What happens when a mindfulness exercise asks someone to notice not only their breathing, but also how power, exclusion or belonging are experienced in the body? Clinical psychologist Aarathi Selvan and mental health practitioner Shoba Nayar explore that question in The Embodied Social Justice Workbook: Exercises for Deepening Practices through Mindfulness, a new Routledge publication released in early October 2026.
The workbook approaches mindfulness through the experiences of people navigating marginalization, systemic privilege and oppression. Instead of assuming that every person enters a reflective practice from the same social position, it gives readers space to consider how circumstances and relationships shape what they notice and how safely they can engage.
Its practical materials include body mapping, written reflection, questions for personal inquiry and vignettes drawn from lived experience. The book can be used independently or alongside Embodied Social Justice Counseling for Indian Communities, a related professional text. It is particularly relevant to mental health practitioners working with the Indian diaspora, though the authors also address individuals interested in mindfulness and social justice more broadly.
The chapter sequence makes the emphasis unusually concrete. One section looks at the body as a site of liberation, including embodied collective action. Another considers bodily shutdown through a chapter titled “Freeze as Protest.” Later chapters explore resistance, encounters with privilege and the continuing work of returning to practice. The appendix offers activities for mapping sensations and considering pleasant and unpleasant events as embodied signals.
These topics ask something different of mindfulness than the familiar promise of becoming calmer. Awareness is not presented simply as a private method for reducing discomfort. The workbook also invites readers to examine the social conditions in which discomfort, safety, silence and expression occur. Its exercises are intended to support reflection, not to provide a single explanation for anyone’s experience.
Selvan is the founder of Pause for Perspective in Hyderabad, India, and works at the intersection of clinical psychology, mindfulness, teaching and embodied social justice. Nayar is a mental health practitioner, qualitative researcher and educator whose work addresses social justice in the Indian context. Their professional perspectives give the publication a defined setting rather than a generic collection of mindfulness prompts.
Routledge describes the 218-page volume as suitable for mental health professionals and individual readers. It is organized into four parts, moving from preparation and safe practice through liberation, protest and resistance. That progression makes the workbook useful to explore gradually, with attention to the context of each exercise.
For practitioners who already teach mindfulness, the publication offers a specific question to carry into their work: whose experience does a practice assume, and what might change when the body is understood within its social world?
Source: Routledge
Web: https://www.routledge.com/The-Embodied-Social-Justice-Workbook-Exercises-for-Deepening-Practices/Nayar-Selvan/p/book/9781041138044
