Better Not to Do It at All

Working with children in a refugee camp grew me enormously as an educator. I came to this work slowly — I completed additional training in somatic pedagogy, I take regular supervision, I study adjacent disciplines, and I reflect, reflect, reflect.

My reflection keeps stumbling on shame. On the fact that being myself is so shameful that I'd rather be someone else entirely — follow the crowd, derail the session, even if I'm genuinely interested.

Better not to do it at all than to not do it perfectly.

Shame in children, shame in adults

In children I see this shame in their excessive engagement, hyperactivity, and desire to "show themselves" — but only through the lens of memes, TikToks, jokes. To show their real selves — kids who can't always read or write, for whom camp life and the German language are hard — that's shameful.

And I see this shame in adults too. Behind furrowed brows, skepticism, retreats into talk and theory instead of just doing something different — yes, it'll probably fail, yes, it'll be humiliating.

I can't not mention the constant transference onto me as the teacher: at first as some great sovereign holding secret knowledge, and then, the moment something goes wrong, as complete worthlessness — often followed by a fairly dramatic rupture, complete with grievances.

This shame, this anger, can't be held inside; it's vital to move it somewhere. But whose shame is it, whose humiliation?

When the self becomes a product

I see more and more parallels between these two states. How my own agency gets replaced by false shame. And not without objective cause: that capitalist modality operating in the economy (itself not without problems) weaves into our relationship with ourselves — we "invest" in ourselves, we turn ourselves into a "product," we look for "value" in every moment of a voice lesson.

When my whole subjecthood turns into a number, an object, a case, a problem to be solved — there's no room in it for creativity, growth, transformation. There's nothing alive in it.

And this is where I see a narrow gap the somatic approach can slip through.

What I mean by "somatic approach"

Disclaimer: there's a lot of speculation and woo-woo halo effect around this word. When I say "somatic approach," I mean working with the living body as a set of processes — not a problem to be solved. The body is not a machine to be fixed or upgraded.

Reclaiming my right to be alive is, for me, tightly bound up with my right to die. You can't deny your mortality and be alive. You can't be omnipotent and be in relationship.

There is no "correct" — and that's the point

Every somatic discipline always brings us back to the cellular level, to the level of my skeleton, my muscles. Again — to the sensory experience of living in one's own body, and to seeking joy and potential in that process.

In somatic exercises we can't succeed — there's no "correct" — and that's exactly what gives us back not only agency in the process of learning, or anything else, but also responsibility.

Yes, I know — it's a deeply unpleasant, clunky word: responsibility. But in reclaiming responsibility and agency, I see a redistribution of power. A rupture of capitalist relations within oneself, and the building of trust, of partnership. Some kind of micro-model of bio-democracy.

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Being humiliated matters. You have to see it through. It matters to acknowledge it and just keep being yourself. And, without you noticing, the shame gets smaller.