Exploring the World of Whole-Person Cancer Care
More than 40 years ago, long before integrative cancer care was mainstream, Michael Lerner helped to launch the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. Over the years, he has sat with more than 2,000 souls navigating a cancer diagnosis, learning much about what it means to live—and die—with uncertainty and illness. One insight runs through each experience: cancer can be an invitation to heal our body, mind, and spirit. This course includes some of the most compelling conversations Michael has hosted at Commonweal’s New School in recent years that explore whole-person cancer care. Join in Michael’s exploration, through his letters and interviews, with integrative oncologists, healers, and patients who are leading the understanding and practice of whole-person cancer care.
What Matters Now: 7 Healing Letters to a Friend with Cancer
What Matters Now: 7 Healing Letters to a Friend with Cancer is a personal and practical guide born from over 40 years of intimate counsel with people facing cancer. Written by Commonweal founder Michael Lerner, these 7 letters distill what he’s learned from sitting with more than 2,000 souls navigating a cancer diagnosis, and from his own encounters with life-threatening illness.
It’s a companion, the kind of book you want on hand when a friend tells you they’ve just been diagnosed—something you can give them that says: “You’re not alone. Here’s what matters.”
Re-Dreaming Healing through Narrative and Story
Bringing with her the traditional Aboriginal practices of dadirri—a sacred practice of deep listening, reflection, stillness, and connection to the land—and yarning—a conversational practice used by indigenous Australians to share knowledge, stories, and culture—Catherine Olweny will talk about ways that art and narrative techniques allow difficult experiences to be shared.
Healing the Roots, Transforming the Future
In this conversation, Kazu Haga—activist, trainer, and author of Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging Through Collapse—joins host Serena Bian to explore why healing is so essential to radically reimagining the worlds we wish to build in the midst of collapse.
A Spiritual Biography
Join Michael Lerner in a spiritual biography conversation with Robert Mulhall—Commonweal board member, former president of Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, and a consultant whose work sits at the intersection of leadership development, organizational health, and human potential. Image: Robert Lukeman, Unsplash.
Invitation to Exploring the Art of Being
In this invitation to Exploring the Art of Being, July 2026 Visiting Scholar Catherine Olweny invites us into her world, where her lived experience as a migrant and a black woman; a student of literature, medicine, and hypnosis; and as both a doctor and a healer affect her worldview. Share her journey at Commonweal, cultivating meaningful, experiential ways to benefit patients and clinicians that center healing arts, collective narrative practices from the Aboriginal Australian traditions, and mindfulness-based approaches as the foundation to her work.
Explore the Art of Being with Visiting Scholar Catherine Olweny
Bringing with her the traditional Aboriginal practices of dadirri—a sacred practice of deep listening, reflection, stillness and connection to the land—and yarning—a conversational practice used by indigenous Australians to share knowledge, stories, and culture, Dr. Catherine Olweny offers another pathway to Mastering the Art of Being. Her many life experiences and training led her to work as a paediatric anaesthetist and medical doctor, and also to help clinicians develop a greater ability to look and listen closely, to attend to patients and their family, to be curious and attentive, and to be fully present.
Art for Our Common Good: Creativity, Health, and Civic Life
What role can art play in helping us meet this moment? As communities face growing loneliness, burnout, environmental anxiety, and civic division, the arts can create spaces for healing, connection, and hope. Join us as we celebrate 50 years of healing arts at Commonweal, building on an earlier convening of leaders in arts, health, and community practice. This public gathering, hosted by Commonweal Board Member Lisa Simms Booth, opens the conversation to all with Maria Rosario Jackson, Deborah Cullinan, and Catherine Olweny.
The Poem as This Moment’s Response
As the winter solstice approaches—a time for contemplation, exchange, and renewal—and Commonweal nears the end of our 50th year celebrations, this conversation with Jane Hirshfield and Host Michael Lerner will attend to how we might best address ourselves to the invitations of precipice and turn: with a spirit of permeability, imagination, and embrace of change.