Episode #65
Awakening Our Soulful Intelligence: What the Octopus — and Sy Montgomery — Know
Episode 65 Awakening Our Soulful Intelligence: What the Octopus — and Sy Montgomery — Know Guest: Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus What if resilience doesn’t come from thinking harder or pushing faster, but from listening more deeply to the intelligence that already lives within us? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal explores the quiet, embodied wisdom of the giant Pacific octopus—and how soulful intelligence can help us navigate our own lives with more clarity, connection, and compassion. Joined by Sy Montgomery, bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus , we step into a world where intelligence is fluid, intuitive, relational, and alive in every moment. Episode Overview In “Soulful Intelligence,” Jessica takes us into the cool stillness of a Northern Pacific kelp forest to meet the giant Pacific octopus—an animal whose distributed, sensory-rich intelligence reveals a different way of knowing the world. Through vivid storytelling, we witness how octopuses perceive, choose, communicate, and relate with a depth that challenges human assumptions about consciousness. This exploration becomes the foundation for a rich conversation with Sy Montgomery, who expands our understanding of soul, presence, and cross-species connection. Through Sy’s stories—of octopuses, dolphins, turtles, caterpillars, dogs, and the living Earth itself—we learn how soulful intelligence deepens resilience, awakens awe, and invites us into a more relational way of being. The result is an episode that reconnects us to our own inner wisdom, to the creatures who share our planet, and to the subtle intelligence that thrives everywhere life is paying attention. What You’ll Learn How the giant Pacific octopus models soulful intelligence through presence, perception, and attunement Why soulful intelligence integrates mind, body, intuition, values, and relationships How slowing down expands our ability to sense meaning and choose wisely What Sy Montgomery has learned about consciousness and soul from octopuses, turtles, pink dolphins, chimps, and caterpillars Why love and curiosity are powerful tools of inquiry in science and in life How awe, reverence, and “beginner’s mind” build resilience and restore connection How small acts of mending—of relationships, ecosystems, and daily choices—strengthen both the world and our own internal steadiness Episode Highlights [00:00] Intro [02:00] Distributed intelligence: sensing, learning, and decision-making across the body [04:00] Camouflage as expression: color, texture, emotion, and attunement [06:50] A quiet greeting: two octopuses meet with curiosity [08:50] Defining soulful intelligence [11:15] Why soulful intelligence strengthens resilience Conversation with Sy Montgomery [12:21] Welcoming Sy: the writer who opened the world to octopus consciousness [14:00] Sy’s octopus teachers: Athena, Octavia, Kali, and Karma [16:10] Soul as connection to the rest of creation [18:25] Why naming animals changed the science of behavior [22:39] Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, and the revolution of relational science [27:07] Scar tissue, resilience, and the sacredness of mending [33:01] The living Earth, Gaia, and the soul of the planet [35:06] Awe, reverence, and the responsibility of connection [37:36] Mending as antidote to helplessness [49:20] How humans silence their own intuition—and how to restore it [53:49] Being massaged by pink dolphins: a story of cross-species soul [56:42] The feedback loop of doing good [59:16] Caterpillars, memory, and the persistence of soul [01:02:10] Closing reflections: the intelligence that waits beneath our first thoughts Meet the Guest Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, bestselling author, and one of the world’s most beloved interpreters of animal consciousness. Her book The Soul of an Octopus was on the New York Times Bestseller List, was a National Book Award finalist, and reshaped public understanding of invertebrate sentience. Sy has written 39 books about animals—from hawks to pink dolphins to turtles—illuminating the relationships that remind us we are part of a living, soulful, interconnected world. Her work invites readers to listen more deeply, love more broadly, and honor the wisdom that exists beyond human boundaries. Tools, Frameworks, or Strategies Mentioned Soulful Intelligence: alignment of values, intuition, sensation, and meaning Distributed Intelligence in Octopuses Beginner’s Mind in cross-species connection Awe as a tool for resilience Mending as a daily practice of healing The Sphere of Influence: acting where energy can truly make a difference Gaian consciousness and interconnected living systems Closing Insight & CTA “Soulful intelligence grows in the space between stimulus and response—the pause long