Passing of Ken Hamilton

It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that Ken Hamilton, founder of HOPE (Healing of Persons Exceptional) passed away Wednesday, February 2, 2022. Our hearts and thoughts are with Ken’s family — Jonna and their children Ian and Karen.

Stephen & Nona Thompson
HOPE Group Members in 1988

 

 

H.O.P.E. Supportive Groups and Healing Circles

Important note re H.O.P.E. Group meetings and COVID-19

It is clear to me, a physician, that COVID-19 is easily transmitted by close contact; so when my group does meet, we stay 6 feet apart; we do not shake hands or hugs; we greet with the Hindu practice of Namaste. We wash hands at the start and end of each meeting. We cough or sneeze into tissue that is then discarded. (We do not cough or sneeze into the elbow because that puts viruses in a place of ready exposure.) Or, even better, we stay at home and come together using Skype or ZOOM!

A H.O.P.E. Group is a safe place in which we come together because we suffer illness and seek wellness. The first group convened on February 12, 1987. It comprised five cancer patients in the general surgical practice of Kenneth H. Hamilton, MD; his practice assistant, Kathleen G; and a nurse from his hospital, Sharon.W.

When Hamilton began his second year in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University his class learned that the most important service a McGill graduate could provide her/his patients was to promise them that s/he would always do her/his best to help them “get on with their lives.” That instruction became the foundation for his career – indeed, his life.

It was no accident then that, in 1975, when he encountered the success-oriented career of Earl Nightingale, which was based on the principle that every one of us is born with a “worthy ideal,” and the greatest service we can do for ourselves and each other is to keep that ideal in our minds as our lives unfold; for we become what we think about most, and the attitudes of the mind open the chambers of the mind that help us realize that personal ideal. Thus Hamilton discovered the experiential foundation for helping others “get on with their lives”.

After sharing 12 years of the wisdom in the monthly Nightingale INSIGHT tapes and helping patients find the wisdom in their own stories, it was clear that there was an inherently effective therapeutic value in helping patients of all kinds come to realize that their stories all contained that “worthy ideal”. Hamilton became known as “the Doctor who listens” for his attention to those personal stories. He became aware that a powerful psychology lay behind this work, and he considered taking a sabbatical to get a degree in psychology.

He shared his thoughts with the hospital’s social worker, who had become his confidant over several years of working together exploring this. She recommended he find a medical tutor to help him learn counseling. He accepted her recommendation, and she introduced him to the Reverend Barry Wood, MD, a gifted psychiatrist in nearby Portland. The chemistry between Barry and Ken was “just right” and the surgeon found that he had native psychiatric abilities. Of important note: Barry was active in the 12-step recovery program, and he introduced Ken to that style of group work.

After 16 months of working together Barry found out that he had an incurable cancer. In hospital, recovering from surgery, Barry read the New York Times Sunday Book Review… that “just happened” to contain a review of Bernie Siegel’s attitudinal healing book, Love, Medicine & Miracles work. He got a copy, devoured it, finding detailed description of Siegel’s Exceptional Cancer Patients (ECaP) support groups and “strongly suggested” that our surgeon “get the book, read it, and meet Siegel”. Dr. Ken followed that suggestion starting as soon as he got back to his hometown. Five days later, he was given a catalog that listed a Siegel “Life, Death and Transition” workshop one month later – on a three-day off-call weekend. He signed up, attended, and met Bernie, beginning a friendship that endures to this day.

At Siegel’s Massachusetts workshop our surgeon-now-psychiatrist heard about the “Attitudinal Healing” work of Gerry Jampolsky, MD. Hamilton signed up for Jampolsky’s “Attitudinal Healing” workshop coming just one month later, coinciding with another three-day off-call weekend, beginning yet another life-long friendship in supportive group practice.

This experience showed Hamilton that he was well prepared to start a support group for his cancer patients. He was encouraged by the nurse, Sharon, who had asked Ken if he would take part in teaching an American Cancer Society “Coping with Cancer” course in their hospital, to which he agreed. Part of each educational session contained group work… the stage was set.

As noted, the first meeting of Hamilton’s support group took place on February 12, 1987. At the end of that two-hour meeting, Hamilton asked the others if they would like to continue, and with their unanimous encouragement, he told them that Siegel had wanted to call his “ECaP” group a H.O.P.E. Group but could not figure out what the letters stood for. I asked the group if they would like to call themselves a H.O.P.E. Group, and they eagerly agreed. I told them that they would have to come up with the acronym. At the next week’s meeting, Sharon had the answer: Healing Of Persons Exceptional: where “Healing” implied becoming whole, “Persons” is our common humanness, and “Exceptional” affirmed the truth that no two of us are alike in our “worthy ideal”.

A H.O.P.E. Group is a safe place in which we come together to find wellness by sharing our stories and listening with hearts and minds to the other stories in the room. We have a simple opening ritual that helps us bring our inner selves together – reading together the three pages (following a cover page) of a laminated document called “The Goldbook…” so–named because we chose to print it on “goldenrod” color paper. The next three pages are: the ten-phrase “H.O.P.E. Group Opening,” the twelve “Principles of Attitudinal Healing,” and the ten “H.O.P.E. Group Guidelines”. In this way, each meeting is responsible for the way it conducts itself.

