Ken Hamilton has provided guided visualizations--also known as guided imageries--in HOPE groups for eighteen years. Those who have heard him report that he is "one of the best" at guided imagery/guided visualizations/guided meditations. He has a soothing voice and an unshakable trust in the people he serves. These guided visualizations are the product of these years of experience, using metaphors that came up repeatedly in HOPE group meetings.

Each imagery lasts almost twenty-three minutes--the length of the background music performed by Daniel Kobialka, his "extended version" of the Pachelbel Kanon (in D). This piece of music is a wonderful conveyor into the state of mind needed to get the maximum benefit. It opens with lovely cascades of clear single notes in the key of D that invite you, the listener, into a calm place. Then, with a couple of ringing "grace notes," the rhythm sets in at 70 beats a minute--your mother's heartbeat that you first heard when you were about three months along in the safety of her womb. The gentle sounds of Kobialka's playing carries you right through to a soft, gentle state of mind that is perfect for bringing your attention, fully alert, back to where you started, twenty-three minutes before... but now above it, with new, relaxed and comfortable ways of feeling and seeing yourself and others.

A special benefit of buying our cassette tapes:

• Each visualization addresses and develops a single healing metaphor. We put it on both sides of the tape so there is no need purchase unwanted product or to rewind for a replay.

We have completed the digital remastering of all guided imageries... CD's now available!

• The guided visualization tapes have all been re-mastered from new digital recordings done in a professional studio, where Ken created some new ones.
• We can custom burn CD's with up to three visualizations on each CD. The CD's all have Avery adhesive labels that Avery maintains will stay on in any kind of CD player--even the one in your car. (But then, it is not safe to listen to these while you are operating machinery--like a car.)
• There are savings for ordering multiple imageries. There is a $5.00 surcharge for materials and labor for each CD. The cost of a CD with one imagery is $15.00, with two is $23.50, and with three is $30.00. The shopping carts are for tape sales only. To order a CD, please send us a letter listing your choices of imageries, and include a money order for the cost plus $1.50 postage to HOPE, P.O. Box 276, South Paris, ME  04281-0276.

Our Warrantee:

• The quality of each tape and CD is unconditionally guaranteed, and faulty tapes and CD's will be replaced at no charge upon receipt of the original in good condition. We will include the mailing cost of the returned tape with the replacement tape or CD.

Additional information:

• For more information about any of these visualizations, please e-mail us

The Visualizations:

All tapes are $10.00 ea. PayPal adds a nominal S&H charge. (No checks drawn on Canadian banks, please--even if in US$--due to prohibitive Canadian bank charges.)

• Deep Relaxation
  Purpose: to help you to relax and reduce stress.
  Principle: a primary stress management tool for reducing tension by focusing on the breath, it lowers blood pressure and improves blood flow to all tissues and organs. It's likely to help you get 15-20 minutes of needed sleep, for it ends with instructions to "open your eyes and bring your attention, fully alert, back to the room".

         Download a complementary six-minute mp3 version

• Autogenic Relaxation
  Purpose: to learn a powerful biofeedback stress management tool that lowers blood pressure further than Deep Relaxation alone.
  Principle: by relaxing the unconscious nervous system, we experience beneficial changes in the circulatory and respiratory systems.
  (Comes with small skin temperature thermometer for the biofeedback and instructions in its use.)

• A Loving Personal Inventory
  Purpose: to get to know what life has given you to meet it with.
  Principle: you have met life with resources that come in your genes and a passion that comes with your soul. Life has met you with circumstances, some of which you'd just as soon had never happened. Their interaction has resulted in a story of Universal value. The inventory of assets and the story of your life experience provide you with the opportunity to fine-tune your life and affirm your ability to see it come to pass. This is the essence of SoulCircling.

• The Path of Hope
  Purpose: to explore what Vaclav Havel meant when he said "Hope is not about optimism. It is not about the conviction that things will work out all right. Rather it is the conviction that things can make sense, regardless of how they work out."
  Principle: each life follows a unique path and hope implies that the path can make sense. No matter what, this path can always be found, which gives a person a reassuring feeling about life.

• Your Inner Guide
  Purpose: to introduce you to your essence--your soul--a loving, wise personal guide who has always known you, and who is always available to you for advice and counsel as you move through life. Principle: this inner guide lives in a set of rooms deep inside our us, and is always willing and able to help us with our choices and questions.

