Most people have only seen this on a rugby field before kickoff. There's a lot more going on than that.
A haka is a Māori chant performed with the whole body, not just the voice. Feet stomp, chests and thighs get slapped, eyes go wide (pūkana), tongues come out (whetero). It's meant to look intense. That's the point. What it actually says changes every time: who's performing it, where they're from, what they're standing for in that moment.
Haka goes back further than anyone wrote down. Specific haka were composed for battle, meant to unify warriors and rattle the other side before a single blow landed. But most haka were never about war at all: there are haka for welcoming visitors, for funerals, for celebrating something worth celebrating.
When colonization hit New Zealand, haka and most Māori cultural practice got actively pushed down. It didn't disappear. Māori communities kept it alive across generations, sometimes quietly, sometimes at real cost.
Things shifted in the 20th century: a real, deliberate push to bring back te reo Māori and Māori cultural practice generally, haka included. Now you'll see it at graduations, weddings, funerals, and, most visibly to most of the world, before every All Blacks match, where the team performs a haka called Ka Mate.
What happens in our gatherings comes out of that same living tradition. It's not a recreation. It's still changing, still meaning something real to the people who keep it alive. That's exactly why we don't take teaching it lightly.
Break the word apart and you get two pieces. "Ha" is breath, the same root behind hongi, the traditional greeting where two people press foreheads and share breath. "Ka" means to ignite, to burn, to set alight. Put them together and haka is often described as breath given fire: the life force in you, made visible and loud.
What happens here isn't just haka, and it isn't just personal development work borrowed from somewhere else. It's a real blend of two traditions: Māori haka on one side, Men's and Women's Work, rooted in Western psychology and group process, on the other. Neither one gets watered down for the sake of the other. Haka brings the body, the ancestry, the fire. Men's and Women's Work brings the structure for actually going inward, for being witnessed by the people around you instead of performing for them. Put together, they do something neither tradition does on its own.