What is HOPE?

I have heard this question asked many, many times 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 said “yea”. We discussed this and 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 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 from our potential and opens us to tremendously creative possibilities. “Reframing” becomes an essential HOPE function. HOPE is all about “moving from our problems to our possibilities”.

HOPE exists to help people whose belief systems have been challenged by “getting one upside the head with the cosmic 2 x 4” 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 a tremendous 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, primary 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 other groups started to form for people with cancer and they soon accepted people with other debilitating physical conditions. Again, the primary focus of HOPE 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 remarkably large perception that HOPE was for people who were terminally ill. However, restricting HOPE’s work to people with terminal cancer is a misapprehension of what the work is all about. Even in the hospice work, HOPE carried its focus on life into the work that we had been asked to undertake. It gave us the opportunity to clearly recognize that HOPE work is all about working with people whose bodies and minds have been given a major challenge 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 people whose lives seem empty. It works for anxious people. It works for prisoners. It works for people--not all, but a good many.

When Václav Havel said 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 HOPE as a vehicle by which we could help people find meaning, value, and purpose in their lives. Our vision began to settle into simply helping people discover that hope and vision collaborate to bring meaning into life in the immediate moment. Together, they empower a person to take hold of the main sheet 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.

HOPE 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 doesn’t 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.

We discovered how wonderfully uplifting it is to know that each of us is a once-told tale, a once-painted portrait, a once-read poem, a once-danced dance, a once-sung song. When we tell others our tale, paint them our portrait, read them our poem, dance them our dance, sing them our song we have told them who we really, really are. Being thus informed, HOPE 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 HOPE, 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 judgment, of criticism, and of criticizing. 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 because HOPE 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[1]”. 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 HOPE 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 HOPE 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, HOPE responds to the needs of others with SoulCircling workshops, retreats, and one-on-one work with HOPE Guides.

HOPE Groups differ from traditional therapeutic groups in that they do not seek to diagnose or prescribe specific treatments for what is “wrong.” They do not seek to decrease symptoms of mental and physical health problems; though such results are common benefits of HOPE Group participation. HOPE Groups differ too from traditional “support” groups in that they do not “support” a problem, e.g. cancer, alcoholism, anxiety, depression, chronic pain; rather HOPE groups acknowledge the value of having good support in understanding the problem and guide a person to focus on the meaning and possibilities that life contains and which lie beyond the problem. HOPE Groups are resources of experiences in living life through all if its challenges and rewards. Participating in one is an opportunity for individuals to discover their life intentions and choose where they want to go, and what they want to accomplish on their own timetable and on their own unique path. HOPE Groups use the HOPE 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 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 breaking determines the quality of the gift that they have to give life in return for that life. They do so by asking 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 have suggested to me that these questions are “therapy” that belongs in licensed, certified, “degreed” practices. I reply that these questions come out of the public (read “non-therapeutic”) domain and not from any texts of psychology or psychotherapy, for I have not read any such texts, nor do I plan to do so. The work I have been doing for thirty years has all grown out of this public domain and focuses on success: “The progressive realization of a worthy ideal (Earl Nightingale).” HOPE 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 depression, manic depression, 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. HOPE does not argue these points; it merely seeks to respond to the wishes of each group. HOPE’s belief and experience is that there is a way for each of us through the difficulties of disease to the discovery of health.

The meaning of life and its discovery lies at the core of HOPE’s psychology; “movement towards a meaningful future is not possible without viewing the past as a series of vital lessons”. HOPE’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. This psychology functions on the wisdom of Albert Einstein who said, “We cannot solve the problem at the level at which the problem was created.” HOPE perceives that the problem invariably arose in childhood during the tender time of ego-development, so the solution lies in discovering one’s “higher self,” the name of which is Psyche—the soul. Indeed, the word, psychology, literally means “the meaningful relationships of the soul.”

And HOPE does its work by acknowledging and validating that while we are all “persons,” no two souls are alike. With this knowledge in hand, then, we come to appreciate why science cannot measure the individual or collective soul. As science is about prediction on the basis of measurement, if it cannot measure, it cannot predict; so it cannot predict the behavior of any one soul. Thus it 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.