Privileging Agency and the Cost to Our Well-Being: A Contemplative Lens
In wellness spaces, including psychotherapy and mindfulness facilitation, we often hear things like:
“Just breathe. Just think positive. Just try harder.”
These words are often meant to encourage, but they can also cause harm and if you know me, you know how I feel about harm. It is inevitable, however, we can prevent, reduce and recover from it, with awareness, accountability, and intention. The above words privilege agency without naming structure.
This idea came up for me in a recent required reading for my undergraduate studies, Theories of Power and Social Change: Power contestations and their implications for research on social change and innovation (Flor Avelino, 2021). What struck me most was realizing I had already been naming this in my own way. I have felt it in my body as a mindfulness teacher, and I have seen it play out in my earlier work as an HR professional. The concept is called privileging agency.
Agency is our individual capacity to act, choose, or change. It is the seed of possibility when we decide to meditate, choose to rest, or practice compassion. Scholar Flor Avelino reminds us that
“power to is about getting things done, about the capacity to mobilize resources to achieve specific goals and intentionally effecting outcomes” (Avelino, 2021).
Structure is the environment, history, and systems that shape what is possible. It is the soil, the water, the sunlight, and sometimes the concrete poured over fertile ground. Indigenous relational wellbeing theory tells us that
“Indigenous relational theories transcend an ‘individual or environment’ dichotomy, providing for pluralistic approaches to health promotion” (Mackean et al., 2022).
Wellness is inseparable from community, culture, and environment.
When wellness practices privilege agency, they place the entire burden on the individual. If you are anxious, you must not be mindful enough. If you are struggling, you must not be resilient enough. This way of thinking erases how racism, inequality, colonial histories, and unjust systems are living in our bodies and shaping our well-being.
When we only privilege structure, we risk sliding into disempowerment.
Nothing I do matters until systems change.
That is not true either.
The truth is both and then some. We can act otherwise, and at the same time, we act within conditions that shape us. Healing asks us to honor both: the breath in our bodies and the air we breathe.
This conversation goes beyond wellness. Privileging agency shows up in how racialized bodies and oppressed communities are told to “work harder” or “adapt better” to systems that were never built for their thriving. Black and Indigenous peoples are often praised for resilience while the structures that demand that resilience remain unchallenged. Migrants and refugees are asked to “integrate” without acknowledgment of the borders, laws, and global inequities constraining their lives. In these moments, agency is highlighted while structure disappears from view.
Naming privileging agency matters because it frees us from carrying weight that was never ours alone to carry. It reminds us that we each hold the capacity to act otherwise, while also recognizing how the conditions around us shape what becomes possible. This way of seeing honors both personal power and collective responsibility.
It also makes space to name the times we have felt powerful and the times we have felt powerless. Both are real, both live in our bodies, and both can teach us something about how power is at work in our lives. When we can acknowledge these feelings honestly, we begin to understand wellness, justice, and healing as connected journeys that belong to us, together.
So I’ll end with a journal prompt, or a few 😉, in support of this reflective opportunity. You might explore these questions through mindful awareness, using the attentional skills of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.
Guidance:
Concentration is our ability to turn our attention inward, to notice, to be with what is arising for us in our sensory categories.
Sensory clarity means noticing what is present or absent across three categories of experience: what you see (images or visual impressions, whether vivid or faint), what you hear (sounds outside you or inner talk and tones), and what you feel (body sensations or emotions). If nothing arises in a category, your awareness of it’s absence is just as important as presence because the noticing itself is the practice.
Equanimity is our practice of holding what arises with grace, compassion, and acceptance. It is the practice of being with a push and pull that may arise like drifting of thoughts and the desire or avoidance that may present itself.
What is power to me, and what is not power, in how I think and feel? Bring steady attention to whatever shows up, even if it is simply the absence of a response.
What memories, emotions, and body sensations arise when I contemplate power in my own life? Notice what you see, what you hear, and what you feel. Be with both the presence and the absence in each category.
When have I felt powerful, and when have I felt powerless, in my own journey of wellness or daily life? How did my body carry those experiences?
With equanimity, let presence and absence both belong. Notice what shifts when you hold compassion for yourself in both states, recognizing your agency while also honoring the structures that shape your life.