Magic Within, Otaihanga (2025)

03/03/2025

🌀 3-Hour Breathwork Experience with Marcel Hof – A Rare Opportunity! 🌀

Life is busy. The to-do lists never end. The world keeps pulling you in a million directions. But when was the last time you truly took a moment just for you?

This is your chance.

Join me as I host this transformational 3-hour breathwork session with Marcel Hof—brother of the world-renowned Wim Hof - “Iceman”. Marcel has spent decades teaching people how to use breath to release stress, increase energy, and unlock a deeper connection with themselves.

🌬 Why You Should Be Here:
✔ Step away from the noise and reconnect with yourself
✔ Let go of stress, tension, and emotional blocks
✔ Tap into deep relaxation and inner strength
✔ Experience breathwork like never before with a world-class guide

This isn’t just an event—it’s a reset for your mind, body, and soul.

📅 Date: Wednesday 5th March
📍 Location: Te Rā Waldorf School - 89 Poplar Avenue, Raumati South
🎟 Spots are limited – grab your ticket now!

Give yourself the gift of presence. You deserve this.

https://events.humanitix.com/marcel-hof-breathwork-kapiti-wellington

04/04/2024

One way to Ground & Center

A visualization and meditation technique might help you become more aware of your surroundings and concentrate on the here and now.

Anytime you're feeling anxious, tense, or agitated, give it a try.

For many people, the picture of a tree conjures up thoughts of security and unity.

1. Sit in a chair with your feet on the ground to begin.
Select a peaceful area free from distractions. You can practice this exercise anyplace as you do it.

2. Notice your breathing.
Clench your stomach, tighten your muscles and breathe up high in your chest. What emotions does that give you? The terms "anxious," "tense," and "panicky" are frequently used. Breathing through your chest is not deep breathing, and it's frequently an unintentional response to tension or difficulty.

3. Relax your stomach and let your breath down into your belly.
Imagine your tummy growing and it dripping down into your toes. Do you begin to experience changes? This type of deep breathing is considered abnormal by some people. Place your palm on your stomach and inhale till your stomach pushes your hand out in order to understand it. Regular practice will make it effortless and instinctive.

4. Close your eyes.
Think of your breath like a tree pushing down its roots; imagine it pushing down through your feet and through the base of your spine. Imagine those roots reaching down into the earth underneath the floor. Assume that they have some sense of the earth's qualities, the things that grow there, and its overall health. Push down into the center, past the bedrock, and through the waters beneath the earth. Allow any remaining anxiety or stress to pass via your "roots."
Some find that it helps to cast their negative emotions into the fire by visualizing that there is a fire in the center of the Earth.

5. Imagine you can draw some of that fire up.
Consider it the living creative energy of the ground, rising via the soil, water, and rock. In the same way that a tree's roots would absorb water and nutrients, bring it into your legs and feet.

6. Bring it up your spine and imagine your spine growing like a tree trunk, reaching up to the sky. Incorporate fire into your heart and any other area of your being that need healing or increased vitality. Raise and open your posture, and bring your attention back to your breathing as you visualize the growth and vitality flowing into you.

7. Direct the energy up through your arms and out of your hands, up through your neck and throat and out the top of your head. Imagine that you are surrounded by branches of energy that stretch up to the sky and then spread out to touch the earth, acting as a shield around you. Look at that energy web for a moment and see if there are any areas that require strengthening or repair. Direct your energy in that way.

8. Imagine the energy of the sun, shining down on your leaves and branches. Take a deep breath and absorb that energy. Breathe it through your hands, your belly, your heart, and your branches and leaves. Intake it, nourish yourself with it as a tree does with sunlight.

9. Open your eyes.
Examine your surroundings. What is your emotional state? At ease? revitalized? More mindful?

10. Imagine your feet have sticky roots.
When you begin to move, let them sink into the ground and then release. Take a short stroll around. Experience a sense of rootedness in the earth. Sense the release and hold of the fictitious roots.

11. Stretch your arms out to your sides as you move, as far as they’ll go, until you can’t see your hands if you look straight ahead. Now wiggle your thumbs, and slowly bring your arms in until your thumbs are just visible on the edge of your peripheral vision. Observe the extent of your field of view. Engage your peripheral vision while you walk, maintaining a grounded breathing pattern. Recognize that you have the ability to perceive your surroundings.

12. Come back to stillness.
Feel where in your body this grounded area seems to reside when you breathe, then reach out and touch that point. Is there a picture of this grounded state you can find? Something you can say, a word or two? Touch, image, and phrase work together to form an anchor that will help you immediately ground yourself in any circumstance.

