What is HOPE?

This question has come up frequently over the years since the first HOPE Group came into being on February 12, 1987. At that meeting, we chose to call ourselves a HOPE Group with the proviso that we had to come up with the name to fit the acronym if we wanted to continue to use it. At the second meeting one week later, the nurse who started this work with me proposed “Healing of Persons Exceptional” and all those present enthusiastically agreed. We also agreed to the following: “Healing” literally means to become whole... to integrate all of one’s parts or fragments into one Being. “Persons” reflects our shared human-ness. “Exceptional” reflects the fact that no two of us are alike.

A moment spent on each one of these ideas “should” be able to take anyone out of restrictive, judgmental boxes like “disease” or “illness” or “what’s wrong,” but we ascribe to the belief that “should” is an imposition of expectation that limits human potential. Such words comprise our belief systems, and the choice of different words removes limitations to our potential and opens us to richly creative possibilities. “Reframing” becomes an essential H.O.P.E. function. H.O.P.E. is all about “moving from our problems to our possibilities”.

H.O.P.E. exists to help people whose belief systems have been challenged by “getting one upside the head with a cosmic two-by-four” and finding themselves off balance to any degree from simple staggering to being flat on the floor... and they are asking for help to recover their equilibrium and upright position.

A skeptic may say of H.O.P.E. work, “I don't see how this can be effective. What makes you think it is?” A critic, especially a medical one, may say, “What proof do you have that this works?” The answer to each one of these people is the same, “The psychology of H.O.P.E. is the psychology of success, the nature of which has been known to successful people for thousands of years. Its adherents today are found in our best-paying professions--business and sports. It needs no ‘scientific’ proof with double-blind controlled studies because it is entirely based on the outcome of the experience of human life over these thousands of years.”

The first HOPE Group comprised five of my patients with cancer. Two had recurrent, metastatic cancer; one had localized, recurrent cancer that I had been able to remove; and two had new, primary cancers on which I had performed conventional surgical removal. We were not focused on the cancer, but on the life that each individual could create for her- or him- self, and we greatly enjoyed the exploration. Twenty years later, two of those people are still alive, the one with the local recurrence and one of the two with the new cancer. Of the other three, the two with recurrent cancer outlived their prognosis by a factor of three and the third died of another, totally unrelated condition.

The word got out that something unusual was at hand, and the author was called on to lead other HOPE Groups for people with cancer and other debilitating physical conditions. Again, the primary focus of the HOPE Group was not on the disease but on life and what gave it meaning. However, when we moved to the lovely Ripley home at 52 High St, South Paris, in 1990, we were asked to assume responsibility for training hospice volunteers, because the local agency had lost their hospice director. That led to a perception that H.O.P.E. was for people who were terminally ill. However, to restrict H.O.P.E.’s work to people with terminal cancer is a misapprehension of what the work is all about. Even in the hospice work, H.O.P.E. carried its focus on life into the work that we had been asked to undertake. It gave us the opportunity to recognize that H.O.P.E. work is all about working with people whose bodies and minds have been challenged by Life, itself. We found out that what works for people with terminal cancer works for people newly diagnosed with cancer… or heart disease… or multiple sclerosis… or chronic pain. It works for depressed people and for people whose lives seem empty. It works for anxious people. It works for prisoners. It simply works for people… not all, but a good many.

When we heard Václav Havel say that hope is not about optimism or the conviction that things will work out all right, but rather the certainty that things can make sense regardless of how they work out, we began to see H.O.P.E. as a vehicle by which we could help people find meaning, value, and purpose in their lives. Our vision settled into helping people discover hope and vision collaborating to bring meaning into life in the immediate moment. Together, they empower a person to take hold of the mainsheet and tiller of their “ship of life” and set course for the glow on the horizon. Then, perhaps for the first time in that life, all winds are fair winds.

H.O.P.E. helps people identify and acknowledge the resources that Life has given them to meet It with, describe the sequence of events that make up the history of their life---what life has met them with--and then decide what to do with it all. It is not rocket science-; it does not have to be. Rather, it is the science of anecdote--the study of experience--well described by people like Edgar Mitchell PhD, and John Mack MD. Such a study acknowledges that no two of us are alike and that every single human being existed at the moment the “Big Bang” lit up or “the Word” was spoken. The point is that these are the same point in time, and the stuff of which we are made came into being then…. The lives we live today were promised us from that time, and the Life that made the promise neither makes mistakes or punishes for mistakes made by its creation.

