The word Maramataka comes from two Māori words: marama (moon, month, understanding) and taka (to turn over, to change). Together they describe a system of knowledge rooted in the idea that life moves in cycles — and that tuning into those cycles is both a practical and a spiritual act.
The Maramataka is not just a lunar calendar. It is a living archive that brings together knowledge of the stars, the sea, the soil, and the seasons. It tracks ecological signs — the flowering of certain plants, the behaviour of birds and fish, the temperature of the wind — and uses them to guide human activity. Different iwi (tribal communities) kept their own regional versions of the Maramataka, adapted to the land and water systems they called home.
When colonisation suppressed the Māori language, land use, and cultural practice, the Maramataka was among the knowledge systems pushed underground. Its revitalisation today is not simply about tradition for tradition’s sake. It is about reclaiming a profound and practical intelligence — one that contemporary science is increasingly recognising as valid.
Te Poutama o te Ora — A Framework That Breathes
Te Poutama o te Ora (TPO) is built across nine dimensions of wellbeing. At its centre stands Taha Tuakiri — the Pou of identity and cultural wellness — because the work has always held that you cannot flourish in any other dimension of life if you are not grounded in who you are. From that centre, eight further dimensions radiate outward: Taha Tinana (physical), Taha Hinengaro (mental and emotional), Taha Wairua (spiritual), Taha Whānau (relational), Taha Kai (nutritional), Taha Pūtea (financial), Taha Matihiko (digital), and Taha Auaha (creative).
These nine dimensions do not exist in isolation. They breathe together, and what gives them their shared rhythm — what ties them to the living world and to each other across time — is the Maramataka.
TPO is a stairway. The nine dimensions are its Pou — the carved posts that hold the structure upright. The Maramataka is the central thread that weaves from Te Tūāpapa – the Foundation to Te Ao Marama – Full Flourishing, connecting every Pou, giving alignment and direction. Without this thread, the interconnectedness of Te Poutama is not in cohesive rhythm…a set of dimensions without a when.
When I am tau — settled and in rhythm — te Ao Mārama is tau.
The world of light reflects the peace within.
The Four Phases: A Rhythm for Living
The Maramataka divides the lunar month — roughly 29.5 days — into a sequence of named nights, each with its own character and guidance. For those new to the system, these are often introduced as four broad phases. Think of them like the seasons within each month.
In TPO, each phase creates a natural cadence for how we engage with the nine dimensions.
🌘The Waxing Moon — Te Marama Tupu
This is the moon building toward fullness — the time of rising energy. In the garden, this is when you plant and sow. In life, it is the time to begin that project, make that call, schedule that hard conversation. Your body is in a building phase — anabolic, growing, energised.
In TPO terms, the waxing phase is the prime window for Taha Tinana — physical training and building practice. It is also the moment to activate Taha Pūtea (financial planning and new income moves) and Taha Matihiko (launching digital projects, engaging new platforms). Taha Auaha stirs here too — this is when creative energy is available, and it asks to be used.
🌕 The Full Moon — Te Marama Kaha / Te Rākaunui
Peak energy. Peak light. This is the time the Maramataka traditionally reserved for large community gatherings, harvests, and ceremonies. It is when the landscape is most visible, when fish are most active near the surface, when collective energy is highest. Sleep may be lighter than usual around this phase — that is not a failure, that is the moon.
The full moon is the natural home of Taha Whānau within TPO — the relational dimension that asks us to show up for our people and receive them in return. It is also the moment when Taha Tuakiri comes alive in the community: identity is not only an inner experience but also confirmed and celebrated in the presence of those who know your name and your lineage. Plan your gatherings, your celebrations, your deep conversations here.
🌘 The Waning Moon — Te Marama Hinga / Tangaroa
The moon begins its return to darkness, and the invitation is to follow. This is the best phase for fishing (certain species were understood to be more active as tidal patterns shift), and it is the ideal time for therapeutic work, rest, reflection, and letting go.
