Abstract: . . .  families, lack of community and school responsiveness. The teenagers meet weekly to learn mediation and conflict resolution skills, to share their daily experience, and to translate their experience into the arts. One 16-year-old shared in her poetry and prose her experience of her father's death on his job, caused by heavy machinery that was operated by a fellow employee who was drunk. The latter, though clearly at fault, was never even reprimanded. She had never been given a chance to speak with this man. Her prose rages at the injustice of her father's death and her lack of opportunity to even talk to the man involved in her father's death. "But why not?" queries members of the project. Might it be possible through a process of mediation to bring together Claire and her family with this man, so that each could be heard and the potential for reconciliation be given an opportunity. One of the group leaders shared the Quaker model of restorative justice, where just such a meeting between the perpetrator and the victim and the victim's family is enabled to occur through the court system, putting a personal face onto the event and allowing the chance for direct reparation and forgiveness, rather than abstract justice only. The group members are eager to help put such a system into place for Claire and others. In another example, the students enact moments of racism they have experienced in their . . .
. . .  psyche, body, 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.  . . .
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