enough for our deeper knowing to rise.” If this episode opened something in you, share it with someone who may be searching for more meaning, more connection, or a more soulful way of navigating their life. Follow, rate, and review Resilience Gone Wild to help these stories ripple outward. Resource Links Sy Montgomery – https://symontgomery.com/ The Soul of an Octopus – Available wherever books are sold Resilience Gone Wild – https://resiliencegonewild.com/ Listen to more episodes – https://pod.link/J4yd77 Produced by: Balancing Life’s Issues (BLI Studios) – https://balancinglifesissues.com/podcast-bli/ the whisper of light through kelp, the subtle information carried by the water itself. Her world is built from details we often rush past, and her wisdom rises from a kind of quiet listening that begins long before action. And that’s where today’s story begins. In a place where intelligence doesn’t rush, it simply breathes. Where awareness flows through every part of the body. Where a creature teaches us something humans often forget. that there is a deeper way to know the world and a deeper way to know ourselves. I’m Jessica Morgenthau, and this is Resilience Gone Wild, where we explore how nature’s quiet brilliance can help us care more deeply for ourselves, for each other, and for the wild world we all share. Today, we’re stepping gently into the world of the giant Pacific octopus to explore soulful intelligence. Transcript: Speaker 1 (00:03.758) Inside the cool stillness of a rocky den in the Northern Pacific, something extraordinary is happening. Quietly, slowly, almost invisibly. A being waits here, not in fear, not in hiding. She is intentional, attuned, present. If you pause long enough, you can almost sense what she senses. The faint shift of a current. a form of inner wisdom that can strengthen our resilience in ways that reconnect us to what matters most. Speaker 1 (01:35.662) The afternoon light softens as it filters down through the kelp forest, turning the water into a slow-moving tapestry of greens and golds. This is her place, a quiet stretch of the Northern Pacific where cold, oxygen-rich water, drifting kelp shadows, and deep rock crevices create the perfect refuge for a giant Pacific octopus. Speaker 1 (02:02.306) Beneath the basalt ledge, she rests, eight arms loosely folded, mantle rising and falling as water moves across her gills. Her siphon makes a faint pulse with each exhale. Two dark, forward-facing eyes, shaped much like our own, watch the flicker of shifting light. From a distance, she seems still. Up close, she is quietly awake. Her world is built from subtle information. Tiny shifts in current, faint chemical traces, the pressure wave of something moving nearby. Nearly 2,000 suckers line her arms, each able to taste and feel at the same time. Her arms, each containing clusters of neurons, make small decisions right where sensation happens, while her central brain integrates everything into something more. Judgment, learning, interpretation. Scientists understand much of how she senses her world, and they’re increasingly recognizing something else in her behavior too, a thoughtful awareness that goes beyond simple reflex. There is a soulful intelligence in the way she pauses, senses, and responds, as if each moment carries meanings that rise from more than her senses alone. She slips an arm out of her den, then a second, then a third. Each moves with unhurried purpose, curling over a rock, through crevices, along sand. Giant Pacific octopuses grow astonishingly fast, from hatchlings the size of grains of rice to powerful adults in just a few years. And the only way to manage a life like that is to learn constantly. Where food hides, what patterns matter, how currents carry clues. A crab scrapes faintly across stone. She tastes its chemical signature in the water before she ever sees it. Her eyes narrow slightly. adjusting to the murky green light. Two arms flow outward with practice coordination. A smooth capture. Her beak, hidden beneath the soft web of her arms, makes quick, precise work of the shell. When she’s done, she uses her siphon to blow the empty fragments out of her den in a neat scatter, a kind of housekeeping that keeps her space clear. Above her, the kelp forest sways. Small fish thread through the fronds. Sunlight flickers in the patterns she has learned to read. Speaker 1 (04:27.49) Her skin shifts to match the moment, the mottled brown of stone, the softened pattern of kelp shadow. Chromatophores contract and expand beneath her skin, altering color in milliseconds, while tiny muscles raise or smooth her texture to mirror the rocks around her. Camouflage is not only concealment, it’s a way of showing her state, calm, alert, curious, content. There are nearly 300 species of octopus. Caribbean reef octopuses, common octopuses, tiny pygmy species, drifting Dumbo octopuses, and the giant Pacific