Redefining Politics: Why & How Politics Live in the Body

When you read the word "politics," notice what happens in your body and mind - are you someone who becomes enlivened and wants to jump in? Maybe someone who will do whatever it takes to change the subject? Maybe it’s different depending on the moment and context. 

Politics is so much more than hot takes, elections, and mistrust because of dis- and misinformation. Politics live in the way your shoulders unconsciously tighten when you walk into certain spaces. In the way your stomach drops before a difficult conversation with your boss. In the way your body has learned - over years, over generations - what spaces are safe and what spaces are not. No one is immune to politics, and no one can truly check out of the consequences of politics.

Through my study and mahi in SomaPsych, I hold and explore the intersection of somatics, psychology, and the wider world. And one of the first things we explore is how we might expand our definition of politics.

Politics is about power, not just policy

In the most fundamental sense, politics is about who has power - who gets access to resources, safety, belonging, and dignity, and who doesn't. Who makes decisions about and for others. It's about the rules, both written and unspoken, that determine whose needs get centred and whose get pushed to the margins.

By that definition, politics isn't a thing that happens only in Wellington, Ottawa or Washington. It happens in workplaces and classrooms, in families and friendships, in hospitals and housing offices. It happens every time someone has to calculate whether they're welcome in a room. Every time someone mutes a part of themselves to fit in. Every time a person's basic needs are met - or not - based on the body they were born into or the community they come from.

When we expand politics to include power, access, safety, and belonging, we stop treating it as something "out there." We start recognising it as something deeply, intimately personal.

Nervous systems are shaped by systems

The nervous system is not neutral. It is a finely calibrated instrument, constantly scanning the environment and asking a single essential question: Am I safe here?

What counts as "safe" isn't determined only by immediate circumstances. It's also shaped by history - personal history, family history, cultural history. A body that has moved through the world as a person of colour, as a queer person, as a disabled person, as a person without housing or food security, has learned different lessons about what to expect from the world. The nervous system encodes those lessons. They become baseline assumptions, automatic responses, the texture of ordinary daily life.

This is not metaphorical - it is neurobiology. Chronic exposure to threat - whether physical danger, social exclusion, economic precarity, or structural invisibility - keeps the nervous system in a prolonged state of activation. Over time, that activation becomes the default setting. The body does not easily distinguish between ‘the threat that happened then’ and ‘the world as it is now’.

This is how systems shape nervous systems. Poverty is not only an economic condition - it is a somatic one. Racism is not only a social injustice - it is a physiological experience. Belonging is not only an emotional need - it is a biological one.

Wellness spaces are never fully neutral

There is a well-intentioned idea, common in wellness and therapeutic spaces, that healing should be a "politics-free zone." The intention is usually to create safety. But the effect, more often than not, is the opposite. Intention doesn’t equal impact, and impact matters.

When a space claims neutrality, it tends to default to the comfort of whoever holds the most privilege in the room. The unspoken norms, the language used, the examples offered, the bodies represented in the marketing - all of these carry political weight, whether we name it or not. Silence about power doesn't dissolve power. It just makes it harder to see and harder to untangle and address.

A truly ‘safe’ space is not one that pretends politics don't exist. It's one that is honest about them. One that actively works to ensure that the people most harmed by systems of power are not asked to leave that harm at the door before they can be seen and welcomed.

This doesn't mean therapy or somatic work needs to become political activism. It means acknowledging that the bodies walking through the door have histories, and those histories are not separate from the structures of the world they were formed in.

Naming and working with collective trauma

The concept of collective trauma is sometimes treated as abstract or academic. But it is, at its core, describing something very real and very embodied: the way that shared experiences of harm - experienced by a community, passed through generations, woven into culture - leave marks on hearts and bodies, not just on psyches or social systems.

Collective trauma can emerge from a single catastrophic event - a natural disaster, a genocide, a pandemic. But it can also accumulate slowly, through generations of displacement, systemic exclusion, economic violence, or cultural erasure. It doesn't always look like crisis. Sometimes it looks like hypervigilance that's been normalized. Like shame that feels like personal failing but is actually a cultural inheritance. Like a persistent sense that one's full self is not welcome in the world.

Naming collective trauma isn't about assigning blame or stoking division. It's about accuracy. It's about saying: this is real, this happened, and it lives somewhere. For many people, that ‘somewhere’ is the body.

An offering

SomaPsych's work rests on the foundation that for genuine restoration to occur, individually and collectively, it has to be whole. That means attending to the personal and the political. The cellular and the systemic. The moment of activation in the body and the larger story of why that activation makes complete sense.

We are not here to tell you what to believe politically. We are here to help you understand that your body has been shaped by the world it has moved through - the water you swim in - and that understanding this is not a burden. 

It is a doorway.

A doorway to deeper compassion for yourself. To a deeper understanding of others. And to a kind of restoration and movement toward liberation for all that doesn't require you to become smaller to receive it. 

Next time you find yourself coming heart to heart with politics - be it a news story, policy change, or another human being with a lived experience different to your own - notice what happens in body and mind. Take a few rounds of grounding breath and see what it’s like to lean into curiosity - where might this take us?