I would like to use 'the broken reed and the smoldering wick' as a metaphor or picture of the link between life experiences and mental health. We want to explore what the hope is after we have collided with life. We are not looking at this concept as victims, saying that we are at the mercy of what happened around us. But, thinking about collisions, we also can't help but think about a car crash. In some incidences, the damage to our lives was our own fault and in other cases, we had no choice. We were in the area where the accident took place, it happened to us and not through us.

We are saying this knowing that there were seasons on our timelines and events in our lives that we were not in control of. If we think for example of a baby born into a family system that is not healthy, that baby and later toddler and even as a teen and teenager do not have much say in what happens to them. We all had unique experiences in our unique stories, on our different journeys, and when the episodic events on our timelines have brought us to the place where we no longer felt strong or stopped believing that we could still burn with a purpose and a hope for a promising future. We can recover hope if we pause and take time to look at what happened in us and discover how we can still recover a wholeness that I believe was intended for us all.

Thoughts, emotions, and our responses to life.

When new information or a stimulus for that matter enters our day, we first experience that incident through our senses. From there it is sent to the brain for interpretation and enters through the amygdala. The amygdala can be seen as the security guard of the brain who wants to protect us. From the amygdala it moves on to the hippocampus which is like the storehouse of memories in the brain. Being aware of how our memories and consequently, our interpretations of our memories and experiences are so different, we can appreciate the role that the hippocampus plays in the processing of the stimulus or information and how the same event could be interpreted so differently by 2 people who experienced the exact same event. Our starting points and end destinations and inner landscapes will always be different but we often have very little time to explore these unseen concepts in the middle of the busyness of the visible world around us.

The hippocampus also plays a huge role in emotional processing, especially anxiety and avoidance behaviours. It is involved in emotional regulation and can also come into play in the treatment of depression and addictive behaviours which are all about a numbing and a coping. 'Numbing and coping' brings us back to the place of collisions where we started. What would we try and numb and cope with, if life here on earth was like it is in Paradise? This is a broken place, shared by broken people and it is when we see the hope in the quality of life that Jesus has paid for on our behalf, that we could turn around from giving up to giving over and opening up to the possibility that there might be more than meets the eye. There is tomorrow and there is hope!

The amygdala and the hippocampus are working together in the place of translating reactive emotions and behavioural activation into specific outcomes. The amygdala is responsible for processing emotions whilst the hippocampus is involved in episodic and declarative memory.

• Episodic memories could be located on a person's timeline or autobiography and it will be the specific memories connected to specific events in someone's life. These memories are also subject to each person's interpretation of the event where others who experienced the same event could have sensed it differently and therefore experienced it differently.
• Declarative memories involves facts, skills and concepts acquired over time. These are the things we often don't need encouragement to spend time on because we've always believed in performance and how it would better our status. The problem is we haven't always felt motivated to trade the outer for the inner and also spend time on the pillars that carries performance like our mood, perspective, beliefs, mental wellness and emotional wholeness.

If the person is in a good mental state and safe, the filters are open and the information is then sent to the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for the executive functions like problem solving, planning, critical and flexible thinking.

After effects of trauma

It is interesting to see how memory, learning and emotions happens in the same part of the brain - the hippocampus - and might help us understand why people who have gone through traumatic events and frequent stress have difficulty learning and could be mistakenly labelled as less intelligent. The case might be that these same people could be the emotionally intelligent in the group and therefore picked up and sensed all the disturbing stimulants like abuse in the world around them that eventually drained them to a place of experiencing burnout and not being able to process information as easily as others who might have had a safer and more normal life.

During trauma, the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are the most affected areas of the brain. These biological dynamics, if not managed and explored and understood so that we can move towards a place of healing and recovering wholeness, can keep a person in constant fear and stress with every new situation or trigger that are reminders of traumatic memories. The amygdala in a life of someone that has experienced traumatic events and intense stress over long periods of time, could be damaged and cause difficulty with memory processing, emotional reactions and decision-making. The amygdala is trying the protect us as the security guard and when overworked could interpret stress as a real threat after which we switch from rational thinking to impulsive reactions. We lose access to the upstairs brain and things like mental flexibility, self-regulation and problem solving. We could feel like we've forgotten all instructions and the ability to make good decisions.

The amygdala keep processing what we take in through our senses, continuously learning what is dangerous so that it can protect us. The difficulty is that when it calls on the memories in the hippocampus, it could draw from episodic memories from previous seasons on our timeline and also classify a new stimulus that vaguely look similar to an old event as dangerous and a reason to call up the fear emotions where this event and this season in life might be different. In such cases, the amygdala or emotional processing could hijack the rest of the interpretation-to-activate-behaviour-process, so that the information doesn't reach the prefrontal cortex accurately and without filters. Accurate decision-making and other executive-functions like problem-solving and self-regulation becomes dark.

When it comes to the amygdala and emotional responses, I hope it has become obvious that our responses depend heavily on interpretation and interpretation on memories and previous experiences. Stimulation of the amygdala when it perceives a threat could cause intense emotion like aggression and fear. In order to protects and enable survival, the amygdala shuts off the prefrontal cortex and it takes over. We can say that the reasoning centre goes dark and the survival centre fires up to take over. It is also obvious then in this place that we could respond in a way that onlookers who happens to have an objective view - just because they weren't subject to the same deeper interpretations and weren't subject to the same emotional overload - could judge as irrational.

What is the answer?

The answer is in a process more than one magical shift, a journey more than a quick fix but here is a good place to make a start.

 A few practical steps to take in order to maintain your amygdala:-

• deep breathing;
• mindful meditation;
• compassion practices and talk therapy;
• pmr - progressive muscle relaxation;
• emotional support and counseling;
• healthy lifestyle;
• cbt - cognitive behavioural therapy;
• nlp - neuro linguistic programming

 A few techniques to improve your hippocampus functioning:-

• Learn something new that will build new neural pathways;
• Grounding techniques;
• Exercise;
• Time in nature;
• Eat fish.;
• Blueberries;
• Nutrients especially B's;
• Dark chocolate and coffee.

 Recovering Wholeness

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a 'broken reed' as something or someone that fails when relied on for support or help. The Bible speaks about the promise about Jesus to come in Isaiah 42:1-4 and says how He will not raise His voice in the streets and promises that He will not break the bruised reed or snuff out the smoldering wick. To the casual eye, a bruised reed holds no value and is supposed to be cut off and discarded. But not to Jesus. He could see how all of us were bruised and smoldering. He also knows who we were created us be, looking just like our Father and He could see how we have lost the glory that was intended for us, the crown of His creation. As we know our Father, His words didn't return to Him void and He got the job done. He carried out what He  has promised so in Matthew 12, Jesus himself is walking on earth saying those exact same words prophesied in Isaiah - that He cares about our bruises and He heals them, that a smoldering wick can burn bright again and give light. It is even more powerful to see that when Jesus said these words He was in the company of the religious walking-talking law books, the Pharisees, reprimanding Him for breaking a rule by picking grain on a Sabbath. Jesus wants to save us from fears, from mere performance for the sake of acceptance, from being subject to endless outward standards and systems while our deeper inner worlds are locked up in darkness. He wants to restore our deeper, inner worlds, our hearts, and then our outward realities will change.