02/04/2024

When Marcel Hof first came to New Zealand, I managed to attend one of his breathwork and ice immersion workshops. I was at a time in my life where I needed change as I was in a very bad and dark place. During Marcels Breathwork I experienced so much insight, tears, emotions and out of body experiences. I then went on to do the ice-immersion... this was the hardest mentally for me as I have health issues with one being Raynaud's and I was scared I wouldn't be able to warm up. Marcel and Gina guided me through the ice bath and ensured they had measures in place if I struggled. The first part was the toughest and I was ready to get out but I was guided and managed to stay in. This was the biggest accomplishment mentally for me.

A month or so after this Marcel and Gina advertised a breathwork facilitator programme called the Hof Upgrade. Without doubt I signed up because I wanted to learn all I could about this method and to ensure more people got to experience this beautiful work. I began this journey at a retreat with strangers who have all become my breathwork family, we have journeyed together, held and guided each other. After this I was able to begin my case studies, the first couple were a little tough as I was still in doubt with allowing my intuition to come through as my mind wanted to know all details but every person, session and moment is different so I learnt to trust. Marcels feedback after each session helped me grow, improve, relax and become more present. The feedback I started to receive from the beautiful people that put their trust into me to facilitate them individually and also in larger groups for breath and ice immersions was invaluable. The benefits I was seeing in my own health and in others was incredible that I knew I was on the right path.

Fast forward a year to today and I can now shout from the rooftop that all my hard work and effort has paid off... I can proudly say that I am the first person in the world to complete the Hof Upgrade Facilitator Training in Breathwork and Ice-Immersions. Thank you Marcel for bringing your gifts to New Zealand and for teaching me so I to can now share your work with others. Thank you Gina for all your hard work in making sure this all happened - the work behind the scenes hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Watch this space as I have something incredible planned over the next few months that I know will excite many. Until then if you would like to experience 1on1 breathwork session and ice-immersion, group breathwork and ice-immersions or breathwork alone then please reach out for a consultation.

Go and check out my page on Facebook - Magic Within https://www.facebook.com/share/KHdsAVXa6kMbwV9A/?mibextid=WC7FNe

30/10/2023

Healing Your Inner Child

A person’s inner child includes sources of strength, lightheartedness, and/or skills that they have learned throughout their stages of growth. But it also encompasses wounds and traumas sustained during the course of growth. Although it could take some time, it is possible to heal these wounds from your inner child.

Healing your inner child can be helpful in addressing:

Transgenerational trauma: Transgenerational trauma occurs across family generations. Youngsters continue to engage in maladaptive behavioral patterns after early exposure to codependency, people-pleasing, and trust difficulties. These wounds can begin to heal and the transgenerational trauma can be stopped with inner child treatment and reparenting.

Attachment issues: When one’s attachment styles are insecure, they are providing evidence that as a child, they felt the need to take care of/protect themselves for one reason or another. These safe childhood coping strategies develop into harmful adult coping strategies that hinder an individual. Working with your inner child teaches you more flexible ways to take care of yourself and your needs.

Perfectionism: Perfectionism in adulthood may stem from a desire to keep a caregiver happy or receive praise from a caregiver in childhood. It's critical to distinguish between what is happening now and what used to function in childhood. The habits we hold from our childhood often don't work in our adult lives.

Low self-esteem: As we grow, we experience the world through our caregivers. If they speak to us in a harsh or abusive manner, we will take on that critical voice as our own internal dialogue. You can have a deeper understanding of who you are right now by learning about the needs, feelings, and experiences of your inner child.

How to Heal Your Inner Child
Prior to starting the healing process with your inner child, it's critical to realize that it will require time.

The suffering associated with childhood trauma or distress cannot be eased with a magic bullet or fast remedy. As it turns out, inner child work is really a conscious, continuous conversation between the inner child and the adult self.

Here are a few ways ways to heal your inner child:

1. Recognize & Accept Your Inner Child 👦
Even if you’re unable to recall many memories from your childhood, you know that at one point, you were a child and that time in your life has had an impact on you. Recognizing your inner child can begin with looking at photographs from your childhood. Even if it could be tough at first, it's crucial to give yourself permission to acknowledge that your upbringing included difficult periods and to look back on past memories.

2. Listen to Your Inner Child 👧
Pay attention to your inner child and accept that it is wounded. This is an ideal moment to observe your own mature responses and attempt to discern what they are attempting to convey to you. By showing love and care, consider what your inner child needs from you as an adult.

Some other questions that you can ask your inner child are:
➡️ What are you judging or blaming yourself for?
➡️ How are you feeling?
➡️ How can I best support you?