Of note… any H.O.P.E. Group can choose to have a H.O.P.E. trained and certified “Guide” to help the group maintain its focus on respectful, affirming listening that helps members remember the “worthy ideal” they were born to serve. A spontaneous Healing Circle may well find lasting qualities and identify a member ar two who would serve well to “guide” such a meeting. Then they can turn to us to find a Senior H.O.P.E. Guide to do the training and recommend that we certify the trainee.

In our H.O.P.E. Groups we learn the practice of compassion and the release of suffering – the engine of forgiving. Join us at one of our three locations in Maine to see for yourself what a difference a H.O.P.E. Group can make.

If you would like to have a H.O.P.E. Group near you, start one! You do not have to be a H.O.P.E. Group Guide in order to have your own. Simply be a H.O.P.E. Group “Convener”! Please don’t be afraid here, go to https://hopehealing.org/hope-groups/ read what is there and communicate with H.O.P.E. through its email account that you will find on that page. A senior H.O.P.E. Guide will get back to you and work with you to convene a Healing Circle that has all of H.O.P.E’s essence. (I have seen it said again and again that the way through the struggle in which we find ourselves is through the interactions of “small groups”… in other words: what H.O.P.E. has been offering humankind for over 30 years.) Read on….

A “Healing Circle” is a small group of people who know each other and come together to explore a matter of common interest. They can well use the Goldbook to set the standards for their relationship during the meeting. There is no “leader”… the group leads itself with the guidance of the Goldbook.

Another model to consider for a “Healing Circle” is the Quaker process called a “Clearness Committee”. Such a gathering convenes at the request of a member of that Friends Meeting so s-he can get “clear” about a particular “concern,” which might simply be about becoming a Quaker; or a couple getting clear about getting married. The members of the committee are asked to refrain from giving advice, devoting all thoughts to asking questions of the one who called the meeting and finding thereby the answers that lie within that person or couple.

In a Healing Circle, according to H.O.P.E’s experience, when anyone presented a “concern”, the others would agree to refrain from advice-giving and devote themselves to question-asking, refraining from asking questions with built in answers, like, “Have you ever considered seeing a counselor?”

A healing circle comprises peaceful, caring, kind, concerned conduct on the part of all of its members, and every meeting begins by reading the Goldbook. Yes, every H.O.P.E. Group meeting is a “Healing Circle”.

Should a spontaneous Healing Circle become established, the members will likely identify the person who has natural guiding qualities, and there we are with a Senior H.O.P.E. Guide to conduct the formal training and certification.

H.O.P.E is 31. What now? We move into its fourth decade… a great adventure!

Here are some welcoming thoughts from Ken Hamilton, MD, H.O.P.E’s founder: As I look back over our first thirty years, I see a steady process of development that began with a study of how to help my surgical patients identify a “worthy ideal” that the entrepreneur, Earl Nightingale introduced me to in 1975. His lifetime of studies of success showed him that we all come here with that ideal in their earliest memories and the circumstances of their life may cause them to forget it. He was of the mind that the healthiest thing anyone can do is to remember it and choose to serve it. To my ongoing appreciation, my patients taught me to listen to their story because it always revealed their worthy ideal – their core passion – no matter how much life had hidden it in the unfortunate circumstance(s) of their lives. I became a human development coach! Then, in the 1980’s, I learned about support groups and guided imagery, and incorporated those skills into my practice. What began for cancer patients benefited a host of other challenges – both mental and physical. This process grew and evolved, reaching maturity earlier in H.O.P.E’s 30th year.

H.O.P.E’S Board of Directors has recognized that they are ready to take H.O.P.E. as far as it could go, building on a motto that first appeared in 1988: “H.O.P.E. is everywhere for everyone”. With our development solid and virtually complete this July, we were called to become marketers and promoters of that for which we stand: our commitment to that principle Hamilton learned as a second-year medical student in the McGill University Faculty of Medicine, to promise that we would do everything in our power to help (people) “get on with their lives.”

In 2014 I had a big dream about the wreck of a driver-less train off its tracks crashing into the waters of Penobscot Bay with the loss of all on board became clear in 2017… it was our oh-so-strange political executive and legislative branches that were off the tracks and headed toward a catastrophic disaster. In the dream I found my way through the smashed undergrowth into a deep, dark forest. With the help of the forest, itself, I found my way onto open land and a large railroad terminus with trains at platforms waiting for all those humans who were coming out of that dark forest. When full, their engineers closed the doors and headed the train out along a track that converged with all others into a single track leading to a lovely light on the horizon.

H.O.P.E. has learned during its developing years how to help people find their way through that dark forest, which is likely to confront just about every one of us humans, and “get on with their lives”. This comprises all of us who began their journey by working their way through the wreckage left by the train wreck.

