Articles

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 redundancy I didn’t choose — to understand that this experience had a name, and that name is not failure. It is the double exile. It was done to me, and to many of us, by a system that has never fully reckoned with what it took.

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.

The Healing Dimension of Creative Expression

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.

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.

Not sure what therapy type you need? Learn how to choose a therapist and why the relationship you have with them matters more than the approach used.