Hello Shame! Bowls and Drums! The Journey from Shame towards Dignity and Hope.
Hello, shame!
Let’s first welcome shame into the room and into this space. Many of us feel ashamed about having shame itself, don’t we? I just want you to notice: how is it to welcome it into the room?
I have learned that shame has a somatic role; it is protective and distracting, and it is a response to Trauma. It takes care of us by covering up overwhelming emotional experiences with a sense of agency in contexts where we felt helpless. Shame has an impulse to hide, to disconnect, isolate, be invisible and make sure that no one finds out who we “really” are! Our sense of self is distorted with the presence of shame! Shame makes us feel smaller, constantly scanning for what is wrong with us, and therefore unable to be aware and present with our potentials and creativity.
What shame protects us from is pain! Underneath shame are experiences and feelings of helplessness, terror, deep grief, agony, abandonment, and rage. When working with shame, we get to uncover a level of vulnerability that is very painful and for me it was heart-trenching. I remember the pain I felt deep in my heart when I touched my own shame; I realised it wasn’t just a sense of “wrongness”, “rejection”, It was also entangled with a deep longing to belong and feel safe in my dignity—which is our birthright. I had to ask myself many difficult questions. One of them is what “wrongness” was I using to distract myself from those very painful feelings?
For me the pain is an echo of the historical marginalisation I inherited from my ancestors which they have experienced in my home country and in other lands. Whether it is from my mother’s Assyrian side or my father’s Ismaili roots—a religious minority—to the weight of classism, this is acutely felt right now. So many minority groups in Syria are facing a threat to their existence based on their identity.
I am reminded of the threats my people have faced for a long time and the historical survival strategies women in particular had to learn, the voicelessness, and the weight of it that I carried for so long.
I now believe that shame is an embodied experience, you cannot talk yourself out of it! No amount of talking therapy went deep enough to know shame in my body. Our bodies has a form of knowledge and wisdom that is different from our cognitive brains—a wisdom I learned to listen to in order to process shame and many other feelings. Shame is experienced through the felt sense; it shows up in the posture, in holding our breath, in the clenched jaw, and the vigilance scanning of threats, AND when it is ancestral, it gets into the bones.
Shame does not want to be seen, and it does not want all of what follows—the grief and the rage—to be seen either. It may also be keeping you away from stepping on the journey of healing. Working with shame like working with anger is very liberating. It made me realise the layers and complexity of my grief. Not only I needed to grieve the loss of home, I also needed to grieve what I did not get: a JUST world, a world where I am seen and viewed as equal to others.
The wound kept repeating itself and the layers of shame got more complex. I moved to the UK in 2011, the same year the Syrian revolution started. In the news, the revolution was depicted as war, and a Syrian person was often seen only as a “terrorist” or a “refugee.”
Moving to the UK meant I was subjected again to the stereotypical gaze—being viewed as a villain or a victim. My nervous system chose to shut down and dissociate, splitting from that experience and disconnecting from my roots so my life could go on. I had to study, work, and live in this very new country.
Yet the question ”Where are you from?” haunted me. Every time I get asked this, I was reminded of how the world might be viewing me. Shame around my identity, race, culture, war, you name it. And among of this shame meant that I had to protect and defend an identity that I myself did not yet know how to relate to.
As the war erupted and I watched from far away, the paralysing fear and helplessness of trying to protect my parents—alongside the UK’s policies—meant that isolation and voicelessness felt like my only options in the face of oppression.
The World of Somatic Healing:
Peter Levine describes Trauma work: Trauma can be “hell on earth,” but when transformed, it becomes a “divine gift.” This is exactly how I can describe my healing journey. While before healing, I was living from this small self that trauma and shame shaped, now I become more than who I was even before the trauma. For those of us, Arabs and particularly from marginalised communities carrying the weight of inter-generational oppression, we are navigating the world with a compounded micro and global gaze of being labelled as villains or victims, but never as human beings. My journey with SE has not merely been a pursuit of personal relief; it has become an act of restoring a whole world to me. I am now re-connecting with my Assyrian roots and reclaiming connection to pleasure and dignity that have been oppressed.
