HOPE and Y2K+3: Our Work in the New Millennium
by Ken Hamilton, MD

As I sit here at my desk and write this, I am acutely aware that it is six weeks away from the 16th anniversary of the first HOPE Group meeting and I just got home from the weekly meeting of that group!

These sixteen years have been great years: this group has met about 800 times; we have seen nearly 1000 people participate in these meetings; we have found out how to teach others to run HOPE Groups; the HOPE Ripley Center has attracted a group of competent practitioners of complementary and alternative forms of health care; we have continued to offer the exciting weekend workshop called Circling the Soul: Coming Home to Yourself®; and we are reaching out to health care professionals to help them bring this work into their practices. (For more information about the groups, go to HOPE Group News, below.)

The Board of Directors has agreed to host a HOPE sixteenth birthday party on Saturday, February 15 from 2:00 to 5:00 at Verrillo’s Conference Center, 155 Riverside Street, Portland (Behind Howard Johnson’s just off Maine Tpk. Exit 8). It is open without charge to all who have had an experience with HOPE since we came into being on February 12, 1987. We’ll have good afternoon finger food aplenty, beverages, and a simple ceremony with birthday cake, bubbly (both with and without alcohol), and a welcoming by Ken Hamilton followed by an open mike opportunity to tell a story, read a poem, show a picture, and otherwise get to know more people with the HOPE experience. Ken will talk about HOPE’s progress over these years, and share with you images of HOPE’s future.

Last year, at the exact time of the summer solstice, a group of interested and devoted volunteers gathered in the back yard of the Ripley Center (the actual time of the solstice!) and drew twelve concentric circles around a point that our spiritual dowser felt was at the center of a small earth vortex. When we were done, the largest circle was forty-one feet across—the beginning of our copy of the Great Labyrinth of the Cathedral of Chartres. We waited for sunrise, coffee warming our souls, and when the sun showed itself on the top of the ridge to the east, we took a compass bearing on it and ran to the rings where we laid out the primary diameter of the labyrinth. We drew the next diameter precisely perpendicular to it, and went to work with trowels, spades, and a machete to cut the lines, labryses, and rosette that comprise the beautiful 800 year old journey to the Holy City, which graces the floor of that exquisite cathedral. And by four o'clock that afternoon, the pattern was complete and the first pilgrims walked it!

Over the next couple of weeks, we finished filling all the carved lines, labryses, and rosette pattern with finely crushed marble. On July 14, we had a public celebration and dedication of the labyrinth. Since then, the labyrinth has been visited and walked by hundreds of people. The walk is on flat ground and the path is comfortably wide and safe. The property is as open as any piece of private property in South Paris, so if you want to take a trip to South Paris and walk it, know you are welcome. If you would like to know more about this kind of Labyrinth, and you are connected to the Internet, go to www.hopehealing.org/projectlabyrinth.asp.

On November 30, 2002, we placed a Peace Pole at the entrance to the labyrinth in a lovely ceremony honoring the four major ethnic groups of the Oxford Hills: Passamaquoddy, English, Finnish and French. We also honored the need for peace amongst the children of Abraham. The way of honor is through fixing on the pole six plaques with the "Peace Prayer," "May peace prevail on earth" in the languages of the four peoples and in Hebrew and Arabic.

Peace Poles are the idea of Masahisa Goi (1916-1980), who began the World Peace Prayer Movement in 1955. The 8 ft tall cedar pole has room for eight four-inch vinyl plastic plaques that say "May peace prevail on earth," or its equivalent, in nearly 100 languages. We chose  Passamaquoddy, English, Finnish, French, Arabic and Hebrew.

The hour-long ceremony opened with the welcoming words of Roger Nighthawk. We then planted the Peace Pole in 18” of concrete. Then Passamaquoddy, Finnish, French, and English guests repeated the prayer in their languages. Roger closed the outdoor part of the ceremony with a fine peace blessing, and we all adjourned to the warm Ripley Center for warm, mulled cider and plenty of comfort food to hear a group of Finnish women from West Paris sing songs from their native land accompanied by the ancient and lovely Finnish string instrument, the Kantele. What a way to close the ceremony!

(To learn more about the Peace Poles and see a picture of one, go to our web site, www.hopehealing.org/projectpeacepole.asp.)

 As you undoubtedly know, HOPE Groups have long responded to people in health crises. They have helped a lot of people who had reached an impasse in their lives, with or without a component of crisis. Impasses are like huge roadblocks; you can't dig under them, walk around them, or climb over them… alone. However, when you can sit in a group of caring people and share your thoughts and feelings with them, you find out the inner reserves that help you get past the block. Every time a person gets past such a block, they learn something valuable from it that helps them move forward with a sense of having succeeded.

We have found over the years that the discovery of these precious and wonderful inner reserves reveals to us the wonder of the human soul. In the face of our brash and often cruel world, the soul seems frail and shy. However, it has been with us for thousands of years, and, in spite of the intellectual pressures of what is called the Age of Reason, soul has not only managed to survive the pressures of rational intellectualism, it is rapidly returning to our conscious awareness of its truly great power. The power-way through crises or past impasses is the soul-path–-the success-path.

