I first noticed it as a feeling. While sitting in karakia, I noticed a lower register beneath the words—not the words themselves, but the vibration carrying them. Then again, months later, learning the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic through Neil Douglas-Klotz’s recovery of body prayer: chant, breath, the same vibration, a different language entirely. Then again in Sanskrit toning. Three traditions. Three cosmologies. No shared root, no contact with each other at the point any of them began. And underneath all three, the same thing happening in the same place.
The throat.
I want to take that noticing seriously rather than let it sit as a nice feeling and move on. Karakia is the indigenous knowledge. Aramaic and Sanskrit prayers are the ancient wisdom. All three point to the same place in the body. That is my founding question, answered in part, from a direction I wasn’t watching.
It’s not just a feeling — there’s a mechanism
In 2001, researchers ran a study that, on paper, sounds like an odd pairing: people praying the Catholic rosary in Latin, and people reciting a Sanskrit yoga mantra. The two groups had nothing obviously in common. They found that both groups, independently, slowed their breathing to almost the same rate—around six breaths a minute, roughly half normal resting breathing. That rate isn’t random. It’s close to the point where the body’s blood pressure regulation works best, and it produced a measurable lift in heart rate variability — the standard marker of a calm, well-regulated nervous system — in both groups.
Different words. Different gods, different languages, different centuries of tradition behind each practice. Same breath. Same physiological signature.
Broader research on chanting and toning supports this. Across multiple traditions, the pattern repeats: extended exhale, slowed breath, a body settling into parasympathetic — rest and digest — mode. And the mechanism keeps pointing back to one place: the vagus nerve, which runs right alongside the vocal cords, the larynx, the throat itself. It isn’t vocalising in general that does this. It’s vocalising there.
The throat is also where silencing lives
Here’s where it stops being just interesting and starts being something we need to sit with properly.
When someone has been silenced — by colonisation, by whānau, by fear, by whatever shape the silencing took — they don’t just choose to talk less. The voice itself changes. It goes quiet. It goes squeaky. People stop being able to hear it or stop trying to. That’s not a turn of phrase. That’s what happens in the body, in the throat, when a person has learned—over years, sometimes over generations—that using their voice carries a cost.
I know this one from the inside. I grew up with te reo Māori denied to me. A generation before me, my Nan carried the Rangīūia healing lineage under the Tohunga Suppression Act and was forced to practise in secret. That is what silencing looks like when it passes down a whakapapa: not only lost words, but a voice that learns to stay quiet in order to stay safe. This work is, in part, about letting that voice come back.
If that’s where the wound sits, then that’s also where the mending has to happen. Not somewhere more comfortable. There.
This is part of what’s underneath the cleansing work some of you will recognise—the moment when hands release outward, then pull back to the throat, and the words come: I take back my mana. The tone and the gesture aren’t decoration around the meaning. They are the meaning. Reactivating the voice exactly where it was suppressed isn’t symbolic. It’s the most literal thing happening in the room.
Karanga carries this same logic in a different shape. Held on a single breath, right at the body’s edge of capacity, karanga isn’t performance—kaikaranga describe it as something closer to a spiritual rope, pulling the living and the dead onto the marae together, one held breath doing work ordinary speech could never do. One kaikaranga has described its purpose plainly: to reach the grief sitting inside a person and move it. That’s not a side effect of the practice. That’s the practice.
What this means, practically
I’m not saying karakia, Aramaic body prayer, and Sanskrit mantra are secretly the same practice. They’re not, and saying so would disrespect what each one carries—its own whakapapa, its own relationships, its own reasons for being exactly the shape it is. What I am saying is narrower and, I think, more useful: three traditions, independently and without copying each other, found their way to the same doorway. The body has a grammar that contemplative practice discovers, not invents. That convergence is the evidence.
For clinical work, this matters. When karakia enters a session, it isn’t an exotic add-on whose effects we can’t check. It’s a well-documented practice humans have done, in different clothes, for as long as we have records of prayer. When someone is invited to chant, tone, or simply speak aloud rather than stay quiet, that invitation isn’t a relaxation technique borrowed from somewhere else. It’s a direct approach to the exact place where silence first did its work.
This sits underneath the Dimensional Autophagy work, and underneath the wider shape of Te Poutama Ora. So much of what gets carried generationally — whakamā, the colonisation wound, the things a whānau decided were safer left unsaid — gets carried in the body, not just the mind. If that’s true, then talk therapy alone will only ever reach part of it. The voice itself, used on purpose and backed by breath, reaches what talking around the wound can’t.
An open thread
One more thing surfaced while I was writing this, and it didn’t stay open for long. A while back, I listened to a podcast that worked through the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer and broke the prayer into nine steps on the way to God—nine, with no explanation for why nine. I wrote it down because it landed, even though I didn’t know what to do with it. Separately, I hold seven as God’s number, completion — my own ariki number. Were those two numbers saying something to each other, or had they just both turned up while I was paying attention? So I did what you do with a thread that matters: I followed it.
Why Nine?
On the number that keeps arriving uninvited
I wasn’t looking for nine.
When I built Te Poutama Ora, nine wasn’t a target. Looking back over those first articles this month, I can trace how it arrived: five dimensions from Life Realignment, three more from asking what Te Whare Tapa Whā leaves out of contemporary life — Taha Matihiko, Taha Pūtea, Taha Kai — and Taha Auaha rising at the apex. Nine was where honest questions led. What I couldn’t explain was why it kept turning up somewhere else.
