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Nadine Clopton

Invited Faculty

Nadine Clopton is devoted to cultivating a world that places compassion, communities, and ecological wellness at the root of transformative change. 

In her role as regenerative education program manager at Rodale Institute, she worked to bridge health care and regenerative organic agriculture. She has stewarded the creation of Rodale Institute’s annual Regenerative Healthcare Conference – a retreat-style conference at the nexus of food as medicine, soil health, and human health. The program is the first of its kind – convening doctors, nurses, health practitioners, hospital leadership, food systems innovators, and farmers looking to co-create a regenerative health care system by shifting how we source our food. Combining her personal passions for holistic health, herbalism, and soil ecology, she grew Rodale Institute’s consumer education initiatives and programming. 

As founder of Conscious Consulting, LLC, she has facilitated workshops, delivered tailored lectures, and consulted with organizations and individuals on a range of topics including purpose-driven leadership, climate storytelling, organizing and campaigning, meaningful youth engagement, and transformational systems change.

Previously, she has been engaged in global advocacy endeavors spanning public health and climate discourse. She is the first young person to have served as director, vice president, and then president of the Global NGO Executive Committee (GNEC), liaising with the United Nations to amplify the voices of civil society leaders. She served on behalf of Caring and Living As Neighbours, an Australia-based NGO,  as an NGO Youth Representative to the United Nations for seven years, advocating for equitable access to health care for children living with chronic health conditions in low-resource settings. She has been a featured speaker at the United Nations, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Global Solutions Lab, UNDP’s Nature for Life Hub, the Institute for Functional Medicine, the American Psychological Association, C40 Cities, and more. 

She graduated from Lehigh University in 2019 with a double major in political science and health, medicine, and society as well as minors in sustainable development and environmental studies. In 2020, as a presidential scholar, she received her Master’s in environmental policy design from Lehigh. She has a certificate in medicinal herbalism from Cornell University.

Outside of work, she finds joy in singing, hiking, writing in her newsletter Root & Rewild, gardening, practicing herbalism, and yoga.

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.