Māori movement practitioner Ngarino Tauwhirowhiro Te Waati has been helping hundreds of people during the lockdown by hosting wānanga and karakia via the Turuki Health Facebook page.
Te Waati has hosted the wānanga every weekday at around 10am for the past six weeks, with hundreds of people tuning in to start the day.
“It was meant to only go for four weeks but because the viewing list went up to 500,000 in four weeks.”
Te Waati says people were also watching from Israel, Scotland, Egypt and Africa. During the online wānanga he’s performed karakia and takutaku.
“The takutaku is really an entrance point into that sacredness so that you could begin the work on yourself and it’s quite an easy system. You do the takutaku, you enter inside of that sacredness and then to whakanoa, you exit using the takutaku, he says.
“That tikanga allows people to understand that they’re going in that area to protect themselves whilst they dive into their own intuitions, their own ngākau, to reorder their hinengaro which I like to use the shifting of the paradigms.”
He says when people come outside of the takutaku it’s a form of release “so that it becomes noa, free of restrictions so that they can come into the world of light and practise that in action.”
During the wānanga, he has talked to people about their emotions, especially important for people who have experienced high levels of stress during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“We want people to be more in tune with emotions whether it’s going to upset them, whether they’re going to feel a little but rangirua because I don’t feel like we should be afraid of our emotions, he says.
“A lot of people mistake that as a form of mental illness but when we’re doing our work its making sure that we’re authentically putting a platform down for them. They can cry and grieve and feel the mamae so that it lifts the tapu off all of the types of mamae that we’re starting to see the cause and effect of.”
Tangihanga held online
Te Waati says during lockdown he’s also experienced his first online tangihanga.
“I saw the stress on our people predominately our wāhine because our wāhine. They need to cry, they need to grieve and they need to express those types of emotions that they’re feeling and without that touch you could see the stress was heightened and it was a really confusing process for all of us.”
However, he said the leaders or tuakana that ran the tangihanga process online did a fantastic job.
“I feel like we’re adapting. We’re slowly adapting to this new way because the inspiration from Kingi Tuheitia that we need to save our whakapapa by maintaining strict rules around tangihanga process at the moment was a very valid point, he says.
“So once we started to formulate our wānanga towards that it just helped the process a little bit easier but it’s still tough.”
Te Waati will continue hosting the wānanga around 10am every weekday.