Then seven surfaced. Seven as God’s number in the Hebraic tradition. Seven as the ariki number, the number of completions in a nine-year cycle. Seven and nine in the same season. I held it as a noticing and didn’t force it into a tidy explanation. And then nine arrived again from a completely unexpected direction.
A Prayer in Nine Movements
So I went back to the source. Neil Douglas-Klotz has spent decades recovering what the Lord’s Prayer looked like before it was translated into Greek, then Latin, then English. In Aramaic, it isn’t a list of requests. It’s a sequence of transformations. And this first-century Semitic prayer — from a tradition with no contact with te Ao Māori, no awareness of the Maramataka, no connection to the framework I’d spent years building — moves through nine of them.
Douglas-Klotz’s recovery of the prayer describes nine distinct movements, each a stage of transformation rather than just a petition. It starts with identity: Abwoon d’bwashmaya — you are not an orphan; you belong to an eternal family. Before anything else, the pray-er is grounded. Belonging first. Identity before petition.
From there it moves through consecration (clearing the inner space), direction (birthing the new image in and through you), embodied alignment (your will and God’s acting together in the earth that is your body), nourishment for the call, release of binding cords, discernment from distraction, deliverance from what opposes the journey, and finally doxology — returning everything to source.
When I held those nine movements against TPO, I wanted a neat one-to-one map. It isn’t that neat, and I’d rather say so. But three correspondences hold without forcing. The first movement, belonging, is Taha Whakapapa. The last, “the song that beautifies all,” is Taha Auaha — the creative apex, where TPO also ends. For a piece about the voice, I love that both journeys finish in song.
That first line got me too. Abwoon: you are not an orphan; you belong. I have carried a quiet fear of being a spiritual impostor — that because my whakapapa doesn’t trace to the covenant, I was praying from outside the family. The prayer begins by answering exactly that. Belonging first.
And Step 6 stopped me.
The Binding Cords
In Douglas-Klotz’s Aramaic reading, the prayer’s forgiveness line isn’t primarily about guilt. It’s about releasing binding cords — the ties that hold us in patterns beyond their usefulness, the energetic knots that keep us looping. His translation speaks of “returning to original slender ties.”
That is Te Wetekina language. Almost word for word.
Te Wetekina is the TPO clinical protocol for ‘loosing’ strongholds — the recognition that some patterns aren’t just habits or coping mechanisms but binding structures, and that loosing them requires spiritual authority, not just psychological technique. I developed it from kaupapa Māori practice, from te Ao Māori understanding of how tapu and binding work in a person’s wairua. Douglas-Klotz arrived at the same clinical description from the Aramaic grammar of a first-century prayer.
Two thousand years. Two completely different traditions. One mechanism. That doesn’t need an explanation. It needs to be named.
On Seven and Nine Together
And then the seven. The Western church has long counted the Lord’s Prayer as seven petitions—Augustine did, and Luther’s catechism did, too. Douglas-Klotz’s nine movements hold those same seven, opening with belonging and closing with a return to source. Seven held inside nine.
So in this prayer, at least, seven and nine don’t compete. Seven is the fullness asked for. Nine is the whole journey that carries it, from belonging to return. One is the arrival; the other is the path. Whether that maps onto my own ariki framework, I’m not ready to say. But the thread I thought was open was sitting in the prayer the whole time.
One Honest Witness
I was ready to call this three witnesses to nine: the Maramataka, the ariki cycle, and the Aramaic prayer. Revisiting the founding articles changed that. TPO’s nine-day cycles map onto the Maramataka, aren’t native to it, and the ariki cycle is my own numerology. They’re part of how I hold nine, not evidence from outside it.
The Aramaic prayer is different. A scholar recovering a first-century Semitic body prayer, working in another language and cosmology with no knowledge of TPO, finds nine movements in the journey of transformation, puts the release of binding cords at Step 6, and returns everything to source in song at Step 9.
One witness, then. But an honest one.
Why It Matters for the Work
For kaiārahi using TPO, this matters in a quiet but important way. One honest question kaiārahi will ask is: why nine? Is this an arbitrary architecture, or does it reflect something real about how transformation moves through a person?
The answer starts with the work itself: the questions led to nine. And now there’s a witness from outside. Not proof in the scientific sense, but the kind of convergence practitioners in any tradition learn to take seriously — when a tradition working from a different cosmology, language and history arrives at the same structure, it suggests the structure may be tracking something real about how transformation moves through a person.
I wasn’t looking for nine. But nine keeps turning up, from directions I’d never have thought to look. At some point you stop calling that a coincidence and start calling it a witness.
So, back to the question I started with last November. Can indigenous knowledge and ancient wisdom unlock identity and wellness? I still don’t have the whole answer. But part of it is this: they don’t unlock it by teaching us the same beliefs. They unlock it by giving back something the body already knows — breath and voice, used on purpose, right where the silence was kept.
What I do know is this — the vibration underneath karakia is not incidental. It’s the work. And the throat that learned to go quiet is the same throat that, given the chance, knows exactly how to come back.
For further information or to view published articles related to Te Poutama Ora, please see here at this link https://www.iantemo.com/publications
This post is part of the Whakapapa of Colonisation series, a companion body of work to Te Poutama Ora (TPO). The academic companion paper is Te Hā e Honoa Ai. Neil Douglas-Klotz’s work is available in Prayers of the Cosmos (HarperOne).