In TPO, the waning moon is the natural rhythm for Taha Hinengaro — the mental and emotional wellness dimension. This is when we process, integrate, and release. It is the therapeutic window: the phase where clinical work lands most deeply, where journalling opens, where the body is ready to let go of what it has been carrying. Taha Wairua deepens here too — spiritual practice moves inward, prayer and reflection finding their natural ground.
🌑 The Dark Moon — Te Marama Mate / Ōmutu
This is the still point before renewal — the most spiritually significant phase in the Maramataka. Physical activity is discouraged. This is the time to go inward: to tend to whakapapa, to rest deeply, to prepare for what comes next.
In TPO, the dark moon is sacred to Taha Wairua and Taha Tuakiri in their most interior forms. It is also, quietly, a Taha Kai moment — the body’s natural fasting window, a time for clearing and cleansing. Practitioners working within TPO use this phase to review, to sit with supervisors, to let the previous cycle settle before the next one begins. It is not empty time. It is the soil being prepared.
Rest is not what you earn after doing enough. It is what the Maramataka says you need — built into the rhythm of every month.
The Maramataka and the Nine Dimensions — A Living Alignment
This is not a rigid prescription. The Maramataka does not divide life into sealed compartments — it offers a rhythm of emphasis. Each dimension is alive in every phase. But the following mapping offers a practitioner’s guide to where each dimension finds its fullest expression across the lunar cycle:
🌘Waxing Moon
Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness) → Building, training, and new health practices
Taha Pūtea (Financial Wellness) → New income activity, planning, financial decisions
Taha Matihiko (Digital Wellness) → Launching, creating, digital engagement
Taha Auaha (Creative Wellness) → Beginning creative projects, generating new work
🌕 Full Moon
Taha Whānau (Relational Wellness) → Gathering, celebrating, communal connection
Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness) → Cultural celebration, whakapapa, community affirmation
Taha Auaha (Creative Wellness) → Sharing, performing, presenting creative work
🌘 Waning Moon
Taha Hinengaro (Mental/Emotional Wellness) → Therapeutic work, processing, integration
Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness) → Deepening spiritual practice, prayer, reflection
Taha Auaha (Creative Wellness) → Refining, editing, completing creative cycles
🌑 Dark Moon
Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness) → Deep rest, ancestral connection, stillness
Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness) → Inner whakapapa work, identity renewal
Taha Kai (Nutritional Wellness) → Fasting, cleansing, preparing the body for renewal
Taha Auaha — creative wellness — moves with special freedom across all four phases, because creative practice is both the instrument and the expression of every other dimension. It plants in the waxing, blooms at the full, processes in the waning, and rests in the dark. This is why, within TPO, Taha Auaha is understood not merely as a dimension but as a healing instrument that moves across the whole framework.
Why This Matters for Wellness
Food and Growing
The Maramataka’s guidance for planting and harvesting according to lunar phases is not folklore — it is ecological intelligence. Biodynamic farming research has now validated the principle that lunar gravitational influence affects soil moisture and plant growth. In TPO, Taha Kai is not simply about what we eat — it is about our relationship with food as a source of mauri, a carrier of whakapapa, a measure of tino rangatiratanga. Community māra kai guided by the Maramataka are a living expression of that relationship.
Physical Health
Contemporary chronobiology — the science of the body’s internal rhythms — tells us that our physiological performance, immune function, and recovery capacity all fluctuate in patterns that extend well beyond the 24-hour clock. TPO’s Taha Tinana has always known this. Its differentiation between high-energy phases and restorative phases gives practitioners a culturally grounded template for periodising exercise, therapeutic interventions, and workload guidance that serves both client and clinician.
Mental and Spiritual Wellbeing
Perhaps the Maramataka’s greatest contribution to modern wellness is its insistence that spiritual and relational wellbeing are not optional add-ons to health — they are foundational. This aligns with Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Whā model, and with TPO’s positioning of Taha Tuakiri at the centre of the whole framework. The Maramataka doesn’t just suggest you make time for these things. It tells you when. That is the gift of a temporal spine.
