The Commonweal Cancer Help Program (CCHP) is a week-long retreat for people with cancer. Our goal is to help participants live better and, where possible, longer lives. CCHP addresses the unmet needs of people with cancer. These include finding balanced information on choices in healing, mainstream, and complementary therapies, exploring emotional and spiritual dimensions of cancer, discovering that illness can sometimes lead to a richer and fuller life, and experiencing genuine community with others facing a cancer diagnosis.
CCHP offers an integrated program of healing that includes daily group support sessions led by a psychotherapist, massage, yoga, meditation, deep relaxation, imagery work, symbolic learning through sand tray, poetry, exploration of sacred space, and a gourmet, primarily vegetarian diet. Evening sessions, led by Commonweal co-founder Michael Lerner, explore choices in healing, mainstream therapies, integrative therapies, pain and suffering, and death and dying.
Widely considered the premier program of its kind in the United States, CCHP draws participants from across the United States, Canada, and Europe.
After offering more than 200 retreats over three decades, we have learned that the program often has beneficial effects on anxiety, fear, loneliness, helplessness, and other similar states that can accompany cancer. Many participants come to CCHP with questions about next steps in treatment or in living with a serious cancer diagnosis.
See the full text of Michael Lerner’s publication:
Choices in Healing:
Integrating The Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer
Listen to one of the Cancer Help Program-related conversations held by The New School at Commonweal— a conversation between Commonweal Founder Michael Lerner and Psychotherapist Francis Weller, both staff at the CCHP.
The Commonweal Way: Letter from Michael Lerner
An amazing conversation in the Commonweal library between U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen—the writer, physician, mentor and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.
The conversation between Dr. Murthy and Dr. Remen focused particularly on the pandemic of loneliness, which has been a central issue for the Surgeon General’s office. His website has collected research, testimonies, and recommendations to guide new ways to address the issue. The recordings of the conversation are available on his U.S. Department of Health and Human Services channels, and on The New School at Commonweal’s website and media channels (YouTube and Soundcloud, as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music).
In some ways, what was happening at Commonweal a few weeks before the conversation—our Power of Hope youth camp — was part of the antidote. The young people who attend the summer camp often say that this is the only place where they can be truly seen, and where they can be themselves. That same sentiment is shared by the hundreds of people who have been to a Healing Circle. From alumni of the Cancer Help Program, we hear that Commonweal is their home and their community. We hear this from the women who attend the Octavia Fund retreats for Black women, from the Fall Gathering community, from the Art of Vitality program in the Commonweal Garden that Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine runs, and from our Retreat Center Collaborative gatherings and community meetings.
In most of our programs, we witness these stories of connectedness. It might be that most of what we do at Commonweal is about connecting. Just the act of gathering in nature, in a courageous and safe space, does half of the work. And yet this sense of community, connection, and belonging reverberates beyond the physical limitations of the Commonweal land. The community formed through decades of gatherings on our land, the sacred hospitality of Retreat Center, and the grief-saturated stones in the Chapel, are invoked each time a Commonweal community gathers, anywhere in the world.
What is the difference between curing and healing?
This is a question that comes up often in our work at Commonweal. Curing is what we see doctors for—to deploy the world of medicine to eliminate an illness. Healing, as we say at Commonweal, is a movement toward wholeness and well being. We can be cured without being healed, and we can experience healing without being cured.
Healing—of ourselves and our planet—is the core of Commonweal’s calling. This calling was first answered by Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen when they started the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which will shortly be running its 222nd retreat. Commonweal’s healing mission spilled out beyond the Cancer Help Program into healing circles, climate change work, youth in the juvenile system, and refugees at the border. Our healing work includes amplifying young voices from the global south and their experience of the polycrisis; responding to the needs of people who are alone and experiencing eco-grief, building community resilience in the face of natural disasters, and a variety of other important work that emanates from Commonweal’s perch on the Pacific.
All of it is the work of healing.
The message of healing has never been more important. I look at the human suffering in Ukraine and Sudan, and the suffering of loved ones in Israel and Gaza, and I do not know what medicine can cure it. But I do know that the healing needed is far deeper than the cures currently offered—and that it is in the hands of the people, more than their governments, to bring it about. I pray every day for the healing hands of peace-loving people.
Margaret Wheatley says that “whatever the problem, community is the answer.” We invite you to let Commonweal, with our unrelenting push toward healing, be your community. Your gift will help our message of personal, national, and global healing—and the skills and models developed in the exquisite laboratory of our Commonweal programs—ring out everywhere there is someone to hear it.
We need your support. Join us. Click here to make your year-end gift.
