As the powerful HOPE group process grew out of my experience with the clinical use of the principles of living success-full lives, it matured and ripened through thousands of two-hour weekly meetings. The spiritual nature of the process became clearer over next ten years. That small group of interested and devoted professionals to whom this book is dedicated saw it's powerful spiritual nature, and turned it into a workshop that we chose to call Circling the Soul: Coming Home to Yourself ®.

We are helping people find answers to the Soul Questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? We explore the soul attitude, hope, in the context of the soul emotion, love. The results give meaning to success, the essence of which is "the progressive realization of a worthy ideal (Earl Nightingale)". It is a process in which every human being is the author(ity) of her or his own success, and worthy of repeating here.

We teach what we have found out about success; that there are seven elements of it:

1. There is a Law behind it that affects all life: the law of returns and it has a corollary, the law of correspondence… “the living Universe always reflects your prevailing attitude back at you” (Nightingale).

2. There is a Principle of the Law: our rewards in life always come in exact proportion to the service given in that life. Service is the highest goal of all life; and we receive our rewards in the process of moving toward that goal. Our rewards come in four forms: material, conceptual, emotional, and spiritual.

The material rewards are those that feed us and keep us warm and comfortable. The conceptual reward is success, itself. The emotional reward is happiness, which must never be pursued for it will forever elude us, as it only comes in the process of moving toward a worthy goal or ideal. In addition, when that goal or ideal is seen in light of a more comprehensive meaning of life than the isolated ego driven life, the spiritual reward is uncovered, and the peace of that life is immeasurable.

3. We have a Resource with which to work the Principle, the mind, which follows another axiomatic law... We become what we think about. Reality is malleable; we shape it at will by bringing our perceptions and intentions together. With the power of our minds we can create vision and goals, and strategies to reach them.

4. We have a Key with which we access the vast resources of the mind, our attitude. Attitudes frame the images of our lives. They are postures that shape the elements of those images, and they determine how we develop them and how we project them into our realities.

5. There is a Freedom with which we can make that access rightly, the freedom of choice. We always choose our attitudes. We can choose differently: by repeating affirmations, through counseling and group work, by practicing martial arts, by meditating, by praying

6.  There is a Living Pattern for all this: GR(I)ST with five elements (with thanks to August T. Jaccaci):

              i) Gathering (accreting, reaping)--an ego-function:
              all living things must “gather” to themselves the stuff of what
              they are made if they are to be alive.

              ii) Repeating (replicating or duplicating what has been gathered)
               --an ego-function: all living things must repeat what they have
               gathered in order to grow.

              iii) A wall stands between the first two and the next sharing... an “I” beam.
               Failure to pass it is death of the system. Looking at it from gather-repeat
               is looking through the eye of the ego. Looking at it from share-transform
               is looking through the eye of the soul.

              iv) Sharing (cooperating)--a soul-function: all living things must share
                in order to survive.

               v) Transforming (transmuting)--a spirit-function: herein lies the spiritual
                power of life. The new form is many times greater than the first gather
                of gathering. It becomes a new gathering force.

     7. We have a Power that makes this freedom of choice possible the power of
        faith, hope, and love. Faith that my life is a fragment of a greater Life contained
        in that Life. Hope that I can make sense out of my life and its experience of the
        greater Life. Love that is of a greater Love, which holds everything in perfect
        relationship. Thus phrased, each part of the Power is transpersonal, identifying
        with the Source of everything.

In this process, we guide people through the step of “mapping” the Soul’s journey, the story of how you got to today. We then show people how to “crystallize” the Soul’s Intent by building the container for their success out of their will, passion, and talents that together can draw the energy they have stuck in the tender points of their story. Thus they redirect this energy into the intention of their life. We then help them power it all up by creating their personal “image of becoming” and attaching an empowering “affirmation of becoming” to the image, the repetition of which installs the image in their subconscious. The process may sound mysterious, but it comes from the consistent patterns of success-full living over centuries of human experience.

The role of the HOPE guide is to draw these elements out of participants in the group over time, according to whatever course and plan the guide’s intuition follows. We encourage intuition in this process. It tends to follow the heart and be thus held in the context of compassion. It makes it possible for the guide to guide by loving kindness, which has the delightful effect of easing the life of the HOPE guide immeasurably. For persons who are professional counselors, the experience of guiding a HOPE group may just be the point of relaxation s-he needs in contrast to a busy day of doing therapy that demands greater control over situations and can be quite tiring. Indeed, by incorporating the elements of Circling the Soul ™ into one’s practise, a therapist may experience considerable relief of the stresses of modern therapeutic life!