Who is a HOPE Group 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. Their purpose is not to analyze a life nor to help people find specific goals in their life, but to follow the meetings of this psychology HOPE Guides bridge the past and the future by focusing on living in the present moment—the “now” moment of Krishnamurti.

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 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, validates present life, and helps their fellow human beings to recognize and describe their potential and encourages 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. They help these individuals focus on setting and clarifying their intentions, and developing and implementing initiatives. The process moves people forward toward appreciating the ego’s disappointment with a situation that the soul knows is a blessed gift. 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 responses of hope, love, and peace. In this way we come to identify with the order that created our 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 in such situations to augment 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 (Vaclav Havel) and gives life meaning (Victor Frankl). This process helps people recognize old labels with which they identified themselves and create new, honest, and realistic descriptions, which 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.

HOPE groups in general are powerful forms of cognitive restructuring that follow centuries-old principles of creating and living successful lives.

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 as professional, therapeutic clinical services provide a safe environment in which the participants can explore the qualities of their relationships with their healthcare professionals. They provide a healthy, safe forum for discussing the effects of the individual participant’s therapies. Guided by HOPE-trained professionals (nurses, physician assistants, and physicians), they provide valuable information about their individual therapies that help their healthcare professionals make beneficial therapeutic decisions. HOPE Groups provide a safe venue for the (re-) implementation of the placebo effect on all therapies.

The process of HOPE 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. HOPE 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, HOPE’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:

General:

HOPE 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 guides do not seek to change people, but delight in seeing them evolve. HOPE guides follow the precept: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together.” (Lilla Watson, Aboriginal activist). HOPE guides come from all occupations—including psychotherapists, counselors, and coaches who leave their licenses and certificates at the door when they come to do HOPE work—working to ease the human travail by sharing their liberation in a safe place.

Specific:

Every HOPE guide has:

·         participated in a SoulCircling exercise and Level 1 HOPE Group Guide training.

·         submitted to HOPE an application consisting of a HOPE 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 writing a review of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

·         read and becoming familiar with SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who, and the HOPE Guide’s Manual.

·         watched and critiqued The Grinch that Stole Christmas.

·         made a conscious decision to replace the conventional “medical model” questions mentioned above with a focus on the wonder and beauty of being human. They have agreed 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:

The HOPE Guide of a HOPE Group in a clinical service must be a licensed professional who is employed by and familiar with the exact nature of the therapies offered by that service. This person is qualified by the service to be familiar with the patients’ clinical records and be 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 subject to the laws and ethics of licensure in the particular state in which the practice is located.

Precepts of HOPE’s function and service:

·         The Universe is conscious, subjective, and experiential.

·         We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings immersed in the human condition (Père Teilhard de Chardin).

·         We are here because Life has created us. It has given us resources with which to meet It. It has met us with a set of circumstances. We have created unique individual experiences out of that meeting. We always share that experience with others—and our attitude toward it—24/7. We have chosen that attitude, which the world constantly, accurately mirrors back at us. As that attitude was a choice, we have the power to make another choice.

·         Love defines the all-inclusive relationships that describe the Universe. It is also the attitude of relationship. It brings us inner peace, and sometimes inner peace is the way to love.

·         All experience uniquely reflects the vital, changing nature of the Universe.

·         Dialogue, as David Bohm shows us (www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/bohm_dialogue.htm), is an excellent, subjective means for sharing experience, for it reveals the order of wholeness enfolded in chaos.

·         Everyone seeks their inner, spiritual essence that gives meaning to their lives. They reveal its presence in their questions and concerns about that which they see around them, not knowing that it is a reflection of that which lies within. HOPE Guides listen and reflect what they hear and feel in the presence of these seekers.

·         Subjective (offering) “I” statements always take preference over objective (instructing, advising) “you” statements.

·         Advice-giving is self-serving; experience-offering is other-serving. HOPE Guides compassionately share experiences of self and others.

·         HOPE Guiding seeks clarity.

·         HOPE Guiding holds integrity.

In summary:

HOPE is spiritual. HOPE Groups and SoulCircling are sacred processes. It cuts through all that is superficial. Engaging in HOPE eliminates all pretenses. This is what you call an ‘open heart’. No where else does this happen with such regularity. – Colleen R.