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, click here.
For further reading on the Natural Happiness way, click here.
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To get in touch with the Natural Happiness Office, click here.
The Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness
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.
Growing through uncertainty: resilience insights
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
In this section you’ll find a range of processes and resources I have created which can help you to grow your own natural happiness and resilience.
Natural Happiness Blog
Why magical thinking threatens us all – and how to antidote it
What I mean by magical thinking is an utter disregard for truth and reality, the delusion that I can make facts just by saying them, thinking them into reality. A great example was Donald Trump telling officials that he could eliminate secret documents just by...
Book blog: The truth about Trump: it’s worse than you think, but there’s hope…
Naomi Klein’s book, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics, is the most lucid, convincing, and alarming account I’ve seen yet of what Donald Trump and other magical-thinking political leaders are really about. She’s clearly right that these leaders excel...
Deep Adaptation in local communities
Two of my current crumbs of comfort are a sense that many more people now recognise that we're in a crisis, and that I hear the need for adaptation being widely accepted. Whilst I used to get annoyed that newer crises were distracting from the climate emergency, I now...
Feeling our way without a map
Subtle discernment for confusing times Imagine you're in a dream where you're trying to drive somewhere. Your satnav goes off. You realise you don't have an old-fashioned paper map. There's no mobile signal, so Google is no use. As you look for road signs, you see...
The Work that Reconnects: a way to face the future
If you’re working with hazardous materials, you need good methods and equipment. The future really is hard to face: it can easily feel bleak and overwhelming. Many people feel pain and despair about the state of the world and the environment, and blank out to avoid...
Emergency resilience: why you need it
Learning from Boiled Frog syndrome Climate psychologists tell us that humans aren’t good at dealing with complex, diffuse threats whose timing is uncertain. It seems we’d be great at handling a woolly mammoth attack, and our evolution is way behind reality. If you...
Mining for hope in the quarry of gloom
There must be some kind of way outta hereSaid the joker to the thiefThere’s too much confusionI can’t get no relief In this time of big troubles, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And if you’re an anxious type, like me, you’ll always find plenty to unsettle you. Yet the...
Deep Adaptation and climate change: an introduction
Back in 2018, the sense of urgency about the climate crisis rose sharply, helped by several key voices, including Greta Thunberg, and Professor Jem Bendell. Jem uses the term Deep Adaptation as a focus for facing and adapting to the major climate and related...
Could a pilgrimage renew you?
As life keeps getting more complex and confusing, I've found that pilgrimages are a good antidote, a way to feel renewed, re-centred, clarified. The tradition of pilgrimage goes back many centuries, and has seen some revival in recent years, with Santiago de...
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