Mauri Tau: Māori Cultural Somatics - From Nervous Systems to Global Systems

Abstract

Reflecting Kaupapa Māori research, this exegesis positions personal and collective healing, systems change and future-making as fundamentally concurrent processes best supported through a creative-led approach. Rooted in Māori ontologies and constituted by creative-led practice and embodied cognition this research discusses Mauri Tau Practices, a uniquely Indigenous, somatic-informed approach to wellbeing.

Approaching whakapapa experientially through multimodal, sensorial, creative, ethnographic, and autobiographical lenses, this (re)search explores relationships between cultural identity, creative expression, embodied cognition, decolonisation, systems change and wellbeing. Centring socio-cultural transformative potentials arising from somatic encounters of self within and as collective, it presents an inclusive, reflective, trauma-informed approach grounded in historical and tempo-spatial forces shaping wellbeing in Aotearoa. Phenomenologically informed, Mauri Tau Practices reflect a living third space generated by Māori cosmological knowledge, positioned within a postcolonial context, and developed autobiographically within a transcultural whakapapa in constant negotiation with colonial, Māori, and migrant realities. Correlations with Eurocentric feminist posthumanist theories are considered, alongside embodied, ancestral, and ecological relationships informing renewed ways of knowing that can enact systems change and future-making.

This exegesis serves as a convergence point for Mauri Tau Practices responding within a continuum of personal and collective cultural (re)evolutions. Expressed through a thematic and genealogically-informed structure reflecting a Māori way Mauri Tau Practices are emphasised as a significant creative practice-led methodology, alongside the mauritau.me website as a key creative contribution providing open public access to introductory cultural somatic practice through sound and video led by the author.

Embracing how cultural principles manifest as movement, presence, and process philosophical and methodological potentials for better wellbeing outcomes for Māori and non-Māori in Aotearoa NZ are identified. Investigating how these manifestations respond to reshaping postcolonial conditions in Aotearoa, Mauri Tau Practices situates the corporeal body as a creative and material form with intrinsic value and intelligence to inform theoretical and philosophical discourse on future-making through cultivated embodied coherence.