That event – a Redundancy – caused grief, although I was used to restructuring, having been through multiple around 1 every 18 months…this one was different.

So I went through all the phases: denial – this must be a mistake, anger – how could they do this to me, bargaining – maybe they’ll change their mind. I can remember a family member saying, ‘Your employer treats you like dogs!’ They were right…then depression – I looked at my life and realised I had no career or meaningful life work; 35 years with one organisation felt like I had wasted my life.

That was followed by isolation; I went into lockdown, stopped communicating with others…worked mostly from home, although in fairness all my desk belongings ended up in the garage because I had no fixed location. I distanced myself from co-workers whom I no longer trusted. They taught me that looking after their positions was more than 35 years of experience and loyalty. Then the illness that left me unable to walk…I accepted what had happened…and started to plan my exit.

At the time I didn’t know it as the ‘cave’, but it was five years of reconstructing who I was, throwing everything out that I knew and finding a truth of who I was and had always been. Long dark moments that consumed my need to not be left vulnerable like that again. That’s when Te Poutama Ora was born. Out of that pain. I did not lose my faith in that cave – God was holding me. I lost the colonised version of faith and living as a ‘good’ citizen that had been used to wound my wairua.

What the Cave Was

From the outside, nothing about those years looked like a spiritual crisis. I was still working, still functioning, still showing up. That’s the thing nobody tells you about this kind of breakdown — it doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like someone doing everything right while something underneath them is being taken apart, piece by piece, on purpose.

For the record, I was not burnt-out…close to it…but not. I had rage for what had happened…and I used that rage to keep pushing myself forward.

I found myself listening to Nick Vaughn Jones – a Christian Prophet. Now people…please, everyone, don’t jump up and down on me about this…to me, Nick was a Prophet. He brought God and Christ in my vision, front and centre. That began with binge-watching every religious and Christian channel I could find over the course of 5 months. I found myself subscribing to the Deep End with Taylor Welch.

What resonated was his pragmatic and logical way of how God is connected to everything we do. In one of his podcasts, he talked about the stages purpose-driven people pass through when they are forced to face the false altars being removed. For me, it was my corporate identity followed by my loyalty as an employee – 2 of 7 of my symbolic deaths…which I talk about later:

· Crisis — you know change is needed, and you take no action. You maintain the false altar.

· Consecration — the altar is removed. You find yourself in the cave: isolated, hidden, refining. Costly… but…this is where the real work happens.

· Confrontation / Clash — what was made in the cave starts meeting the world. People want what you have. Life is still awkward. You’re still in survival mode.

· Multiplication — the refined work finds its scale.

· Institutionalisation — the remnants are packaged and shared on a stage. The story becomes a legacy.

When redundancy came, that took the financial stability, the corporate identity, the altar I’d built to security. And there were other opportunities where I faced these same situations, but I didn’t listen. Clearly staying in the crisis step.

So, I was forced into Consecration. I realised I was isolated. Hiding. Uncertain. Questioned everything, from my belief in God, to who I was as a Māori Wahine. The lies I had bought into and the profound effect that colonisation was having on me.

The Whakapapa Dilemma

Underneath the redundancy, an older question was waiting, one I’d carried unnamed for forty years: if I whakapapa back to Porourangi – ancestor of Ngāti Porou and Rangatira Momo ancestral lines of Te Momo, then I’m not Jewish…how can I be Christian when I don’t whakapapa back to God’s people? Come to think of that, I don’t even look like Jesus; he has blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin.

The Bible I’d been given opened with a covenant made to a specific people, and I wasn’t one of them. And the Christianity I’d received hadn’t arrived as a gift — it arrived with a flag. The Anglican ministry handed to me as a child was rooted in an agenda that reshaped the colonised into compliant subjects rather than liberated souls. My bones knew that before my mind could argue it.

So, I felt like an impostor — worshipping in a tradition that wasn’t mine, delivered by a power that had harmed my people, built on a genealogy I couldn’t trace. It was its own kind of trauma. Quiet. Not the obvious wounds. Just a constant, low-level hum of wondering whether you belong.

It was a ‘wairua assault’ — not a rejection of faith, but the colonised version of Christianity that taught Māori to see their own atua, whenua, and whakapapa as separate from God. It looked like religious liberation, but it was a wound-wearing doctrine as a disguise.

That left what felt like three options: Stay inside the toxic version of the faith as I’d received it; reject Christianity outright and return only to Te Ao Māori frameworks; or find a third way. I couldn’t do the first — I’d seen it too clearly. I couldn’t do the second either — because my encounters with God were real, not performance.

