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No one will ever go through cancer alone

Commonweal Cancer Help Program

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.

We often refer to the Cancer Help Program as the beating heart of Commonweal. Since the program started in 1986, thousands of alumni have felt the transformation in their heads, hands, and hearts. Our participants gain knowledge about integrative medicine strategies and experience how to hold the transformation that a cancer diagnosis may generate.

The Cancer Help Program is very much the beating heart of Commonweal. When the staff and participants are on the land, the place transforms. You can sense something is happening. Entering the main building, a calmness and hush emanates from the library where people lay in deep relaxation after a morning of Tai Chi or Yoga. All week, people wander between the Pacific House, the Sandtray Room, the acupuncture table, a walk with Michael Lerner, or a talk with Jenepher Stowell.

As I write, eight people are at Pacific House right now experiencing the Commonweal Cancer Help Program’s retreat. More than 1,600 people have been through this week-long retreat at Commonweal across 38 years — not to reveal a magic cure, but to begin a healing journey.

The work is deeply informed by extensive research that backs integrative medicine, research that clearly details the profound benefits of embracing nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, and contemplative practice along with western medicine’s efforts to treat people with cancer.

At the same time, what happens in the Cancer Help Program circle holds mystery. I have learned to trust the circle, especially as hundreds of people around the world experience transformation in similar healing circles.

The staff of the Cancer Help Program, directed by Arlene Allsman, hold these circles six weeks a year, and three more weekends with another group, Bay Area Young Survivors. Those of us here at Commonweal while the cancer retreats are in progress can tap into the mystery of the place, and experience the deep humility of spending time with people who are looking toward the edge of life and who are asking deep questions. The mystery and humility in the face of the unknown ripple through the Commonweal community, in Bolinas and around the globe.

Just as an individual faces cancer, our communities now face a global crisis. Over the years, our experiences in healing have helped us to understand the world of personal resilience — and to expand our focus on resilience to both community and global exploration. Each morning, when I walk into Pacific House during a Cancer Help Program retreat, I am grateful for where this all started: the founders of our healing work and the hundreds of alumni who carry the spirit of this work. As our world faces increasing challenges, our talented program directors and staff continue their commitment to finding healing and resilience.

With gratitude,
Oren Slozberg
Commonweal Executive Director

 

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.

Healing the Spirit and Soul of Cancer Patients
by Michael Lerner, Commonweal President

We just completed our 223rd week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program. Most staff and board members at Commonweal hold the Cancer Help Program as the deepest work we do. I would say you can find equally deep work woven throughout much of Commonweal’s work. But given that we have devoted 38 years to offering the Cancer Help Program, the question remains — why do people come to spend a week with us?

The simplest answer I can give is that, while conventional medicine can treat the body, it cannot heal the spirit or the soul. The spirit is the part of us that moves upward to our highest hopes. The soul is the part of us that stays close to the body, that remembers all its pain and suffering, and that needs to grieve and to be heard.

So when the spirit flags under the burden of illness and treatment, and when the soul years to be held, touched, and heard, the week-long Cancer Help Program retreats are nectar for the spirit and a balm for the soul. Some people are truly reborn here. Many others leave with lesser but still profound transformations.

We all need to heal. We all suffer. But healing must be done with infinitely close attention to the specifics of our grief. Yes, meditation and yoga and massage and good food are all part of the healing. But it is when we have a safe place to speak to the specifics of our grief, and to be heard, and not judged, that the deepest healing begins.

So often, the deepest healing is not about the cancer, nor even about the often great suffering with the treatment. It is about love and loss. It is about our most important relationships, past and present. It is about our spouses, our lovers, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children, and our friends. It is about how abuse and neglect in childhood marked us for life. It is about how someone we loved with all our heart broke our heart. It is about a child lost to some great sadness.

It is about what a struggle it is to live in our close family – or how much we suffer from the absence of someone to hold at night or someone to grow old with. It is about precious work or precious community that we had and that we lost.

Finally, it is about our grief about ourselves — our disappointment with ourselves — that somehow, after all these years, we are still less than we wish we were.

So healing is also necessarily about forgiveness — forgiveness of ourselves and others. It is about letting go of what we can’t change. It’s about discovering what matters most to us now. And just as healing our grief must address our most secret sorrows in what William Blake called “minute particulars,” so the discovery of what matters now is also about minute particulars. It is about how we will live, day by day, hour by hour, sometimes even minute by minute. Breathing through what we almost cannot stand. Discovering the immense healing power of being in nature. Finding solace in some small creature that loves us as no human has ever been able to love us.

So often, it is also about finitude. It is about how to live in the presence of the end of this life – and into the mystery of what lies beyond our last breath. I have been thinking a lot about that lately — about the nature of mind, about whether the soul survives death. I have come to believe it does, but in ways more complex than a simple guarantee of soul survival. But my beliefs are not what matters here — what matters is your beliefs, your hopes, your fears and your own way through the great portal.

I sometimes say the Cancer Help Program is here to help you live as well as you can for as long as you can (or choose to) — and, if and when the time comes to let go, to go into the mystery the way you would choose to do so. The ancients believed that how we die is a reflection often of how we have lived. So considering how we would like to go, and doing what we can to work toward that, is not a trivial part of healing into life and death.

After 222 Cancer Help Programs, the weeks stay as fresh and profound for me as ever. There is no place I would rather be. There is no pretense. It doesn’t matter what was gained or lost in your life up until now. What matters is this moment — and each of the moments ahead. Love is the greatest healer. Wisdom is the best guide to lasting love. Dedication of our hearts and mind to some service greater than us is what gives us peace. Come join us. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken your vows a thousand times. Ours is not a caravan of despair.” (Ibn Arabi).

Come. I mean you. Come.

May 31, 2024

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 poly-crisis, 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.

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www.commonweal.org
P.O Box 316
Bolinas, California 94924
415 868-0970
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