What is a challenge you overcame?

Van | Ōhope

Content warning: Discussion on physical and sexual violence.

Last year Van moved from Tāmaki to Ōhope to escape the cycle of burnout.

“Moving to a small town, and moving to Ōhope and Whakatāne in particular and learning off the rivers, learning off Ngāti Awa and the people here about how to live better in accordance with myself and nature, has been huge.

I come from a domestic violence background. I come from a sexual abuse background. And I’ve always just been go, go, go my whole life.

I think that’s because of trauma and also because of the type of world that we live in where it’s so busy and you’ve gotta mahia te mahi to survive. When I was living in Tāmaki Makaurau last year, I was just busy and I was so burnt out. My mental health was down the drain. My physical health was down the drain. Spiritually, I was just running on empty.

So for me, the challenge to overcome was to realise this isn’t the way I want to live my life, and this isn’t the way I deserve to live my life. I deserve rest, I deserve peace, I deserve patience with myself as does everybody. So late last year, I had some big internal discussions with myself and realised I need to get out of the city and I need to get out of the patterns that have been haunting me my whole life.

When you grow up with trauma, when you grow up in situations where your physical self and your spiritual self is unable to rest, I feel like there’s a lot of wiring that happens where you’re constantly becoming busy. Because you’re used to the chaos and you’re used to high levels of stress.

For me, the connection between the trauma and the burnout and the busyness, was me ignoring my body and not listening to it enough and not listening to when it was really saying, “hey, you need to slow down” or “hey, you actually hold on to a lot.”

Like many people, you’ve got a lot of stories going on in your body. And the more you ignore them, the more they’re going to be coming up in different ways. So you actually need to sit down and be with yourself, in order to be well.

Being surrounded by te taiao, nature and by the whenua has really helped me learn my lessons of slowness, of resistance, of understanding that we’re all living in these cycles that are so much longer and slower than a 9 to 5 day job. So the land has taught me so much this year.”