The Garden Within: Where the War with Your Emotions Ends and Your Most Powerful Life Begins

“I was looking directly at two things God made, and those two things looked alike. Scriptures began to float to the surface of my heart, verses and passages that used flourishing gardens to describe human flourishing.”

This quote introduces the book’s basic premise: that the internal structures of the human brain and the organic structures of the natural world mirror each other. Not only that, but they mirror each other to reinforce the proper way to care for the human brain: as if it were a garden.

“A garden’s condition depends on its soil; the condition of the garden within you—spiritually, mentally, and physically—depends on the soil of your heart. That means embracing your feelings. All of them. And that means it’s time to end the war.”

In this passage, Phillips showcases her characteristic style of imagery through repeated metaphor. Her distinctive, staccato style of sentence structure is likewise eye-catching, creating momentum and certainty in the reader’s experience.

“Plato’s division between thinking and feeling became a defining feature of Western culture: mind good, emotions bad.”

This quote reveals Phillips’s wry simplification of complex philosophical concepts. Her skill as a speaker and an internet personality is evident in how she presents the information, allowing intimidating philosophical models to become more digestible through truthful yet succinct presentation.

“Emotional well-being does not mean that we are always happy. Emotional well-being is our capacity—and willingness—to feel all our feelings. It requires us to be aware of, acknowledge, and experience our feelings.”

This passage is a good example of Phillips’s efforts to puncture common myths about emotional health that both popular and Christian cultures often propagate. She acknowledges the inclination to enforce positivity in larger social spaces in order to accommodate others but cautions that this practice is ultimately harmful. Instead, she emphasizes that emotional well-being is complex and requires care like a garden.

“The life zones in your garden aren’t divided by brick walls. A garden is an interconnected system where each part depends on every other part.”

Phillips emphasizes one of the key tenets of her model: that all parts of the human internal experience interconnect. In the expanded model of Eden’s life zones, she points out that improving one zone often helps improve another at the same time.

“Many things nourish our heart-soil, like joy, peace, and kindness, but love is the most important nutrient. Fruit nourished by love-rich soil is better in every way.”

This quote underscores the importance of love in Phillips’s model. The Bible upholds love as the greatest virtue, and Phillips strongly supports this in her model. The transformative power of love is crucial to a healthy inner garden.

“Let’s say I decide I want a pear tree in my backyard. I buy pears from the grocery store, glue a string to each pear’s stem, then go to my yard and hang the pears on a tree already growing there. Success! Well, sort of. I have a tree with pears on it, but I do not have a pear tree.”

Phillips combines her characteristic humor with her skill in creating metaphorical imagery. The idea of a person gluing pears to a different kind of tree is vivid, unexpected, and funny, allowing readers to easily remember this example while considering the more abstract concepts in the rest of the chapter.

“Since the fall changed the ground, faith, hope and love are no longer a given. Now sadness, anger, and fear are.”

This quote sums up the nature of the consequences of ‘the fall,’ or Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden for disobedience. God told Adam that he had to sweat and toil to produce crops, and Phillips extends that consequence to the inner garden as well, equating poor soil in Eden to problems in the garden within a person’s heart.

“This isn’t a simplistic binary between good ground and bad ground. You are not a dichotomy, all or nothing. Some areas of your heart may be perfectly fertile for something, yet another area of your heart-soil may need to be healed. That’s what cultivating the heart is about. None of us is perfect.”

This passage emphasizes the complexity of the inner garden. Phillips’s model emphasizes that bad soil does not exist; it is simply soil that is out of balance. She advocates for understanding that the different states of soil or of the heart should exist in tandem and interact to become balanced: None requires elimination.

“Living a powerful life requires you to embrace how your spirit, heart, mind, and behavior work together seamlessly. That means approaching your own heart as a garden rather than a war zone where you’re constantly battling your emotions.”

Phillips displays the fundamental paradigm shift of her work. Approaching emotions as valuable assets to be cultivate, honor, and love is a departure from more traditional Christian understandings of emotion as obstacles to morality.

“Transforming rough patches of soil takes time. As you begin to intentionally cultivate your garden, you don’t need to rush. If you try to do all the things at once, you may deplete the soil rather than restore it.”

In this quote, Phillips introduces the transition from as Part 1 to Part 2, which outlines more actionable strategies and exercises for cultivating the inner garden. Phillips moves from an explanation to an invitation to start cultivating and visualizing.

“We know that we have a spirit, a heart, a mind, and a body, but when it comes to taking care of ourselves, that knowledge is meaningless if we don’t know how each part depends on the others.”

This quote introduces an expansion to the model that Phillips presents in Part 1. Instead of heart leading to mind leading to action, Phillips is beginning to complicate the model by constructing a system that circulates strength and weakness among the different parts.

“A garden is a system we all understand. In every part of the globe, among every people group, against every cultural backdrop, across human history, people understand this system. We know the parts. We know the relationships. We know what can be produced.”

