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

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

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

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

What if the most important healing you ever do is not for yourself, But for the generations who come after you? This companion tool sits alongside your monthly Dimensional Autophagy workbook. It is not reading material — it is a practice tool. Pick it up when a pattern won’t shift. Dimensional Autophagy moves through five dimensions across five months. For most patterns, the four-phase process — Recognition, Breakdown, Metabolisation, Release — is sufficient. You name the pat

Understanding Dimensional Autophagy Your body has a secret. When you fast — when you give your cells space from the constant work of digestion — something remarkable happens. Your body doesn’t just rest. It cleans house. This process is called autophagy, from the Greek meaning ‘self-eating.’ Your cells break down damaged proteins, clear out toxic waste, recycle what can be reused, and rebuild with what’s healthy. It’s not destruction. It’s a transformation at the cellular lev

The Healing Dimension of Creative Expression Ko te auaha te ara e tukuna ai ngā kōrero o te whatumanawa. Creativity is the pathway through which the stories of the heart find release. Let Me Tell You About a Poem A few years ago, my daughter wrote a poem for me. It was about plastic windows. On the surface, that does not sound like much. But when I read it, I felt something shift in my chest — a recognition so deep it was almost physical. She had found language for something

There is a world that exists before a life is born. A threshold. A held space between what is and what is becoming. Our tūpuna knew this. They built everything around it. The Whakapapa of a Wound series traced a wound from childhood through to the next generation — from the child at the washing basket to the Tamariki asking why they cannot go home. But there is a place the series did not reach. A place before the washing basket. Before the child draws her first breath. Befo

Series Introduction Humble Beginnings: Matapihi Kirihou – The founding backstory of Te Poutama o te Ora The plastic windows were never just plastic. They covered what glass couldn’t be afforded. They let in light, but not clearly. And they were the beginning of a backstory that travels forward — into bodies, into relationships, into the homes our children grow up in, and sometimes into the arms of experiences, others and systems that step in when those homes become unsafe.

The Question Children Carry What the Whakapapa passes on – the Children of the Wound The continuing story of Mere Children of the Wound This is the fourth piece in The Whakapapa of a Wound. We have followed Mere from the washing basket, through the biology of her childhood, into the relationships that replicated what she first learned about love. Now we turn toward the children. Toward the question that is the most tender of all: Why am I not with my Mum and Dad? There Is No

Last week, I introduced the Weeds of Anxiety and how those were planted at the age of two when a sibling arrived, and all of the love and attention went to this new person. Leaving the question for this two-year-old of "why do they need them?"...." aren't I enough?". We pick up this story again, this time in relation to Mere - a Māori Wahine struggling with these weeds that have played out in her life. This narrative now forms a wider body of work called 'Whakapapa of the Wou