Listening to your inner child and experiencing the feelings and emotions that may arise is a valuable way to grow and work through the past.

3. Write a Letter 👦
Composing a letter from your adult self to your inner child can be a profoundly healing and loving practice. It releases some of the responsibility your inner child may have always felt, while simultaneously giving it the wisdom of your mature self.
You could start this letter with "Dear Younger Me."
Writing a letter from the viewpoint of your inner child is another useful practice. The inner child is free to write anything that comes to mind in this letter using crayons or markers. "Dear Big Me" would be the opening line.

4. Try Meditation 👧
When we meditate, we become still and are able to control our thoughts and attention. Working through inner child wounds frequently causes us to lose concentration and make it difficult to pay attention to the past. A guided, straightforward method to help you access emotions from the past is to practice inner child meditation.

5. Try Journaling 👦
Using writing, audio, art, video, apps, or other mediums to express your ideas and feelings can help you make sense of them. Journaling is an active therapeutic approach. Setting new goals for your life and changing unhealthy coping mechanisms can be facilitated by being able to identify and let go of these thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns as an adult.
Another approach is journaling from the point of view of the inner child. This will allow the inner child to express him/herself, rather than keep the emotions bottled up inside.

Below are signs that your inner child is healing:
✨ You’ve learned healthy coping mechanisms
✨ You’ve broken patterns of avoidance
✨ You show yourself empathy and are able to recognize your needs.
✨ You’re able to set boundaries
✨ You’re better able to regulate your emotions
✨ You can create everyday routines and rituals.
✨ You are able to clearly express your own needs
✨ You are able to take care of yourself and tune into what you need
✨ You let yourself have fun and be impulsive.

20/10/2023

We naturally prefer to avoid uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, and memories. However, that does not mean they vanish. Rather, they continue to exist in our unconscious minds in secret.

We must learn to heal childhood wounds and accept not only our light but also our shadow if we are to become whole human beings (because we all have them).

The world we live in is bipolar.
No day without night.
No hot without cold.
No light without darkness.

If we keep undesirable parts of ourselves hidden, how can we ever be completely authentic? If we don't embrace our darkness completely, how can we ever love and accept others?

These days, the idea of "shadow work" is widely discussed and tossed about like candy, but there still appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding it all.

When we talk about the shadow, we mean all the parts we deny, hide or reject about ourselves.
Carl Jung describes the shadow as the hidden part of our human psyche.
How Does Your Shadow Manifest and Express Itself?

There are many ways our shadow parts show up in our conscious lives:
Jealousy, Addiction, Depression, Anxiety, Codependency, Creating or being part of a lot of drama in life, Self-sabotage, Power struggles, Lies, Procrastination, Resentment, Passive-aggressiveness, Bitterness, Aggression, anger and rage, Violent behaviors and abuse, Victimisation, Guilt and shame, Reactive, Discontentment

Examples of the Shadow
Your parents didn't respect your opinions as you grew up. Little You came to the conclusion that your parents don't care about your thoughts, so you should keep quiet so they won't judge or blame you. This is a constantly changing component that teaches you to keep your ideas to yourself and makes you afraid to speak up, especially in school, at work, or on social media.

Or maybe you learned to not take all sweets from the table because you would be considered greedy. Alternatively, you discovered that being loud, wild, and expressive would make you appear foolish or bothersome.

You might criticize somebody for the same traits in both situations, such as being obnoxious or avaricious.

When you scroll around on Instagram and you see someone celebrating a 6-figure product launch or having just bought an epic home by the beach or getting married to their dream partner - and you notice yourself feeling jealousy. Or sadness. And you criticize them or judge them “Oh look at them boasting their big money egos” or “Who would need such a big house anyway?” or “Well, we all know how many marriages fail, so I’m sure they won’t make it far.”

So how do I do shadow work?
Journaling can be an excellent place to start if you want to spend some time with your shadow. The most straightforward way to do shadow work is to identify experiences or interactions where you felt inferior to others, tension in the body, or feelings of jealousy, envy, or anger. then write about them in a journal. Engaging in self-reflection exercises like this one enables you to identify the aspects of yourself that you might be hiding and begin to explore the reasons behind it.

Here are some journaling exercises to help you shine light on your shadow:
Are there aspects of your personality that you feel too embarrassed to discuss with others?
Have you ever been dishonest about who you are, your likes/dislikes, or your personality?
How recently have you experienced embarrassment, and why?
Are there times you don't want to share something you have with others (like your time or an item), but you don't speak up because you fear being judged?
Which presumptions about other people do you usually make?

By increasing awareness through this exercise, you'll be in a better position to make judgments and choices going ahead that are more in line with your values.