The Maramataka in the Digital Age
One of the more exciting developments in recent years is the emergence of digital Maramataka tools — apps and platforms that make this guidance accessible to urban Māori communities who may be far from traditional knowledge holders, and to younger generations who engage first with the world through their phones. Within TPO, Taha Matihiko asks us to reclaim digital space as a site of Māori wellness — not to be consumed by the algorithm, but to use technology in service of tino rangatiratanga. A Maramataka-guided digital tool is one expression of that reclamation.
But this comes with an important caution. The Maramataka is not wellness content to be packaged and sold. It is a living, community-embedded knowledge system that belongs to Māori. Any digital platform that carries the Maramataka must be developed and governed by Māori knowledge holders, in accordance with the principles of indigenous data sovereignty. When that is done well, the digital Maramataka is not a diluted version of the real thing — it is a new expression of it.
The TPO 90-Day Engine: From Awareness to Authority
What makes the Today’s Alignment tool more than a daily check-in is the architecture running underneath it: the TPO 90-Day Engine — a complete wellness journey built directly into the bones of the Maramataka.
Three rhythms run simultaneously, each cycling through nine steps from beginning to end. Every rhythm starts at the same place: Mawharu — the star associated with new beginnings — with Step 1, Te Ohorere: Awareness. Every rhythm ends at the same place: Huna, with Step 9, Te Whakamana i tō Mana — Reclaiming Authority. Ninety days. Nine steps. The full arc of the journey, from first noticing to standing fully in your own power.
The genius of the three-rhythm structure is that at any given night of the Maramataka, someone is always at a different stage of the journey. Because the three rhythms are staggered across the lunar cycle, you can enter the programme wherever the moon finds you — and the rhythm places you exactly where you are ready to begin. The engine doesn’t wait for you to start at the beginning. It recognises something the Maramataka has always known: real movement begins where you are, not where the calendar says you should be.
This is what Taha Matihiko looks like in practice — not technology imposed on wellness, but technology shaped by it. The Today’s Alignment tool is the Maramataka’s temporal intelligence made visible and portable, carrying the 90-Day Engine wherever you go.
Coming Home to Rhythm
There is something quietly revolutionary about the Maramataka in a world that tells us to be constantly productive, always on, endlessly optimising. It says: no. There is a time for expansion and a time for rest. A time for harvest and a time for fasting. A time for gathering and a time for silence.
That is not a limitation. It is a liberation.
Within Te Poutama o te Ora, the Maramataka is the temporal spine of the whole framework — the rhythm that runs through every one of the nine dimensions, from Taha Tinana to Taha Auaha, from the body’s daily needs to the soul’s seasonal hungers. It is not one component among many. It is what makes all the other dimensions coherent.
Whether you are a practitioner, a community member, or simply someone trying to live a little more in tune with the world around you, the Maramataka offers something that very few modern wellness systems can: a way of knowing when.
When I am tau — when I am settled and in rhythm — te Ao Mārama is tau. The world of light reflects the peace within.
If you read the introduction to Today’s Alignment, you will be using the Maramataka and TPO Rhythm experience.
If you missed that article, you are warmly invited to explore the live experience here and join the community:
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 — my choices, my pain, and the truth as a Māori person navigating a world that had been shaped to accommodate someone else’s story.
I carried a secret for 40 years. Not because anyone was forcing me, but because religious shame was so deeply internalised I couldn’t even name it to myself.
But the shame wasn’t only about what I’d done or not done. It went deeper than that. It went all the way to whakapapa.
The Question That Wouldn’t Leave Me
Here is the dilemma I could never quite name, but always felt:
“How can I be Christian when I don’t whakapapa back to God’s people? I’m not Jewish.”
I knew my whakapapa. On my mother’s side, I trace back to Porourangi — the great ancestor from whom Ngāti Porou descend. On my father’s side, to Rangatira Momo, the ancestor of Te Momo. These are ancient, living, sovereign lines. These are my people.
But when I opened the Bible, I found a story that began with Abraham and flowed through a lineage I had no genealogical connection to. The God of scripture had made his covenant with a specific people. I was not one of those people.
