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2024 – 2025 Annual Report

Cultivating the Conditions for Health

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Continuing This Journey Together

Letter from Nova Founder and President Professor Brian Berman, MD

This past year at Nova has been one of deep reflection, growth, and transformation. At our annual meeting, we gathered around a shared recognition: we are living in a time of transition individually, collectively, and globally. In such moments, we are invited to pause at the threshold— to stand between what has been and what might yet be — and to listen deeply.

We spoke of the need for reconnection: to one another, to our communities, and to the living world. We spoke of deep listening — the kind that heals rather than divides, that bridges differences rather than reinforces boundaries. We spoke of belonging, and the courage it takes to resist “othering” in a world too often marked by separation.

Thresholds, we discovered, are not merely spaces of uncertainty — they are spaces of potential. They are open doors through which our most creative and compassionate selves can emerge. At Nova, we believe this is our collective threshold moment: an invitation to reimagine what health, healing, and human flourishing can mean in a changing world.

In a culture that measures health largely by access to doctors, treatments, and technologies, we have come to equate healing with intervention rather than with the conditions that allow life to thrive. Our nation’s deep investment in medicine reflects a powerful truth: we care profoundly about health. Yet it also reveals a limitation in our imagination. What if health were not merely the absence of illness, but the presence of right relationships within ourselves, our communities, and our planet?

At Nova, we believe that to change course, we must change the story. Through narrative and storytelling, we can broaden what we talk about when we talk about health, inviting new ways of seeing and being that honor the interconnectedness of all life. By centering care, compassion, and relationships, we can begin to rebuild trust, belonging, and well-being in service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

I’ve been reflecting on journeys and thresholds quite a bit this year, and my thoughts keep returning to the Green Road,  a 1.6-acre natural refuge at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. At a time when many there were suffering from the traumas of war, Nova helped co-create this healing space near a stream beside the clinic. Wounded warriors living at the hospital could now take the Green Road to reach their treatment sessions — a literal and symbolic pathway toward healing. The Green Road is more than a physical path; it is a bridge to deeper connection. Those who walk it are invited to witness life in its many forms — trees that have fallen, saplings emerging, the quiet pulse of renewal all around. Entering that space of reflection opens the heart to new possibilities along the journey toward wholeness.

In this time of fragmentation  marked by a global mental health crisis, deep loneliness, and profound injustice, Nova is committed to exploring the systemic roots of suffering. We understand health and flourishing as matters of justice: social, economic, racial, environmental, and beyond. Mental and spiritual well-being cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live, grow, and relate. Healing, therefore, must include the repair of our social, ecological, and moral fabric.

Through research, dialogue, and community-based initiatives, we are cocreating spaces for reflection, collaboration, and collective action. This work unfolds across our growing network — through our community of Scholars, Fellows, and Invited Faculty; our online Campfires; our Annual Conference; and the Nova Integration Hub, where thinkers and practitioners from every field come together to imagine, share, and collaborate. Soon, we’ll extend this reach even further through our upcoming podcast series and the launch of two new centers: the Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being and the Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing.

Each of these initiatives invites us to cross thresholds together,  to imagine and build a world in which all life can thrive. As we move forward, I invite you — our friends, partners, and fellow travelers — to join us. Bring your voice, your story, and your presence to this shared endeavor. Together, we can mend what has been broken, restore what has been forgotten, and nurture the conditions for collective flourishing.

The door is open. Let’s walk through it together.

With gratitude and hope,

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.