The HOPE Group Process—focusing on health and healing:

HOPE groups focus on health and healing through the power of hope to open doors otherwise closed by fear. The words, health and healing, come from the same root as the words, “whole” and “holy”. In this light, healing is the result of bringing together in a balance the traditional four parts of the human being; body, mind, soul and spirit[1]. This centuries-old way of looking at the human being came to an abrupt end in the 17th century when the philosophers of the Age of Reason decided that the soul did not exist because there was no scientific evidence for it. Fortunately for us, the French philosopher-mathematician, René Descartes, in the final work of his lifetime, The Passion of the Soul, rescued the soul by placing it in the pineal gland of the brain!

The soul is unquestionably the spiritual director of a person’s life. It knows, through love, that death’s sting is but a moment in a rich succession of lives. Having separated its qualities from the other three qualities of human nature and (seemingly) discarded them, we in the West have lost that part of self that sees the “big picture.” We are left with the narrow-minded, narrow-visioned secular director of life, the ego, which fears the anguish of death and all forms of pain.

It is common to our ego-driven human experience that we tend to be stuck in states of fear and anger that prevent us from allowing ourselves to grieve. We do not recognize that grief is a transitional emotion that frees us from our stuckedness, allowing us to move toward happiness and joy. Medical science is just now coming to understand the role of grief, happiness, and joy in illness and in health. HOPE nurtures the move toward states of happiness and joy through encouraging an awareness of the nature of “inner peace”. We find that many people seek this state, but have little understanding of it, let alone how to achieve it. We believe that it is not difficult to find. However, it might take some work to create it. HOPE groups facilitate this change.

A popular perception of health defines it as “the absence of disease.” Rather, it is a wholeness of self. Health is not the absence of anything, let alone “disease.” Disease does not have to mean “the absence of health”; rather it can mean a condition in which “ease” is not present thus threatening to fragment self. It is a condition of being which is related to a wounding of the body or the mind (by any conceivable agents or entities). There are times when the agent that causes the dis-ease needs to be identified and moved against with some kind of “treatment”, such as strep throat requiring penicillin, a heart attack requiring angioplasty, a cancer requiring surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, or a depression requiring antidepressants. There are other times when the “cause” cannot be found, and health cannot be sought by moving away from the disease by any of these means. First, though, it is essential that the existence of dis-ease be acknowledged because denying its existence can prevent any movement at all. When one recognizes and acknowledges the existence of dis-ease, one has a base from which s-he can begin to move toward a teacher of the way to health.

We have learned that the many small voices which cry out in the wilderness, “I’m not worth anything!” can begin to find hope...to find meaning, value, and purpose in one’s life. The tiniest ray of hope can become the beacon that lights the way from any problem to all possibility. In HOPE, we believe in possibility. We also know that it is harmful to carry expectations; so we share in a subjunctive, inviting, caring, loving manner what we have seen work, because we believe in the greatness of experience. It is only great if it is shared without any “should”s. We learn to let go of guilt with the “shoulda, woulda and coulda” that we so often carry with it. We learn to focus on the quality of life as we live it. We learn to see mistakes as lessons, not failures. We learn to see life as full of lessons, from one end to the other.

We believe in you. We believe in your greatness and your ability to till the plot of land the Universe has given to you; and, indeed, promised you from the beginning of time. We believe that if each of us was supposed to have the answer to everything, our heads would be so huge, we would not be able to carry them around. We believe that life is a study of the things that are important for us to learn, and that each one of us is here to learn something differently from all others. We believe that there is meaning and purpose behind this concept that we may not yet understand. Therefore, we honor and support you in your process, and know that you are free to take from any HOPE encounter what is meaningful for you at the time.

We know that the past is gone, and the future never comes. What works is what is working now. It is framed in our attitudes and influenced by our heredity and our environment. We are free to mold it as we want, and if we do not like what is coming up for us, we can change our attitude toward ourselves and what we believe is happening to us.

We also know that there is great importance in having a vision. There are soft balances between its details and its generalities. The general rule is that the vision must make sense to the person who has it. It is part of a group guide’s challenge to help foster the idea of the vision making sense. It may seem impossible for a one legged person to climb Mount Everest, but it shall likely happen one day[2]. It will come about through a coach using soft, yet firm encouragement to get a person to focus on the impossible dream and the process that leads to it.

These ideas are seminal to the HOPE Group process. Of equal importance is the way in which they are brought to the group. We use a method that has been in use by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) for over 300 years—the "Clearness Committee". Using it, Quakers have solved the problem of providing pastoral counseling in the absence of a pastor. When a member of any Quaker Meeting has a "concern" (getting married, solving an interpersonal conflict, experiencing business difficulties—in other words, virtually any of the mundane problems that humans meet from day-to-day, week-to-week, or year-to-year), s-he calls together a group of four to seven friends and family members in one of these Clearness Committees. (You can see that this is already potentially an ideal "small group").

S-he presents her-his concern to the group, all of whom share the belief that the responses and answers to the concern lie in the person with it and not in the group. Therefore, the group is not there to judge, criticize, or even give advice; its responsibility is to listen carefully and respectfully, ask open questions for amplification and clarification of the concern, reflect on the associations heard in the expression of the concern, and affirm the person for bringing the concern to the attention of the group and her-his ability to resolve it.

These last two paragraphs speak to and for countless thousands of episodes of human experience. The process is exquisitely simple. It is also easy to follow. I do not need to amplify on what I have said. Consider practicing the listening, asking open questions, reflecting on what is heard, and affirming a fellow human being for her-his life and its story. Yes, it is delightfully simple though perhaps not as easy as it is simple.

HOPE Groups set the context of the meeting by reading the "Golden Book" sentence by sentence, beginning with the HOPE Group opening, going through the Principles of Attitudinal Healing, and ending with the HOPE Group Guidelines. This is an alchemical process that builds the once-used container for alloying the content of the meeting that always walks in through the door. The meeting begins when it begins with those who are there, and no one is ever late to a HOPE Group meeting. The meeting usually lasts two hours but always ends when it ends. All meetings end with standing in a circle and holding hands, reciting The Prayer for Serenity (using words like “Love,” “Great Spirit,” “Source” other than “God” if so desired).

This simple closing is a powerful, quick form of centering because it is a prayer for serenity, courage, and wisdom. At the guide's discretion, further forms of centering can be used before this last one: a few moments of silence with a request to simply go quietly into one's own center and let the experience of the preceding time settle there, or twenty to thirty minutes of guided relaxation to pay attention to some of the metaphors and images that have developed during the meeting time.[3]

Closing a meeting with hugs is a pleasant, informal, and safely intimate way of saying “thank you” and good travels until we meet again. However, that level of intimacy is more than some people wish to share. Hugs must always be an option, and never mandatory.