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

Chapter 2 begins with the example of Maria Colon-Johnson, a “powerful” woman of faith who struggled emotionally after her daughter died as the result of an act of arson another child committed. Though she became a leader in her Christian community and an advocate for racial reforms in juvenile justice, she felt smothered and oppressed by that community’s expectations. They seemed to want her to overcome her grief in order to prove Christ’s power, even quoting the story of Job to her, in which God kills the children of a righteous man, Job, to prove a point, and as recompense gives him twice as many children. While working with Phillips, Maria finally wept in front of her, stating that she had not cried in front of someone else since her daughter died.

Phillips uses this example to point out that many religious people fall into the trap of avoiding negative feelings to avoid burdening anyone else. Sometimes they externalize and project that attitude as well, urging others to “be optimistic, think positive thoughts, or remember to be grateful” (17). Phillips discourages this approach because denying pain only increases it. She uses Bible verses to explain that Christian people often attempt to fix a broken spirit without tending to the sorrow, or emotional hurt, that created the broken spirit in the first place.

Throughout the history of American Christianity, particularly African American Christianity, emotions were (and still are) mostly seen as obstacles. This is based on ancient Western philosophies, including the Platonic and Stoic models, both of which defined emotions as “irrational reactions” (19) to be tamed or even destroyed in order to better serve God. Though the African American Christian community encouraged people to show emotions more openly than their white counterparts, they also emphasized mental strength as the non-negotiable companion of emotion. One can feel emotions but must not let them influence decisions or lead to weakness.

Phillips notes that Jesus Christ’s own actions in the New Testament contradict this approach. Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, raged at the moneylenders in the Temple, prayed while weeping and even sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and cried out to the heavenly Father while dying on the cross. At no point did Jesus rebuke himself or his followers for displaying emotion. Phillips asks readers to see their heart, or their true and full experience of their emotions, as “immeasurably valuable to God” (22).

In Phillip’s model, the heart represents soil. Words, whether spoken by others or to oneself, are seeds, and if the soil of the heart accepts these seeds, they germinate into beliefs. However, seeds need more than soil to grow. In this model, faith represents the air necessary for germination, and feelings are the water necessary for germination. If one refuses to feel emotions fully, the garden dries out, and all the seeds die. Phillips points out that emotions often draw literal water from people in the form of tears and sweat. In order to have a healthy garden, feelings must flow like water through well-drained soil. Too much water drowns the seed; too little leaves it parched. Allowing the full experience and expression of emotions creates the essential bedrock of a healthy inner garden. Emotional well-being, states Phillips, is not a constant positive state. It is the ability to notice and fully appreciate all emotions while understanding that they are an essential ingredient of mental health.

Chapter 3 begins with the example of Phillips’s coworker Casey, who worried that at age 34 he wasn’t accomplishing what he thought he would by that age. Phillips encouraged him to set goals for himself to accomplish over the next year and share them with her. When he did, she noticed that they could be sorted into three categories: relationships, purpose, and legacy. When Casey questioned what had inspired these categories, she replied that they were essential parts of her scriptural model for fertile ground, in which the garden of well-being grows. The story of Genesis, or the creation myth that begins the Old Testament, states that after creating water and soil, God commanded three types of plants to grow: grasses, herbs, and fruit trees. She assigns these plants to life zones—relationships, purpose, and legacy—and encourages readers to write down their feelings and reactions to the following explanations.

Grass represents relationships because of its nature as a thriving mass. Grass rarely, if ever, grows on its own as one single stalk. It becomes a meadow or a pasture through the presence of others of its kind. Relationships with the self, with other people, and with God are the main subcategories of the relationship life zone. She invites readers to reflect on their experience with themselves, others, and God, and on the positive and negative aspects of those relationships.

Herbs represent purpose because they don’t exist simply to exist; they were made with a purpose. This category contains both crops and medicinal herbs, and their purpose is to achieve something besides existence. They are meant to be harvested, processed, and turned into nourishment or medicine. Purpose serves the larger community, and it doesn’t need to be dramatic to have impact. Phillips invites readers to reflect on the need that moves their heart and the gifts they could offer to meet that need in order to be the herb that fixes the problem.

Fruit trees represent legacy because they take longer to grow and provide fruit, but produce immeasurable benefits after the they grow: “Trees exemplify legacy because trees stand for generations” (41). Many interpret legacy as children and financial holdings, but a legacy can be published writings, art, an organization, mentoring, or educational programs.

A healthy garden requires all three life zones to thrive. It also requires the soil of the heart, combined with “the most important nutrient” (43), which is love. Love accompanies the aeration of faith, the watering of hope, and the germination of the seeds of belief. Phillips quotes a line from the Letter to the Corinthians from the New Testament, stating that three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these three is love.

