Circles at cancer retreats
When illness enters our life experience, a spiritual change can occur. We can feel alone—outsiders to the vital flow of energy that sustains us when we’re in community. One antidote for feelings of isolation is to belong, to find kindred spirits, to find one’s tribe. Healing Circles Global offers that sense of belonging to many who experience cancer. It offers an online or in-person opportunity to gather around the ceremonial fire of healing to share stories of pain and resilience, suffering and stamina, life and hope.
Jaune Evans has been involved with Commonweal, the nonprofit to which Healing Circles Global belongs, for more than 15 years. She is on the Commonweal board, co-hosts two online HCG Living with Cancer circles, and is on the staff of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.
Jaune attended her first in-person training for healing circles in 2019 and again in 2020 to deepen the practice of circle facilitation. But then the pandemic changed the landscape of our world and birthed online circles.
Online circles, Jaune explains, “developed out of a need, not intention.” Initially, online Living with Cancer circles were structured on a drop-in basis, but circles didn’t thrive under that format because participants couldn’t develop trust in one another. Now, most online Living with Cancer circles meet weekly—with many members having attended the same circle for years.
Jaune has facilitated both in-person and online circles. “Being together is healing,” she says, but there’s a difference between the two circle types. She’s a Soto Zen priest in the Branching Streams lineage of Shunryu Suzuki and learned about the art of healing at an early age by caring for her parents, who had long-term illnesses.
Zen places great emphasis on embodied realization, and Jaune speaks about the deeper knowledge that can come from the temple of the body—when a shared space and energy flows among circle members.
She says that, in circle, we receive and transmit subtle information, and she points out the deepened capacity offered by the in-person experience. She says that the story we tell is often how we re-member events—as we experience and re-experience them in the body. When people are in a shared space, this adds to the mixture of awareness.
Jaune points out that while Richard Willhelm and Carl Jung translated the Tao de Ching, they learned that the Chinese character for mind and heart are the same. This suggests that knowing and wisdom are shared sensory experiences—experiences that are enhanced when people are together.
Jaune has hosted healing circles online and, more recently, in person as a staff member at Commonweal Cancer Help Program retreats. She also offers creative arts exploration and loving kindness meditation at the retreats.
All that Jaune touches comes alive in new and vital ways, and I feel blessed to have her in my life and circle.
written by Lisa Peacock
Please note
At Healing Circles, the foundation of our circles is built on the authenticity of those who host them—with each host bringing their unique voice, personal perspective, and lived experience to the space. Healing Circles hosts and guardians are independent circle organizers. Their statements, opinions, and impressions are their own and do not represent the views of Healing Circles Global or Commonweal.
