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 I had never been able to name. Something about what it is to look through a barrier at the world, where the quality of light that comes through is not quite clear. About beauty that is simultaneously present and just out of reach.

That poem was not just a gift. It was a passage, and when I received it, I understood something about creativity that no clinical definition had ever captured for me:

Creative expression is not about producing something beautiful. It is about giving something held, somewhere to go.

That is what Taha Auaha is about.

You Have Probably Been Told You Are Not Creative

Maybe you haven’t been told directly, maybe it was more subtle than that.

At art classes, you were made to feel foolish. Your singing was compared unfavourably to someone else’s. Someone laughed at something you made. Maybe the culture or home environment you grew up in did not have space for creative expression — people were too busy surviving.

Maybe you were a Māori child who lost access to the waiata and kōrero that would have been your natural creative inheritance. Your creative language was taken before you knew what it was.

Whatever the pathway, many of us arrive at adulthood carrying the belief that creativity belongs to other people. To the talented ones. The trained or those selected as being worthy. The ones who were given time, space and encouragement.

This is one of the most damaging beliefs we can hold. Not because everyone needs to make art, but because we all carry stories that need somewhere to go — and if we have decided that creativity is not for us, we have also decided that those stories have no passage.

You are not trying to be an artist. You are trying to give your held stories somewhere to go. That is a different thing entirely.

What Taha Auaha Actually Is

Taha Auaha is the ninth dimension of Te Poutama o te Ora — our Māori wellness framework. The word auaha means creative, inventive, and generative. But in the context of healing, we understand it more specifically than that.

Taha Auaha is the dimension of the passage.

Think about it this way. Each of us carries, somewhere in our body, a library of stories. Stories from our own life — things that happened, things we lost, things we never got to say. Some stories from before our own life — from our parents, grandparents, the generations before them, carried forward in the body through what science now calls epigenetic inheritance.

These stories do not disappear because they are unspoken. They lodge in the body. They show up as anxiety, as a tightening in the chest, as the tears that come at unexpected moments, as the rage that feels too big for the situation. They wait.

Creativity is not the only way these stories can be addressed. But it is one of the most powerful — because it reaches material that words alone often cannot. When we write, draw, sing, weave, move, cook, garden, or make in any form that comes from a place of honesty, we create a pathway. We give what has been held somewhere to go.

That is Taha Auaha. Not talent. Not technique. Passage.

Why Deep Emotion Needs Creative Form

There is a simple reason why creativity works where words alone do not.

Trauma and deep emotion are not stored in the brain as stories. They are stored in the body as sensation, image, sound, and felt experience. The language centres of the brain — the parts that help us construct sentences and tell sequential narratives — are among the most disrupted by intense emotional experience.

This is why people who have been through difficult things often say: I cannot explain it. I don’t have the words. It just lives in me.

Creativity bypasses the need for words. It invites the body to speak in its own language — through image, sound, movement, texture, or form. In doing so, it reaches the material that ordinary conversation cannot always access.

This is also why, when people create from a place of truth, they sometimes feel things they did not expect. A wave of grief. An unexpected release. A sense of something completing. That is the passage opening. That is Taha Auaha at work.

The Stories We Carry Are Not Only Ours

One of the things I find most remarkable about recent science is what it tells us about inherited trauma. Researchers studying the children and grandchildren of survivors, of war refugees, of indigenous peoples whose cultures were suppressed — they are finding measurable biological traces of that ancestral experience in the bodies of descendants who were never there.

This is not a metaphor. It is biology. The body inherits what the ancestors could not fully process.

For many of our whānau — for Māori, Pasifika, and other peoples whose whakapapa carries the weight of colonisation — this research names something that has been felt but rarely said aloud. The grief in your body is not always your own grief. The fear is not always your own fear. The silence you carry may have been learned across generations, in conditions where speaking was not safe.

Here is what moves me about Taha Auaha in this context.

When you create from a place of deep truth — when you write the poem your grandmother could not write, or paint the grief your father carried without words, or sing the song your people were forbidden to sing — speak the mother tongue denied your own mother – you are not only doing something for yourself. You are doing something for the whole lineage.

The creative act becomes an act of intergenerational healing. You give passage not only to your own held story, but to the stories that were passed to you.

When we reveal our creativity, we give passage to all the narratives we have held — brought through from epigenetics, upbringing, and environmental conditioning.