And the Christianity I’d received? It hadn’t arrived as a gift. It had arrived with a flag. The Anglican ministry given to me as a child was deeply rooted in England’s political agenda — a tool used to reshape those they colonised, to create compliant subjects rather than liberated souls. I knew this. My bones knew this.
So I felt like an impostor. I was 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.
That feeling is its own kind of trauma. It doesn’t look like the obvious wounds — not shame about your body, not fear of hell, not the memory of religious leaders who hurt you. It’s quieter than that. It’s the constant, low-level hum of wondering whether you belong.
When Religion Becomes a Weapon
Religious trauma happens when spirituality gets weaponised for control:
• Your body is sinful
• Your sexuality is shameful
• Your questions are dangerous
• Your Māori spirituality is demonic
• Your culture is primitive
• You are not of the covenant people
These aren’t spiritual truths. They are wounds masquerading as theology.
For Māori who were raised in colonial Christianity, the wound is compounded: you were handed a faith and simultaneously told — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — that the culture you came from made you less suited for it. You had to become more like the messenger to be eligible for the message.
That is violence. And naming it as violence is not rejecting God. It is being honest about what human beings did with God’s name.
The Dilemma: Three Options
When you see this clearly, you face what seems like three impossible options:
Option 1: Stay in the toxic faith as you received it, performing belief in a tradition you know was weaponised.
Option 2: Reject Christianity entirely and return exclusively to te ao Māori spiritual frameworks.
Option 3: Find a third way.
I couldn’t do Option 1. I’d seen too clearly. And I couldn’t do Option 2 either — because despite everything, my encounters with God were real. The faith in my bones wasn’t performative. It was mine.
So I had to find the third way. And that third way wasn’t a compromise — it turned out to be the original truth, buried under centuries of colonial distortion.
The Cave That Changed Everything
I didn’t find my way through by thinking it…I was driven through it.
When redundancy came, I lost the thing I’d been using to avoid the question: the financial stability, the corporate identity, the altar I’d built to security.
Taylor Welch talks about a process that began to make sense of what happened to me. He describes it as movements through which purpose-driven people pass, and the ‘Cave’ became my site of praxis:
• Crisis: You know change is needed. You take no action. You maintain the false altar.
• Consecration: You are forced to face it. The altar is removed. You find yourself in a cave — isolated, hidden, refining. This is costly. This is also where the real work happens.
• Confrontation/Clash: What was created in the cave begins to meet the world. People want what you have. But life is still awkward. You are still in survival mode. The remnants are being shaped.
• Multiplication: Things finally take off. The refined work finds its scale.
• Institutionalisation: The remnants are packaged and shared on a stage. The story becomes a legacy.
I was made redundant. I was isolated. I felt like I was in a cave — hiding, dark, uncertain, and it was in that cave that Te Poutama o te Ora emerged. The thinking I’d suppressed for decades came flooding out. The questions I’d been too busy to ask demanded answering.
And one of those questions was the oldest one: Am I really God’s?
What I Found in the Cave
I am still somewhere between the Consecration and Confrontation stages as I write this.
TPO is still being shaped. The books are still being written. Two part-time jobs add up to more than 53 hours a week. Religious study fills the remaining hours. Life is full and demanding, and not yet arrived.
But I know something now that I didn’t know before the redundancy. Or rather, I believe something I used to only argue about.
God did not leave me in that cave. He was in the cave with me, and the theology that had made me feel like an impostor was the theology of the colonial church, not the theology of the New Covenant.
Here is what I found:
The New Covenant through the blood of Jesus Christ is not an ethnic inheritance. It is not for Jews only. It is for all whakapapa. 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.
In the logic of the New Covenant, belonging is not determined by birth into the right people. It is determined by the blood that covers every person.
My Porourangi whakapapa is not cancelled by my faith.
My Te Momo whakapapa is not superseded by the cross.
They are held alongside it. I belong to both, and they do not fight each other.
The impostorship was never real. It was a colonial lie.
God had me all that time. I had covered my own eyes. Matapihi Kirihou o Nga Karu.
Releasing the Shame, Keeping the Wisdom
Through the process of wairua autophagy — the nine-cycle framework at the heart of Te Poutama o te Ora — I’ve been learning to metabolise what was toxic and keep what is true.
