What is the Sangha?

The Mindfulness Sangha is a weekly, community-held practice space rooted in embodied social justice. It is not a space for self-optimization or nervous-system fixing. It is an invitation to gather and practice listening to our bodies as sites of memory, meaning, resistance, and possibility.

In these sessions, mindfulness is approached as a relational and political practice. We attend to sensation not in isolation, but in relationship to history, power, privilege, oppression, and the material conditions our bodies live within. Rather than asking only what am I feeling?, we also ask why was it never safe to feel this, what does this sensation know about power, and what might it be asking of me or us.

The Sangha is held as a cumulative, iterative space. Across weeks and months, we return to practices such as body scans, noticing impermanence, working with freeze and thaw, meeting discomfort, and engaging with bias and privilege through the body. These are not linear steps or lessons to be mastered, but doorways we move in and out of, at our own pace.

Practices are trauma-sensitive and choice-based. Participants are always invited, never compelled, to share. Silence, pause, numbness, resistance, and not-knowing are welcomed as meaningful bodily responses rather than obstacles to be overcome.

A central orientation of the Sangha is learning to relate to discomfort with curiosity rather than judgment. Discomfort is not treated as inherently unsafe. At times, it is understood as the body’s way of signalling friction with privilege, inherited bias, or internalized power. We practice staying with that friction long enough to notice what it reveals, without collapsing into self-blame or defensiveness.

Over time, the Sangha supports participants to experience the body as:

• an archive of lived experience and structural conditions

• a site of protest, refusal, and survival

• a site of resistance, accountability, and collective responsibility

Mindfulness here is not an inward retreat from the world. It is a way of staying with the world, with more honesty, care, and capacity.

What a session may include

• Grounding and anchoring practices (feet, seat, breath, orientation)

• Social-justice-oriented body scans

• Practices of noticing impermanence and change

• Working gently with freeze, numbness, and pressure

• Reflecting on discomfort, bias, and privilege through somatic awareness

• Optional journaling or sharing

• Closing with grounding and integration

Access and community

The Mindfulness Sangha is offered online and is open to all bodies. Sessions are free, with an invitation to donate if you wish to support and sustain this work.

Participants are invited to stay connected through:

• a SoundCloud archive of guided practices for ongoing or asynchronous practice

• a WhatsApp community group for updates, reflections, and shared holding

Facilitated by Aarathi Selvan, the Sangha draws from mindfulness-based practices, narrative therapy, trauma-sensitive somatics, and an explicit commitment to embodied social justice.

To be added write to us on whatsapp at +91 81068 64001. You can also dm us on Instagram and asked to be added to our Whatsapp group