{"id":405,"date":"2009-01-28T09:00:23","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/01\/asking-ourselves-questions.html"},"modified":"2009-01-28T09:00:23","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T09:00:23","slug":"asking-ourselves-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/01\/asking-ourselves-questions.html","title":{"rendered":"Asking ourselves questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am going to start out this post with some questions we ask ourselves:
\nWhat is my intention? What is my behavior? What is my role in the problem\/suffering? What is my attachment to the goal? How much do I know? When do I react in anger and fear?<\/em>
\nWhat is the reality of this situation? How do I think about other people that are involved? What are my perceptions\/assumptions of\u00a0 the other person\/people? What do I see as the potential effects of taking action (on myself, on others, on my surroundings,\u00a0 etc\u2026)? What are the things that prevent me from taking action?<\/em>
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\nThese are questions we came up with at the most recent\u00a0 Integral Activism<\/a> meeting. The integral activism framework intends that the questions could be applied to the three different levels of engagement: on a personal level (myself), interpersonal\/group level (my interactions with one or more individuals or working with a group, including doing service or volunteer work), or on a political\/community\/collective level (as a group working with other groups or as a community engaging our state government, or as a country interacting with other countries).
\nWhen we first brainstormed these questions, we were talking about being aware of our behavior when we engage in activism work. Then someone pointed out that we may be asking ourselves these questions on one of the levels, but often we don\u2019t work on asking ourselves these questions on all three levels.
\nFor instance, while I may be asking myself these questions on a personal level as I go about my daily life, how often do I move those questions to what we are doing with the Back to the Sack<\/a>\u2019s work to reduce the use of plastic bags? To demonstrate:<\/p>\n