For example, maybe the last time you felt embarrassed was when a friend pointed out that you’re super talkative. You can analyze why this made you feel so uncomfortable and what it says about your values and how you want other people to see you by scribbling over that.

From there, begin to pose questions to yourself, such as, "Where did I hear that being talkative was a bad thing?" and "What are some stereotypes about talkative people?" These inquiries will help you understand where this all began for you and what it might look like if you choose to embrace your talkative nature rather than feeling it had to be kept hidden.

20/10/2023

Codependency involves living life unconsciously reacting to the emotional wounds and intellectual programming from childhood. In order to stop living our lives in reaction, we need to be willing to start being more conscious. That includes becoming more conscious in relationship to how we learned to express ourselves growing up in codependent cultures.

Just take a moment to become conscious in how different the energy of saying "I have to" is from the energy of saying "I choose" - and I think you will get the point.

In terms of starting to learn some emotional discernment - of learning how to clear up, and change our relationship with, our own emotions - it is important to become conscious of some dysfunctional ways we learned to express ourselves in relationship to emotions.

When we make statements like:
"I am angry”
“I'm very hurt" etc.
We are stating that the feeling is who we are.
The feeling is not who we are.
Emotions are a vital component of our being but they do not define us. It is important to start seeing emotions as a part of us so that we can start taking responsibility for them instead of being the victim of our own feelings.

We also need to stop blaming our feelings on another person:
"You make me angry"
"You hurt me" etc.
When we make these kind of statement we are saying that the other person is totally responsible for our feelings - we are blaming from a victim perspective.

The healthier, and more honest, way to express our feelings is to state how we are feeling and what we identify as having triggered that feeling. To say something like:
"I felt hurt when you didn't call me."
"I feel angry when you talk to me that way." etc.
(This also helps us to start focusing on cause and effect - a vital step in raising our consciousness so we can move out of a victim perspective.)

By becoming conscious of changing the way I expressed my emotions, it became easier for me to start seeing my emotional reactions with more clarity. Then I could start becoming more discerning in sorting out what part of my emotional reaction was caused by things I did have some control over / was my responsibility.

For instance:
If I felt hurt because you didn't call me, then I could look at what expectation on my part set me up for that emotional reaction.
Did you tell me you were going to call me - or did I assume you would call me.
If it was my assumption, those feelings are something that I created that don't really have much to do with you.

A component in codependent behavior is assuming, mind reading, fortune telling, and interpreting.
I was afraid of asking directly for what I needed and setting boundaries - out of my inner child wounds relating to fear of confrontation and of abandonment - which set me up to feel like a victim when someone did not do what I expected them to do.
I needed to learn to take responsibility for how I set myself up emotionally with my expectations in order to start getting more emotionally honest with myself and stop blaming you for my feelings.
If I am upset because you "should" have called me, or because it was the "right" thing to do - that is about my belief system and expectations.

Perhaps you told me you were going to call me, and I feel I have a self righteous reason to be hurt by your behavior. What I need to look at then, is rather this is a pattern of behavior for you. Is this something you have done before. If you have a pattern of behavior that causes you to be irresponsible in following through on promises that you have made - then I need to look at my responsibility in choosing to believe you when you make a promise.
The definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results - would then apply to my expectations, which are my responsibility.

If it is just a case of you were busy and couldn't call, a rare occurrence where you didn't keep a promise, then I need to look at any beliefs I have that don't give you room to be human - that cause me to think you will be perfect. To expect another person to never screw up (in my view of their behavior) is an insane expectation of another human being.

It is vital for me to look at anything I may be doing, or any attitude or expectations that I am holding, that contributed to the emotional reaction I experienced.

As I start to clean up the way I expressed my feelings, and stop blaming them on you, then I can also start to look at what other factors play a part in my emotional reaction. I can then become aware that any time I have a strong emotional reaction - intense, a lot of energy behind it, a "button" was pushed - I am reacting out of unresolved grief from the past.
Then I could start to see that the emotional reaction that you may have triggered is an opportunity for me to get in touch with an inner child wound that may need my attention.

There are many different levels and layers to the process of getting emotionally honest so that we can become emotionally discerning. It is very important to become more conscious of all the ways we were trained to have a dysfunctional relationship with our own emotions. A small, but very important, step in that process is to start becoming more conscious of what is coming out of our mouths.
It is important to become more aware of what you say, how you express yourself.

Monday	10:30 - 13:30
Tuesday	10:30 - 13:30
Friday	10:30 - 13:30

Magic Within

03/03/2025

04/04/2024

02/04/2024

30/10/2023

20/10/2023

20/10/2023

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share