[Text on screen: Whānau talk about Mirimiri (Massage)]
Speaker 1:
Mirimiri, to me, is bonding with the child.
Speaker 2:
Mirimiri to me I think is a form of hands-on healing. It’s a way that we can, from human to human, give some calming, some good feelings.
Speaker 3:
Mirimiri is something that I like to do, or get done, have a massage as often as I can but it doesn’t happen that often. When my children were young, I used to massage them after a bath, once or twice a day, and that was really good at helping to get them to sleep and relax and hopefully sleep all night and all that kind of thing. It was a way of transferring aroha or all sorts of good feelings to them about, you know, I’m your mother, it’s okay, I’m here for you, don’t worry, go to sleep now. That kind of thing. I think it’s something that my mother did with me, and my aunty did with all her children. She’s got nine of them. I think the connection, you get a different level of connection with your children when you do that because it’s skin to skin and it’s heart to heart, if you like. Yeah, it’s something that I hope my children continue with their children when they have them.
[Music]
[Text on screen: How does baby benefit from mirimiri?]
Speaker 4:
In times when children are uptight, or hurting, mirimiri is a good way of relaxing them and taking some of the hurt or the mamae out of the children.
Speaker 2:
When I relate it to children, I think that it’s a way to bring a closeness to your baby to start with. What you’re doing is you’re bringing your hands, you’re using your hands, and touch as a way to show your baby that you love them. I think that it’s a wonderful way to bring time together because you can’t actually do the dishes and do mirimiri at the same time. It’s your undivided attention that you’re giving your baby. For us in busy homes with lots of children sometimes it is difficult to give a hundred percent attention. Whereas mirimiri is something that you can do; you require your full attention.
Speaker 5:
We’ve got many whānau members who are sort of active participants in mirimiri and rongoā, and I’ve seen babies, you know, they just absolutely love mirimiri. I think it’s really important and I think there’s horses for courses and for some people mirimiri is the most soothing thing that could take place in terms of that type of healing that they’re seeking at that particular time.
Speaker 3:
It makes it easier for them to accept that type of therapy, I suppose, when they’re getting older. I know I’m open to all of that maybe because of how I was treated when I was young. There’s definitely some healing qualities in there and especially when it’s between mother and child or father and child or siblings, or even the other way around, like, say grandchild to grandmother.
[Music]
[Text on screen: How do you use mirimiri, and is it safe?]
Speaker 2:
With mirimiri it’s something that it depends really on the situation. You don’t have to pack your bag if you’re going with your child somewhere, you don’t have to pack your bag of mirimiri, you know, here, they are here, you’ve got the tools here. It didn’t have to be clothes off, oil down mirimiri. It could be just a simple soothing action and again they respond to it, they know. Particularly when they’re sick too, that’s the time, and hence the sense that it’s a rongoā, that mirimiri is a healing. They’ll often want to have mirimiri when they’re not a hundred percent. That’s probably where I’ve used it the most often.
Speaker 4:
No, no, I don’t think it’s easy to mirimiri a baby or a small child. I think you have to be very careful how, what you’re doing and how you do it. We’re just a lot stronger than the person that we would be mirmiri-ing, so we’ve just got to be very careful not to hurt the child but just to relax the child.
Speaker 3:
There are I guess some safety issue around doing mirimiri with very young children, similar to when you’re bathing them, they can get quite slippery. Then when they get older and more wriggly they can fall off things, so the floor is a good place to sort of start when you’re already there, just as long as it’s warm.
[Music]
[Text on screen: personal experiences with mirimiri]
Speaker 5:
When we were brought up mirimiri wasn’t really a big part of our life, but more recently I think that it has come back, in more recent times, that our people have started to rekindle what was potentially becoming a lost art, the art of being able to massage and soothe through the art of mirimiri.
Speaker 3:
When I did mirimiri on my children I did their arms, faces, head, scalp sometimes, especially now the older one. She plays tennis you see, and she gets a lot of stress up in head so I rub her head and she goes, “Mum, can you rub my head?” And, oh, arms, I said arms and fingers sometimes, legs, puku a lot as they might have wind or something.
Speaker 5:
My children have had mirimiri done on them when they’ve been unwell by a kuia of ours and both of them I’ve noticed absolutely responded to it awesomely.
Speaker 1:
Only time I done it when they had a bath and you mirimiri them when they get out of bath tub and you rub the limbs down with…
Speaker 6:
Olive oil.
Speaker 1:
Olive oil, that’s what I used to rub my children down after a bath with olive oil. They loved it, they lapped that up, because they could feel, you know, nice rubbing of my hands on them, touching them.
[Music and singing]
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