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Who is a HOPE Group Guide?
HOPE Guides help those whom they serve in HOPE Groups focus on setting and clarifying their intentions, and developing and implementing initiatives derived from the intentions. The process of intention moves people forward toward appreciating the ego’s disappointment with a situation that the soul knows is a gift from the Divine Unmanifest. HOPE Guides recognize that emotions and attitudes are intimately connected and have a profound subconscious effect on the life of every individual. In this way, HOPE Guides work with people to create attitudinal shifts that transform harmful responses based on the harmful, dark triad of guilt, fear, and anger into the beneficial effects of hope, love, and peace. In this way, people come to identify with the order that created the Universe.
HOPE Guides also recognize the power of the dark triad to overwhelm people and are readily prepared to advise them to seek professional help that augments their recovery program.
HOPE Guides help people construct and reconstruct their lives by focusing on that which makes them feel whole, integrated and healthy--an attitudinal belief that things can make sense (Havel) and gives life meaning (Frankl). This process helps people recognize old labels with which they identified themselves and create new, honest, and realistic descriptions that help them shift their state of mind from illness toward wellness. It encourages them to live in the present moment, free of projections and attachments and to focus on the whole of life rather than its fragments. It also encourages them to see that they are the sum total of all the choices they have made in their lives and that they can choose again and rewrite their story in any way that they wish. It encourages them to use the two attitudes that Victor Frankl found common to all concentration camp survivors--hope and love--and use them to focus on developing a life story that contains a worthy ideal--the very essence of success.
The process of H.O.P.E. Guiding comprises five simple elements that define the operating system: Listening with open heart and mind; asking open, honest questions for clarification and deeper understanding; avoiding criticizing or advice-giving; affirming people for their experience of the way in which they have met life’s circumstances; and encouraging them to create benefit for self and others from that experience. H.O.P.E. Guiding avoids the use of the pathological assumption and questions: “Something’s broke--what?” “What caused it?” and “What can we do to fix it?” Instead, it prefers questions that ask for the story of the individuals’ experiences of life, how they have met it in the past, how they would like to meet it in both the present and the future, and how they will feel when they know they have succeeded. Thus, H.O.P.E.’s evocative psychology and related HOPE Guide work complement virtually all forms of counseling, psychotherapy, coaching, and self-help groups.
Requirements to be a HOPE Guide:
The function of a HOPE Guide is to look at each life as a rich, though sometimes painful, always challenging experience and to see how that rich experience can direct a life towards the discovery of its own meaning. The Guide’s purpose is not to analyze a life nor to help people find specific goals in their life, but to follow the leanings of this psychology HOPE Guides bridge the past and the future by focusing on living in the present moment--the “now moment” of Krishnamurti, and, of late, Eckhardt Tolle.
Loving kindness--compassion--is the motor of this psychology; forgiveness leading to inner peace and, ultimately, to happiness, is the consequence. HOPE Guides know that we must remember the past in order to forgive judgments about it that paralyze both our present and future growth. They appreciate the value of the popular perception about anger… it is like taking poison and expecting the object of the anger to die. They understand that forgiveness is possible only where love and compassion prevail. HOPE Guides provide people with a compassionate, soft-eyed approach to their lives. They encourage people to see themselves as beings called to life by Life itself, which has provided them with a set of personal resources with which to meet the unique circumstances that Life gives them. HOPE Guides encourage people to believe in themselves as spiritual beings with the power to use their resources and circumstances to transform their lives into meaningful blessing-gifts to themselves, to their fellow human beings, and to Life itself.
HOPE Guides are familiar with the practice of “presence and letting go of fear” as a close acquaintance with a rich background in American indigenous healing teaches. A relatively insignificant injury, like a cut finger, can be the tip of a complex iceberg of interwoven fears. By giving herself permission to be present to the tip of the iceberg, the bulk of it reveals itself, the fears are acknowledged for their illusory projections, released, and the cut heals in an instant. A life-threatening disease can heal through the same process. Every healing that the author has been privy to owes the healing to being present to the iceberg, and releasing oneself from its fears. In this way, presence is synonymous with love and letting go of fear is synonymous with forgiveness.
Confidentiality is essential to the establishment of a safe place. HOPE Guides ensure confidentiality because they do not keep written notes or goals set jointly or separately by the guide or by the individual with whom they are working. Guides work with clarity of intent and purpose and follow the contexts of the Golden Book that acknowledges past experiences and validates present life. They help their fellow human beings recognize and describe their potential and encourage them to reach out for it. Guides focus on attitudinal shifts that transform an individual’s guilty and/or shameful response(s) to a traumatic set of circumstances. As guilt and shame are attachments to the past, developing a sense of responsibility and accountability for the past, brings one forward into the present and love, where they forgive their attachments, release themselves from fear with compassionate awareness, and let go of the need to attack in defense of the danger of their projections.
General:
H.O.P.E. Guiding requires mature-for-age, caring, healthy people who have no active, debilitating disease and who have the ability and desire to listen to others with discernment and compassion, reflect on what they have just heard and convey it, encourage others to use their personal resources to meet the circumstances of their lives, and affirm them for every step in the process. HOPE Group Guides do not seek to change people, rather, they delight in seeing them evolve.
HOPE group Guides are not psychotherapists; they are not coaches. Rather, they are human beings who are there to learn, not to teach. They do not lead down the prescribed path but walk with or behind the participant, knowing that s-he is on a hero's journey: in spite of the skeptic who says, "We can't all be heroes," the HOPE Guide says, "Yes, we can; if you are living the life that life wants you to live, then the world will be saved."
A HOPE group guide delights in seeing people evolve, following the precept:
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together.”--Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal activist
Specific:
Every HOPE Guide has:
- participated in a SoulCircling exercise and Level 1 HOPE Group Guide training.
- read and become familiar with SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who, The H.O.P.E. Guide's Manual, Man's Search for Meaning.
- has become familiar with the Grateful Dead song, Ripple.
- submitted to H.O.P.E. an application consisting of a H.O.P.E. resume (a description of those personal resources with which they met life, the circumstances that life met them with, the experiences they have created out of the interaction including education and work, and their intention for becoming a HOPE Group guide), and a review of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
- has participated in regular meetings with other H.O.P.E. group guides (in person or over the Internet).
- has committed self to put aside therapeutic tools from psychological practices that focus on pathology and focus instead on the wonder and beauty of being human. They have agreed to eschew the use of the pathological questions, “Something’s broke.” “What caused it?” “What can be done to change or fix it?” and to ask instead for the story of the individual’s experience of life, how they met it in the past, and how they want to meet it in the future… in short, life-affirming questions, rich in potential.
- agreed to adopt the motto: With hope there is meaning in life, and a life with meaning has a future
- agreed to validate the uniqueness of an individual’s experience as a way through the pathless land of truth to the essence of life--love.
Specific for HOPE Groups in clinical services:
- all of the above.
- is a licensed professional employed by and familiar with the exact nature of the therapies offered by that service.
- is qualified by the service to be familiar with the patients’ clinical records and to able to make additions to those records with the full knowledge and consent of the participating patients. Such a professional would be a nurse, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, or physician
- is subject to the laws and ethics of licensure in the particular state in which the practice is located.
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Quote references in support of H.O.P.E.’s views of the past.
All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone.
-Richard von Weizsäcker
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
-Henri Bergson
To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
-Charles Caleb Colton
Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. -William Penn
So that we may move on in life, it is not that we should forgive and forget; rather it is that we must forgive and remember. Thus we free ourselves from our past conditioning.
-Ken Hamilton
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