That means:
• Naming the colonial church as a political instrument without rejecting the faith it distorted
• Honouring my Māori whakapapa without treating it as incompatible with covenantal belonging
• Acknowledging the impostor feeling as a trauma response, not a theological verdict
• Finding God in the cave, not as a reward for surviving it, but as the one who was present in it
• Understanding that my place in the covenant does not require me to stop being Māori
You are Not an Impostor
If you are Māori — or from any indigenous people — and you carry this quiet ache, this sense that the faith you hold is somehow borrowed, somehow not properly yours — I want to say something clearly:
The colonial church was not God. It was people using God’s name. What they gave you was a distorted package. The faith inside the package is real, and it was never only for Jewish people.
Your whakapapa is not a disqualification. It is not an obstacle. It is the line God has always known.
The covenant through Christ does not require you to become someone else. It invites you, as you are, from the whakapapa you carry, into a belonging that no colonial agenda was ever authorised to gatekeep.
The Autophagy of Dimension Programme
The full Autophagy of Dimension programme through Te Poutama o te Ora addresses wairua (spiritual) trauma across nine cycles over five months. It is designed for people navigating:
• Colonial religious trauma and the Whakapapa Dilemma
• Shame-based faith and fear-based theology
• The impostor experience in spiritual identity
• The integration of te ao Māori and Christian spirituality
You don’t have to choose between your whakapapa and your faith. You don’t have to perform a belief that doesn’t hold your full complexity.
Release the shame. Keep the wisdom. Come home to who you actually are.
Here’s what I’ve learned, both from developing Te Poutama o te Ora and from working with people in my practice: the method matters far less than the match. A habit-building approach that energises one person creates invisible friction for another. Not because of commitment levels. Not because of willpower. But because of orientation, the natural way each person tends to move through a process.
Today I’m going to introduce you to the Three Orientations, help you figure out which one you are, and then show you which of the three practice methods I recommend for your 18-day Kaha cycle. One method. Yours. For 18 days.
Let’s go.
First — What’s a Nine-Day Cycle Got to Do with It?
Within TPO, Step 2 Whakatūria tō Mana Establishing your Authority is structured as two consecutive nine-day cycles. With a brief pause between cycles. This isn’t arbitrary. Nine days is long enough for genuine neurological rewiring to begin — the kind that changes behaviour — and short enough that you can hold focus and motivation across the whole arc. Two cycles give you the chance to consolidate what you started in the first, and to deepen from ‘I’m doing this’ into ‘this is part of who I am.’
But here’s the thing. Not everyone experiences those three phases equally. Some of us come alive at the beginning and start to drift by Day 6. Some of us need a little running start, but then hit our stride in the middle. Some of us only really relax into it when the finish line is in sight.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s orientation.
The Three Orientations
◈ The Starter
You’re energised by new beginnings. The moment when a project or practice is just getting started — when it’s all possibility and no problems yet — is where you feel most alive. You’re great at overcoming inertia, generating ideas, and making the first move. Your challenge? Once the path is set and the work becomes repetitive, your attention can start to drift toward the next exciting beginning.
Your method: Anchor New Practices to Existing Routines
💡 Design your anchors on Day 1 (this is genuinely fun for you). Let the existing routine carry you through Days 4–9 when novelty fades. On Day 10, you get a legitimate refresh — a small redesign moment to keep you engaged.
◈ The Middler
You thrive in the doing. Give you some structure to work within, a bit of direction, and enough latitude to navigate your own way — and you’ll keep going long after others have stopped. The long middle of any project is your natural home. Your challenge? Blank-page beginnings can feel nebulous, and the final details of completion can feel constraining.
Your method: The 3-Tier Integration System
💡 You write your own content into the three tiers (this suits your self-directed style). The framework gives you something to push against without locking in the outcome. Tier 3 has built-in grace for days when life interrupts — no guilt, no shame, just keep going.