A letter from Michael …
December 4, 2023
Dear Commonweal Friends:
I hope this finds you well in these difficult times.
We cannot know what will be happening happening in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere as you read this letter. Wars are unpredictable. The toll in lost lives and lost opportunities is tragic. The polycrisis—by whatever name we call it—is unfolding with increasing velocity and force.
We have been thinking about this gathering storm at Commonweal for 47 years. We have explored it intensively for the past decade. Oren Slozberg has wisely made polycrisis resilience the overarching theme of our work in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice.
The personal question for each of us—and for our families and communities—is how we live lives of service in these times. Where do we find hope? How do we protect what is good and beautiful? What do we tell our children? Countless millions of people cannot ask these questions. They can only seek survival. We are fortunate to be able to ask.
This is no time for hopelessness, cynicism, or despair. New opportunities to serve are emerging just as old systems are breaking down. For millennia, humanity has faced long periods when the world looked as dark as this time does to us. This is what Commonweal is about—finding new and old ways to serve in dark times.
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Eighty
I turned 80 on October 22. I am grateful for a clear mind, a quite healthy body, and a caring heart. My work has changed. I counsel the new leaders. And I continue my own work with four clusters of initiatives. I’ll start with a brief summary of these clusters. Then I’ll address a few in more detail.
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Healing with Cancer
Healing with cancer has been my central work for 40 years. Arlene Allsman is my partner and director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program (CCHP) projects, which include our week-long retreats, our month-long on-line Sanctuary program, our week-end retreats for young breast cancer survivors, and all our alumni activities. Arlene is a wonderful partner.
Miki Scheidel is my partner and creative director of our extraordinary CancerChoices.org website, widely known as the best resource for integrative approaches to cancer on the web. Miki is likewise an extraordinary partner in this equally vital dimension of my life work.
Healing Circles Langley and Healing Circles Global are guided by Diana Lindsay, Oren Slozberg, and their leadership team. Healing Circles includes cancer circles but also offers many other kinds of circles as well. The circles bring community and healing solace to people all around the world. It was a deep joy to co-found Healing Circles with Diana and her husband Kelly and to support the work as it moves forward without asking much from me.
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The Resilience Projects
My vision of Commonweal from the start has been a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth. The cancer work has been at the heart of our work on personal healing. Our resilience projects address planetary healing. This cluster includes Omega, the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA), the Commonweal Resilience Project, and the Resilience Funders Network.
ORA supports three cohorts of seven fellows each in Africa, Latin America, and India. ORA also makes ten $25,000 resilience research grants each year. ORA is led by Mark Valentine, Andrea Frey, Stanley Wu, and Susan Grelock Yusem. ORA is our largest resilience project.
Stanley Wu directs the Commonweal Resilience Project. We have mounted a large solar array that feeds sun power to our Main Building (we’re seeking batteries for a self-contained microgrid.) We’ve placed large water tanks strategically around the site for fire and other emergencies. We are working on many other forms of organizational resilience.
Tamzin Ratcliffe is the new coordinator of the Resilience Funders Network. This brave community of funders grapples with the challenges of the polycrisis. They are far ahead of the rest of the funder community which overwhelmingly thinks in silos. Silo work is necessary. But if you don’t take the polycrisis into account, your strategies may get badly disrupted.
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The New School, CHE, and the Migration Support Project
The New School, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Migration Support Project is my third diverse cluster of work. Kyra Epstein is now the co-director of The New School where so much of our healing and resilience work comes together. Kristin Schafer directs the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, which does our work on chemical contaminants. Angela Oh leads our support for the Sanctuary outside Tijuana where Pastor Banda is housing and feeding 1,600 migrants from around the world for the cost of $1 per person per day.
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The Commonweal Archive, the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and Work Beyond Commonweal
My fourth cluster of work is with the Commonweal Archive Project, the Jenifer Altman Foundation, and work beyond Commonweal. The Commonweal Archive Project is rescuing the history of Commonweal from old files and artifacts before it is lost. We need to know where we came from to know where we are going. Erin O’Reilly, Susan Grelock Yusem, and Natalie Tallerico are working with me on the archives. Ann Blake directs the Jenifer Altman Foundation, which has been a significant force in environmental health and justice philanthropy for more than
25 years. My work beyond Commonweal is an essential space for me since I have always been drawn to frontiers of knowledge—some of which are not ready for broader dissemination and others that are simply not part of our Commonweal work.
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This, at 80, constitutes a full plate. It is only possible because of the leadership that each of these projects enjoys.
Can We All Be Healers?
Conversation with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Rachel Naomi Remen
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