About
Find out more about the centre, Jacci, the centre co-ordinator, and what the hope is for everything we will do at the centre, online, and in our collective actions.
The Hope Centre for Meditation, Healing, and Well-being
The Hope Centre in Penrith, Cumbria, is a place for people of all faiths or none to come together and connect through meditation, creativity, well-being classes and therapies, in an integrative and respectful space. It is part of ‘the love that we are’, and connected to the ethos of this website, but it is important to clarify that the centre is a place for everyone – of any faith or no faith, and for people not even interested in spiritual focus – everyone who is interested in enjoying the activities we hold here. Perhaps when you come you will want to explore if ‘the love that we are’ is an idea that interests you (that we are all made from and belong within one universal unconditional love), and if so then you could come along to one of our sessions with a spiritual focus. But if you are not interested, you are still really welcome! Welcome to our peaceful space to enjoy our activities and healing.
The Hope Centre is on Angel Lane, Penrith, above the ‘Angel Cards and Gifts’ shop. There is sadly no access for people with limited mobility, as the centre is upstairs in an old building. However, some activities will be planned to take place in other, more accessible locations, including outdoors.
It is a centre for hope, where (if we wish) we can enjoy sharing our questions and ideas, while also truly listening to each other, with pauses and space for reflection.
Our various classes, healing sessions, workshops, and meeting groups, will be listed on the HOPE CENTRE page. Some can be booked into online, while others you can just turn up and find a space.
Jacci Bulman (Dip. d. Y. Th., Reiki Master, B.A. (hons.))
I grew up in Lancashire and now live in Cumbria, beside a river. I studied at Oxford University, overcame brain tumour surgery, then skin cancer, learned (and am still learning) a lot from my experiences of healing, trained as a yoga therapist, with focus on deep-relax visualisations, helped set up a charity (The Kianh Foundation www.kianh.org.uk) for empowering disabled children in central Vietnam, wrote two poetry collections, began to develop a small ‘wild’ nature reserve with my husband, and gradually came to know that what matters to me is God’s love – and all love is God’s love.
I researched and wrote my first non-fiction book (‘Talking God: Daring to Listen’, Lion Hudson, 2021), based partly on Iona island, Scotland, where I became connected to the Iona Community. I now dedicate my time as much as possible to writing about, meditating upon, practising (imperfectly) and actively learning about God’s unconditional love for us all, inspired by Jesus and Mary Magdalen.
I have done some training in faith reconciliation facilitation, firstly with ‘Place for Hope’ in Scotland and recently with ‘Journey of Hope’, co-ordinated by St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, in London.
Now I have begun to set up The Hope Centre in Penrith, Cumbria, England, as a place where people can – if they choose – explore the exciting possible realisation of ‘the love that we are’, and/or they can simply enjoy sharing the creative, healing, well-being activities and peaceful silence we share together.
I have recently trained further as a mindful meditation teacher and extended my training as a Reiki healer, taking my Reiki Masters from Tera Mai Reiki to now include Angelic Reiki at levels I and II, which I very much love practising. Increasingly I discover that mindful awareness of the present moment we are living in is itself a great teacher and healer. I learn that being in our reality, rather than remembering or planning for what no longer or doesn’t yet exist, is a very powerful and simple healing gift, on all levels. It ‘wakes us up’ to who we are and helps us to be loving and forgiving, to ourselves and towards others.
I am a Christian. I attend Quaker meetings and go for Celtic communion at my local church when I can. And I use the word ‘God’ in my understanding and description of the universal, unconditional, all-inclusive, non-judgemental, divine, conscious loving energy we all belong to. But it doesn’t matter to me what word you use or, none at all. Very often the fewer words we use, the more we agree!
What is the Hope in your work?
The aim of my work in writing, teaching, healing, and online, and in bringing people together, can be described as:
1) I very much hope to encourage people to explore how faith in something ‘More than this’, something divine, beyond our human descriptions – which I call God – is a good, enjoyable, positive way to be! Faith in God need not be all about ‘sin’ and ‘judgement’. Or about exclusion and ‘punishment’ in hell. No! God is so much more than this. More than this limited human, dualistic thinking of people being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of God’s all-enfolding grace.
And if people want to come to the Hope Centre or join in any of our events who are not even interested in faith, or who recoil from all ‘religion’ or even ‘spirituality’, for whatever reason, if they come simply to enjoy the peace and the activities we hold there, that is good too. Because God’s love holds us, wherever we are, even when we don’t want to talk or even think about it. I trust in that.
2) To help us all connect to the love that we are, and so to help reconcile us to the power of forgiveness, courage, creativity, joy, and well-being, which is already there inside us.
3) To help us feel held and supported by the unconditional love which is all around us, and we all belong to, as one diverse and united creation of an all-inclusive, divine loving
4) To help us all to reconcile with the love inside of us in our own uniquely authentic ways, so we can be transformed and healed by the love that we are, and we can help to actively transform and heal our world. We can unlock our true potential.
5) The hope is to facilitate and encourage a transformation of our communication and learning patterns – into a networking of wisdom, rather than a hierarchy of ‘expertise’. Where we listen to each other with equal attention and talk with integrity, seeing no one point of view as ‘right’ and all others as ‘wrong’. Instead, we can acknowledge that we all are trying to understand the complexity of life and can be inspired and affected by respecting very different ways of seeing to our own – without feeling obliged to accept them. We can enjoy communication as a true ‘exchange’ process, and so learn so much more panoramically, from the matrix of wisdom in our world.
6) To encourage and enable people to enjoy the beauty, wisdom, and healing powers of nature.
7) To encourage an understanding of love, peace and healing as active, continuous ways of being, rather than static ‘goals’ to aim for in the future.
So much of my hope, and the hope of the centre and ‘the love that we are’ is about positive transformation, into being the best of ourselves.
Because the Hope Centre welcomes people of all faiths or none, we do not use there any Christian terminology (unless a session is clearly stated as faith-focused, such as a discussion). In general we simply say ‘love’ – which I do agree is acceptable to a wider range of people – as the name for all that matters. But in my own writing, I use the name which is in my heart, which is ‘God’.
I hope that in my writing and videos, when I say ‘God’ you can if you wish hear/use whatever word or name works comfortably for you, for the best and ultimate truth in all that is. The I AM and the WE ARE we all belong to.