◈ The Finisher
You’re animated by completion. You see the gap between ‘nearly done’ and ‘actually done’ that everyone else seems to minimise — and closing that gap is where you come alive. You’re patient, meticulous, and capable of real sustained focus once momentum is building. Your challenge? Starting from zero can feel overwhelming because you can’t yet see what you’re finishing.
Your method: Simple Daily Tracking
💡 The tracker gives you a visible finish line every single day — exactly what your motivational system needs. Setting it up on Day 1 gives you just enough clarity to begin. By Day 18, you’ll have two full weeks of visible evidence. That will feel deeply satisfying. Because it is.
Not Sure Which One You Are? Try This Quick Quiz
Answer each question honestly — not the person you want to be, but the person you recognise. There are no wrong answers.
1. When you start something new, you feel most…
A. Excited. This is the best part.
B. Ready — once there’s a bit of structure to work with.
C. Confident — once I can see what ‘done’ looks like.
2. By Week 2 of any new habit or programme, you tend to…
A. Be eyeing off the next interesting thing.
B. Be in your stride and feeling solid.
C. Be frustrated that you can’t yet see the finish line.
3. The part of the 18-day cycle that will be hardest for me is…
A. Days 7–9. Closing out and completing.
B. Days 1–3. Getting started.
C. Days 1–6. Before I can see the end.
4. When I miss a practice day, I’m most likely to…
A. Start fresh with a whole new approach.
B. Review, adjust, and keep going.
C. Feel unsettled until I’ve ticked something off.
5. My natural strength in this 18-day journey will be…
A. Designing the practice and committing early.
B. Sustaining momentum through the long middle.
C. Completing every entry and finishing strong.
📊 Your result
Mostly A → You’re a Starter. Your method: Anchor New Practices to Existing Routines. Mostly B → You’re a Middler. Your method: The 3-Tier Integration System.
Mostly C → You’re a Finisher. Your method: Simple Daily Tracking.
Mixed? Ask yourself: which phase of a project tends to feel most alive for you? That’s your orientation.
One Method. 18 Days. That’s It.
I want to be clear about this: you are not being asked to use all three methods. Just one. The one that matches your orientation.
This is intentional. One of the most common reasons people fall off a new practice programme isn’t lack of motivation — it’s cognitive overload. Too many systems running at once creates a management problem on top of a habit problem. You end up spending your energy tracking the systems instead of living the practice.
One method, chosen well, is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s sustainable.
🌿 A note on mana
Choosing your own method — rather than being assigned one — is itself an act of mana. Self-determination theory tells us that when we choose something because it genuinely fits us, we’re far more likely to sustain it than when we follow something prescribed from outside. This small act of self-knowledge at the start of your 18 days is part of building Kaha. It’s not a preliminary step. It is the step.
What Happens at the End of 18 Days?
At the end of your two cycles, I’ll be asking you to sit with a few reflection questions:
• Which phase of the cycle felt most alive for you?
• Which phase felt most like resistance?
• What did your method make easier — and what did it not quite hold?
This isn’t about whether you ‘succeeded.’ It’s about what you learned about yourself. Because that self-knowledge becomes the foundation for Steps 4–6, where we start to deepen and integrate across multiple dimensions of wellbeing.
You’re not just building a habit. You’re building a relationship with your own nature. And that, friends, is where real Kaha comes from.
Over to You
Take the quiz. Identify your orientation. Choose your method. Commit to it for 18 days.
And if you want to share — which orientation resonated with you, and which method you’re going with — drop it in the comments or send me a message. I love hearing how people see themselves in this work.
The academic companion article to this blog — Orientation-Responsive Practice Selection: Matching Method to Person in the 18-Day Kaha Cycle — explores the research base behind this approach, including habit formation theory, self-determination theory, and the neurological basis of the nine-day cycle. Available on request.
The self-diagnostic tool is also available as a formatted stand-alone document for use in individual practice or group settings.
The First Exile: When Māori Identity Became a Liability
My tūpuna did not wake up one morning and decide that Māori culture was not worth passing on. They made a calculated decision — made out of love, made under duress — that the safest thing they could do for the next generation was to equip us for a Pākehā world.
“Learn the ways of the Pākehā. There is no future in being Māori.”
