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

In this chapter, Phillips explores the mind-body connection. A client named Brian, recently diagnosed with a nerve disorder that caused pain throughout his body, struggled to locate emotions in his body as Phillips asked him to. Finally finding and acknowledging the places where his sadness were (his head and chest), enabled him to cry, and afterward, he was surprised to find that his pain significantly lessened. Phillips notes that emotional well-being has a huge impact on the body (and vice versa). Phillips expands the heart-as-soil model, stating that the soil extends from the heart to the entire body.

In the New Testament, Jesus displayed intense physical as well as emotional pain during the crucifixion. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his execution, Jesus experienced severe depression, felt paralyzing terror, wept strongly and loudly, and experienced hematidrosis (or hematohidrosis, a condition in which one experiences stress so profoundly that one sweats blood): The blood vessels in Jesus’s forehead burst, and blood mingled with his sweat. He prayed to be spared from crucifixion, and the Scripture notes that God heard his prayer, though he still died on the cross. Phillips argues that God, hearing Jesus’s prayer, met the need of his heart—to find the strength to undergo the torture of execution—instead of the need of his mind—to escape from physical stress. Praying calmed Jesus to the point that when the Roman soldiers arrived to arrest him, he stood and identified himself, and his words were so powerful that they physically knocked the soldiers to the ground.

Emotional embodiment is therefore central to the experience of being human. Jesus could not be human without experiencing strong emotions, and his powerful negative emotions were not shameful; they were the conduit of his eventual positive strength and power.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS), or the unconscious processes of the nervous system in keeping the human body alive and regulated, is intensely affected by emotion, memory, and sensation. Trauma can throw the ANS into disarray without the conscious mind understanding how or why. The apostle Paul, an influential Christian leader and follower of Jesus, likewise experienced intense, seemingly disconnected bodily sensations that he described as painful and overwhelming, though he found relief in his faith. Though many of Paul’s writings are lamentations against the weakness of his flesh, Phillips cautions that the body is not an enemy, only fallible and in need of love and care to be strong.

Chapter 8 explores the pervasive effect of trauma on the garden within. Phillips cites two stories: a soldier who experienced PTSD after surviving the war in Afghanistan, and a mother feeling overprotective of her daughter and withdrawing from her husband because of sexual abuse in her childhood. Phillips notes the profound influence of trauma on mental health: “No one is exempt” (102) from the negative effects of trauma. In 2022, the National Council for Mental Wellbeing found through a massive survey that 70% of Americans experienced a traumatic event, a statistic that mirrors other surveys worldwide. Even people lucky enough not to experience trauma themselves are still affected by the trauma of their caregivers, loved ones, and children. Some types of trauma, like genocide or institutionalized slavery, affect entire communities and populations.

Trauma’s most egregious damage usually affects a person’s emotional regulation. Emotional regulation, reconceived by Phillips as “water flow” into the garden, becomes destructive, eroding the soil and leading to negative effects on the plant of the mind and its fruit. Phillips emphasizes that unwanted behaviors, like addiction or emotional breakdowns, are often the things people wish to solve but are simply the “fruit” of an emotional trauma and subsequent dysregulation. Unwanted behaviors are a coping mechanism to mask emotional pain, and they will not go away until one addresses the soil (heart/body) problems that necessitate the unwanted fruit. Phillips encourages readers to be understanding and gentle with themselves and not fall into the trap of believing their pain doesn’t qualify as trauma. One doesn’t need to have undergone violent abuse in order to need to heal dysfunctional beliefs. Phillips provides several steps to start healing trauma, including creating a safe space to help combat hypervigilance and emotional dysregulation, connecting with the body, building a community like a support group or a group of friends, working with a trauma therapist, and reading books about experiencing and healing from trauma.

The chapter ends with a comment on how experiencing trauma can shake faith. Many Christian leaders explain trauma as a part of God’s mysterious plan, which will turn out well eventually, but Phillips argues that “God does not have darkness to give us” (110). All negative experiences are the result of human fallibility and the efforts of the Devil, not God; God always heals humans but never hurts them.

In Chapter 9, Phillips discusses the trauma that her older sister, Valerie, experienced as a result of mental health struggles. Undiagnosed schizophrenia and subsequent addiction to cope with the trauma had profound effects on her and on the rest of the family. Though the family now understands that Valerie had no control over her actions, during Phillips’s childhood, the family and their community blamed Valerie for her own suffering. Phillips uses this example to outline the surviving stigma of mental health issues in US society, especially in Christian communities. However, Phillips notes that people who have mental disorders should receive the same compassion and support as those who have physical conditions like a broken leg, diabetes, or cancer.

Phillips lists several common mental disorders, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder; the factors that differentiate normal negative emotional experiences from a disorder; and treatment options, including therapy, medication, and support groups. Though some faith-based groups tend to treat mental illness as a symptom of imperfect faith, Phillips cautions readers to understand that God does not use mental illness as punishment. God especially loves and cares for the weak and vulnerable. Phillips encourages readers to “let Him do what He does best: love you” (119). She states that allowing oneself to be loved by God while imperfect is a profoundly healing experience.

Chapter 10 reflects on and summarizes the models, analogies, and metaphors presented in the last first nine chapters. The soil of the heart is the basis of a healthy mind, which is represented by a plant. The behaviors that the mind enacts are the fruits growing from the plant. The garden, far from being a linear cause-and-effect between heart, mind, and behavior, instead represents a cyclical and complex system, and the health and positivity of every part affects all of the other parts. However, trying to change one part (behavior, for example) is impossible without understanding the profound effect of the other parts on the whole system.

Phillips compares the two gardens that the earlier chapters describe, the Gardens of Eden and Gethsemane, in this chapter. Jesus’s embodied experience of internal suffering in Gethsemane represents the profound emotional experience of being human, an experience that one must not ignore or devalue. In the Garden of Eden, meanwhile, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil tempted Eve. Phillips argues that tasting this fruit influenced humans to become obsessed with the power of their own minds, ignoring the importance of emotions and filling human history with “the deafening echo of the original sin” (126)

Phillips acknowledges that the switch to considering the heart the foundation of being is tough after a lifetime of prioritizing the mind. As a clinician who holds a doctorate and as a scholar who loves science, physics, and mathematics, Phillips realizes the urge to understand rather than feel. However, she argues that Jesus taught Christians that the brain’s thinking is not a higher function that controls and subjugates our embodied emotions, but instead that our thinking is the fruit of embodied emotions.