This Is Not About Being Good At It

I want to come back to this, because the resistance to creativity is strong and it is almost always rooted in the same place: the belief that creative expression requires competence.

It does not.

Art therapist Shaun McNiff has spent decades working with people who do not consider themselves creative. His work consistently shows that the healing power of creative expression has nothing to do with artistic skill. It has everything to do with honesty.

A drawing that is clumsy but true is more therapeutically powerful than a polished piece that conceals. A poem that is rough around the edges but comes from the gut carries more passion than a technically perfect poem that says nothing real.

In our framework, we do not ask people to be creative. We ask people to be honest in some form that is more than words. That might be:

•      Writing — anything from a sentence to a full piece

•      Drawing or painting — without expectation of product

•      Singing — even alone, quietly, or without a tune

•      Moving — dance, walk, gesture, physical expression

•      Making — weaving, knitting, cooking, gardening, building, crafting

•      Telling — story, kōrero, spoken word

•      Being in te Taiao — the environment as a creative partner

The form is not what matters. What matters is whether something held is being permitted to move.

A Word About Tūpuna and Creative Inheritance

In te Ao Māori, creativity has never been understood as individual achievement. It has always been understood as participation in the creative lineage of one’s people, in relationship with one’s tūpuna, in the ongoing conversation between the living and the dead.

When a kairaranga weaves, she does not weave alone. She weaves with all the women who taught her, and all the women who taught them. The pattern she creates has a genealogy.

When a poet writes, she writes with all the voices that have shaped the words she knows. Even the words themselves carry whakapapa — histories of usage, transmission, and meaning.

Understanding creativity this way changes everything about how we approach it. It removes the pressure of individual originality and replaces it with something much more sustaining: the sense that we are participating in something larger than ourselves. That our creative voice is part of a conversation that began long before us and will continue long after.

For those of us who feel separated from our creative heritage — through colonisation, cultural loss, or family disruption — this reframing can itself be healing. You do not need to have been raised with access to all your ancestral creative traditions to participate in them. You only need to begin, in whatever form is available to you, and trust that the lineage will meet you there.

How to Begin — Right Now, Without Waiting

If this is resonating with you, I want to offer something very simple.

Do not wait for the right time, right materials, right inspiration, or the right level of skill. Those conditions will not arrive on their own.

Begin here:

Pick up something — a pen, a pencil, your phone’s notes app. Write one true sentence about something you are carrying. Not a beautiful sentence. A true one.

That is enough for today. That is Taha Auaha.

Tomorrow, you might write two sentences. Or draw one line. Or hum something under your breath that has been waiting in your throat.

The channel opens with use. The more you give your held stories permission to move — in whatever form — the more passage becomes possible.

Here is the thing about the passage: once it opens, it not only releases what was painful. It also releases what was beautiful. The joy that was suppressed. The delight that was dismissed. The wonder that was too vulnerable to show.

Taha Auaha gives passage to all of it.

Te Ara Whakamua — The Path Forward

In the Te Poutama o te Ora framework, Taha Auaha sits as the ninth Pou — the integrating dimension that draws from and gives expression to all others. If you have been working through the other dimensions of your wellness — attending to your body, your relationships, your spirit, your finances, your identity — Taha Auaha is where you bring all of that to form.

It is the dimension that says: what has this journey opened in you? What can you now express that you could not before? What story is ready to find its passage?

The Steps 1–3 programme for Taha Auaha — Creativity – The Passage of Freedom — will guide you through a 7-day creative awareness process, goal setting, routine building, and the 9-day creative intensification that builds the kaha to sustain your creative practice even when resistance arises.

But before the programme, before the framework, before the steps — there is just this:

Your stories matter. Your voice matters. The things you are carrying need somewhere to go.

Taha Auaha opens the passage.

Ko tōu reo, ko tōu māia. Your voice is your courage.

He mihi

This blog is part of the Te Poutama o te Ora weekly series exploring each of the nine dimensions of wellness. If this has resonated, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And, if you are ready to begin, pick up your pen.

Ngā mihi nui,

Ruku I’Anson

─────────────────────────────────────

Further reading: Taha Auaha Academic Article | Steps 1–3 Taha Auaha Creativity the Passage of Freedom Programme | Te Poutama o te Ora Framework Overview