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

Chapter 11 covers the biblical basis of Phillips’s garden model of internal human experience. Beginning in Genesis, or the biblical creation story in the Old Testament, Phillips recounts how the first man was made of the dust of the ground, and then around him God made the Garden of Eden, full of fruit-bearing trees. In the garden, God planted the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He made a river flow through Eden to water it, and the river branched off into four smaller rivers as it left the garden to the East. God tasked the first man with working the garden and protecting it. Though the Tree of the Knowledge usually takes center stage, Eden also has a Tree of Life, to which humans lost physical access after being exiled from Eden. Phillips states that the Garden of Eden is a model for the neurological structure of the garden within each human being as well. Using diagrams, she points out that the nervous system, which links most strongly to the belly, heart, and brain, looks like a tree, and argues that the nervous system thus represents the Tree of Life.