In 2018, I was reminded of the poetic blessing by John O’Donohue, that wonderful Irish poet who passed in his sleep in 2008, called “For the Interim Time”. For me, he describes that which brings people to H.O.P.E. groups… a time in which things are no longer going right, and the future is unclear. I have read this blessing poem many times, and it helps me grow. It is copyrighted and I am seeking permission to publish it here. The reference for my copy is: O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (pp. 118-121). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

We would appreciate your help in experiencing and sharing what we have to offer. There is not one human being who can not benefit from this support. We’ve shown you how to do this work… Your personal initiative in convening H.O.P.E. groups using the H.O.P.E. Goldbook to keep the group headed toward that lovely light on the horizon. There, we find our potential to live in a loving Universe where all human beings are created equal with individual dreams and core passions. Yes, we are all one.

Please feel free to contact us, and we’ll keep looking for you.

Welcome to H.O.P.E. where you find out who you really are…

where we know that at the core of our being all humans strive to be healthy and whole: the process called healing. In addition, all of us are persons; and because no two of us are alike, we are all exceptions to each other.
Moreover, an intense, indomitable curiosity about life, health, and our spirituality has brought us to see that we are alive because the whole marvelous Universe is alive, and It’s not in the business of repeating Itself… we are, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin told Jean Houston just before he died in 1955, “spiritual beings having a human experience!”

No H.O.P.E. Group near you?

Do you work with a therapist?

Invite her/him to go over these pages with you and see if there is a group that is available for you. If there isn’t, invite your therapist to talk with/message me through this website to see how we might get a H.O.P.E. Group started. Therapist referrals are a very important way to get a H.O.P.E. Group going. We in H.O.P.E. work to support both you and your therapist. I’m delighted to share 30 years of guiding over 5,000 H.O.P.E. Group meetings, keeping in mind that my personal devotion to all of my patients, going way back into the 1970’s was, and still is, to help them get on with their lives, and the best way to do that was to help them remember and serve that core passion with which they were born… and may have been discouraged from ever realizing. The life work of my great teacher, Earl Nightingale (probably the world’s best at helping humans succeed), focused on that as the essence of all success.

Be your own H.O.P.E. Group. Here’s how a personal life plan unfolds – stepwise!

  1. Pencil and paper in hand, get comfortable and give yourself permission to know that you, like every other human, were born with a “worthy ideal,” a “dream,” a “fantasy,” a “divine assignment”. Take a few deep breaths, relax your eyes and let thoughts of achieving that “worthy ideal” come to mind as an action. Write out every one that comes up now, even if there is but one.
  2. Patiently relax into an intention for every worthy ideal you wrote down. An intention is more than a goal… a line to cross is something you’d like to have happen, or something you’d like see come out of a particular circumstance. Take mine, for instance: “My worthy ideal is to become a doctor like my grandfather and one of his nephews.” It is already in your imagination, and the work of your life is to make that image real.
  3. Now, you’ve just remembered why you are here, haven’t you? Good! Now write out the answer this question: “Who am I?” Well, let’s get clear that you are not just a body, you are a spiritual being – a Soul, just as the Source made you – immersed in your human body, and promised this life at the beginning of time.
  4. . Alright then, journal what comes up in response to this question: “How am I going to get what I came for, and exactly what am I to do with it when I have it?
  5. Now you need a context in which all of this works: An attitude of service: “First of all, do no harm; second, do some good; third, benefit someone.” Promise that you’ll do everything in your power to help people get on with their lives. Be aware that in making this promise, you’ll be a beneficiary of it, too. This is called “The Law of Returns”, also heard as: “What goes around comes around.”
  6. Now, I strongly recommend that you download a copy of the H.O.P.E. Goldbook that we read at the opening of every H.O.P.E. Group meeting, and participants take home with them to help them keep their focus on care, wellness, kindness, forgiveness, health, and love in the face of so many harmful thoughts that seem to find their way into our lives.
  7. There you have it. Start with yourself, and if you find others along the way who want to do more of this work, your group will grow. Please know that we are always at your service, and we welcome your participation it the process. Just go to the menu bar at the top of the page and click on “Ask Us”. It will get you in touch with a senior H.O.P.E. Guide. Blessings thoughts come and abide….

    Recent News

Honoring Peter Kingsley

Peter Kingsley is a renowned scholar of the ancient Greek healer/prophets – Parmenides and Empedocles. His study of them began some fifty years ago, when he was made aware that their traditions had been corrupted by later Greeks who could not fully grasp what they had learned, and how they had learned what they described in poetic forms. Kingsley has learned their language and style, finding answers that astounded me.

I found this interview that was made about ten years ago as a significant part of a larger video. In this precious YouTube interview, Kingsley describes the sacred traditions that comprise our origins in western civilizations. He takes me into a rich, deep concept of “Oneness” that is to be found by really paying attention to our senses.

I invite you to pay close attention to this 19 minute interview. Watch how he says what he says, and I do hope it gives you the pleasure it gave me…

There is only One…

Death Shall Have no Dominion

From the 2018 book of spiritual poetry by Arden Thompson of South Bristol, Maine titled Journey. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Herewith a copy of one of the Amazon reviews of this work that I found to speak my mind. With her permission to share it, it is my wish that you have it.