octopus, the largest of all, stands apart. Octopuses have been on Earth for over 300 million years, the Pacific octopus just 2 million. They live in colder waters, have broader bodies, longer arms, exceptional strength, and an especially striking blend of problem-solving, flexibility, and individuality. Divers describe them as calm or bold, shy or playful, patient or impulsive. Personality is not a stretch, it’s an observation. A flicker enters her peripheral vision. A young octopus drifts between the kelp blades, smaller bodied, thinner armed, still learning the control of its colors. The juvenile male carries the beginnings of what will one day become the species specialized arm, the hecticotilus, used during mating. She registers him without alarm. Giant Pacific octopuses are solitary, yet solitude does not mean disconnection. Territories can overlap at the edges, and when encounters happen, they can be surprisingly nuanced. The two octopuses pause, holding a few arm lengths of water between them. Her colors soften into a calm, steady pattern. The juvenile’s flickering settles into a gentle speckle. They assess. They wait. they choose their next move. Octopuses communicate through posture, texture, color changes, and faint shifts in pressure. And embodied language scientists are still decoding. In this moment, both animals are reading cues. Size, intent, comfort, possibility. She extends one arm, slow, deliberate. Her leading suckers taste the water before they reach anything solid. A light touch to one of the juvenile’s arms. Speaker 1 (06:53.782) not a grab, a greeting. The younger octopus responds with a small curl of his own arm, a brief mutual acknowledgement, before gliding back into the kilp. Simple, yes, still meaningful, a quiet moment of connection between two conscious beings navigating the same forest. Her life includes choices like this every day, some quick, some contemplative, some, like meeting, brief and careful. And the most profound comes at the end of her life, laying tens of thousands of eggs, tending them without leaving her den, gently blowing water across them for months, cleaning and protecting them until they hatch. She does not eat during this time. Her body slowly fades. She dies soon after they emerge. It is one of nature’s most striking acts of devotion. Presence, patience, and purpose expressed through a being whose intelligence lives throughout her body. Back in the kelp forest, a seal passes overhead. She darkens instantly, warning red, and then slowly eases back into calm as the water settles. She evaluates, she waits, she resets when she’s ready. This is her world, alive with signals, choices, interactions, memory, and awareness. Her intelligence is not contained in a single brain or expressed through words. It is distributed, embodied, relational. a form of consciousness scientists are still working to understand. And woven through her movements is the deep quality at the heart of our episode today. A kind of soulful intelligence, a flexible, attentive inner awareness that shapes how she moves through her place, meets other beings, and makes sense of each moment with curiosity, intention, and quiet depth. Speaker 1 (08:50.872) Soulful intelligence has a quiet power. It’s the form of inner wisdom that rises when we pause long enough to listen beneath our first thoughts and our first feelings. It comes from a deeper place, our values, our compassion, our intuition, our relationships, our sense of meaning and purpose. And in many ways, the giant Pacific octopus gives us a glimpse of what this kind of intelligence feels like in motion. Our giant Pacific octopus friend moves through her world with this kind of presence. She tastes the currents before choosing a direction. She shifts her colors, patterns, textures, and shape in ways that reflect her inner state. Calm, anxious, alert, and sometimes slips into the background by mimicking the world around her. She approaches a young octopus with steady curiosity rather than fear. Each decision rises from a whole body understanding of the moment. Thoughtful, attuned, and deeply integrated. Soulful intelligence is this deeper integration. It happens when awareness, intuition, compassion, and meaning come together. It’s not just IQ or EQ, not just what we think or feel. It’s the kind of knowing that moves from the inside out, even before we have words for it. It sounds like this choice matters. This connection deserves care. I want to act from who I truly am. This is a moment to slow down and listen. Soulful intelligence is the alignment of head, heart, gut, values, and relationships. It steadies the system, it softens reactivity, it strengthens discernment, and it guides us toward decisions that feel grounded and true. The giant Pacific octopus shows this so clearly. She reminds us that intelligence does not have to be fast, loud, or analytical. It can be