I recall both parents saying this to me as a child. They were not wrong about the world they were describing. Te reo Māori was banned in schools. Children were beaten for speaking it. Land was confiscated. Māori cultural practices were suppressed and, in some cases, actively criminalised. Choosing cultural visibility in that environment was not a cultural preference — it was a risk assessment.
But that survival strategy — however loving its intention — had a cost that got passed down quietly. The cost was this: we arrived in the world carrying shame about who we were. We didn’t speak te reo. We didn’t know our whakapapa beyond a generation or two. We didn’t feel at home on the marae, and everywhere we looked, there seemed to be a standard of Māori authenticity that we had already failed to meet.
Not Māori enough. That phrase. If you know it from the inside, you know how heavy it is.
The Second Exile: When the Corporate World Finished the Job
Then came the workplace. The white-collar environment. The professional world that was supposed to be the reward for following the instruction — learn the ways of the Pākehā — all the way to its conclusion.
I was successful, by external measures. I worked hard. I was competent. I rose, and inside that rising, I learned something that nobody had told me: there is a version of yourself that the corporate world will accept, and there is who you actually are, and these two people are not the same.
The words I heard in that environment stay with me. These are real words, spoken in real workplaces, to real people:
“The only good Māori is a dead one.”
“Cunning as a Māori dog.”
“We caught an eel — can you tell us how to cook it? You know, you being Māori, you must know.”
“Do you know [person]? You know, they’re your people.”
“I see you got the time off — or is it a Māori day off?”
“You know, Māori with funerals… they end up taking a week off. Such a nuisance.”
Words that stick. Words that land in the body and stay there, quietly confirming what you had already been taught to fear: that who you are — what you carry in your blood and your bones and your history — is a problem to be managed.
Then, alongside the racism, came something that masqueraded as professional development but was something else entirely. I call it now what it was: structured deconstruction.
“You are saying too much in meetings, responding too fast — people think you haven’t heard them.” “You aren’t saying enough. Let people get to know who you are.”
I remember saying, once, “It doesn’t really matter what I do. I’m stuffed either way — told I say too much, and the performance counsellor saying I need to reflect more of myself.” They called it restyling your brand. I know now that it was deconstructing who I was.
A dear mentor — who has since passed — used to say to me: “What are you being asked to ‘fix’? You don’t need fixing. They need to understand more about you as you are and always meant to be.”
He was right. But I didn’t have the language for it then. I had been taught to fit the mould, and every time I tried to fit it, the mould shifted.
The Double Exile
Here is the architecture of it, seen clearly:
Colonisation stripped away cultural identity and taught the next generation to be ashamed of what remained. That generation entered the professional world already carrying the wound of the first exile: not Māori enough.
The professional world then spent decades completing the work colonisation began. It took the authentic self — the self that was already diminished, already doubtful of its own legitimacy — and subjected it to a second systematic dismantling. Not in the name of colonial policy, but in the name of Personal Brand. Performance. Professionalism.
And at the end of it, you are left standing in the space between two worlds, belonging to neither:
Not white enough to be Pākehā. Not Māori enough to be Māori. Two different kinds of rejection, one continuous wound.
At 55, after a redundancy that forced me to stop and look clearly at what had happened, I finally understood the truth: they didn’t teach me. They dismantled me, and before that, colonisation dismantled my tūpuna, and the gap that was created became the wound I carried into that corporate world.
Now I had neither. And somehow, losing the corporate identity — as painful as it was — cracked something open. For the first time, I had to ask: Who am I, beneath all of this?
Why “Just Deal with the Burnout” Doesn’t Work
If you have experienced the double exile and tried to address the burnout part of it with standard tools — better boundaries, stress management, yoga on your lunch break, a holiday — you will know that they don’t touch it. They cannot touch it because the burnout is not the wound. It is the symptom of the wound.
And the wound is not primarily psychological. It is stored across five dimensions of your being:
In your tuakiri — your identity — which has been performing a self that is not yours for so long, you have forgotten what yours feels like.
In your whakapapa — your relational and ancestral self — which is carrying intergenerational survival strategies that were never yours to carry alone.