“These poems will quiet you when the world feels loud. They’ll center you when you feel lost, but mostly, they’ll reassure you that we are all, in our own way, on the same journey to understand our place in this world.” — Erin Lowell

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had it “Right On”

J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had it right on. In my experience of reading that fascinating novel, it is about the epic struggle between good and evil. It addresses the momentous struggle between the two classic forces that, together, threaten to overwhelm us today. In the thirty-two years of some five-thousand H.O.P.E. Group meetings helping humans get on with their lives, I met that struggle many times. Tolkien’s first work, The Hobbit, came up often enough in H.O.P.E. Group meetings to pique my curiosity. I read it and was drawn to read The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where I found the following dialog between Frodo and Gandalf:

Frodo: I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, than the will of evil.

Kenneth H. Hamilton and H.O.P.E.

The first H.O.P.E. Group convened itself in February, 1987, and the struggle between the forces of the light and the dark engaged us for its two hours. We met weekly, and within a couple of months other physicians started asking me to “facilitate” a H.O.P.E. Group in their healthcare setting. The “struggle” was present in every meeting, and working with it was not easy… we were not “facilitators” but “coaches”. We were working with our fellow humans to find the resources Life had given then to meet that challenges that life was giving them.

When we in H.O.P.E. recognized that there was a “SoulCircling” workshop potential in our work to help people find out who they are – a spiritual being, their soul – in contrast to what they are – a DNA-structured physical being – I created a brochure and a business card for the work. We agreed that the model for the work was the butterfly and its wonderful process of change called “metamorphosis”, and if we would learn from the butterfly, we would need to encircle the creature in a gossamer web of love. With all this in mind, I put the Tolkien quote in the card as an attention–getter.

As the core passion in my life is to help humans get on with their lives, and I no longer “practice” medicine and surgery, I offer my service to as many who can use those coaching skills. I offer those skills,having acquired them over the past 40+ years since I was introduced to the remarkable career of Earl Nightingale and his lifetime study of human development.

I found immediate use for Nightingale’s rich experience with helping people get on with their lives to helping my patents get on with theirs. I used what he and all his friends were teaching me through the monthly INSIGHT tapes to which I subscribed for 22 years. Through this all, I became known as “the doctor who listens.” I have had the pleasure of knowing that my successful career in healthcare was as much due to my passion as it was for my surgical skills that came from gentle hands.

James R. Doty, M.D.

In that respect, I was just recently introduced to the splendid work of James R. Doty, MD, a physician/neurosurgeon devoted to serving humans in ways to help them “get on with their lives.” I highly recommend his well-written autobiography: Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. It is a mystery how he was led to the Magic Shop and the guardian angel, Ruth. She helped him heal the wounds of his childhood and become the master of healthcare he is today. In that well-written book he teaches the reader precisely what I was taught by many other teachers for the benefit of humans everywhere. Do visit his web site, Doty’s web.

My Concern

I write this because I have concern that Iktomi, Lakota trickster, and Narcissus, of Greek myth, are two “archetypes” of human behavior that are separately harmful, and, together, are a force to be reckoned with in today’s world… compassionately. The pair are alive and thriving today, much to my concern, especially in the context of H.O.P.E, Healing Of Persons Exceptional, which convened itself in my surgical practice in 1987. What I have written here is the result of spending several weeks patiently waiting for power thoughts and ideas to play out. The result… five days ago a painstaking review made it clear that what I have to offer has beneficial qualities.

I begin with these wise cautioning words of Deena Metzger:

There are those who would set fire to the world.
We are in danger.
There is time only to move slowly.
There is no time not to love.

The Trickster

Let us first look at the trickster as an archetype, beginning with a pair of trickster quotes from Wikipedia:

All cultures have tales of the trickster, a crafty creature who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief.

In later folklore, the trickster/clown is incarnated as a clever, mischievous man or creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defense.

With these images in mind, I now turn to the work by Kurt Kaltreider, PhD (1943-2017), and his 2004 Hay House book, American Indian Cultural Heroes and Teaching Tales. In Part I: The Cultural Heroes, he talks about three famous cultural heroes of the Lakota people: Dekanahwideh, Sweet Medicine, and White Buffalo Calf Maiden. In Part II: The Teaching Tales of Iktomi, he gives the reader seven tales of the Lakota antihero trickster whose name means “spider” – “shape changer”. The people of several tribes, of which the Lakota are those whom Kaltreider names, tell these tales to their young that they may learn the ways of the Lakota: act(ing) “honestly, generously, and in a good way”.

Let us now look at the archetypal qualities of Narcissus, beginning with what Wikipedia has to say about him:

Narcissus

Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. According to Tzetzes, he was a Laconian hunter who loved everything beautiful. Narcissus was proud, in that he disdained those who loved him, causing some to commit suicide to prove their unrelenting devotion to his striking beauty. Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a fixation with oneself and one’s physical appearance or public perception.

