It was some years before I discovered the full significance of our name.   Wynsome Diprose, co-founder of our Retreat Centre, chose the name and it was translated to us as “a healing place”.

Later, another retreat centre owner in Piha, suggested that I find out from the Tangata whenua, Te Kawerau A Maki, what Te Wahi Ora meant to them.   She also told me what she had heard about the Maori Pa sites being at high energy points, on the north and south ends of Piha.   Plus a huge population living on the heights of Maungaroa, the ridge directly behind our Retreat House.

“The three points form a triangle and your A-frame triangular house is right in the middle of their land-triangle,” she told us.   “I’ve heard that the early Maori called this area inside the triangle, ‘a place of sacred healing’.”  She added. 

I was intrigued.

And when I asked a woman of the Te Kawerau A Maki what she thought of that story, she too was excited.

“That makes sense of the stories I’ve been told.”  She said.

“When my mother’s mother was getting old and unwell, she used to ask her family to take her to Swanson and she would walk across the trails of the Waitakere Ranges to stay with the Tohunga in the caves at the end of North Piha.   When she was well again, she would walk back across the trails to Swanson.”

I then asked her about our name.

“Does Te Wahi Ora mean a ‘healing place’ as we had been told?” I said tentatively.

She was quiet for a long time and then answered, “yes, Te Wahi Ora fits perfectly with what you are doing.”  

“Its literal translation is, ‘a place to belong to while moving into wholeness’.”

I thought of the women over the last 18 years who have come to visit and to stay at Te Wahi Ora over and over again until they were ‘whole’ again perhaps after a physical or emotional trauma.   Sometimes it took years.   Sometimes it took weeks or months.   But they had a place to belong to while they were in their process of moving towards wholeness!

I was quiet as I thought with awe of how we had been given the name, right at the beginning.   Then it had taken years to develop our type of work.   Now I was finding that the two matched perfectly.

A place for women at Piha.  
Te Wahi Ora. 
A place to belong to while moving into wholeness.