• The Tapestry of Life
  Purpose: to introduce you to the time-honored metaphors of “the fabric of life” and the “tapestry of life”, and make it possible for you to mend breaks in that cloth, healing old wounds without having to recall the actual experience of the wounding.
  Principle: many of our wounds are associated with loss of pieces of soul. These fragments are left behind in safe places, and we spend a significant amount of our energy keeping them healthy. Recovery of that part of our essence that we left behind heals us--makes is whole, and makes the energy available for following our path.. You can safely go to where the soul part has lived all these years and invite it to come home. It will respond to your invitation and come help you restore the broken threads in the fabric of your life.

• The River of Time
  Purpose: to explore the meaning and application of time in your life and get a bigger picture of where you are; so the image takes you to where you can see this river and the quiet place to which it goes.
  Principle: time flows like a river, and flowing with it helps us to heal. We flow with this river to its quiet ocean, finding meaning as we do.

• To See Differently
  Purpose: to introduce you to the universe of possibility to be had when we let go of our fears and their misperceptions through the application of twelve Principles of Attitudinal Healing.  
  Principle: when we exercise our ability to see with love, fear and its misperceptions fade from our view.

Download a complementary six-minute mp3 short version.

• The Breath is Like a Wave
  Purpose: to develop deeper appreciation of the power of the breath to connect us to everything on the earth, and thereby release a lot of our tensions, anxieties and fears.
  Principle: the ocean of air, like the sea, connects us with all life on earth, past and present… and we find our wholeness--we heal. Here, I invite you to stand at the ocean's shore and feel how the flow of two oceans--water and air--connect you to everything in the world.

• Energy’s Flow
  Purpose: to help you direct the flow of the life force in your body to places in yourself that need healing. 
  Principle: a soothing, warm guidance calls the life force from the spiritual realm and from the physical realm. It fills your being with these two energies--one gold, the other blue--and directs the flow of this energy to places that need healing... not only in your self, but in others... a very safe, powerful way of bringing healing to self and others

• Inner Strength in the O.R.
  This visualization is meant to be listened to both before, during, and after surgery. Yes, you do hear at the subconscious level when you are anesthetized!) It comprises a gentle set of helping, healing instructions that help in controlling blood loss and depth of relaxation. They empower you to be the center of love in the operating room. The opposite side of the tape is a slightly modified version of "Your Universal Self" appropriate to being under an anesthetic.

• Putting Chemo to Work
  A relaxation and guided visualization to direct the flow of chemotherapy in your body to the place(s) it is needed, and directing its work once it gets there. On the second side is the "Your Universal Self" visualization. It is meant to be played while chemo is flowing.

• Fear, Anger & Love/Releasing Anger
  Purpose: to show you how to transform the destructive energies of fear and anger into the beneficial energies of awareness and presence.
  Principle: projection is a function of the ego and is the source of all harm.
  This visualization consists of an educational talk about anger and its relationship to fear and time on one side and a powerful, reframing guided imagery on the other. They both cover this reframe in depth. You can listen to and use the talk while you drive; it keeps down the popular road rage virus. The deeper work on the other side is for when you have twenty-five minutes in which to learn how to become assertive rather than abusive.

• Soar with an Eagle
  Purpose: to join an eagle in a soaring flight over your path of life for a real high with one of nature’s finest guides.
  Principle: nature's creatures have remarkable archetypal power, and the eagle is one of the best.
  (This shamanic image came out of my fourteen years of soaring in gliders and the passionate love that a HOPE group participant has for the bald eagle.)

• Goodbye to Nicotine, hello...!  
  This is a "stop-smoking" visualization with some unique and perfectly true messages. It is instruction about the good feelings associated with smoking and how you can experience them without the smoke or the nicotine. It will teach you an "anchor," a subtle gesture and movement that you can use in place of smoking tobacco. Ken has been doing this with patients for years!

• Your Universal Self  
  Purpose: This rich image is a visit to a private, beautiful beach where you give yourself the experience of the Universal origins of your being. You then take these experiences into a sheltered place among the dunes where you discover your inherent beauty that is well-known to the Universe.
  Principle: you have a beautiful, three- dimensional, fully colored flower representing your heart--the center of love--in your being.