Combine these two archetypal images in any one of many wounded, confused and harmful people in our world, and include our President… he who gives so many signs of being the engineer of that train wreck, about which I dreamt some ten years ago:

A predictive dream

I was standing on a low cliff overlooking Penobscot Bay when I heard a great racket coming towards me. I turned to face it, and I saw three railroad cars of 1940’s commuter vintage off their tracks and headed for the water… without an engine in front or an engineer in the lead car.. The passengers all looked the same: paper cutouts of a man who looked for all the world like Mitt Romney, en silhouette, pasted on the windows. As it crashed into the bay, a huge, blind, aquatic mammal rose up out of the water and smashed it down, holding it under while all on board perished!

Today, I re-read Drew Westen’s August 7, 2011, op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review. For me, he spoke to the essence of that 2009 dream… a dream that resides in my memory as clearly as if it had been dreamt last night.

What Drew Westen said then to President Barack Obama, I read again yesterday, and, in the context of that train wreck dream, here are my words to President Trump:

My message to POTUS

“Mr. President, you have until Wednesday, January 20, 2021, remaining in your first term. Please take today’s train that is just barely on its tracks and become its engineer, driving us to where Mr. Westen and I would have us go: to a land where public opinion carries more weight than the opinions of the wealthy and their corporations… before the arc of history gets bent so far that it breaks. Please do it, even if it costs you a second term. I pray that God give you the strength to get us back on track.

“You can do it. May the peace that passes beyond human understanding be yours…. Forgive those who harmed you yesterday, and commit to loving yourself with the love that you’ve been led to believe is outside of you. It has always been within… in the home of your soul… your heart.

“With love, Ken Hamilton, MD”

Compassion and Peace

Compassion and peace are not intellectual abstracts! They make up a practice and an attitude that are exquisitely simple to learn and share with others. In the sharing, they grow.

Historical aspects

When I first began my surgical practice in 1971, I knew very little about compassion. However, I was known as “the doctor who listens” so I must have known something about it for some time before. I convened the first “H.O.P.E. Group” meeting in February 1987, which attracted the attention of the holistic medicine movement. I started participating in their meetings and workshops, one of which was a workshop on mindfulness meditation, in which there was a steady emphasis on compassion, and my curiosity got the better of me. It led me to the work of Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist abbess, who taught me the practice of Tonglen to relieve suffering. I found it to be extremely powerful and effective. I used it regularly in H.O.P.E. Groups where the suffering of serious illness was commonplace.

Tonglen

This Tibetan word literally means “giving and taking” (in our Western minds “sending and receiving” seems to work better because it creates a specific reference to the relief of suffering.) It comprises a compassionate practice utilizing the breath, the lungs, and the heart… images that we can readily understand and appreciate. In its practice one can imagine that the suffering is like a cloud in the air we breathe. We can also choose to see the spiritual nature of the physical heart – love – as one of a noble transformer, which can change suffering into peace… nothing more needed!

I think it is so important that this simplicity avoids encumbering thoughts of being able to walk in somebody else’s shoes, carry their loads, pity, and even understand. I have used and taught this practice for nearly 30 years now. When I share it with another human being, the response I always get is, “Oh, I can do that!” And it is not uncommon to hear a few weeks later that same person say, “It works!”

Specifically, and pardon me if I repeat, but I am very interested in helping us become familiar with this remarkable practice. Imagine the suffering that you’re present to, whether it be your own or somebody else’s, looking like a dark cloud. Now, breathe the dark cloud into the space around your noble art and hold it there for a moment, letting the noble heart transform the suffering into peace. Repeat softly to yourself that one word, “Peace” while you hold the cloud in the space around your heart. See it transforming that cloud into a pure light that you can let go of gently in the breath.

Give yourself permission to see it flowing around the object of your thoughts and actions, be it yourself, another or others. Repeat as often as necessary until you feel comfortably lighter and more peaceful. As this feeling pervades, give yourself permission to soften the gaze in your eyes as you look at yourself, the other, or the others… let peace be yours – and ours – all of us.

A simple experiment

I went for an annual physical just before the Republican National convention this year. My blood pressure was 190/90! It used to be 150/80 without treatment. My physician and I agreed this was likely related to stress, and I was to apply what I knew about stress relief when I got home. It was down to 170/82 when I got there and I took a few minutes to do a progressive relaxation that brought it down almost to 150, but not quite.

I watched it for a day and it never got down to 150. After listening to the Republican candidate, it went up to 170 again… a classical response to stress! Progressive relaxation brought it back down, and in the morning, it was unchanged and I was disappointed.

I chose to listen to a 25-minute guided imagery of mine called “Deep Relaxation” and it dropped another 20 points to 132/70, where it stayed with a little fluctuation up and down for the rest of the day!

The next day, it was back up to 150; so I decided to do a simple progressive relaxation focusing on single muscle groups (e.g. “forehead”, “jaws”, “low back”, thighs,” etc.) repeating to myself, “Peace” while letting the breath go… Tonglen in action!