As I began to heal, I developed so much compassion for my survival strategies. They were powerful; they allowed me to keep going. But I started letting go of them one by one. My first 8 years of living in the UK, I was working in Tech and Education, I realised later that there is more to me and I began my journey towards integration and aligning my purpose and my authentic self. While shame carries an impulse to hide, to be invisible, the tech space kept me hiding from my true potentials. When I woke up to this, I couldn’t un-see it.
Through Somatic work, I started connecting with my resilience and particularly my ancestral resilience, slowly reclaiming my roots through spiritual practices such as yoga, connecting with Buddhism, somatic resourcing, chanting, joining African dances and Dabkeh, going on protests fighting all forms of oppression. I started reclaiming a grounding sense of who I am at my core and reclaiming my voice.
In my work right now as a yoga teacher and a somatic therapist, I see that the “story” is not always needed in order to heal. That was a relief for me. I could work with the imprints of the wounding—listening to how the silence and voicelessness spoke through my physiology—without the exhausting need to intellectualise what happened. Meaning-making and storytelling come towards the end; reclaiming the voice and narrative of the Soma first, reclaiming our inner truth is the the very act of resistance.
We have come along way!
As I am writing this, I am reminded of what we are still living nowadays of what we have not yet overcome. This is not the past yet. Marginalisation and oppression in Syria is still happening. White Supremacy and fascism in the West are rising. The people of Palestine are witnessing a genocide, and the threat to our identity as Arabs is being feltcollectively and globally.
I cannot talk about shame without talking about the systems that manufacture it. I must ask these hard questions:
How can we get over oppression when we have not been out of oppression for as long as our ancestors were in it?
How can we overcome the legacy of slavery and move on when so many are the namesakes of those who held them in captivity?
Is it reasonable to expect Indigenous people to forget broken treaties while living in cities that carry the names of the tribes that were displaced?
In my own process, I found these inquiries very useful and at the very core of my process working with shame and particularly in relation to the invisible wound of racial trauma:
How does my racial identity shape how I look at the world?
How do I believe my racial identity impacts how I am perceived?
As I sit with those, I track my somatic response:
What posture do I go into when I feel shame? (Does my body want to shrink, hide, or appease?)
Does the shame have a character, a gesture, or a movement?
If it had a voice, would it be a whisper or a roar of rage?
What do I believe is “bad” or “wrong” about me based on how the world sees me?
My 2026 Daily Ritual: the Shame Bowl
Because this historical and ancestral wound is still acutely felt, I have made a commitment to show up and do the work on a daily basis. I invite you to witness or create your own container for this work:
The Container: create a safe space/an altar in your home and chose a bowl.
The List: I brainstorm all aspects of shame asking the question: what do i feel shameful about? on small slips of paper and i fold them and put them in the bowl.
The Practice: Every day for 90 days, I centre myself, connect with my body and pull one slip of paper.
The Movement: I hold the paper and feel into my body what needs to move through me. I breathe, I move, or I use a drum or mala to support me.
The drum reminds me of Dabkeh (a traditional Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian dance), where we stand shoulder to shoulder with dignity. It is a symbol of resilience.
The mala brings me to my spiritual community (Sangha), which is about togetherness in contrast to isolation.
The Declaration: I read a commitment I wrote for this journey: “I am a commitment to having my truth and love be at the centre of my life—showing up for myself as a dignified human—and both giving and receiving with dignity and compassion.”
Self-Forgiveness: This is vital so I do not fall back into the trap of self-blame. I use the phrase: “Even though [____], I am forgivable.”
When I feel complete with one aspect of shame, I leave that paper open under the bowl and move to the next.
When I am less burdened by shame, I can see situations clearly. I move from a “frozen silence” toward an inner authority, towards the humanity of myself and others, and I can take up more pace breathe fully.
If you enjoy this, please write to me. I am very curious to hear from you. When you sit with the questions I present for you, how does that move through you?
If this resonates and speaks to your own system, I invite you to join my upcoming Masterclass on Healing Shame through Somatic Resilience. Over three hours, we will gather to work with shame using somatic and ancestral tools.
I am inviting you to fill out an interest form first. This allows me to understand the 'shape' of the group and ensures I can hold the space with the dignity and care it deserves. If your body is saying 'yes' to being seen, you can find the form here.