So, the Cave became the place I was driven, not led, to find the third way. I also found Ethiopian Christianity, the hidden books, Enoch, Adam, Nag Hammadi…and…if Jesus was Jewish, then he was not white…he was brown…plus…Christianity was not English…it was Jewish. The Anglican-Christian version was built on a lie. The Council of Nicaea cemented it. A bible constructed to ensure compliant subjects that fit Emperor Constantine…brown was out, white the substitution.

Seven Symbolic Deaths

Inside the cave, the dismantling wasn’t one loss — it was a sequence. I’ve since mapped that sequence as seven symbolic deaths, Te Whitu Matenga Wairua: seven chronological turns where an identity I was holding onto had to die before the next one could be born. Not seven bad things that happened to me. Seven necessary endings, each one compost for what came next. I’ve shared Te Whitu Matenga Wairua on my blog and in an academic article on Academia.edu. You can find a copy of those here on my website.

These were seven specific events that forced transition and transformation and closed an identity I held. 1983: The Death of Innocence – the child sees the adult world. 1998: Death of Whakapapa Anchor – my dad passing and the family core was fractured. 2010: Death of Physical Certainty – first cancer – the reality of death. 2011: Death of Belonging – mum passing, the daughter’s identity severed. 2020: Death of Institutional Belonging – Redundancy. 2023: Death of Life Endurance – second cancer – the corporate habit of managing illness, pushing through long hours when the corporate only demanded more, the final door closing. 2025: Death of Rescuer Identity – carrying a role and burden of others that was never mine to hold. TPO now formed.

The Whakapapa of Colonisation

The deaths weren’t random, and they weren’t only personal. Underneath them was a pattern I eventually named the Whakapapa of Colonisation. Colonisation doesn’t always arrive as an event — sometimes it arrives like poison ivy, creeping unseen until one day it’s structural. It’s in how you were raised, what you were denied, which parts of yourself got normalised into silence. I carry that as Colonisation PTSD — a real category of distress, lived long before I had language for it.

To put in context, I was born in the early 1960s, the third generation colonised by England. My mother was strapped for speaking Te Reo. I was brought up with language, tikanga and identity removed…and…before the Māori Renaissance in the 1980s. So, I am living proof that colonisation is real.

The Triple Exile

Inside that pattern, three separate exiles were operating at once, and I didn’t understand until much later that I was living all three simultaneously.

The first was the colonisation exile — cut off, generationally, from te reo, from tikanga, from the marae. My grandmother carried the Rangīūia healing lineage and had to practise it in secret because of the Tohunga Suppression Act. That severing didn’t end with her. It landed on me.

The second was the double exile — the Brown Pākehā experience. Forty-one years in corporate spaces, systematically not white enough for the Pākehā rooms and not Māori enough for Māori ones. Belonging nowhere fully.

The third was the exile of the displaced — what happens after urban migration quietly severs your connection to marae, and then your own people turn you away too, because you’ve been away too long.

Three exiles. One woman. All at once. That’s the weight that was in the Cave with me.

Restoration — God Was Holding Me the Whole Time

Here’s the part I couldn’t see until I was standing outside the Cave looking back in: God had me the whole time. I had covered my own eyes — Matapihi Kirihou o Nga Karu, plastic windows over my own sight.

The resolution to the whakapapa dilemma came through the New Covenant. Paul writes in Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, and that all who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed — not through genealogy, but through promise. Belonging was never determined by birth into the right people. My faith doesn’t cancel my Porourangi whakapapa. The cross doesn’t supersede my Te Momo whakapapa. They’re held alongside it. The impostorship was never real. It was a colonial lie wearing theology as a disguise.

That sentence — God had me the whole time — I trace back to 1983 – the death of innocence when the religious world I was in was far removed from the Anglican teachings I had been brought up in. Forty years of not knowing if I was truly God’s. The Cave wasn’t a rescue that arrived at the end. It was a presence that had been there from the first death, through every exile, through every year I thought I was simply enduring something that made no sense. The cave wasn’t abandonment. It was a whare tangata (womb) with the lights off.

What Came Out

Everything I build now — Te Poutama Ora, the nine dimensions, the Poutama itself — is the Cave, translated into something someone can walk. The seven deaths gave it a chronology. The Whakapapa of Colonisation gave it a diagnosis. The triple exile gave it a shape. The whakapapa dilemma gave it a theology. And the cave itself gave it a centre: Taha Auaha, the divine aperture, sitting at the very top of the framework, because that’s where the light finally came in.

