HOPE, Healing Of Persons Exceptional

Principles:

• Supportive groups that focus on intention nurture healing and wholeness.
• HOPE Groups ask these soul questions:
  • Who are you?
  • What have you come here to do?
  • How will you get it?
  • What will you do with it?
• You have the answers

Meeting the needs of the ego and the soul:

In Chapter Five, we brought together in a homecoming the most vital aspects of self, ego and soul. Ego needs to talk about its worries and concerns and soul needs to talk about its passion. It wants to love and be loved. Whereas the ego has extensive experience with judgment (and reasoned, analytic thought to support its judgment), the soul benefits not from any analysis, but from the love that nurtures it and promotes its growth. Both the ego and the soul need a safe place in which to talk about their needs, desires, and passions. A HOPE Group is just such a place.

HOPE Groups started in 1987 when I created a support group in my surgical practice to help people with cancer find meaning in their lives. Here is the story of how the 501(c)(3) HOPE organization grew out of my experience with helping these wonderful people with cancer find meaning and value in their lives.

In 1975, I had begun to familiarize myself with Earl Nightingale’s lifelong study of the essence of success. Nightingale was responsible for showing me that our attitude was the key to accessing these resources because they determine the way in which we direct our minds. History had shown him that when people took control of their attitudes, they took control of their lives. When I started helping my patients take charge of their attitudes, their lives changed for the better, as had mine. This supported my personal growth and development.

HOPE Groups

At the first group meeting, the group decided it wanted to continue, and to call themselves a HOPE Group. At the next meeting, the nurse who had encouraged me to start the group, Sharon Williams, RN, offered “Healing Of Persons Exceptional,” and got cheers for her idea. (Traditionally, humans are of four parts, body, mind, soul, and spirit. A HOPE group is a relationship-centered group. The relationships are loving, caring and compassionate—attitudes that direct the growth of group. The groups focus on hope, the attitude of possibility, meaning, value, and purpose. The attitude of the relationships in a HOPE Group is love, unconditional love. Love provides the stable platform, the safe place, the compassion, and the support for everyone in a HOPE Group.

The focus on hope and healing that is expressed in the name, “HOPE Group,” expresses a vitally important semantic difference between a HOPE Group and a “Breast Cancer Support Group. Because we in HOPE are acutely aware of the simple psychological phenomenon, “What we focus on expands,” HOPE Groups are not cancer support groups, AIDS support groups, or depression support groups, because they do not support those conditions. Rather, they acknowledge the conditions, recognize the challenges in them, and use them to focus on the individual participant’s life and their intention for that life. There are HOPE Groups for people with cancer, but the focus is on hope and healing. This context of group work is not as common as one might wish. Some trainees and workshop participants are interested in guiding groups, and the center helps them start these groups. My nearly thirty years experience in this particular form of cognitive restructuring makes it possible to provide ongoing support for those whom we have trained and their groups.

In all our work we encourage and teach people to focus on what they would like to have happen in their lives, rather than what is wrong with those lives. We introduce people to attitudes that have helped thousands of other people throughout the ages. HOPE groups are open and ongoing. Caring people who are doing their own healing work guide them. These fine persons have been trained in the HOPE process, and meet as needed as a group with a senior guide to share their experiences. It does not take a special degree to guide a HOPE Group. We have trained school teachers, nurses, fishermen, and housewives to guide these groups. People who do personal coaching tend to make excellent HOPE Group guides. If a person in their group needs “therapy”, the guides encourage that person to seek professional help.

HOPE encourages its group members to support their guides in ways that acknowledge their time spent with the group, their out-of-pocket expenses, and their willingness to study and learn more about the process.

The style of a HOPE group:

HOPE Groups all have the following in common: a focus on healing and wellness, support for the processes of each individual’s life. showing neither judgment nor criticism but unconditional love.

The crucible of a HOPE Group meeting:

HOPE Groups guides create the crucible by setting the context for the meeting by welcoming the group and inviting introductions between those who are new to any of the others. The guide describes the nature of the following three parts to newcomers, and the group takes turns reading the following, one phrase at a time:

Part One, The HOPE Group opening:

This part names us and states our primary intention, finding wellness. It then describes how we find it. This leads us to the second intention of seeking the power to be able to choose to focus on the whole of life. It ends with a description of the nature of that power.

Part Two, The Principles of Attitudinal Healing:

With deep gratitude to Jerry Jampolsky and the Center for Attitudinal Healing, for permission to use them in our work. Jerry describes the power of the first seven of these twelve principles, in his book, Teach only Love, the Seven Principles of Attitudinal Healing. In the context of HOPE work we teach people to use these principles as affirmations with which to empower themselves to shift out of the paralyzing, destructive attitudes of fear and anger into the empowering, creative attitude of peacefulness.

Part Three, The HOPE group guidelines:

This is a verbal contract to which we all agree to guide us in our relationships with each other for the duration of the HOPE Group meeting.

Closing the HOPE Group meeting:

We use the “Prayer for Serenity” (sometimes slightly modified to suit the sentiments of the group).