We discovered how wonderfully uplifting it is to know that each of us is a one-of-a-kind work of art. When we display our gifts for oters, we have shown them who we really, really are. Being thus informed, H.O.P.E. has learned to say, “You honor me with your Self. Thank you.”

When we evoke these qualities in our fellow human beings, we see their pain become our pain and that pain calls our attention to what really, really, really matters in our lives. We find that paying attention to what matters changes the character of the pain, even though it may not leave. In H.O.P.E., we have found the creative power that lies deep within all human suffering. We have found that we do not have to carry it, but we can let it penetrate us through and through like an arrow, leaving its trail behind so that we can measure it... we have found empathy through compassion. We have found that listening matters. We have found that advice giving does not. We have learned to let go of any need to judge, to criticize, and even to understand. We have learned to ask questions that increased our appreciation of each other. We have learned to reflect peacefully and without judgment on qualities that we hear in another person’s words. We have learned to affirm each other with honesty and sincerity. We have learned that these are the components of a “safe place”… a place where people can go and speak from their hearts. H.O.P.E. knows that every one of us is expert in our own lives without being an expert for another.

We have learned to let go of fear and thus to be able to give ourselves permission to love without condition or attachment. We have learned how to create and meet in “Rumi’s Field” that lies “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing”. We have learned that when we are in Rumi’s Field, we are in Love; for “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.(Ibid)” We continue to learn how to invite others into that wonderful place of creativity that is so rich with the potential of a quantum wave function where “Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.(Ibid)”

We have discovered how interesting and wonderful it is to see how we all seem to need acknowledgment of the different packaging, all the while recognizing the shared essence of being. As Cheri Huber offered:

“Yes, I am me, but what animates me is what animates Uncle Bob, the cat, the tree, the rock and all that is. We are packaged differently, but we share the same essence. There are many of us and we are not the same but we are all one.”

This is what H.O.P.E. is about… finding the one in the different packaging and honoring it.

What is a HOPE Group?

HOPE Groups are gatherings of people who come together to find wellness by replacing fear with hope--the key to deepening the meaning, value and purpose of their lives…. They are catalysts of change where the attitude is hope--the attitude of meaning and possibility--and their context is love, the context of true relationships... Certified, H.O.P.E.-trained Guides provide this supportive community service for people who want to move forward, either by getting through a crisis or by progressing to the next level in their lives. People who choose to participate in HOPE Groups are commonly seeking emotional and/or physical healing and/or relief from a physical and/or psychological pain or hardship. HOPE Groups evoke strengths that increase the source of possibilities that exists within each one of us for living a creative life and they focus on bringing that life into its creativity. In addition to HOPE Groups, H.O.P.E. responds to the needs of others with SoulCircling workshops, retreats, and one-on-one work with HOPE Guides.

HOPE Groups employ an inductive process of open agenda, authentic expression, coping, and group support (Spira, p.6). They do not seek to diagnose or prescribe specific treatments for what is “wrong.” They do not seek to decrease or deny symptoms of mental and physical health problems; though alleviation of symptoms is a common benefit of HOPE Group participation. HOPE Groups focus on problem-solving, meeting challenges, and focusing on meaningful thought and action according to one’s ability to do so in any given moment. They encourage participants to focus on life rather than disease and use helping professionals to manage the disease so they can get on with their lives. While a HOPE Group may exist for individuals with a specific disease, its focus remains on “HOPE” and not on the disease its members have in common. HOPE Groups acknowledge the value of having good support in understanding the presenting problem. They guide a person to focus on the meaning and possibilities that life contains because this focus lies beyond the problem to a level higher than that at which the problems developed. HOPE Groups are resources of experiences in living life through all if its challenges and rewards that help people simply get on with their lives in the face of the challenge of their disease.

HOPE Groups as volunteer, non-therapeutic services are not expected to practice any form of therapy. The group is not there to treat members’ diseases. They encourage anyone needing conventional therapy to find it outside the group.

