A number in my whakapapa keeps finding me. By Nōpera Te Rangīūia’s generation, formal teaching at Te Rāwheoro had ended. I don’t yet know exactly how it ended, or what he did within it. As his descendant, I know what it means to me: a place where ancient mātauranga Māori had been taught no longer carried it forward. What Te Rāwheoro taught went underground. It did not disappear. It waited, generation to generation, unopened, like inherited things do when no one is left standi

Karakia, Aramaic prayer and Sanskrit mantra — and the breath they share Last November I asked a question I didn’t yet know how to answer: can indigenous knowledge and ancient wisdom unlock identity and wellness? It was the question Te Poutama Ora began with. Revisiting those first articles this month, I expected the answer to look like a framework. I didn’t expect part of it to arrive as a vibration in my throat. I first noticed it as a feeling. While sitting in karakia, I no

— When the wound grows through the roots of the words themselves He kupenga kaharoa tana e hao ana i ngā momo ika katoa, His is a drag-net fishing in all types of fish, mā ngā wāhine i uta e wehewehe. for the women on shore to separate. — Apirana Ngata on Elsdon Best, 1930 This blog draws substantially on the doctoral research of Jeffrey Paparoa Holman — Best of Both Worlds: Elsdon Best and the Metamorphosis of Māori Spirituality (University of Canterbury, 2007) — which a PhD

There is a man in the counselling room who does not have a drinking problem. He is not violent. He does not drink to excess. He has not passed his father's or grandfather's patterns down to his children. By every visible measure, the wound has stopped. And yet — every evening, almost without thinking, he reaches for the wine glass. He cannot fully explain it. He just does. This article is about that thread. Not the dysfunction — which may already be healed across generations

Why healing Colonisation PTSD requires the body — not just the mind There is a man I want to tell you about. Every Monday morning, he drives to the awa — the river of his tīpuna. He stands at the edge. He opens his fast there. He spends the week in deliberate contact with wai-māori — living water, his own body's rhythm, the natural world his grandfather knew. He composes a waiata that names his grandfather's river. On Friday, he sings it to close the fast. He found he couldn’

How five years in the dark became Te Poutama Ora – and Imago Dei brought me front and centre You may already be familiar with my life origins; thirty-five years in a corporate environment enabled me to build a lifestyle, from all intents and purposes...was successful. Then a life-changing event that turned that vision completely upside down. That was in 2020. That event – a Redundancy - caused grief, although I was used to restructuring, having been through multiple around 1

When the wound became the water. There is a kind of harm that is very difficult to see. Not because it is hidden. But because it has been present so long, and so completely, that it stopped looking like harm at all. It became ordinary. It became the way things are, and for many of us, what we thought of as simply ourselves. This is what is meant by normative abuse. It is, I want to argue, one of the most precise ways to describe what colonisation did — and continues to do — t

The healing that begins the moment you stop calling the wound "just how I am"...to “I am suffering from Colonisation PTSD” There is a suffering where you are triggered by specific acts or situations…and you really don’t know why. It is the suffering of not knowing something is wrong…but not knowing what that is…and…what am I complaining about? For me, this was conversations about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, movies like ‘Once Were Warriors’ or ‘Boy’. Then there was seeing non-Māori,

Three sentences. Three exiles. And why “just get over it” is not a garden — it’s a weed strategy. Poison ivy doesn’t announce itself. It sits quietly along the fence line, climbs where no one is looking, and waits for the right conditions. Then it releases. The strangulation isn’t sudden — it was always there. What changes is that the conditions are finally right for it to show what it’s been doing the whole time. Colonisation operates the same way. Most of the time it doesn’

I chose the metaphor of Poison Ivy for a specific reason: There is a plant called poison ivy. Once it gets into your system, the urushiol oil it carries can take up to three days to produce a reaction. By the time the itch arrives — the rash, the inflammation, the unbearable urge to scratch — you have no memory of the contact. You were not paying attention when it happened. You may not even have been near the plant. It spread to you on the hands of someone who did not know th

We revisit the alignment of TPO and Te Maramataka - The Temporal Spine There is a question I get asked when people first encounter Te Poutama Ora: why ninety days? It’s a fair question. Most wellness programmes are structured around weeks — six weeks, eight weeks, twelve. Clean numbers. Neat calendar blocks. The kind of timeframes that fit neatly into a semester or a quarter. Te Ara Iwa doesn’t work like that. The reason why tells you almost everything you need to know about

Tinana Autophagy — the final dimension, the complete integration. My body has died twice. Cancer twice. And both times, I thought my body was betraying me. Both times, I was wrong. My body was doing what my mind couldn't comprehend. Physical breakdown forcing the spiritual breakthrough that nothing else had managed to produce. The illness wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t a failure. It was the body doing, at enormous cost, what I hadn’t yet known how to do willingly. I spent years

What Hinengaro Autophagy is, and why it only works after the first three months Let me tell you something nobody said to me during the years I spent trying to fix my mental and emotional patterns. They were not broken. They were responding. Accurately. Intelligently. To genuinely difficult circumstances. And the reason all the tools and techniques and positive thinking and therapy weren’t landing the way they were supposed to was not that I was unfixable or resistant or too d

Symbolic Death, Dimensional Autophagy, and Identity Transformation Looking back over my life, I can identify seven moments that changed me permanently. Not because they hurt. Not because they were dramatic. But after each one, I could never return to being the person I had been before. When most people hear the word death, they think of physical death. Yet some of the most significant deaths we experience are symbolic. A marriage begins and exposes uncomfortable truths. A p

I want to tell you what forty-one years of systematic identity assault looks like from the inside. It looks like success. It looks like promotions, adaptability, professional development, and being told you’re a good cultural fit. It looks like learning which version of yourself to bring to which room. It looks like getting really good at making people comfortable — smoothing your edges, moderating your language, monitoring your Māoriness so it reads as flavour rather than th

What Wairua Autophagy is, and why spiritual clearing changes everything that follows. I want to ask you something. Not about what you believe. About what you carry. Because there’s a version of spiritual life that sustains you. That orients you. That makes the difficult things bearable and gives your life a shape that holds. And there’s a version that is slowly killing you from the inside — made of shame, secrets, inherited images of a punishing God, beliefs that drove your m

I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me at 17. You can leave. You can move five hours away, start over, cut contact, change your number, build an entirely new life in a different city with different people, a different job, and a different name if you want. The patterns will be waiting at the new address. Not because you’re broken, or you can’t escape. But because the patterns aren’t in the location. They’re in the whakapapa. They’re in the web. And you carry