Resources
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Resource Toolkit for Natural Happiness Book
Resource Toolkit: Conflict Resolution Process
Many challenges involve conflict. This process is one I’ve used often myself, and have taught in training groups. You can use the gist in minor conflict, and the full process in major ones. Here we move on to human skills which can help you to compost difficult...
Resource Toolkit: Community Mapping Process
The four-stage approach I’ve set out below may look elaborate, and you could go through it more informally. Communities of various kinds are likely to become very important for all of us in the uncertain years ahead: the benefit of a thorough review is getting clarity...
Resource Toolkit: Embodiment, sound and movement
As you can imagine, these topics are hard to cover in a book. Many approaches of this kind are best experienced in sessions with a teacher, or at minimum from their videos. I’ve learned most in this area from Neil Douglas-Klotz: you’ll find a range of video and audio...
Resource Toolkit: Natural Communication
Natural Communication provides the skills to express yourself, hear others, have a fruitful conversation. These methods are part of my overall Natural Happiness model using gardening analogies. All this is closer to gardening than you might think: both need a dynamic...
Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness
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Seven Seeds Overview
How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? Are there ways to bounce back and thrive if life is getting you down? Natural Happiness uses skills from organic gardening and farming to help you cultivate your own wellbeing. The Seven Seeds...
Natural Happiness Seed 1: Nourish Your Roots
This is the first in a series of blogs presenting the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, a unique way to help people grow their own happiness using parallels with organic gardening and farming, created by Alan Heeks. For an overview of all seven seeds, click here. In...
Natural Happiness Seed 2: Natural Energy Sources
Do you find it’s getting harder to find the energy to get through the day? You’re not alone! Life and work really are getting more complex and demanding for most of us, so it’s no wonder if your energy feels depleted more often. One reason why this topic is so...
Natural Happiness Seed 3: Compost Your Troubles
Imagine that you can tap into a major new source of energy and insight, that’s already within you: it’s free, abundant, and just needs a bit of effort to process it. What’s more, you’ll be creating benefits out of problems that drain energy and pollute your inner...
Natural Happiness Seed 4 – Shaping Uncertainty – The Co-Creative Way
Most people are trying to shape their lives amid more uncertainty than they can handle: co-creative skills make this easier. It's about finding solutions with other people's needs, with apparent obstacles, with uncertainty, balancing them with your own needs and...
Natural Happiness Seed 5: Cultivating Community
When I think about how we can all prepare better for the turbulent times ahead, raising the resilience of local communities comes up as a top priority: this is something we can all contribute to, without waiting on all the many policy steps which national government...
Natural Happiness Seed 6: Growing Through Climate Change
The climate crisis can easily feel overwhelming, bewildering and depressing. Human nature needs something to hope for, and that’s hard to find when the outlook appears bleak. We need to redefine what kind of hope is possible, and to keep managing our perception of...
Natural Happiness Seed 7: Natural Inspiration
The future outlook for all of us is turbulent. We’re going to need a quantum step up in our resilience, and that’s what this blog aims to offer you. I believe the fastest way to do this is by a deeper connection with inspiration, and what we might call higher...
Other useful resources and processes
Resource Toolkit: Personal Energy Audit
This can be a powerful process to help you understand your sources and uses of physical, emotional, mental and inspirational energy. Gardeners and farmers manage the energy mix for their land, and you can do this for your personal ecosystem. Asking yourself “How’s...
Cultivation Cycle checklists
For gardens and farms, every stage of the cultivation cycle and all four seasons are important. This holds true for people’s work and life generally, but we often over-focus on some stages of the cycle, and neglect others. This quick checklist will help you see how...
The Diamond Process: drawing on both sides of the brain
As we try to handle ever more complexity and uncertainty in our lives, co-creative skills are essential. Co-creativity is about both-and, combining action and reflection, balancing your needs and aims with the realities of the situation and other people in it. One way...
Mapping your wild margins
This matrix can help you recognise and value wild margins in yourself, or you could use it for a group such as a work team. Start by listing a few activities, skills, interests which may seem marginal and unproductive. Then explore how they could help you, and how you...
Self-help Process: Circle of Voices
This is a method I’ve evolved for integrating multiple viewpoints: see Chapter 4 for a fuller introduction. Before you do this process, read this briefing thoroughly, and get clear on basic decisions such as aim, location, and who’s involved. Set aside more time than...
The Hero’s Journey: an archetypal growth map
The five stages of positive change It was the American anthropologist Joseph Campbell who coined the term hero’s journey to chart the archetypal stages of change which he identified through many years of research. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he...
Resilience Toolkit: Some Basic Methods
What is resilience, and why does it matter? Resilience is the ability to stay calm in high levels of change and challenge, to bounce back when something difficult happens, to face up to a problem and find a good solution. It’s a set of skills to help you maintain your...
The Seven Seeds Ecosystem Model: Cultivating resilience and sustainability for people and organisations
The Seven Seeds is a unique approach using parallels with cultivated ecosystems to help individuals, teams and organisations to grow their resilience and their sustainability for both human and environmental resources. Alan Heeks has evolved this model through many...
The Seven Seeds Resilience Audit
This quick questionnaire will help your current levels of resilience, which have a big influence on your general happiness. Write down your score from 1 to 10 for each question... A. Nourishing your roots Using the tree test, are your roots, trunk and branches...
Resource Toolkit: Manifesting a vision – the Pink Bubble Technique
This guided visualisation is a great way to picture a vision or goal, feel your passion for it, and let go of your attachment to an outcome.