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

Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions emotional trauma, physical abuse, and addiction.

Chapter 6 begins with a discussion of the interconnected system of thought, emotion, and action in ensuring well-being. Phillips relates the story of a couple of clients who needed extra support while caring for their special-needs son, emphasizing the difference between the mother and father in accessing and comforting him through emotional support. The author notes how the emotional “flow,” or water in the garden, underpins the whole system, introducing the metaphor of the mind as a plant. If the heart is soil, then the mind is the plant that thrives or dies in that soil.

The idea that the heart’s richness is vital to the mind’s health echoes throughout the Old and New Testaments in the Bible. Phillips quotes several verses that describe the primacy of the heart in this system. However, Christian communities often ignore the importance of emotion in determining mental health, instead treating the mind as a vessel from which devotees must remove “bad” thoughts and add only “good” thoughts. Phillips rejects this premise, instead encouraging readers to see problems in the plant of the mind as indicative of issues in the soil, or heart, that must be tended to, not ignored.