109: Somatics, Politics, and Practice feat. Sumitra Rajkumar

Jul 26, 2025

Sumitra Rajkumar, a somatics practitioner at the Action Lab, joins the conversation to explore how somatics intersects with personal and collective transformation. She describes how somatic practices, distinct from talk therapy, engage the body to address trauma and habitual patterns. Sumitra critiques self-help culture for its apolitical tendencies, emphasizing the need for awareness of power dynamics. The discussion delves into the synergy of embodied practices and activism, highlighting the role of community engagement in fostering social change.

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ADVICE

Agency in Shaping and Change

Recognize we are constantly shaped by social and institutional forces but possess agency to shape them back.
Focus attention intentionally on contradictions to enable purposeful individual and collective change.

INSIGHT

Relational Self and Body

The body is integral to the self, and the self is fundamentally relational.
We are shaped by and shape intimate, social, institutional, and environmental spheres simultaneously.

INSIGHT

Body as Heuristic and Praxis

The body is a heuristic that spans from individual to collective identities, emphasizing fluidity and interconnectedness.
Intentional organization of self under pressure enables agency and change.

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Abby and Patrick are joined by somatics practitioner Sumitra Rajkumar to clarify the theory and practice of somatics and its relationship to ideas of personal and collective transformation. Sumitra walks Abby and Patrick through somatics as a theoretical perspective that sees the self as both thoroughly grounded in our individual bodies but also always bound up in relational, social bodies as well. She unpacks how somatic practice differs from talk therapy by using techniques of “bodywork” and other exercises to explore histories of “shaping,” undo habitual patterns of embodiment, address trauma, and cultivate a capacity to remain centered and present under pressure. As the three explore, what sets Sumitra’s approach apart from ostensibly “apolitical” or openly right-wing traditions is a self-conscious, critical awareness of power dynamics and different people’s varied relationships to historical oppression and their own bodies. Over and against “apolitical,” mystical, or openly right-wing tendencies of other practices, Sumitra’s vision of somatics is particularly attuned to the physical and psychic tolls of maintaining compassion, resisting burnout, and building relationships of solidarity with strangers. Rich with psychoanalytic resonances throughout, their conversation focuses in particular on the concept of the “transferential constellation,” which clarifies a great deal about the different dynamics between right and left mass movements, and casts many difficult experiences – whether in a consulting room, at a protest, or canvassing by knocking on doors – in provocative new light.

The Action Lab: https://www.actionlabny.org/

Art of Purpose fellowship application: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGsmA_TIm0/7-aSlMVivPoR4kHvJD-Hbg/view?utm_content=DAGsmA_TIm0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h12e5faa7a3#1