I am going to start out this post with some questions we ask ourselves:
What 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?
What is the reality of this situation? How do I think about other people that are involved? What are my perceptions/assumptions of  the other person/people? What do I see as the potential effects of taking action (on myself, on others, on my surroundings,  etc…)? What are the things that prevent me from taking action?

These are questions we came up with at the most recent  Integral Activism 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).
When 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’t work on asking ourselves these questions on all three levels.
For 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’s work to reduce the use of plastic bags? To demonstrate:

• What is our intention of doing this work? To reduce plastic bags use.
• What is our role in the problem? presuming we are fallible, and some of us do use a plastic bags on occasion (for example, I have when I have forgotten my reusable bags).
• What is our attachment to the goal? We want New Yorkers to use less plastic bags.
• What are my perceptions/assumptions of  the other people? We assume that many New Yorkers may be hostile to the idea of not being able to use plastic bags. We assume that many people might not see the importance of getting rid of plastic bags. We also assume that many may not think it is worth the effort to switch to reusable bags.
• What are things that prevent us from taking action? Here I can only use my personal example – I am afraid that people will react negatively towards me. I feel I may not be prepared enough to defend my point of view. I am concerned I don’t know enough about the situation.

What does it mean to ask these questions in different contexts? On these three levels? I was totally absorbed by the idea of asking these questions of ourselves as a country – looking at ourselves as one mind or one being – what do our laws, our actions, our media, our work, say about our intentions, our ideas of other countries, what keeps us from taking action, etc… and what is my part in that “we” of the United States. For me, it brings a deeper awareness of how all three of these levels of though/action are interdependent.