When someone gives up an addiction — whether it’s alcohol, substances, pornography, food, or a behaviour they’ve relied on for years — something powerful happens inside the nervous system. A kind of awakening. A crack of light. A surge of momentum that says: “Right, let’s fix everything now. Let’s get to the finish line.” If you’ve ever felt this in the early stages of healing, you’re not alone. And if you’re a practitioner or support person seeing this in someone you care fo

“Your presence became the tāhuhu — the ridgepole of the whare —holding the space steady as the storm passed through.” That’s what the day asked of me —to stand grounded in faith as everything around me swirled. Aurora over the marae The Storm Arrives A client was coming for her first in-person session at Hurihanga  after months online. She had already faced a difficult morning — locking her keys in the car, breaking a window to retrieve them, gathering her three dogs without

There’s a truth I’ve seen play out in the arena with horses, in the counselling room, in leadership spaces, and around the kitchen table with family. We teach — whether we mean to or not. Every moment, we are transmitting a message. With horses, I often say: we are always training . We are either training what we want… or we are unintentionally training what we don’t. A horse is learning from the release we give, the behaviour we ignore, the tension we hold in our body, and t

There are moments in life when something unsettles us so deeply that the ripples move through our mind, our body, our relationships, and even our sense of who we are. It may be a conversation that lands awkwardly, a misunderstanding that lingers, or a situation that touches an old wound we thought had healed long ago. Often, our first instinct is to fix the imbalance “out there” — to explain, correct, defend, or seek resolution with the other person involved. But there is ano