Beyond “Mental Health”: Tending to Your Inner Garden This May
As holistic therapists, we tend to approach the month of May—Mental Health Awareness Month—with mixed feelings.
Yes, we’re grateful that we have a month dedicated to destigmatizing emotional and psychological challenges. But, we also feel called to speak honestly: the term “mental health” itself is outdated. In fact, it can be misleading.
When we say “mental” health, we unintentionally reinforce the idea that emotional and psychological well-being is just in our heads—a purely cognitive, mental, or brain-based issue. This disconnects us from the deeper truth: our emotions, our trauma, our healing—they don’t live only in the mind. They live in our bodies, our breath, our relationships, our energy, and in the pace and rhythm of our lives.
True healing doesn’t happen in the mind alone. It happens when we return to wholeness and tend to ourselves and each other holistically.
We Are Not Just Minds With Bodies—We Are Embodied Minds
Modern neuroscience, trauma research, and ancient healing traditions all point to the same reality: the human experience is an embodied one. What we often call “mental health” is actually a whole-body process. We can’t simply think our way into healing (if we could, many of us would’ve done this already). Instead, we must feel, move, rest, connect, cry, and breathe our way into healing.
If you’ve ever experienced anxiety and noticed your heart race or your gut twist into knots, you know this. Emotions show up in the body. Therefore, healing must also take place in the body, not just at the mental level.
That’s why, in holistic therapy,, we don’t separate the mind from the body, or the individual from their environment. We understand that you yourself are a system and you exist within a system—that emotional wellness is woven into how you sleep, how you eat, how you relate to others, how you relate to yourself, how you breathe, how much sunlight you get, what kind of work you do, and how safe you feel in your nervous system.
Tending to Your Inner Garden
The month of May is a time when the earth bursts into bloom, reminding us of the rhythms of nature that we too are meant to live by.
In this spirit, as therapists we often use the analogy of tending to an inner garden. Imagine your emotional life as a garden inside of you. What kind of soil are your thoughts and feelings rooted in? Soil is the foundation for growth, so perhaps thinking about your own foundation…your childhood. Was the soil of your childhood nutrient rich and fertile? Or perhaps there were factors that got in the way of your developmental years being nourishing. And now, present day - are you receiving enough sunlight—joy, rest, creativity? Are your roots nourished with connection, nutrition, movement, stillness?
There’s a beautiful quote by Alexander Den Heijer that says:
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
Too often in mainstream approaches to “mental health” focus on fixing the flower. Mainstream mental health pathologizes a person’s symptoms and rushes to suppress them. But rarely do mainstream mental health approaches ask: “What kind of soil is this person growing in? What’s happening in their environment, relationships, and daily rhythms that might be hindering their natural capacity to thrive?”
Holistic healing is about tending the soil, not forcing the bloom.
Tending to Each Other: Why We Need Each Other to Be Well
As holistic therapists, we have seen time and again that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. While the dominant mental health narrative in American culture often frames healing as an individual pursuit—“Go to therapy and figure yourself out”—this lens is only part of the story. Yes, individual therapy is incredibly valuable (we’re big fans of it!), but it is not the whole story. Humans are wired for connection, and it is within the context of relationships, community, and co-regulation that deep healing and transformation can truly take root.
Too often, "mental health" is treated like a solo project, as though the path to wellness lies entirely within individual self-awareness and boundary-setting. And while insight and healthy boundaries are crucial tools, they are not the only ones we need. What often gets lost in Westernized models of care is the understanding that we heal in relationship—in spaces where we are seen, heard, supported, and held with care.
Relational care isn't just an idealistic notion, it’s a biological necessity. Our nervous systems are wired for connection. From birth, we rely on caregivers to help regulate our emotional states because we are born with all the emotions but none the circuitry or skills to regulate those emotions. That need for co-regulation doesn’t disappear in adulthood—it just becomes less visible in a culture that values self-sufficiency and hyperindependence over interdependence. True nervous system healing requires spaces where we can feel safe with others, not just within ourselves.