In your wairua — your spirit — which has been offered professional achievement as a substitute for cultural belonging and real meaning, and has been quietly starving.
In your hinengaro — your mind and emotions — which are exhausted not from overwork but from the maintenance of a gap between who you are and who you are permitted to be.
In your tinana — your body — which is keeping the score of everything listed above, and has been keeping it for a very long time.
You cannot heal one of these while the others remain untouched. That is what Te Poutama o te Ora calls dimensional autophagy: metabolising the wound across all five dimensions at once — not managing the symptoms, but processing the source.
The Three Movements of Healing
In the TPO framework, healing the double exile moves through three phases. They are not quick. But they are real.
Recognition: See it clearly
The first movement is naming what happened, not as personal failure, but as structural injury. The cultural disconnection was done to your tūpuna, who passed it to you in love. The professional deconstruction was done to you by systems that needed you to be useful, not whole.
This phase allows the grief and, where it exists, the rage. Both are appropriate. Both are part of recognising the wound accurately.
Metabolisation: Process what happened
The second movement asks: what remains when the shame and the performance are set down? Forty-one years in a demanding environment, however difficult, built genuine capacity — resilience, skill, the particular intelligence of someone who learned to navigate a world that was not designed for them.
In this phase, you begin to sort what is genuinely yours from what was imposed. You begin cultural reconnection without shame — learning te reo or whakapapa not as an admission of failure but as an act of reclamation. You release the professional identity not as defeat but as the setting down of something that was never yours to carry.
Regeneration: Build what is actually yours
The third movement is the construction of an integrated life — one that holds both the Māori self and the professional self without requiring either to be hidden. For many, this involves significant change: career transitions toward work that allows full expression, renewed engagement with cultural community, and the beginning of teaching the next generation something different.
At 62, I am building something different. Work that allows me to be fully myself. A wellness ministry that integrates my Māori identity instead of requiring me to conceal it. My anxiety is nearly gone. My body is healing. I wake up with purpose instead of dread.
Not because I learned better stress management. Because I finally metabolised both exiles — and found, on the other side of that work, that I had always been enough.
For Everyone Who Knows This from the Inside
If you are carrying the double exile — if you recognise yourself in the space between two worlds, not Māori enough for one and not Pākehā enough for the other — I want to say this directly:
The disconnection from your culture was done to your tūpuna and passed to you through love. It is not your failure. The dismantling of your professional self was done by systems that valued your performance over your personhood. It is not your failure. You have always been Māori. And you have always been enough. The reclamation of both — your culture and your authentic self — is not about becoming something you are not. It is about returning to who you were before the world decided who you should be.
Nau mai, haere mai. The healing is hard. But you are not broken. You are colonised. And that is something that can be undone — one dimension, one cycle, one reclaimed piece of yourself at a time.
This post is part of the Te Poutama o te Ora Wellness Wisdom series. Te Poutama o te Ora is a nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework developed in Aotearoa New Zealand, integrating indigenous wisdom with contemporary transformation practices. The dimensional autophagy programme addresses complex, layered trauma across whakapapa, wairua, tuakiri, hinengaro, and tinana dimensions.
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 moving through the day.
Each day includes:
Maramataka phase alignment
Moon and energy rhythms
TPO rhythm cycles
Dimension focus areas
Reflective activity guidance
A forward view into the next few days
The intention is not to tell people what to do, but to support greater awareness of timing, pacing, restoration, and connection — both within ourselves and with the wider rhythms around us.
This project sits at the intersection of:
wellbeing
reflective practice
rhythm awareness
cultural insight
holistic restoration
At this stage, the platform is still evolving, and I am intentionally sharing it early so people can begin engaging with it in real life. Over time, I hope to continue developing deeper TPO dimension guidance, rhythm reflections, and expanded wellbeing tools.
You are warmly invited to explore the live experience here:
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
• 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
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Further reading: Taha Auaha Academic Article | Steps 1–3 Taha Auaha Creativity the Passage of Freedom Programme | Te Poutama o te Ora Framework Overview
