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

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

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

How the Maramataka became the backbone of a 90-day wellness programme This structure I call the 90-Day Engine, the Maramataka integration —all of it—didn't come from a whiteboard session or a literature review. It came from a determination to complete an alcohol-free period, where I found myself struggling to stick to that fasting period. Then, suddenly, in the second week, it seemed to be a lot easier. That shift is where Te Ara o te 90 Rā was born. Walking My Own Programm

A Māori Christian’s Journey Through the Whakapapa Dilemma, Religious Trauma, and the Cave That Changed Everything I did not lose my faith. I lost the colonised version of faith that had been used to wound my wairua. As a child, my Christian faith was unshakeable. God was real. The Bible was the truth. I didn’t question. By my mid-twenties, it had all crumbled. Not because faith is wrong, but because the version I’d been given couldn’t hold the complexity of my actual life — m

Find Out Before You Choose Your 18-Day Practice Mōrena e hoa mā. Let me ask you something before we get into the 18-day practice plan. Have you ever started a wellness habit full of energy — and then quietly abandoned it around Day 5 or 6, not because you didn't care, but because something about the approach just didn't fit how you work? If that sounds familiar, this is the post for you. Here's what I've learned, both from developing Te Poutama o te Ora and from working with

The Double Exile, and Why You're Not Broken — You're Colonised I want to tell you about a particular kind of loneliness. The loneliness of being surrounded by people in two different worlds and belonging fully to neither of them. For a long time, I thought this was my personal failure. A character flaw. Some essential inadequacy in me meant I would always be slightly too much in one direction and not enough in another. It took me a long time — and a forced stop, courtesy of a

Kia ora koutou, Over recent months, I have been quietly developing a new part of the IAnTeMo Counselling journey — a living daily rhythm experience integrating Maramataka and Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO), my nine-dimensional wellness framework. Today’s Alignment is designed as a gentle daily guide rather than a productivity tool or traditional calendar. It offers a reflective space to pause, observe rhythm, and consider how energy, focus, well-being, and restoration may be mov

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