Introduction

The Healing Journey is a series of 5 courses, which gives participants a range of tools and strategies to reduce cancer stress and move towards a happier, more meaningful and more fulfilled life.

It’s based on the understanding that, while cancer is often a very distressing experience, there is much you can do by taking an active approach to regain a sense of control over your life and to reduce the distressing feelings you might have.

These tools and strategies include:

• meditation
• relaxation
• mental imagery
• setting goals
• planning lifestyle changes
• befriending all the aspects of yourself and reducing inner conflicts
• identifying supportive and unsupportive relationships
• managing distressing thoughts
• learning to centre yourself and access your inner stillness
• making a spiritual connection in whatever way is appropriate to each individual.

The Healing Journey is not just for people with cancer but also for their partners and carers. This is because partners and carers often feel a great deal of anxiety and distress themselves and the Healing Journey can help anyone reduce their levels of stress and increase their quality of life.

Secondly, when you’re trying to introduce changes into your way of life, it’s often easier if you have the co-operation and support of people close to you

The benefits of doing the Healing Journey

Here are some of the reasons why the Healing Journey is so beneficial:

• it combines lots of different approaches, so it provides lots of ways you can be helped
• Level 1 starts simply with a short 4-week course and then each further level allows you to tackle things in more depth. This means you don’t get overwhelmed with too much information
• most people have internal blocks and barriers that stop them creating a better life for themselves. The programme encourages you to explore and gradually let go of these obstacles
• the Healing Journey is delivered in groups and we find this increases the motivation of participants. The quality of relationships that develop in the group helps everyone to move forward
• the programme aims to help you discover approaches and ways of thinking that are effective for you
• however difficult the experience of cancer may be for you, the Healing Journey will give a vision of a different way of living which gives you more control and helps you to identify meaning and authentic purpose in your life
• the courses draw on knowledge and wisdom from both West and East
• we provide considerable course material to help with study at home
• the programme is strongly evidence-based and research on it has been done over 25 years. See the Research page.