Breaking Open the Stone: The Heroic Passage from Adolescence to Adulthood

The Seven Challenges of Passionate Engagement is a group counseling course for teens and young adults. It is designed to be utilized by schools and community youth providers. In high schools and colleges, it can be a one semester course incorporated into a student's regular schedule. The course consists of a series of character development lessons which are interactive and participatory in guiding students through an intense self-exploration of personal story within the context of the bigger story of the universe. The result of successful completion of this course is a mastery of mature perceptual skills and an advanced skill to process the choices and challenges of daily living. Thus, an emerging young adult can achieve a sense of meaning in a quest to fulfill life purpose. The course is a step by step journey inspiring a successful passage through a second birth canal that is required to achieve an adult status that is responsible, productive, and happy. With the SCOPE Process, adult status becomes a palpable achievement rather than the currently accepted meaningless chronological milestone of turning eighteen years of age. The SCOPE Process has been endorsed by poet and men's movement leader, Robert Bly. Nationally known authors Sam Keen and Karla McLaren have also praised SCOPE as a means to successfully address the issues that have gone unaddressed in helping teens to become adults. The SCOPE course is a group experience appropriate for teens of all levels of academic achievement. Advanced communication skills, group leadership skills, and self-reflective verbal and writing skills are developed in a peer centered community where perception and self-knowledge are illuminated in a group milieu where empathy, support and confrontation require adult life skill. Students who successfully navigate these seven challenges will know what it means to be a self-responsible adult in a society that cherishes them as unique individuals fully prepared to contribute the purpose of their lives to a world in need.