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

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child death and emotional and physical trauma.

Phillips opens Chapter 1 with a childhood story about a class assignment to grow pea plants in a clear container so that she could see the seed split and the roots develop. At first, its growth was miniscule and difficult to track, but her teacher told her that a lot was happening under the surface. Like the seed, Phillips’s childhood experiences, both good and bad, invisibly shaped her spirit and her mind. She lists some of the beliefs she developed from her experiences and how they encourage and limit her.

In college, she realized that the structure of a neuron looks strikingly similar to the structure of her pea plant seedling from grade school. She likens this similarity to a verse from the Book of Romans in the Bible that states that the nature of God can be best understood through the nature of His creations. Though at the time she felt some trepidation at the prospect of criticism from the academic community, she ultimately decided to pursue her intuition to search for biblical parallels to psychology and neurology via gardening, plant, and agricultural