By Rabbi Michael Lerner l Huffington Post

Close to 600 people in the San Francisco Bay Area gave up their President's Day Monday vacation to spend some nine hours in a "Strategy Conference for Liberals and Progressives" to address "How To Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought We Elected" and "How to Launch a Constitutional Amendment to Restrain Corporate Power" after the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow unrestrained corporate spending on elections.

For many, just being in the context where this discussion was happening in a face-to-face encounter with others, rather than an isolated individuals reading it on a computer monitor, seemed an important step toward re-empowerment. Many are suffering from post-traumatic Obama abandonment syndrome--an ailment that came from being severely traumatized by Obama's political moves in the past thirteen months. A palpable sadness, depression, anger and even despair carried by many who had worked for Obama and now felt betrayed by his choices in his first year in office was mixed with compassion and a strong determination to not allow the political Right to use our despair as their ticket to a political revival. The conference was conceived by Tikkun Magazine and its interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives (including secular humanists and atheists who consider themselves "spiritual but NOT religious") as a way to allow people who have been having these feelings privately to both receive the comfort of sharing those feelings with other liberals and progressives, and then to move beyond them to actually face the critical question: "What do we in the liberal and progressive world do now, if we face three, or hopefully seven, years of an Obama presidency?"