Phillips notes that agriculture is almost universal among human civilizations, and therefore we all seem to have a basic understanding of how it works. This makes garden metaphors a useful communication method for spreading the spiritual philosophy, since gardening provides a relatable inroad to almost every culture.

“Embodiment is central to what it means to be human. Jesus had to put on a body like ours to have an experience like ours, including our emotional experiences. For Jesus to be made in the ‘likeness of men’ was to be embodied.”

This quote exemplifies one of Phillips’s crucial tenets: Humans are fundamentally emotional beings, and that is the most divine thing about us. When becoming incarnate among humans in Christian mythology, Jesus could not understand humanity without fully experiencing emotions, and Jesus’s full emotional range remains one of his most striking things characteristics.

“I can’t remember the first time I heard the word trauma in the context of emotional and mental health, but these days, it’s hard to imagine there is anyone who has not heard it. This widespread awareness is a good thing because trauma is an issue that has almost certainly touched your life or the life of someone you love. Trauma can affect anyone. No one is exempt.”

Phillips introduces her argument that trauma is actually a pervasive issue among modern humans, instead of a relatively rare occurrence related to extreme violence or near-death experiences. Trauma is so pervasive among all echelons of society that Phillips argues that most people need to heal from some form of inner trauma, and she cautions readers not to dismiss their own pain.

“It’s so important for us to recognize that people do recover from mental illness. Mental illness isn’t a life sentence, but untreated mental illness might be.”

In this quote, Phillips points out that people often consider mental illness something to hide and sublimate under the strength of the mind and reason. She notes that mental illness, when correctly treated, is not nearly as disastrous a fate as untreated, secret, or ignored mental illness, which can lead to chronic health problems or even death by suicide.

“The fact that He loves us broken is so much more powerful than if He only loved us perfect. He is too good a God to ever withhold His love from you.”

This quote underscores the basis of Phillips’s understanding of the nature of God. She asserts that God is such a good and understanding Creator that He loves us even when we are broken, and we should therefore always feel that we can depend on Him.

“Your brain’s thinking activity is not a ‘higher function’ that stands above and controls your embodied life. Instead, your mind is very much the fruit of your uniquely embodied life.”

In Phillips’s characteristic style, she eviscerates yet another popular myth about mental health: that the mind can control the emotions. Instead, she points out that in fact, a healthy emotional life is crucial to creating a healthy, strong, positive mind.

“A portion of our nervous system is linked to our heart, our brain, and our belly. It looks like a tree. The Creator planted that tree of life in the midst of your garden within. To understand this tree, and the role it plays in the relationship between our emotional and physical well-being, let’s trace its growth.”

This passage expands on the model of the inner garden as a physical manifestation within the human body. Phillips argues that the tree-like structure of the main nervous system reflects the Tree of Life that remained in Eden after Adam and Eve’s exile. The Tree of Life provides endless love and eternal vigor, which the love of Christ represents in heaven and the inner garden represents on Earth.

“Learning how emotional pain can hurt our bodies is important. It’s also important to know that healing can begin in our bodies too. We are a system.”

This quote exemplifies Phillips’s main strategy for mental health: The emotions that cause pain can also bring healing when one negotiates them differently. The model points out that the inner garden simply needs to be tended in another way, not transplanted or ripped out entirely.

“Anger is most often the response when we feel a sense of both certainty about and individual control in the situation. We know what’s happening and feel empowered to do something about it.”

Phillips describes the nature of anger as part of the “soil” system in the inner garden, noting that it can be a motivating and healing force. Another crucial tenet of the argument is that all the different types of soil (or emotions) are good and necessary, but sometimes they are out of balance and must be adjusted or processed.

“Sometimes we say we trust God even when we’re not sure that we do. It can be hard to sit in the presence when you’re not sure you’re safe there. Not trusting God is the same as being afraid of God. But it’s okay to share your fears with the Creator. It’s okay to say that you are afraid of what might happen.”

This quote shows Phillips’s characteristic compassionate, straightforward style of writing. She acknowledges the difficulty of fully trusting an intangible, confounding divine presence and assures readers that God is patient and will sit with you while you grapple with the seemingly impossible task of trust.

“Even though the fall made the ground unruly and the work much harder, our garden is still a place of value.”

Phillips showcases another of her main philosophical and therapeutic points: Even though cultivating the garden is difficult and sometimes painful, and even though it will never be perfect, it is still of great value. The pursuit of perfection can discourage people from working on themselves, and she encourages readers to instead see the garden as a priceless mess that only improves.

“Try to keep the seeds of truth in your heart. Do not let your faith escape. Do not let your hope escape. Do not let love escape. But if on a hard day something does slip away, you know how to get it back.”

This quote displays the importance of emotional resilience. Throughout the book, Phillips points out that on some days, pain and negative emotions win. However, this doesn’t mean that one has lost the battle. It simply requires rebalancing one’s emotions and being kind to oneself.