Alena Forbes, PhD

Welcome to my practice, where research, mind-body medicine, clinical nutrition, and healthy aging come together to explore how people cultivate resilience across a lifetime.

My work focuses on the everyday practices through which people adapt, recover, and continue to grow in the face of adversity. Drawing on qualitative research, clinical nutrition, and decades of professional experience, I translate these findings into meaningful applications for healthcare, community programs, and healthy aging.

About the Study

My doctoral research followed twenty-eight women, ages sixty-five to ninety-six, in Sonoma County, California. I asked how they had come through what they had come through — the losses, the illnesses, the caregiving, the marriages that lasted and the ones that did not, the decades of holding a life together. What emerged was a pattern: every woman built a daily architecture, cultivated inner resources, refused to let what happened define her, named the conditions that had shaped what was possible, and decided across a lifetime what resilience meant to her. When disruption arrived, and it always did, meaning steadied her while she began to build again. I call this the disruption pathway. 

Resilience is not something we are. It is something we do, again and again, across the whole length of a life. Resilience does not begin at a single moment. It is shaped by biological inheritance, early experiences, relationships, culture, and the environments in which we live. It is strengthened and reconstructed through the choices we make, the meaning we create from what happens to us, the relationships we nurture, and the daily practices that sustain us.

Whether you are a researcher, a healthcare professional, a student, or someone interested in aging well, I invite you to explore the research, resources, and educational materials shared here.