Janna’s Reviews > The Garden Within: Where the War with Your Emotions Ends and Your Most Powerful Life Begins > Status Update

“Hope is essential to life. Hope, like water, nourishes the soil of our thought-lives, but hope is not positive thinking. Hope is not optimism. Hope is a catalyst. Hope is what possibility *feels* like. Hope flows first…it is the most important emotion because it’s the foundation for every other pleasurable emotion and it strengthens us in pain. Hope sustains us so that purpose continues to grow”

“After experiencing trauma, emotional regulation can become challenging because trauma changes our nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system becomes dominant, and our window of tolerance shrinks, sometimes quite dramatically, so those once manageable stressors start to fall outside of our ability to handle them”

Traditional theories of emotion have been proven wrong. We now know that emotion is profoundly integrated into the neural circuits of our brains, inseparable from our circuits for “rational” thought. We could live without the ability to reason, but we would be completely dysfunctional if we couldn’t feel….emotions precede other mental processes by subconsciously directing our attention and focus

“Nitrogen is to a garden what love is to our hearts…Where love is deficient, fear rises…fear exists only as the absence of love.”

“Fear deceives us by disguising itself in good intentions…[but] fear can’t nourish [us]. Fear only supports weeds”

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life

“The scorched earth of your heart bears the scars, but your heart was never meant to be a battlefield”