Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard.

For centuries, the march of modernity has not only unleashed devastation on Indigenous peoples and our natural environments, but also aimed to eradicate healing arts that have sustained communities and landscapes for millennia.

Hāweatea Holly Bryson is an Indigenous psychotherapist, rite of passage guide, and Māori healing practitioner of the Ngāi Tahu and Waitaha tribes who is working to challenge the colonial power structures that still endure within Western psychotherapy, and restore the role of cosmologies that long predate modern psychology.

While this process has at times been deeply challenging, Hāweatea is convinced that the “younger sibling” of Western psychotherapy must come into relationship with the “elder sibling” of Indigenous knowledge at this time of interlocking global crises — when the modern world has much to learn from older ways of knowing. 

“In our Western mindset, we’re still theorizing, we’re still having to prove things that Indigenous people already know,”  Hāweatea tells host Matthew Green. “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.”

This episode illuminates the powerful role practitioners are playing in challenging therapeutic models rooted in modernity’s story of separation, and shows how Indigenous worldviews could help to heal the split between the human and the more-than-human world. 

You can find out more about Hāweatea’s work at Nature Knows.

This conversation was first published as part of the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024.  

Applications Open: The Pocket Project is offering 48 Integration Labs in 2026, each dedicated to exploring and addressing specific dimensions of ancestral and collective trauma. To access a complete list of the Labs and to apply to participate, click here. (Registration closes on 20 January, 2026). 

Further Resources:  

Nature Knows 

Hāweatea on Instagram

Climate, Psychology and Change: Psychotherapy in a Time When the Familiar is Dying (features a chapter by Hāweatea, ‘Decolonizing Psychotherapy’)

Integration Labs 2026

About Hāweatea Holly Bryson 

Hāweatea Holly Bryson (Hāwea) is the founder of Nature Knows,  and a specialist in trauma, transition, and transformation. She is  an Indigenous psychotherapist, couples therapist , and Māori healing practitioner. She trains facilitators and therapists in rites of passage, ecopsychology, and profound ways of listening.

Hāwea’s community bases span Hawai’i Island, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia. Rooted in her tribal lineage of Ngāi Tahu and Waitaha, Hāwea has spent 15 years guiding rites of passage, committing herself to the resurgence and retrieval of our Ways of Knowing. Her work is driven by a lifelong fascination with human energy and the unique, innate power we each hold to heal and move toward greater alignment.