spacious, relational, and steady. It can emerge from quiet pauses, from sensing widely. from allowing internal wisdom to rise in its own time. Her way of living teaches us that resilience is not only about recovering, it’s about responding with integrity. It’s about moving forward in ways that honor our values and our connections. It’s about letting our deeper knowing, not fear, not urgency, not habit, shape our choices. And so her lesson becomes simple and profound. Trust your soulful intelligence. Let it steady you. Speaker 1 (11:15.298) Let it guide you towards choices that honor your values, your relationships, and your deeper sense of meaning. And recognize that your quietest wisdom often speaks the most clearly when you give it space. And that brings us to our conversation. Because when we talk about soulful intelligence, about awareness, intuition, connection, and the deeper ways a being can know the world, there is no one better to explore this with than Sy Montgomery. Sy has spent her life listening to the inner worlds of animals. She’s written about them with a tenderness and clarity that helps us see consciousness, emotion, and relationships where we once saw only instinct. And in the soul of an octopus, she opened a door for so many of us, revealing the depth, the mystery, and the undeniable presence inside these extraordinary beings. To help us step even further into this story, into this way of understanding intelligence and connection, I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back my friend, Sy Montgomery. Speaker 1 (12:21.07) So I am so, so excited to welcome you back, Cy. So welcome, Cy Montgomery, back to Resilience Gone Wild. This is such a highlight for me to get to have this conversation with you about things that just so light me up and you so light me up. We’re in season two of doing this, and I hope that we do this for like decades to come. We are gonna talk octopus and we’re gonna talk soul. And soulful intelligence is, as far as I’m concerned, like kind of a newish concept that I’m so excited to expand and make part of people’s lives. And you are the, obviously the perfect person to bring this forth with me. I’m just so thrilled. So welcome, Sai, welcome, welcome back in your jacket and you’re up in. in New Hampshire and like how beautiful it is to have you here. So yeah, it’s for those who don’t know you, you want to give a just a little background on why I’m so excited to have you here. Yeah, well, I’m the author of now 39 books. They’re all nonfiction, they’re all about animals, and they’re all about our relationships with the other creatures on this earth. And I’m just going to put it out there that you are the really important starting point for this journey that I’m on. I, you know, meeting the turtles came after I read Soul of an Octopus. And Soul of an Octopus put a completely different perspective on the depth of connection that we can have and need to have with nonhumans, with the rest of this joyful Speaker 1 (14:08.982) incredible, wise world that we live in. And I just like it brought soul to me and it brought deep connection, it brought love and I’m just that’s who you are to me. So thank you for because you brought this beginning of this new this chapter of my life to me. And I got to and for those who don’t know, I got to meet Sai in person, which is so hard these days, right? To like meet people in person, I chased her down at a book tour. a years ago, a number of years ago, and when you were touring around your new turtle book, at the time it was your new turtle book, and you’ve put out the paperback since then and gone on, I think, quite a few book tours since then. Last time we spoke, you were headed out to swim with the Manta Rays in Ecuador, and I’m actually headed to the Galapagos soon, so I’ll be thinking of you there. And I’m so excited to catch up and to have this conversation about what relationship we really need to understand that we can have with each other and with every species on Earth, whether plant, animal, fungi, force of nature, whatever. I am thrilled. A lot of people were really surprised when my 2015 book came out and it was called The Soul of an Octopus because soul and octopus were two words that didn’t usually appear together. know, mean, octopuses, as you well know, are more closely related to clams and snails. They’re actually in the same phylum. They are mollusks, although they don’t have shells. Such a thing was not thought. possess a soul. But the octopuses who I met in researching that book, which I spent about three years getting to know octopuses personally, showed me that if I have a soul, octopuses have a soul. And you can meet someone so different from you that you’d have to go to outer space or science fiction to find someone that Speaker 2 (16:10.806) different from a human. know, no bones can taste with their skin, three hearts, blue blood, detachable arms
