How five years in the dark became Te Poutama Ora – and Imago Dei brought me front and centre
You may already be familiar with my life origins; thirty-five years in a corporate environment enabled me to build a lifestyle, from all intents and purposes…was successful. Then a life-changing event that turned that vision completely upside down. That was in 2020.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let me tell you something nobody said to me during the years I spent trying to fix my mental and emotional patterns.
They were not broken.
They were responding. Accurately. Intelligently. To genuinely difficult circumstances. And the reason all the tools and techniques and positive thinking and therapy weren’t landing the way they were supposed to was not that I was unfixable or resistant or too damaged. It was because I was trying to address a downstream symptom without clearing the structural conditions that were generating it.
That is what Hinengaro Autophagy is about. Not fixing what was never broken. Metabolising what has been held for too long, in patterns that served their purpose, and building something new in their place.
Symbolic Death, Dimensional Autophagy, and Identity Transformation
Looking back over my life, I can identify seven moments that changed me permanently.
Not because they hurt.
Not because they were dramatic.
But after each one, I could never return to being the person I had been before.
When most people hear the word death, they think of physical death. Yet some of the most significant deaths we experience are symbolic. A marriage begins and exposes uncomfortable truths. A parent dies. Cancer arrives. A career disappears. A family relationship fractures. Something inside us is lost that cannot be recovered in its previous form.
The event happens once.
The transformation takes years.
I want to tell you what forty-one years of systematic identity assault looks like from the inside.
It looks like success.
It looks like promotions, adaptability, professional development, and being told you’re a good cultural fit. It looks like learning which version of yourself to bring to which room. It looks like getting really good at making people comfortable — smoothing your edges, moderating your language, monitoring your Māoriness so it reads as flavour rather than threat.
It looks like ‘disappearing’. Incrementally. Professionally. Over decades.
And then one day — through redundancy, illness, through whatever event finally cracks the performance open — you look in the mirror and realise: the person looking back is a survival strategy. A construction. Someone you built to get through.
Ko wai au? Who am I?
That is the question Tuakiri Autophagy is built to answer.
I want to ask you something.
Not about what you believe. About what you carry.
Because there’s a version of spiritual life that sustains you. That orients you. That makes the difficult things bearable and gives your life a shape that holds.
And there’s a version that is slowly killing you from the inside — made of shame, secrets, inherited images of a punishing God, beliefs that drove your most important choices before you were ever old enough to choose them. Spiritual frameworks given to you before you had a self robust enough to accept or refuse them.
Most of us carry both.
Wairua Autophagy is how you learn to tell them apart.
But first — a word about what wairua is. Because in Te Ao Māori, wairua is not one component of the person among others. It is the person’s fundamental orientation: the connection to te Ao Wairua, to tūpuna, to atua, to the sacred dimensions of the world. Wairua is not peripheral. It is load-bearing. It permeates and shapes every other dimension.
Which is why when it is wounded, everything else is interpreted through the wound.
I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me at 17.
You can leave. You can move five hours away, start over, cut contact, change your number, build an entirely new life in a different city with different people, a different job, and a different name if you want.
The patterns will be waiting at the new address.
Not because you’re broken, or you can’t escape. But because the patterns aren’t in the location. They’re in the whakapapa. They’re in the web. And you carry the web with you — in your nervous system, in your body, in your choices, in the relationships you keep finding yourself in that feel uncannily familiar.
That’s what Whakapapa Autophagy is about. Not escaping the web. Understanding it. Metabolising it. And building something new within it.
