The Get Well Cards are deeply informed by the work of mental health practitioners and trauma healers who have helped the world understand how experience lives in the body. Our thinking draws especially from the teachings of the COLEVA Healing Institute, founded by Amandla O’Connor, which centers collective liberation, embodied healing, and cultural wisdom, as well as from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which illuminated how trauma reshapes the nervous system and physical health. These frameworks, alongside the lived, land- based practice of Restore Forward and its food-as- medicine and land-as-medicine programs, guided us in creating the Get Well Cards, tools that bridge clinical insight, ancestral knowing, and everyday nourishment to support whole-person healing.
