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Innovative Thinking and Action

Transforming Health

We envision a world where health is valued as our most basic and essential asset and where people, places, and the planet flourish for the benefit of all. 

Our Mission

Connect with Others to Explore New Ideas and Ways of Thinking

Check out the Nova Integration Hub

Innovation

Driving Change

Our interdisciplinary community of thought leaders investigates critical questions, elevates evidence-based practices, and discovers cutting-edge solutions.

Scholars and Fellows >

Ideas in Action

What We Do

The Nova Institute for Health is a heart-centered think tank that takes action for the good of people, places, and the planet. 

Putting Ideas Into Action >

Insights

Reflections From Our Founder

A pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, Dr. Brian Berman is the president of the Nova Institute, founded in 2007 to catalyze new ideas in health. 

More from Brian Berman >

Collaborative Centers

Our collaborative centers are transdisciplinary hubs advancing leading-edge research and implementing innovative solutions for today’s most pressing challenges.

Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being

Catalyzing transformative approaches to health, justice, dignity and healing

Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing

Promoting the flourishing of people, places, and the planet

New publication

Beneath the Surface of a Mirrored Lake: Why Judicial Well-Being Matters to All of Society

In Societies, Nova Fellow Alan C. Logan, Scholar Susan Prescott, and Justice Rangajeeva Wimalasena assert that judicial well-being is fundamental to justice systems. 

This paper examines growing international evidence that judicial work can carry substantial psychological and physical burdens, arising from heavy workloads, exposure to traumatic material, professional isolation, public scrutiny, and sustained high-stakes decision-making. Authors call for a shift toward greater confidential support, evidence-based training, appropriate rest and recovery, healthier institutional environments, and stronger research into what genuinely improves judicial well-being and performance.

Read more

Nova Campfire, "Leadership for a Changing World: Imagination, Emotional Intelligence, and Relational Wisdom"

The complex challenges of our time require more than technical expertise—they call for leadership at every level. Join us 9/24 as we explore leadership as a creative, relational, and ethical practice.
Register now
Nova Publications and Announcements

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Media Fellow Publications

Hot Nights are Costing You up to 56 Hours of Sleep Per Year, Study Finds

July 28, 2026
Research and Publications

The Value of Regeneration

July 23, 2026
Research and Publications

The Effect of Recent Changes in Federal Preventative Guidance on Patients and Primary Care Practice

July 23, 2026

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.