HOPE Groups: creating possibilities out of chaos

© 2001, HOPE and Ken Hamilton, MD

The challenge of our time is to learn to focus on possibility and meaning in life rather than on life’s problems and their causes. When we can focus on our innate ability to meet and move beyond challenges, we focus on what is possible; not what is wrong. HOPE groups help people face challenges in their lives by focusing on what they want to have happen… what they would like to see come of things. We encourage the participant to “go for it”, and patiently wait without expectations (“shoulds”) for the appearance of the person’s essence—the soul—to take charge of the life, letting the ego concentrate its strengths on serving the soul and its purpose in this lifetime. When it appears, we reflect on its presence and nurture it as it appears. It is a magical, wondrous process.

Consider the lives of those with serious illness; fear, pain, uncertainty and despair often fill their days. Consider the lives of those facing the loss of loved ones; what fills their days? Consider the lives of alcoholics; what fills their days? Consider the behavior of today’s children; what fills their days? They all need the relief and salutary experience of hope. A HOPE Group provides this experience.

Hope is an essential ingredient of the human condition. It provides us with a vitally important way of looking into our future. How we see that future determines the quality of the present moment. Hope is not simply a “promise of good things”; rather it is the belief that things can make sense, regardless of how they turn out (Vaclav Havel). When things do not make sense, we become afraid. To Dante, in The Divine Comedy, hell is the place where nothing makes sense. It is the source of all fear, pain, and suffering. The purpose of a HOPE Group is to support individuals facing hell while they make sense out of their lives.

People come to HOPE groups because of the hellfire of an acute illness like cancer or AIDS or the black hole of a chronic condition like depression, CFIDS, or chronic pain. The HOPE Group helps them identify their fear and replace it with hope through the discovery of the meaning, value and purpose in their life. Inner peace returns, and the experience of joy and happiness becomes possible, regardless of the ultimate course of the illness .

Every human being is unique. The Universe comes together in only one time and place for each one of us. A HOPE Group celebrates that uniqueness because it gives us the right to be individuals. We all share a quality of “human-ness” helps us to overcome feelings of “specialness” that only serve to help our egos separate us. The law of returns reassures us that as we nurture the wonder of each other, we nurture the wonder of our individual selves.

The groups focus on nurturing each member's core passion--their innermost desires. The discovery and nurturance of this vital component of self leads people beyond the confines of their illnesses to the discovery of the meaning, value, and purpose of their lives. The fundamental belief on which the groups work is that the answers to all of our questions lie within and can be discovered in the presence of a nurturing group of human beings who are all on the same path.

HOPE Groups are highly effective means of stress management that help people face challenges of all kinds. They develop synergy, the ability of minds to work together and create far more than they can when working apart. They nurture success, focusing on the possibilities that lead to a solution rather than the problem that prevents them from getting there. Research shows us that the challenge of disease responds favorably to group work. It shows us that children grow and develop wonderfully in diversified groups. It shows us that industry grows best out of group process.

Health is more than just a state of being-free-of-disease. Though being-free-of-disease can imply the existence of health, health is being-wholly-alive! Indeed, the root meaning of the word, health, implies both wholeness and holiness! To us, health is a natural condition of all of living things. HOPE Groups help people focus on health by critically examining the process and meaning of their lives. We know that it is possible to be healthy even when disease is present. Conversely, it is possible to be unhealthy even when there is no recognizable disease! Everyone has likely met someone who is an example of one or the other condition.

Each one of us is capable of finding health because it is our natural state. Furthermore, we believe that no one else can heal us but ourselves, though others can help in many ways. We believe that “fixing” is not helping. We heal through the power of our own inner resources, and the work of helpers is to assist in the recovery of those resources.

We have learned in HOPE to take the problems of our past as they present themselves and create possibilities from them. We have seen that some people perceive that their disease represents an unresolved problem in their life. We accept such a belief, but we do not try to force people into such thinking, for it will create guilt in already unhappy people. Guilt is a harmful and restrictive state of mind that always fosters fear. Creating guilt is contrary to our beliefs and purposes. We work to release the guilty past, and to change a fearful future into hope. We have the belief that all of our life experiences have value. With this attitude, HOPE groups foster the development of lives of balance and harmony. We foster our ability to love, which brings us into relationship with others and ourselves. Ken Hamilton knows from his personal experience of over 4,000 HOPE group meetings that the process is a spiritual one. It is not religious; it touches the spiritual essence of a human, the soul. HOPE's name for this process is SoulCircling™.

The person who helps group participants in the HOPE process is a guide--a HOPE guide. Each HOPE guide has participated in a personal SoulCircling experience and special added instruction in the methods of guiding HOPE Groups. SoulCircling™ is a process of discovering and implementing one’s soul’s intention through story-telling, taking a loving personal inventory, sharing these with a “small group” and creating and affirming the intention that rises out of this process. The story contains the important elements that shape one’s life. The inventory comprises one’s talent, temperament, intelligence(s), responsibilities, attachments, and core passion. The intention is the soul’s reason for coming into one’s human form. This one-day, process, spread out over a serious of weekly meetings, is the HOPE Group process.