Imagine: some 15 muscle groups, fifteen peace breaths… about three minutes in all… while sitting comfortably relaxed at my desk… without any antihypertensives or tranquilizers!

Closing thoughts about compassion and peace:

  • Healthy personal practices that benefit self and others simultaneously
  • They work on the broad scale because we are all ONE in the Universal field of consciousness
  • They hold us in relationship with ourselves and others
  • The quality of that relationship is always a matter of choice
  • There is no alternative to peace in reality and truth
  • Do not wonder about trying to change the world! It just changed!

I know something about you…

Margot and Milton

Years ago, a very dear friend, Margot Taylor Fanger, A.C.S.W. (1929-2001) introduced me to the work of Milton H. Erickson, MD, Psychiatrist, and founder of what came to be called “Neurolinguistic Programming”. Milton was fond of challenging “stuck” patients with: “I know something about you that you don’t know that I know and aren’t you going to be surprised when you find out what it is?” It would move his clients into a state of mind where, as a result, they could no longer hang onto illusory thinking.

I read the quote in a book about him by the man who has been called his biographer, Ernest Rossi. His book, My Voice Will Go With You, engaged me with the life of this remarkable physician. Erickson was a master at “double-binding” his patients to give themselves permission to see their self differently… free of illusions…. I have had several occasions to ask that question of individuals in H.O.P.E. Groups. It stimulates them to start thinking about what it could possibly be what I did know about them that would be surprising.

My sense of what that statement implies will be expressed later in this post. In the meantime, do keep it in mind as we look at what I do know about being human… both you and me… that might be infinitely more surprising… to have meaning….

A life that becomes meaningless is a life that falls into despair, and it is my appreciation today that despair lies behind all addictions and suicides.
Diederik Wolsak had the tragic experience as an eight-year-old of being captured by the Japanese army in the South Pacific and put in a prisoner of war camp! He believed he’d been abandoned by his family… imagine how traumatic that must have been! Wolsak’s life after liberation was one of becoming a meaningless, mean narcissist with multiple addictions.

In his adult years he became motivated to see if there was a way of correcting that dysfunction. He found the practice known as “Attitudinal Healing” that had healed a dysfunctionally mean, nasty psychiatrist of the effects of being called a “dummy” during his growing years… (He was born dyslexic, but the condition had not been identified before he became a teen–ager.) When he met the spiritual text called A Course In Miracles, he had an instantaneous, well documented complete healing. Wolsak had exactly the same thing happen to him when, helped by Attitudinal Healing, he got over his feeling of having been abandoned by his family when he was put in that prison camp.

A Shift in Consciousness

Also, I would like to share with you an appreciation that we are the product of a living loving Mystery that never makes mistakes… any more than it has “accidents”. No, my good humans, we are not mistakes or accidents: we are conscious expressions of the mysterious “Source” that started this whole issue evolving nearly 14 billion years ago. I would add that it has been described as a point of light, and it still is a point of light because you can’t get outside of it to measure it!

Yes, science describes the processes that comprise the Mystery, but cannot provide the answer to the questions, “Why? Where? When? Also, in an affirming way, we create religions to try to explain and explore the Mystery, but they commonly get lost in being judgmental. Above all, it is clear to me that today we are in the situation of being able to tell the story of how we ever came into being.

I have recently been moved to re–read Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaermann’s 2009 book, Spontaneous Evolution, adding it to Peter Kingsley’s 2018 Catafalque and to Caroline Myss’ recent three, 2-hour video presentations, Reflections: Healing Practices for Your Soul. Add their thoughts to the oft quoted Pierre Teilhard de Chardin… “We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience but spiritual beings immersed in the human condition.” As a result, if you are at all like me, you’ll find enriched meaning to life.

Matters of Soul…

Consider that we are actively engaged in healing the deep soul wounds of the intellectual, misguided 17th century idea that the existence of the soul could not be scientifically proven, and, therefore, it does not exist. Likewise, and of interest and value, the Shaman societies that have managed to survive tragic practices of genocide know all about the soul. Late religions have joined René Descartes and his fellow rationalists of the 17th century in denying soul’s existence. It has helped me to read Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul that he wrote some 40 years after his denial of the soul’s existence. He preserved the soul by placing it in the tiny little pineal gland in the brain… and that was where it was when a senior and well–known neurosurgeon taught my medical school class that there was such a thing as Soul beyond the Cartesian perception.

A thought from all of my resources going back some 40 years is that the soul is a form of consciousness that brings mind and spirit together as real entities. In other words, you and I each have a soul… it will leave this form when it can no longer sustain its life. It will reincarnate bringing the experience of all previous incarnations into the next life…. Yes, as Peter Kingsley says in the closing words of his masterful study, Reality, “We are immortal.” The power of the soul to change reality is a fundamental concept that H.O.P.E. promotes, demonstrated hundreds of times in H.O.P.E. Group meetings. It is the subject of Caroline Myss’ recent lectures.