HOPE work is, indeed, soul work with its focus on our spiritual strengths.  HOPE Groups focus on our spiritual nature as they help us focus on who we are rather than what we have and do. The HOPE group  experience with helping people discover their spiritual nature led directly to our Circling the Soul: Coming Home to Yourself® workshops.

By working with body, mind, and soul, HOPE is at the forefront of healing work in this country. As we carry this work to other health care professionals, they start thinking differently about their relationships with their patients and clients. The work brings them the opportunity to find deeper and richer meaning in their professional lives. We know the beneficial effect this has on their patients and clients.

At present, there is a diverse and dynamic group of people who practice health care in the HOPE Ripley Center: Diane Peseckis, acupuncturist; Abigail Downs Duarte, massage therapist; John Patrick Davis, Reiki master; Jane Bamberg body-mind oriented counselor, and your editor, Kenneth H. Hamilton, holistic physician and health counselor. We call ourselves The Center for Hope and Healing (C4HH). We are the major source of complementary health care in the Oxford Hills community.

C4HH professionals nurture HOPE with their body-mind-soul oriented practices. HOPE nurtures them as a not-for-profit organization that is focused on community health and education. This health focus heightens HOPE's qualification to use the Ripley home which houses The Center for Hope and Healing. This is truly a unique and beneficial health enterprise in the Oxford Hills communities.

As we enter this new millennium of spiritual transformation, HOPE and its C4HH and SoulCircling services constitute an important part of the focus on treating each individual as a body-mind-soul. Through the World Wide Web HOPE connects to other organizations with the same focus. Together, we stand at the forefront of health care where there is much work to be done  today. We shall keep our focus on this field of health-related services.  All the while aware that the ultimate focus of this century will be on integrating body-mind-soul-spirit. We are ready to stand at the forefront of that endeavor as the collective need grows in human consciousness.

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HOPEr's Stories
We would love to have your HOPE story for Ripples! Please send it to the HOPE office, PO Box 276, South Paris, ME 04281 or email it to Ken at hope-at-hopehealing.org. If you don't think you are a writer, record it onto a tape and send that to the office. Ken will transcribe and edit it for you! You didn’t know he could type, did you? He’s not a speed demon, but he has a handy-dandy speech-to-text program in the computer that can follow him at 120 words per minute with 95% accuracy…and you know how he loves to talk!

Here’s a piece of personal journey that was handed over to me a while ago at the Portland HOPE Group meeting:

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HOPE Group News
Jean Libbey has a wonderful group that meets Tuesdays at 6:00 PM at CMMC. Colleen Lavigne has started a group in Sanford that meets in the UU church Sundays from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Peggy Oriol has started a group in Wells at the Regional Medical Community Center that meets every other Tuesday at 6:00 pm (call Suzanne Ilsley at 207- 646-5211 for details).

Susan Vangeli is combining HOPE Group guiding skills with her Coaching training and is working this combination in Adult Education in the Capitol area of our lovely state. She and I meet weekly to develop the trainings and workshops to help people experience the HOPE process.

If you are a HOPE Group member and would like to write something about your HOPE group for this section, please call 207-743-9373 or email it to us!

Changes at HOPE
As of November 1, 1999, there is no longer a full-time employee in the office at the HOPE Ripley Center. Budget constraints including the end of the funding for this position have necessitated this change. Know that your request or call to HOPE will be answered; it just might take a little longer than usual. At this time, I, your editor, have a separate HOPE phone line in my home with call forwarding, so your call will be answered as soon as I am free, which could be immediately! This would be especially true if you were to call at any one of the five times a week that I’ve set aside for HOPE calls: Monday and Friday at 10:30 am, and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 2:30 pm. That number is (207) 743-7458.

Our database currently has nearly 1000 names in it, and we continue to send Ripples as an episodic-periodic newsletter.  More importantly, and in keeping with the times, we have decided to have professional design of our web sites, www.hopehealing.org and www.soulcircling.com. We will publish Ripples on the hopehealing.org website at the same time we mail it to the people on the database.

The initial phase of this development work was essentially complete by the end of this past summer. I still have access to the files so that I can add or modify text (but not design). I'll be sitting down at my computer every Tuesday to keep the sites up to date with HOPE news. Ripples will continue to be published, and articles from past issues will always be available.

The SoulCircling web site focuses on SoulCircling, Coming Home to Your Self® workshops,  on the book about the process, SoulCircling, the Journey to the Who, and on The H.O.P.E Guide's Book, the instruction book for guiding HOPE groups. At this time, chapter summaries of the entire SoulCircling book are on the web. Each summary is about one-quarter the size of the original, and still contains the essence of each chapter that gives the reader an opportunity to see if SoulCircling has meaning and value for her or him. These summaries can be downloaded for free in pdf file format. The complete 164 page book is available as a pdf e-book download for the very reasonable price of $10.50. We have paperback copies for sale for $17.75, plus postage and handling. (To order any of these, click here to go to that page.) With this book in hand, you will be able to Circle your Soul and find out who you really, really, really, really are. You’ll learn how to start your own personal SoulCircle to support you in that process, and then, if you want to go further with this and even start a HOPE Group, we’ll be there to help you. You are welcome to study the text of the HOPE Apprentice's Guide on the web site.

So, keep your eye on this page, and it will keep you up to date with HOPE’s Ripples.

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