Experiencing the premier CCHP in California

Experiencing the premier CCHP in California

In September 2024 we had the opportunity to directly experience Commonweal’s signature Cancer Help Program in the Bolinas, California Retreat Center. This is a continuation of the partnerships we began developing during the international integrative retreat in Bulgaria in March 2024.

The Commonweal Cancer Help Program (CCHP) is an intensive week-long residential retreat for people with cancer and their significant others. The program supports discovery-learning and tending to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of living with cancer. It creates the conditions for people to explore what matters most to them now, and step into the field of deep, intentional healing. While cancer brings us to the edge of experience in so many ways, this methodology helps us navigate the edge in a way that supports us to understand and embrace our edges.

A guiding principle is the belief that each person has within themselves what they need for their own deep healing. The program supports the balanced exploration of choices in healing, including conventional and integrative therapies, pain and suffering, and death and dying. Participants in the program most frequently describe it as life-altering. Most of them go on to live longer and better, many of them surpassing both diagnosis and prognosis. For others, healing has a transformative and powerful effect even as cancer may be progressing – and especially as life may be nearing the end.

We are honored to have been invited to experience and shadow the program with the intention to helping to bring it in Europe, with co-missioners from the Healing Circles Europe initiative. We plan to start with the first retreats in 2025 in Sweden and Bulgaria. Expect more updates from the experience soon!

Commonweal was founded in 1976 and currently runs multiple programs at the intersections of health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice.  In the last thirty years it has established itself as one of the global leaders in the field of integrative medicine and healing for people touched by cancer.

In addition to the Cancer Help Program which has been successfully conducted over 200 times, Commonweal also runs the premier Cancer Choices platform – an internationally acclaimed independent and science-informed resource supporting information and better choices in integrative cancer therapies. As well as The New School at Commonweal offering high-quality educational and training podcasts and videos on cancer, and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, a learning community based on the evidence-based science focused on environmental risks, their impact human health and ways to improve individual and collective health.