What I know about you…

Furthermore, the response to Erickson’s rhetorical question comes from the mindset of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are spiritual beings immersed in the human condition.” This is what Peter Kingsley, Caroline Myss, H.O.P.E. Group participants… and many others know is a Mystery calling us into the next level of evolution. I am of a mind that says that this is a mindset of purification that destroys the old judgmental ways of seeing each other, and sees us through God’s eyes… as collaborators in creation, which is exactly what I know about you. Does that surprise you?

Care in healthcare?

I recently got a call from a beginning student of allopathic medicine who was concerned about an apparent lack of physicians acting as “healthcare consultants”. The focus of our time together was the question: “Is there Care in healthcare?. My response to it was to recognizance that there is an overwhelming focus on treating disease with scientific algorithms and not enough attention to choosing attitudes that make the algorithms work. I shared with the student how my career became that of “a Doctor who listens” by choosing peace, appreciation, presence, awareness in my interactions with patients. I’m committed to sharing some important points that helped me develop a rich experience with what can be well called “healthcare”.
I wish to establish a point about “experience”… it is not about giving instruction. It is about sharing that which has become a valuable story that may or may not have any value to the listener. In other words, I have no attachment to how the other may… or may not… use the experience.
I also wish to point out that to “listen” is different – 180° different – from to “hear”. Listening opens to the presence, the essence, the core of the communication. In my opinion, this is what the Quaker Ecumenist, Douglas Van Steere, calls “Holy Listening”. He describes it: “To ‘listen’ another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.” He goes on to say about the soul “try to listen one (another’s soul) into life.” (Essay: “On Listening to Another, Part One” in his book, Gleanings (1986, The Upper Room) So I ask the reader to imagine being with another human and their story in such a state of openness, helplessness, and surrender that makes possible that life-giving wonder.
It was back in 1972 that one of my patients asked me if she could tell me something about herself that she had never told anyone before, but that she thought it important for me to know in view of the major surgery to come. Something very simple told me to sit down next to her, to shut up, and simply listen. When done, she thanked me and said she felt ready for her operation. She was, indeed “ready”. She sailed through the operation and her post-op recovery, asking to be able to go home on the third post-op day (when the statewide average stay was seven or more days for her operation).
In 1975 my practice manager introduced me to the attitudinal work of Earl Nightingale, for whom “attitude” was the key to the doorways of the gold mine of the mind, where we “become what we think about most.” After studying Nightingale for 12 years, Life introduced me to Bernie Siegel, MD, and his book, “Love, Medicine and Miracles” (1986, Harper Collins). One month later, I found Jerry Jampolsky‘s “Love is Letting Go of Fear” (1981, Bantam Doubleday).
And there you have it: my provenance that stands behind my sense that the most important thing that we humans can do to find the Care in Healthcare is to realize that “healthcare” is all about caring for another’s health… and it may be that which “listens another’s soul into life”.

Strangers to our inner depths

I turn to the deep wisdom of that Irish Celt, John O’Donohue, whose 1997 book, Anam Cara, has provided me with countless, rich insights, one of the most recent being that of becoming “strangers to our inner depths”. In my synchronistic way of being, as I was reading what O’Donohue had to say about this phenomenon, a dear friend presented his struggle to find meaning in his life… not knowing that he has the inner depth that makes it possible to heal soul wounds. As I look at the struggles in our present-day world, I see an epidemic – a conflagration – of a hunger to find out our collective and personal inner depths – our soul nature.

O’Donohue says on page 92 of his book, “People have difficulty awakening to their inner world especially when their lives have become overly familiar to them they find it hard to discover something new, interesting, or adventurous in their numbed lives. Yet everything we need for our journey has already been given to us. Consequently, there is great strangeness in the shadowed light of our soul world.”

Take a moment, now, to perform a small very powerful exercise: see yourself as a complete stranger who has just stepped into your life… what has the stranger seen about you that you had forgotten or tried to deny?

Take a second moment now to consider what Earl Nightingale saw in all human beings: every one of us is born with a “worthy ideal”. Nightingale’s lifetime of study of human nature and success made it clear to him – and to your author – that the greatest service we can do for ourselves and each other is to remember that “worthy ideal” and serve it. I brought those thoughts into H.O.P.E. in its very beginning, because I have been doing that very work with my surgical patients ever since I heard Nightingale make that statement back in 1975.

Consider this: the behavior that infects us all – of note in our governing bodies in Washington, DC – is the behavior of human beings struggling to find meaning in their lives, but never going into the depths of their souls where true creativity – meaning – lies. Could it be that so many sincere, dishonest, loving, and hateful human beings could have been denied compassionate nurturing in their growing years when they were shaping up their brains? I have seen this many times throughout H.O.P.E.’s thirty years of service. It manifests as a hunger, and as a lot of dysfunctional behavior.

