This chapter describes the changes the garden experiences during sadness. Using the example of Keshia, a woman who felt intense sadness and shame after several failed relationships, Phillips explains that people often experience grief and sadness in and around the heart. It can feel like heaviness or tightness. Phillips returns to the metaphor of the packed ground, or clay, which has plenty of water but no movement or air.

Feeling overwhelmed and lonely, Keshia experienced depression. She could not concentrate fully and even stopped attending sermons and services since she couldn’t muster the strength. Grief from the loss of what she thought her life would look like, and loneliness in not having anyone to talk to about it, affected her deeply. Phillips details the differences between loneliness and grief and the ways they manifest emotionally and physically. She emphasizes that untended sorrow can be deadly: It has been proven to lead to heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and other issues.

To heal the “packed ground” of sorrow in the heart, Phillips offers thought and meditation exercises to bring energy and joy back into the body. She uses the Scripture to encourage sorrowful people that hope always rises up from despair. Additionally, she notes that sadness is a function of compassion: People feel sad when their emotional needs for connection aren’t met or have been disrupted in some way. When sorrowful people offer support to other groups dealing with sorrow, it can sometimes meet both needs at the same time.

Chapter 13 describes the effects of anger on the garden within. Christian communities often encourage their members to downplay their anger as a function of Christian charity and forgiveness, but Phillips points out that anger “releases mighty energy in our system” (160), which doesn’t just go away if ignored. When silenced or turned inward, anger can and will bear bitter fruit of unwanted coping behaviors. Anger, when constant and unexpressed, can lead to addiction, obesity, and migraines and can even raise the probability of abusing others. However, when people express anger, it can help enact positive change and protect the vulnerable.

Phillips notes that in the New Testament’s Letter to the Ephesians by St. Paul, he instructs them, “Be ye angry, and sin not” (165). Anger in itself is not a sin and in fact is a quite complex emotion. It has several different parts. Unlike fear or sadness, anger can motivate action. Most importantly, it signifies what is important to us. A boundary violation, like betraying a secret, provokes anger because someone has devalued something important. Injustice, or the abuse of power at a community-wide level, provokes anger because it can have huge ripple effects that affect entire groups of people. Anger at injustice, provoking actions that protect the vulnerable, is not harmful.

In addition, anger often protects people from their fears. Represented by the stony soil, anger is thirsty for the water of love, and hope creates and supports love. Like sorrow, anger requires hope to become more stable and fruitful. However, Phillips reminds readers, anger is an essential component of the soil of an emotionally healthy heart. Phillips offers more mental and physical exercises to help reconcile the heart with anger and point it in a more helpful direction. She provides Bible verses and examples from her own life that illustrate the unique challenge of processing righteous anger without sinning, and she encourages readers to exercise mercy on themselves and the people who have wronged them (without necessarily putting themselves in danger of being wronged again).

This chapter addresses the challenge that fear brings to the garden within. Fear, as Phillips defines it, is the impact of a threatening situation on the body and the mind and can cause deep mental and physical pain. As an example, Phillips describes her fear of a mouse running rampant in her home while she dealt with the stress of caring for a newborn. The mouse did not constitute a huge problem, but her fear of the mouse interrupted her life to the point that she had to wage war against it. Fear is “a bodily response to a threatening situation” (175) that may or may not have a basis in reality. Our amygdalas (sometimes referred to as our lizard brains) regulate fear. It activates our parasympathetic nervous systems to panic without our conscious knowledge. Adrenaline floods the body without permission from the mind and, even if the threat is just a mouse, suddenly grips the entire body, so the body demands to be calmed. Existing in a constant state of alarm like this can lead to long-term health problems.

Phillips uses Bible verses to define fear as the absence of love. In order to experience more love, she encourages readers to visualize their inner garden and populate it with sensory experiences that make them feel calm, relaxed, happy, invigorated, and cared for. She advises readers to “talk to your Creator about what you need” (179). Asking God for help can be difficult for some people, so Phillips also recommends just sitting in the presence of God in loving silence.

Phillips then once more brings up the Apostle Paul, whose bodily sensations of emotion often seemed to overwhelm him. The author believes that Paul was experiencing anxiety. He described his physical-emotional vulnerability as a thorn in the flesh. The word he used in Greek is the word for the thorns Jesus was forced to wear as a crown while being crucified. Phillips compares these two afflictions to the thorny soil (the silt) in the parable of the sower. Thorns, or anxiety, are a painful plague on the human heart, but they have been present since humanity was exiled from Eden, and everyone deals with fear to some extent.

Phillips begins this chapter by describing the birth of her second child, her daughter Olivia. Wanting to experience childbirth naturally, she found a book that explained how an emotional signpost signaled each stage of labor and how the woman in labor could tell where she was in the process by staying aware of her emotions. Phillips went into labor at her house, and her doctor dismissed her claims of labor progression since the contractions were not speeding up and her water had not broken. However, Phillips felt the emotional marker that indicated the final stage, and sure enough, her baby was born soon after. She delivered into her husband’s hands: “Emotional awareness ended up being a better guide” (185) than her doctor, and more importantly, strong emotions, even negative ones, signified progress.

She then applies this metaphor to the garden within. Although caring for the garden within can be difficult and often brings up painful emotions, the garden is a sacred and holy place of great value. God tasked the first two humans with caring for the Garden of Eden but used specific words in describing that caretaking. He instructed Adam and Eve to “dress” and “keep” the garden. To dress means to work in and serve the garden. To keep means to guard and watch over. Similarly, we must preserve, guard, and cherish the garden within. Phillips offers strategies for doing so sustainably: She advises making sure to sleep, staying hydrated, eating regularly, and engaging in activities like positive social connections and outdoor time in order to keep the nervous system regulated.

Phillips ends the book by recapping that the body, mind, heart, and spirit all coexist, and the health of one affects the health of all. Even though tending, dressing, and keeping the garden within can uncover painful emotions, “you are walking the ground of your garden, and the Gardener is so pleased with what He’s found” (190).