You’re Not Being Attacked, You’re Being Activated.

Lately I’ve been noticing a pattern on TikTok. Videos of students feeling attacked by teachers. Teachers being dissected in post-class reviews. Moments filmed and shared without context, without conversation, without the kind of repair that can only happen in real relationship.

A lot of my clients and teachers send these videos to me, and they’ve sparked longer conversations inside our studio about the role of a teacher. What are we actually here to do? Are we here to be liked? To avoid discomfort at all costs? To never activate anything in anyone? Or are we here to guide, to correct, to bring people back to their center, knowing that being seen clearly can sometimes feel uncomfortable?

Over and over, I kept noticing the same dynamic in those videos. The teacher becomes the authoritarian. The student becomes the victim. Then, once it’s posted publicly, the roles flip. The teacher is the perpetrator. The student is righteous. The audience chooses sides. And no one seems to step back far enough to see that both people are participating in the same unconscious pattern.

We talked about this often. We talked about clarity. About responsibility. About what belongs to the teacher and what belongs to the student. And then, almost as if on cue, life gave us our own mirror.

I received a review that wasn’t glowing. One voice among hundreds of beautiful ones. What stayed with me wasn’t the review itself. It was that one of my teachers saw it and it stirred fear in her. The review wasn’t even about her, yet it attached itself to a recent moment where she had asked someone to wait outside while a class finished and that person chose to leave. The two experiences merged in her mind. Fear filled in the gaps. It suddenly felt like proof that offering guidance could be misinterpreted, that clarity could be perceived as harm.

I didn’t see it as proof of anything. I saw it as something surfacing.

This is what happens in a real container. Conversations we have in theory eventually show up in practice. The same questions we were asking about teachers online were now alive in our own space. Not as drama, but as material.

When my teacher felt that fear, the work was not managing the review. The work was looking at the fear. Asking what it touched. Seeing clearly where it belonged.

That is the same work I ask of students every day.

A classroom is a relationship. When you step into it, you bring your history with authority, correction, being seen, being told what to do. When a teacher guides you back into alignment, it can feel relieving. It can also feel exposing. Exposure is not automatically harm. It is often the beginning of awareness.

But if we are not practiced in self-responsibility, that awareness quickly turns outward. It becomes “you made me feel,” instead of “something was stirred in me.”

I care that someone did not have a good experience. I truly do. I wish she had used her voice in the moment. I would have listened. I would have adjusted. Relationship allows for repair. But repair requires participation. It requires ownership.

As a teacher, my responsibility is clarity. I begin every class with consent. I tell students I am hands-on. I invite them to let me know if they prefer space. I am clear about my intention, which is to help them move with more stability and awareness. I refine constantly. I am human. I miss things sometimes.

But I will not teach from fear.

If we allow every reaction to redefine the work, we lose the container entirely. And the container is where people wake up. It is where they see how they relate, how they respond, how they interpret being guided.

The TikTok videos, the review, my teacher’s fear, none of it feels separate to me. It is all part of the same unfolding. A reminder that being in relationship will always surface something. The question is whether we use those moments to assign blame or to gain clarity.

We are living in a time where it is easy to be offended and easy to offend. It is harder to pause and ask what is actually happening beneath the surface. It is harder to recognize that we can occupy the roles of authority and victim in the same lifetime, sometimes in the same day.

The role of a teacher is not to avoid activating anything. It is to guide with steadiness and care. The role of a student is not to feel nothing. It is to take responsibility for what arises.

Life is a practice. A classroom is a practice. It mirrors back what we carry.

The real work is learning to see ourselves clearly inside of it.