Every day, I find myself practicing the Tibetan Buddhist practice of compassion known as Tonglen. It brings me peace – peace that I extend to all those who suffer from this debilitating lack of love in their growing years. And I am no exception to this because when I was three I tried digging clams in Great Peconic bay, Long Island, New York, using a garden rake at high tide; nearly drowning; but being rescued by my aunt who hauled me out of the water, spinning me around, giving me a good shake, and screaming at me, “You stupid little boy!” Guess what… I had issues with “stupid” in myself and others for about the next sixty years! I can recall that episode with clarity even today, but I no longer experience the terror I felt back then. I am so grateful for becoming a stranger to my inner depths… and I still explore them when reminders appear.

Love and Unity, as found in H.O.P.E.

Editor’s introduction…

Love and Unity, as found in H.O.P.E, was written two years ago by a H.O.P.E.r who had been challenged by a serious health condition. She had found little help in support groups and medical practices because their focus always seemed to be on what interested her least — disease, drugs, and doctors. She was looking for love and unity, but never found what she sought. A friend who knew us at H.O.P.E. suggested she see what she could find at the local H.O.P.E. Group meeting. I met her on the driveway outside of the building where the H.O.P.E. Group met and she told me about her concern. I invited her in, and she found the love and unity she had been looking for. She kept on finding them at subsequent meetings.

She became an active participant in that meeting, and had a mature way about her that led me to ask her if she would be interested in writing a post for this blog. She agreed, and wrote two! In the meantime, I got slowed way down (age? depression?), and her post(s) got put in a file that disappeared from my field of attention until this past week. As soon as I read it, I knew where it belonged… here, and with her permission (and I have sped back up, too).

Her post…

A few days ago while visiting with peeps on Facebook, (oh, yes, I love my FB friends) there was an interesting meme that asked for a description of our world in just one word. After giving it a nano-second of thought, my heart knew there is no way to define our present world in one word – it being two words; Love and Unity.
For those who know the bible, know that Christ’s words all add up to LOVE.
1 John 4:8 – He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
Mark 12:31 – Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Romans 14:19 – Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another.

Jesus time on our planet was spent spreading this message. A one word message. Was it a new concept? I don’t think so. We, humans, get lost or intentionally take side trips away from our true path. It may take a moment or a day or a millennium to find our way back.
And when we do find that path, often obscured by hard lessons learned along the way, we are then greeted with our next lesson.
The lesson of this time is unity. Its time, my friends, to find an acceptance beyond our profound love, as self-loving, loving one another as individuals, or all humanity, loving our earth, and way beyond.
That “beyond” becomes unity. The word of our time. I can mention religion here because there is a new religion that teaches Unity as its basis, The Baha’i Faith, with this writing:
“It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” —The Báb
Let me step beyond organized religion to avoid that constant; the fear of being lead or taught a theology instead of self-investigation to find our own understanding of our place in time on our Earth.
We have H.O.P.E. to guide us into and through self-discovery. We each do our work with the support of others who are walking their own paths. Our stories, our active listening, our loving compassion for one another, all make a safe place to become who we were born to be.
Unite with us. Unity is a powerful thing. And a very powerful place to live.

H.O.P.E. is in Rumi’s Field

H.O.P.E. is in its thirtieth year and SoulCircling is in its twenty-first. The experience has spiritually enriched many, including me. It tells me that H.O.P.E. is in Rumi’s field. That field lies “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing where the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense” (according to Coleman Barks’ translation of work of that Great Light — Rumi).

It has given me an appreciation for that principle of Attitudinal Healing: “We can choose and direct ourselves to be peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside.” Through it all, I have become keenly aware of the grace of compassion and forgiveness in helping us find out why we have come into this life.

This year opens a new phase in H.O.P.E’s growth and development. The decades behind us have built H.O.P.E’s experience with helping people find the meaning, value and purpose in their soul’s journey. The experience that began with five of my patients threatened by cancer now includes virtually everyone hit “one upside the head by the cosmic 2 x 4”.

H.O.P.E. has learned that its work, as derived from Earl Nightingale’s lifelong study and application of the spiritual nature of success that I began studying and applying in my surgical practice in 1975. It focuses on remembering why one’s soul came into a human form. We know that today’s polarizing life-style does not provide adequate time for participating in weekly two-hour support group meetings. We have learned that a single SoulCircling workshop works well in waking up the memory I refer to above. You are, indeed, a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork: a once-painted portrait, a once-danced dance, a once-sung song, a once-told tale in the annals of the Universe! Look around you and see how you fit in Rumi’s Field.

Would you like to have a SoulCircling experience? Send H.O.P.E. an email at hopeheals@hopehealing.org, and we’ll accommodate you. We can do it over virtually any distance, great or small, using Skype or Zoom, for from one to four participants… find three friends to join you and create a SoulCircling Quartet. It will take approximately 1 1/2 hours, for which we ask each participant to pay a deposit of $15 on registering and an additional $99 at the beginning of the exercise, using PayPal, which can readily accommodate foreign currencies. As an incentive, for every participant you get to register (up to a maximum of three), each of you can reduce your deposit by $5.

In addition, in preparation for this experience, I ask you to read Chapter 8 of my book, SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who,© 2002,. It covers this workshop in detail. If you do not have a copy of the book I will email you an eight-page copy of the chapter on receipt of your deposit.