Natural Happiness –
The Gardener’s Way
Learn from nature to grow your wellbeing and resilience
How can we stay happy when there’s so much uncertainty around? The answer is to cultivate yourself like a garden, and grow your own wellbeing by learning from nature.
Natural Happiness is a simple, practical guide that supports people in their personal lives, in their work, and in making sense of wider issues.
People are organisms: constantly changing, and with interactions between physical, emotional, mental, and inspirational aspects.
In cultivated ecosystems, such as organic farms and vegetable gardens, we can see how to shape and steer an organism to achieve the outcome we need, and this is a great guide to cultivating human nature.
Organic farmer, conservationist and social entrepreneur Alan Heeks has developed a way for people to cultivate and maintain their own sense of wellbeing and happiness, drawing on his own experiences.
Alan comments: “Having set up a 130-acre organic farm and education centre, I realised that people and teams can learn a huge amount about human sustainability from the parallels with cultivated ecosystems.”
Alan has since created a 70-acre conservation woodland, an acre of organic garden in his hometown, founded a community food security project, and runs workshops on personal resilience and adapting to climate change.
For more about Alan’s planned fourth book, Grow your own Happiness, go to: https://www.naturalhappiness.net/books/
For further reading on the Natural Happiness way, go to: https://www.naturalhappiness.net/natural-happiness/
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To get in touch, email the Natural Happiness Office: naturalhappinessoffice@gmail.com
The Seven Seeds
The times we’re in are tough: it’s clear that we need new approaches and models to thrive in all this. Natural Happiness is a simple, practical approach which can help in your life and work, and for work teams and communities.
Alan Heeks has created a unique model based on what he calls the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, which stress different ways of enhancing and supporting your wellbeing inspired by nature, gardening and farming, for example, nourishing your roots; compost your troubles; cultivate community.
Read more about the Seven Seeds here.
Organic gardening methods offer us many useful parallels for growing happiness and the Seven Seeds are a distillation of what Alan has learned over the last 30 years.
Foresight: future flourishing through super-resilience:
The present is already so demanding that most of us don’t want to consider the future. But surely the rapid changes and rising pressures we face now are likely to continue, and increase? Alan has been researching and leading trainings in resilience for several years: the skills to grow through problems and keep thriving, not just cope and get by.
Here are some resources that may help you:
Nine positive ways to use your lockdown time
Finding the gifts in Bewilderment
Deep Adaptation and climate change
The 8 Dimensions of Super-Resilience: How to grow into the 2020’s
Events
We’d love you to join us at one of our events. We create spaces to connect like-minded people and explore a range of different topics for personal development and have started doing workshops online.
Resources
Natural Happiness Blog
Book Blog: In Love with George Eliot, by Kathy O’Shaughnessy
The genius novelist becomes human George Eliot has been my favourite novelist for all my adult life, but I knew only the bare outlines of her life story until reading this book. It’s riveting, but also a shock: suddenly this revered pinnacle of English...
Natural Happiness: from regenerative agriculture to regenerative humanculture – you’re invited!
How do we live with rising chaos? For over twenty years I’ve explored how people can learn from cultivated ecosystems: analogies from gardening and organic farming can show us how to grow our own happiness. In 2021, I want to offer this approach more widely, and I’m...
Book Blog: Britain’s fragile food security insights from Tim Lang
by Caroline Walker Professor Lang is one of the leading experts, as well as a veteran (and pretty exasperated) campaigner on food issues, and I have drawn on his recent book Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them for this short article. I have also...
The Gardener’s Way: seasonal tips for January/February
This is part of a series of blogs to show what we can learn for our wellbeing and resilience from gardening priorities through the seasons of the year. The depths of winter are not a time for intense activity, in the garden, or in our lives. So, an overall lesson from...
2021 and the seeds of hope
In the gardener’s year, November to January is a time for clearing and fertilising ground, and starting to plant seeds for the new cycle’s growth. And when we plant a seed, we plant a bit of hope with it. The process of realising that hope takes plenty of time – so...
The Gardener’s Way: seasonal tips for November
This is the start of a series of blogs to highlight gardening priorities through the seasons of the year, and how we can learn from these for our own resilience and wellbeing. This blog covers the period from mid-October to the end of December.
Resonate or Rescue: Choose Your Response to the Covid Crisis
I’ve had many feelings about this crisis in the past six months, but two have consistently troubled me. I feel guilty about my relatively privileged and easy situation. And I keep reproaching myself that I should do more to help...
Nine positive ways to use your lockdown time
The lockdown has given most of us a gift of more time. You may need no help in filling it with worries or distractions, so here are my ideas about the positive possibilities. Radiate love: My experience of the lockdown is that simply sending out love is one of...
Learning to Unlearn
Yes, it's a paradox, but our ways of thinking, our habitual responses, are so deeply set that a deliberate effort of unlearning is needed if we want to see things as they are, and be able to find a fresh response. I've been exploring Sufi teachings for over thirty...
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