Through this metaphor, Phillips dismisses the idea that spirituality is the result of conquering emotions and ignoring one’s pain: It’s actually the result of cultivating emotions and honoring pain by using the internal garden of well-being.

Chapter 4 covers common roadblocks that people trying to cultivate the garden within encounter. Phillips details the problems her coworker Casey faced in trying to meet the goals he set. His perceived lack of progress frustrated him, but Phillips pointed out that he was trying to conquer his emotions and essentially destroy them, not honor and cultivate them.

To explain this issue, she introduces the biblical example of the Garden of Eden. In the beginning of the biblical creation story, God creates Adam and Eve, and gives them a beautiful garden called Eden. He forbids them from eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, one of two sacred trees in the garden, along with the Tree of Life. A serpent that lives in the garden (the Devil in disguise) encourages them to eat from the tree. Eve gives in, eating the fruit and giving fruit to Adam. God exiles them from the garden, denies them access to the Tree of Life, and ensures specific consequences. Phillips states that the Garden of Eden was God’s original model for the garden in every human mind. However, after Adam and Eve’s transgression, Eden was irreparably changed, and so are our inner gardens. The parable of the sower (from Chapter 1), explains the unique issues facing the soil of the heart after Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden. The packed ground, the stony soil, and the thorny soil all represent unique spiritual challenges that can halt spiritual growth.

The packed ground, also called the “wayside,” or a well-trodden path that has been compacted into heaviness, represents sadness. Phillips compares the packed ground to clay, explaining that clay holds water and is nutrient-rich. Sadness and grief are functions of love, so they can make the garden within quite fertile. However, clay doesn’t drain well and can become a swampy trap of grief if left untended. It can even dry out and harden into numb paralysis.

The stony soil represents anger. Phillips compares this to desert sands. While sand is dry and waterless, it is very well aerated, unlike clay. Air, which represents hope in Phillips’s model, can exist alongside the stony soil of anger but cannot bear fruit without love, an emotion that gets burnt up in the face of too much anger.

The thorny soil represents fear. Philips compares this soil to silt that weeds love to grow in. In the original parable of the sower, Jesus defined the thorny weeds as anxiety, the deceitfulness of wealth, and idle pleasure. Silt is fertile, but it erodes easily, meaning that only weeds can take root in it, and their root systems quickly drain all the nutrients away.

Although these three different types of bad soil exist, the parable also contains good ground. Loam represents the good ground, states Phillips. Crucially, loam is not separate from clay, sand, or silt but represents a balance of all three. Creating fertile ground for the garden within does not require excising all the bad ground but instead creating a balance of the different soil types so that they support one another and compensate for their shortcomings.

Chapter 5 encourages readers to actively visualize and tend to their inner garden. Phillips reminds the reader that most peoples’ gardens are a mix of healthy and unhealthy plants, pointing out that when this book was published, most people had lived through several global crises, including the COVID pandemic. People were grieving, dealing with mental disorders exacerbated by isolation and the breakdown of social infrastructure. She states that the Christian culture that emphasizes mastery over emotions and prioritizing the comfort of others over one’s own emotional health has tragically contributed to mental suffering among Christian Americans, especially African Americans. She advocates for the inner garden model to counteract this emotional health deficit.

Chapter 5 breaks down the cultivating of an inner garden into four achievable steps: deciding what you want to grow, preparing a location, setting up a watering system, and planting the seeds. Step 1, deciding what you want to grow, starts with listing hopes and goals for the three different life zones (relationships, purpose, and legacy).

Step 2, preparing your location, involves removing weeds (or obstacles to spiritual growth), whether they are distractions, bad influences, or temptations, and then testing the soil, removing any tendency to be overly sad, angry, or fearful. Without judgment or shame, one must explore the soil condition and use intentional exercises for body awareness; one can temper painful mental conditions with memories of joy and prayers to God for help. A footnote warns readers that these self-led methods are of limited scope and that a professional should guide one through complex or highly painful traumas.

Step 3, setting up a watering system, involves finding sustainable ways to “replenish yourself emotionally” (70). Creative outlets, social engagement, and self-care all help water the inner garden and make it fertile.

Step 4, planting your seeds, involves identifying the seeds (or beliefs) already planted in the inner garden. These seeds can be positive or negative, and Phillips notes that many negative seeds have religious underpinnings, involving beliefs of unworthiness or impurity. She encourages readers to think about what they want their beliefs about love, God, life, and purpose to be and what seeds to plant to get there.

The chapter ends by assuring readers that “transforming rough patches of soil takes time” (72) and that one should not feel the need to rush the process.