VS: Intuition is a nudge or a whisper coming from Spirit (or your Higher Self). Intuition can show up at any time in any way.

VS: I didn’t grow up in an environment where my emotions were validated. Now I journal and self-talk. (Pisces Stellium)

HM: psilocybin on a mountain to gain clarity as part of a full SMBS cleanse (fasting was also part of the cleanse)

HM: listen to hear about her fasting experience and to find out who she is quoting when she says “a man with a full belly has a thousand problems, but a man with an empty belly only has one”

HM: the psilocybin brings you back to source and to that togetherness

HM: “How to Change Your Mind” about LSD and psilocybin scientists

DM (SN Pisces) brought up the seven clairs:

• Clairvoyance — Clear Seeing 👁️ The ability to receive intuitive insight through mental images, symbols, colors, or visions. You might “see” flashes, dreamlike scenes, or light around people and places.
• Clairaudience — Clear Hearing 🎧 The perception of intuitive messages through sound — words, music, tones, or internal phrases that seem to come from beyond your own thoughts.
• Clairsentience — Clear Feeling 💞 The ability to feel energy or emotions from people, spaces, or situations. You sense truth, mood, or vibration through your body — the “gut feeling” or empathic knowing.
• Claircognizance — Clear Knowing 💡 When you just know something without knowing how you know. Sudden insights, downloads, or truths that arrive whole and complete.
• Clairalience — Clear Smelling 🌹 The intuitive sense of scent — like catching a whiff of perfume when no one’s around, or smelling flowers, smoke, or herbs connected to a memory or presence.
• Clairgustance — Clear Tasting 🍯 The ability to taste something without physically eating it — often linked to spirit communication, ancestral memory, or energetic association (like tasting honey when receiving sweetness or healing).
• Clairtangency — Clear Touch ✋ Also called psychometry, this is when you receive intuitive information through physical contact — touching an object, plant, or person and feeling its energetic history or essence

COURSES