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
2022 Climate Outlook: pray for miracles
The holiday time around New Year 2022 has been a chance for some of us to reflect on the outlook for the climate crisis, and it's not a cheery prospect. I have been digging deep to find some constructive responses. In reviewing current information, I was startled to...
Community climate responses: co-creative insights
I’m writing this thinks piece in January 2022, to see what I’ve learned from two years’ work in my hometown, and to share my hopes for the year just starting. On this journey, I’ve had to dig deep in my co-creative toolkit, and add some new approaches. So here’s a...
The Book of Joy: Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
Lasting Happiness in a Changing World This deep and delightful book, published in 2017, became an immediate best-seller worldwide. The wisdom of these two great men in their eighties is surprisingly fresh and practical, and relevant for all of us in handling daily...
Co-creativity – dancing with problems
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...
Teach your children well
Teach your children well What do younger generations need to learn? Do you ever wonder how we can help to prepare young people for the future they face, and whether what they learn at school really helps this? These questions become more acute as the climate crisis...
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...
Nurture and adapt: Natural Happiness for stormy times
Nurture and adapt: Natural Happiness for stormy times This blog is part of my quest for positive approaches to the turbulent future I foresee for all of us. As you'll see, I explore several role models, people already living with high uncertainty and low control. Farm...
Digging into Regenerative Agriculture
Digging into Regenerative Agriculture A model of de-intensification for humans too! Ever since I co-founded an organic farm in 1990, I've tried to stay aware of trends in sustainable farming. The latest is regenerative agriculture: there's a lot of hype and froth...
An introduction to Soul Resilience
If you hope to thrive and grow through your life, not just cope and survive, how will you do this in the stormier times we can see ahead of us? It needs a quantum step up in resilience, and that’s what Soul Resilience could offer you. Exploring the soul’s journey is...
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