Articles
Articles written by our counsellors to better help you!
Te Ngākau Tūāhua – The Normalised Heart
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 — to Māori and to those who carry its inheritance, whether they know it or not.
When you finally have a name for it – Colonisation PTSD
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?
Te Māra me te Pīkao – The Garden and the Ivy
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’t look like colonisation. It looks like ordinary sentences — said by whānau, by colleagues, by people who mean well, sometimes by the voice in your own head.
The Poison Ivy You Didn’t Plant – Understanding Colonisation — why naming it changes everything
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 they were carrying it.
This is what colonisation has done to generations of Māori families in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Not only as a metaphor, but also as a clinical mechanism.
Te Ara Iwa – Walking the Path of Nine in Rhythm with the Moon
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 what makes this framework different.
My Body Died Twice – Here is what I learned when it did
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 trying to fix my body with diet, exercise, and willpower. Nothing stuck. Nothing lasted. Because I was treating physical symptoms while the underlying dimensions — whakapapa, wairua, tuakiri, hinengaro — remained blocked and still generating what the body was trying to clear.
When I finally understood what my body had been doing, and why, and what it needed from me rather than what I was demanding of it — everything changed.