Valuing cosmologies that long predate modern psychology

Māori healer and psychotherapist Hāweatea Holly Bryson on restoring balance between Indigenous and Western approaches to healing planetary grief

This week, we’re welcoming back Matthew Green, creator of Resonant World, a newsletter serving the global trauma healing movement, to give us a preview of the Pocket Project’s Climate Consciousness Summit 2025.

For the summit, Matthew spoke with Hāweatea Holly Bryson, an Indigenous psychotherapist, rite of passage guide, and Māori healing practitioner of the Ngāi Tahu and Waitaha tribes, about her work to decolonise the ways in which we heal the pain within the world and ourselves, which includes integrating Indigenous and Western approaches.

The Climate Consciousness Summit 2025 is a free online event that starts on November 14 and offers supportive conversations on how to build emotional resilience in the face of the crisis, including a dialogue with me, Britt Wray.

Committed to the resurgence of Indigenous healing practices in communities in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia and Hawai’i, Hāweatea has long argued that Western schools of therapy have tended to deny or denigrate the wisdom of other cultures – and has called for enduring colonial power structures within the profession to be dismantled.

In the book Climate, Psychology and Change: Psychotherapy in a time when the familiar is dying, Hāweatea wrote about the tension she feels between her lineage as a Māori healing practitioner and Western psychotherapeutic training, and urged her colleagues to recognise the value of cosmologies that long predate modern psychology.

Picking up on these themes, Hāweatea and Matthew discuss below how Indigenous peoples have laboured for many generations to transmute the experiences of dispossession and disconnection that the climate crisis is now increasingly visiting on people in the industrialised world.

Hāweatea shares her vision here of how the “younger sibling” – or teina in Māori language – of Western psychotherapy can learn from the “elder sibling” – or tuakana – of Indigenous knowledge. This move rests upon there being no split between the human and the more-than-human world, and recognizes that healing requires a deep engagement with this innate relationship. You can find out more about Hāweatea’s work at Nature Knows.

To watch a video clip of Matthew and Hāweatea’s conversation, please click here.

Now, over to Matthew and Hāweatea.

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Why did you choose to write about decolonizing healing?

That was due to my experiences in my communities in Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Hawai’i, and in China, of how Western healing actually overruns and pathologizes Indigenous cultures. The very pain that we’re facing in the world right now is the same pain that our Indigenous healing methods have encountered and met over thousands of generations.

However, it’s these Western modes of healing that are the ones that are revered and the ones that are assumed to have substance. The very ways that I have to water down my way of sharing in academic spaces are often very unconscious, or occluded.

Returning into my cultural spaces, I’ve seen the bravery of the elders I look up to in terms of how they speak to the essence of a topic, without having to filter it through these academic and therapeutic frameworks all the time.

In these different countries where I’ve lived, roughly 70 percent of young people in juvenile detention are Indigenous. So when people talk about this pain being in the past, it’s very present – and in regards to our global crises it’s something we’re now experiencing together. People might say that it’s an Indigenous pain, or an Indigenous problem, which is spoken out of their own disconnection – because our modern crisis are those that Indigenous people have been handling and working with and transmuting over a long period of time.

Could you say more about your work to integrate Western and Indigenous healing practices?

At the time of writing that book chapter [in Climate, Psychology and Change], I really called it my ‘white and my brown sock’: I very much felt tension between my two worlds, and the need to bridge or mediate.

Over the last four years, those ‘socks’ have dissolved into my body, and part of it is seeing these two elements as a family unit.

One of the pieces in that book that I named is that we often don’t look at the lineage of our work. The lineage of psychotherapy came through American missionaries, through German psychiatry, and through the rise of academia and colonialism at the exact same time that all our cultural practices were being punished and villainized in severe ways. Historical records show that it was imprisonment for up to a year for practicing what was then called “crafty” science.

I’ll just acknowledge that in the last 50 years – my grandmother’s and my great-grandmother’s generation – some of the elders that aren’t here anymore would say that it was actually punishable by death if you were practicing any kind of cultural or land-based healing practice.

In a Māori way of thinking, we would look at Western psychology and science as the teina – the word for the younger sibling – and Indigenous psyche-ology and science as the tuakana – our word for an older sibling. Part of the crisis that we’re in right now is that these Western schools are considered the apex of our profession. They need to acknowledge that Indigenous psychology is the tuakana, the elder sibling. This requires Western psychology to decentre itself and recognise its place in a family unit. Integrating this is healing, because there’s value in every member of a family.

It’s the tuakana who will experience everything first. In our Māori genealogy, the trees, the water, the elemental beings are our tuakana, our direct elders. The atmosphere will get sick, the trees will get sick, the water will show signs of distress – and then we’re going to experience this next in our bodies.

Similarly, in a lot of the cultural pains that we’re in right now, the tuakana experienced them first – in terms of feeling bereft, or feeling this sense of dispossession, of losing access to our natural places, where you’re told you cannot enter this place of deep intimacy, where you receive your reflection and your answers.

Those pains that have often been put on Indigenous people alone are things that now, in our culture of modernity, we’re all experiencing. People will say there’s this emptiness, or there’s this missing piece around belonging. And so the tuakana has experienced that first, but in essence, it’s now become a connection point for us in how we can be in this together.

Could you say more about the depth of Indigenous experience of the kinds of crises that are now increasingly associated with modernity?

I know that in my grandmother’s generation, you could protect people by not identifying as Māori. But my generation knows that it’s the resurgence of our healing and cultural practices that we most need.

When we look at the climate emergency, often people will get that sense of a survival instinct activating in our bodies: That is because our body is the same as the wider body, and it knows that we are, in fact, abusing ourselves.

We’re in a time where we are poisoning our very breathing networks, cutting off our own arm, soiling ourselves. I feel really deeply sad that we’re in this time of such self-abuse, and this could actually be the opening. Our body may feel the climate crisis as a survival instinct due to knowing its belonging in a bigger body, but now our minds and our hearts are potentially starting to catch up.

The problem is that many of us are conversing in the same worn structures all the time. We argue or debate at the “important table of ‘things’” and we forget to look up, to look down, to step outside. There’s something pulling really strongly in our hearts: Our natural landscapes are speaking. So how do we re-engage those conversations? If we come back to the idea of family, who’s eating at the table? And how long have you sat at that table, eating at that table? And what other voices need to come in? Are we having conversations with our tuakana, our elders, in all forms? Or in our pride are we constructing more “fix-it-careers” separate from the family system?

In our Western mindset, we’re still theorizing, we’re still having to prove things that Indigenous people already know. And yet, if we look back at how Indigenous people have handled this same crisis over generations, at the ways that my communities or my elders are responding, it is through tending these wounded places that we are guardians of, and which are part of our being, with furious love.

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Thanks for being here and taking in Hāweatea’s wisdom and gratitude to Matthew for this interview. We’ll be back soon with a very exciting first of its kind offer for our readers and subscribers - stay tuned.

In community,

-Britt