The Garden Within Book Review

In the new book, The Garden Within, trauma therapist and mental health expert Dr. Anita Phillips reveals how embracing emotion is the key to living your most powerful life. Just as gardens thrive in good ground, the abundant life you’ve been seeking can only be grown in the soil of your heart.

About the book….

Too often we’ve been taught to view our emotions with suspicion, seeing them as something to be suppressed, managed, or mastered. This isn’t true. Emotions are not your enemy. Internal war is not your destiny. You were created to flourish.

In this game-changing book, trauma therapist and mental health expert Dr. Anita Phillips reveals how embracing emotion is the key to living your most powerful life. Just as gardens thrive in good ground, the abundant life you’ve been seeking can only be grown in the soil of your heart.

Blending faith, the latest discoveries in neurobiology, and her own research and work as a licensed therapist, Dr. Anita shows you how to cultivate a state of emotional well-being that can: strengthen your body and reverse the effects of trauma, calm anxiety and renew your mind, unleash a new level of spiritual power in your life.

Dr. Anita Phillips is a trauma therapist, life coach, and minister. Widely recognized as a thought leader at the intersection of mental health, faith, and culture, Dr. Anita holds degrees from the University of Maryland and Regent University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The Garden Within was featured on Super Soul Podcast hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Other book features include Oprah Daily, Red Table Talk, Essence, Tamron Hall, Woman Evolve, Proverbs 31, the Today Show, Instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestseller.

This book will equip you with the tools you need to nurture a part of yourself that has been misunderstood for too long — your heart — setting you free to live just as the Creator intended.

Watch the Book Trailer

How many times have we heard, “Don’t be ruled by your emotions?” “Don’t trust your emotions?”

But that’s not true. Our emotions are not our enemy! Dr. Phillips shows us how we can embrace our emotions. We don’t have to constantly have an internal war. We can flourish just like the plants in the garden.

The Garden Within is divided into 3 parts. Soil Power, Deeply Rooted. and The Embodied Garden.

The Garden Within Book Review

In Soil Power, we learn that no emotion is a sin. We need to learn how to get rid of the lies that we have believed about emotions. Another important part of this section is seeing how Scripture defines well-being. We learn that while knowing Jesus guarantees our salvation, but it doesn’t guarantee our emotional health.

Then in Deeply Rooted, we learn how to care for our garden. An emotion is the impact a situation has on our body and brain. Researchers have found that emotion is a bodily experience. I think this is the first place that I have read that. And how those emotions can later cause an autonomic response. This section really explains a lot of how our body, brain, and emotions work.

Book Review

In the final section, The Embodied Garden, we learn about our heart-body relationship. How our emotional health can influence our physical health. I love this illustration showing how everything is connected in the human body.

Here’s what stuck out to me the most from this section.

” Your heart contains the holy of holies in the temple that Scripture says your body is.”

This section also discusses how to heal the broken heart from loneliness and grief. Learning how to overcome anger and fear are also discussed in this section.

In the chapter Tending Your Embodied Garden we learn how self care is important to our emotional well being.

I learned a lot from this book. If you have had any kind of trauma or any kind of strong emotions – i.e. anxiety or fear, The Garden Within will be a great help to you. Even if you haven’t had any kind of trauma, we all have emotions that we need to overcome so we can live life abundantly.