Community and connection also help break cycles of silence—those invisible legacies we carry around trauma, shame, and disconnection. When we share our truths in safe, affirming spaces, we interrupt those patterns. We remember that we are not alone. And in being witnessed, we allow the exiled parts of ourselves to join, to be part of it, to feel connected which has a significant impact on well-being.
A major challenge to truly engaging with the connection, relational and community aspect of healing and growth is an overemphasis on boundaries and an underemphasis on repair being taught in Westernized therapy. Boundaries are absolutely essential—especially with people who have caused harm or who are unsafe—but when we’re taught to cut people off at the first sign of discomfort or conflict, we risk reinforcing disconnection rather than healing it. There’s a difference between protecting yourself and abandoning the possibility of deeper, more meaningful connection.
Relational repair—learning to work through conflict, rather than around it—is one of the most transformative practices we can engage in. It asks us to stay present, to lean into discomfort with care, and to recognize that closeness often comes after rupture and repair, not before. Learning how to navigate relational repair can be uncomfortable, but it is also deeply liberating and humanizing. We were never meant to do this work or life alone.
Individual therapy can absolutely be the doorway to healing. It can be the first time someone feels safe enough to explore their inner world. But we cannot build a whole life of connection with just one safe relationship. Healing requires more than one safe person. It requires community, chosen family, soul friendships, and people we can be real with—especially when things get messy.
In a culture that often individualizes pain and commodifies healing, we must return to what’s always been true: we need each other. Not in a co-dependent way, but in a deeply human way. Healing happens when we are held in community, when we experience safe connection, and when we learn—together—how to return to each other with more presence, compassion, and care.
What True “Mental Health” Support Looks Like
True support for emotional well-being honors the whole person. In our work as a holistic therapists, this includes:
Offering a person information (psychoeducation) on what is happening in their brains and bodies when they are feeling a certain way and how past relational experiences and traumas can create unfinished stress responses that are being held within the body.
Speaking the language of the body by supporting nervous system regulation through breathwork, movement, somatic awareness and somatic exercises.
Exploring ancestral patterns or unprocessed trauma stored in the brain and body.
Working with the rhythms of nature—resting more in winter, expanding in summer. Supporting folks to learn and identify their own inner rhythms related to hormonal fluctuations and their own personal seasons of healing, growth and harvest.
Integrating nutrition, sleep, and lifestyle into the therapeutic process.
Encouraging embodied presence (the felt sense), rather than intellectual analysis alone
Guiding people to experience or feel their own energy, the fluctuations of that energy and sensing the energy of other nervous systems and the culture around them.
Cultivating self-compassion and slowing down enough to feel what you feel, helping your body learn to metabolize and digest the sometimes intense emotional energy that comes with various life experiences.
Experiential practice of expressing needs, hurts, boundaries, and preferences and coaching and skill building on how to work through conflict not only within one’s self but with others as well.
Encouragement for you to participate in group processes and/or find a community you feel connected to and safe in.
This isn’t about chasing happiness or symptom relief. It’s about becoming more fully yourself and in doing so symptoms reduce and a sense of well-being, contentness and peace arrive. It’s about inhabiting your body, trusting your rhythms, and allowing space for all of you—grief, joy, fear, creativity, longing—to exist and be held with care and compassion.
Mental Health as Wholeness
So this May, instead of asking “How’s your mental health?”, try asking:
How’s the soil you’re growing in?
Are you getting the light, nourishment, rest, and connection you need?
What would it mean to truly honor your wholeness—not just your mind, but your body, spirit, and heart?
Healing isn’t linear. It’s seasonal. It moves like a garden—sometimes blooming, sometimes resting, sometimes shedding what no longer serves. When we honor this, we shift from treating symptoms to cultivating well-being.
Let’s reclaim “mental health” as embodied wellness—a return to our natural state of balance, aliveness, and connection.
Let May be your invitation to tend your inner garden.
Gently. Patiently. Holistically.
If our approach to “mental health” speaks to you, reach out to us! We seriously cannot wait to connect with you and walk alongside you on your journey to wellness. Just click the “contact” tab in the upper righthand corner of our website, submit a contact form, and we will be in touch with you ASAP!
♡ The Brave Embodiment Counseling Team
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