False choices

I've never been tempted by the false choice of just focusing on the individual or just focusing on the larger picture, larger structures. There is an article in Tricycle: Who Is Misrepresenting Mindfulness?  It comes to the same conclusion I came to in social work school. People say that psychotherapy blames the victim. By focusing on the individual, you are essentially saying, you are the problem. That it is not racism, classism, skewed governmental priorities, politics, poorly run government because of low expectations created by a stream of incompetent people who are incompetent on purpose.

I expect more out of government, and I think by working to help an individual become empowered, you can also discuss larger forces.

I'm not even sure why we get so caught up in this false choice in politics.

I found this a paradox. If you talk to someone about individual forces, they often seek wider forces. When you talk about wider forces, they talk about individual forces and take responsibility.

But systems theory does away with the false choice. We can look at all the systems. We can look at the individual system, and we can look at the larger systems.

So to say that individual mindfulness teachers are at fault for all this McMindfulness stuff, well, I think you can also become mindful of the larger forces. It's not like becoming mindful necessarily makes you more individualistic or egotistical.

The plea of the article is to ask you to be more mindful of the larger forces. OK. We can look into all the systems.