HOPE Groups in professional, therapeutic clinical services, on the other hand, provide a safe environment in which the participants can explore the qualities of their relationships with their healthcare professionals and the medical therapies they provide. They provide a healthy, safe forum for the inductive process with which to discus the effects of the individual participant’s therapies. Guided by H.O.P.E.-trained professionals (nurses, physician assistants, and physicians), they provide valuable information about their individual therapies that help their healthcare professionals make well-informed therapeutic decisions. HOPE Groups provide a safe venue for the (re-) implementation of the placebo effect on all therapies

Participating in a HOPE Group is an opportunity for an individual to discover their life intention and choose where they want to go, and what they want to accomplish on their own timetable and their own unique path. HOPE Groups use the H.O.P.E. Golden Book , a four-page, 4.25 in. x 5.5 in. laminated document which sets the context for the meeting with the prime directive: “We come together to find the wellness that comes with the discovery of peace of mind.” In this way, group participants create the agenda for each meeting. HOPE Group guides’ primary responsibilities to the group are to model active listening, reflect back to the speaker what they hear, affirm the presence of movement and direction aligned to an intention; and trust the sought-after answers that lie within the person with the question or concern.

HOPE Groups are places where people explore who they are, not what they have, what they have done, or what others think of them, which includes their labels--their diagnoses and prognoses.They learn to see life as Henri Nouwen described it: a call from Life, itself--a blessing . They learn to see that Life has met them with a set of circumstances that may well have contained heartbreak, and how they see that heartbreak determines the quality of the gift that they have to give life in return for that life. They do so by asking four questions that evoke meaning:

“Who are you?”

“Why are you here?”

“How are you going to get what you came for?”

“What are you going to do with it when you have it?”

HOPE Groups build a safe context in which the answers can come forward. HOPE Groups have simple “Guidelines” of behavior that sustain the safety of the environment. Some people who run volunteer-facilitated groups believe that these questions are “therapy” that belongs in licensed, certified, “degreed” practices. These questions come out of the public (read “non-therapeutic”) domain and not from any texts of psychology or psychotherapy, for HOPE’s psychology comes exclusively from the world’s literature comprising the essence of success. The work the author has developed over the past thirty years has grown out of this domain with its focus on success: “The progressive realization of a worthy ideal (Earl Nightingale).” H.O.P.E. willingly offers these evocative skills to the facilitators of any of this nation’s thousands of self-help groups.

The need to participate in a HOPE Group exists in almost every one of us at some time or another. Most of us seek the support of a group when a serious disease confronts us, such as cancer, AIDS, depression, or alcoholism. Some come with less “serious” conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, emphysema, arthritis, or lupus. Some come with depressive, bipolar, or anxiety disorders. For some, life just isn’t going the way they want. For some, it is essential that their fellow group participants have conditions similar to theirs. For others, open, eclectic groups are appropriate. H.O.P.E. does not argue these points; it merely seeks to respond to the wishes of each group. H.O.P.E.’s belief and experience is that there is a way for each of us through the challenging difficulties of dis-ease to the discovery of health.

The meaning of life and its discovery lies at the core of H.O.P.E.’s psychology; “movement towards a meaningful future is not possible without viewing the past as a series of vital lessons”. H.O.P.E.’s psychology avoids analysis that pathologizes the past in order to create a meaningful present. Instead, it asks each of us to view the past as an integrated, molding, and shaping experience that challenges us to find meaning, value, and purpose in our present lives. H.O.P.E. perceives that the seeds of the challenge arose in childhood during the tender time of ego-development, often appearing to come with elements of a larger, collective consciousness. The solution lies in rising to a level higher than that at which the problem arose--the level of the “higher self,” the name of which is Psyche--the soul. Indeed, the word, “psychology,” literally means “the meaningful relationships of the soul.”

H.O.P.E. does its work by acknowledging and validating that while we are all “persons,” no two souls are alike, any more than any two persons can be identical. With this knowledge in hand, then, we come to appreciate why science cannot measure the individual or collective soul. As science is about prediction based on measurement, if it cannot measure, it cannot predict; so it cannot predict the behavior of any one soul. Thus, science finds itself in a bind in which it has to say that the soul does not exist, as the French Rationalists, famously represented by René Descartes, proclaimed in the early 17^th century. Let us keep in mind that there are both measurable and immeasurable aspects of reality, and tension exists between them--creative tension--healthy tension.