Abstract: . . .  nature, community and attunement to spiritual experience, as they each turned their attention to Eastern spiritual practices. The most basic practice of these meditation systems is the focus on the free arising of the breath, the enjoyment of the breath, the gradual capacity of the ego not to interfere with the breath but to follow it with awareness, allowing oneself to be aware that one is breathed despite illusions of control. Such awareness allows one to experience that their very life is freely arising and autonomous. 4 Pacifica Graduate Institute has begun a Ph.D. program in depth psychology that has precisely this focus of creating a bridge between depth psychology and the wider community. Its hope is to assist students in creating collaborative community projects that broadly imagine liberation . Participatory action research models will be used to study these projects.  . . .
. . .  being links depth psychology to perrenial spiritual traditions across time. I believe, it also speaks to the particular configurations of suffering in our historical/cultural time that Western depth psychotherapy has been committed to address and heal. By focusing on this aspect of therapeutic practice--the liberation of being--I hope to clarify the ways in which depth psychology needs to widen its sensibility toward oppression and liberation . In its history this call--the call for depth psychotherapy to be a partner in liberation struggles--has been sounded, but little heeded--by Reich, Horney, Sullivan, Fromm and others from the Frankfurt School, Lifton, Jean Baker Miller and other feminist critics of psychoanalysis, the Black psychology liberation movement, and Martin-Baro, among others. Those attuned to liberation on social, politial, and economic levels of being often see depth psychology at best as a practice that conserves the status quo arrangements of power within the culture. At worse, it is seen as a bourgeois practice that compounds the oppression of others by creating a cocoon around privileged individuals, enabling them in their attempts to define well-being in a Page 2 personalistic vein. Those attuned to liberation on an intrapsychic level are often ill at ease in political and cross-cultural realms, neglecting or disparaging . . .
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