Since dropping out of Yale University as an undergraduate studying neuroscience in 1995 (when he realized the department didn’t even have concepts to attach to the interoceptive experiences he was having on a meditation cushion), Gabriel has spent more than thirty years rigorously investigating the intersections of neuroscience, awareness-based practices, and Indigenous Lifeways with many of the world’s leading experts in neurophysiology and connection science, and with Indigenous mentors from places as diverse as the Amazon Basin, the Pribiloff Islands, Africa, Australia, and Hawaii.

Trained at the Stanford University Creative Writing department, he is the author of the Autonomics trilogy, which includes The Neurobiology of Connection: Re-Wilding the Deep Nervous System for Wellbeing (2024), GROUND: How Modernity Disconnected from the Earth, Why it Matters, & How to Fix It (2025) and Body as Verb: The Genius of the Vertebrate Movement System (forthcoming 2026), Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, A Field Guide to the Missing Words of North America, the handbooks Finding Home in Your Nervous System, Autonomic Triage, and The Role of Autonomics in the Origin and Healing of Chronic Illness, the children’s book Origin Stories, the short story collection Can’t Get Home, and Destoryer of Empire (poems 2020-2022).

He is host and Executive Producer of The Restorative Practices Film Series, The Connection Masterclass: Interviews on the Medicine of the Ancestral Future, The Autonomic Spectrum Lectures on Evoking Connection States, and Lectures on the New Foundation Model in Autonomics.

He has trained Indigenous tribal leaders, corporate executives around the world, leaders of global activist movements, and been asked to train the entire faculty of one of the world’s leading medical schools. Autonomics has been requested as a modality by the United Nations, a division of NATO, and a handful of the world’s leading executive coaching and leadership development firms including the Leadership Cirlce, Aberkyn, and McKinsey & Co.

Gabriel teaches Autonomics internationally, and at the Hearth Science headquarters in Northern California, about 45 minutes northwest of the Golden Gate bridge (Nicasio, CA population 124). When not leading Hearth Science, you will likely find him tending a forest, on a tennis court, or spending time with his family.

Learn more at www.naturezagabriel.com