I’m not telling you this story because it’s finished — I’m still building on top of what came out of that cave. I’m telling you because if you’re in your own cave right now, I want you to hear this before anything else from me: it is possible that you are not lost in there. It is possible you are being held.

The Image

(the original image contained my whānau; for the public version, I have protected their faces while retaining their place in taku whakapapa)

In bible college, I was asked for a single picture or creative piece that represented Imago Dei to me. I thought of my whakapapa, my grandparents, my parents and Christ, the brown version…the version that looked like me. I thought of the lands my grandparents came from, the marae, the whare karakia (church)…and the image came.

Christ, looking out over water and mountains. What came back stopped me somewhere I wasn’t braced for, because nothing in it was staged. Every face in it already belonged to the story.

Top of the frame: my Nan, and beside her my granddad, an Anglican Minister. Two people who were, by every measure, fully Māori — and one of them married the church into our whakapapa long before I had language for the wound that carried.

Beside them, my father’s parents, who I never really knew. Dad’s father died a few months before Dad was born — a son who never once met his own dad. Nan, I knew only through what she left behind: a revered Kuia, a stalwart of her community, and the carrier of an English thread that had entered our whakapapa generations before her, through a marriage. Not through conquest. Through choice — a choice that would have cost the Englishman who made it just as much standing with his own people as it ever cost her side of the ledger. Two peoples, each with their own purity rules, and one marriage that broke both sets at once.

Centre frame: my parents, on my wedding day. My mother — the last of her line to be fully Māori. After her, that unbroken thread no longer runs in the same form again. It runs through me as ninety-two percent Māori; 9 percent European; carrying both of my grandmothers’ bloodlines forward at once rather than letting one cancel the other out.

Below them: Whāngārā, my mother’s marae. And rising out of the water in front of it, Paikea — the tūpuna who came from Hawaiki atop he tohorā (a whale), the one Whale Rider borrowed its story from, because his really happened first. And beside it, Poutu Pā, my father’s marae, with its small white church standing exactly where it’s always stood.

And above all of it, unmoved by any of the arguments I used to have with myself about whether I belonged there: Christ. Not standing apart from the whakapapa. Looking directly into it.

I Was Always Imago Dei

The caption under the image says: He looked more like me. I could have left it there. It’s true, and on its own it would have been enough.

But sitting with my own tūpuna underneath that sentence, I realised it wasn’t really a claim about skin. It was the same question I carried into the Cave, arriving one more time in a different shape: does God look at all of this — the severed line, the English thread carried in through marriage, the marriage that brought the church in, the father who never met his father, the mother who was the last of something — or only at the parts of it that stayed pure?

Galatians already gave me the answer once. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek — belonging by promise, not genealogy. I used that to settle the dilemma about whether I was allowed to be Christian without whakapapa to Abraham.

What I hadn’t done yet was turn that same mercy back onto my own bloodline, and let it cover the parts of my whakapapa I’d quietly filed as complications instead of gifts. The English blood carried in through a woman who was herself a revered Kuia — not despite her mana, but somehow within it, and traced back to a marriage that cost the English side of it just as much acceptance from their own people as it ever asked of ours.

My father shaping a life around men and community without ever once being fathered himself. My mother closing out a line that had stayed unbroken for generations, so that what continues now is a different purity — it’s faithfulness across a mixture nobody chose, and everybody survived.

I don’t whakapapa back to Abraham. I never will. But I was never asked to. I was asked whether I belonged to Christ, and the answer to that was always yes — not because my line eventually straightened itself out into something that resembled holiness, but because it never had to.

Imago Dei was never a status I was working toward from inside the Cave. It was already true of every photograph in that image before I ever asked for it to be made — every severed line, every borrowed inheritance, every grandmother, whichever side of the whakapapa she came from. I wasn’t trying to become the image of God by making peace with my whakapapa. I was always the image of God, and the whakapapa was simply where it had been hiding, in plain sight, the whole time.

That’s the last plastic window. Not God’s absence from my Māori half and presence in some borrowed spiritual identity — but God’s presence in the whole photograph, unedited, from Whāngārā to Poutu Pā to a face that never got to meet his own father. I don’t need to resolve which line of me is more legitimate. I was always Imago Dei. I just needed to stop asking my whakapapa to prove it.

This is the story underneath Te Poutama Ora — the nine-dimension framework built from what the cave gave me. In other episodes, I walk through each thread in full: the seven deaths, the Whakapapa of Colonisation, the triple exile, and the whakapapa dilemma that became a theology of belonging rather than a record of exclusion.