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
For lasting happiness, nourish your roots
Alan has been leading groups on natural happiness and resilience for years. He writes about ‘The Story Behind Natural Happiness’… For several years the focus of my learning and teaching was resilience. I believe it’s a crucial skill set for all of us in these...
Beautiful Garden Wisdom – for all!
How many times have you sat in a garden and felt a weight lifting from your shoulders? There could be a number of reasons for this – maybe gardens hold special memories for you; or fresh air and being outdoors really does ‘blow the cobwebs away’. Some would say it...
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 gardening and organic farming, created by Alan Heeks. For an overview of all seven seeds, click here. In...
Natural Happiness Advocate
Role Description 1. SUMMARY Author and group leader Alan Heeks is seeking up to six people to work with him as Advocates, sharing the Natural Happiness approach by selling and running workshops, online and in person. 2. BACKGROUND Alan Heeks has a unique approach to...
Earth Visit Report from Prostetnic Vogon Jelfs
To: Controller, Zone 581, LIP Group. (Less Interesting Planets) Your Greatship, I grovel before you as I make this report. This is the scheduled 50-year update on my visit to Earth in 1971. Your Greatship will recall that in 1971, the outlook here was promising. Many...
Don’t let lockdown grind you away!
Don't let covid grind you away! Staying cheerful in covid year two Despite my resilience skills, I’ve had to keep digging deep to sustain my mood, especially in these recent winter months. Whilst there’s hope for easing restrictions soon, lockdown has a cumulative...
Covid vaccinations: a touching flavour of Dunkirk spirit
Covid vaccinations: a touching flavour of Dunkirk spirit Plus tips to avoid side effects Covid vaccinations: a touching flavour of Dunkirk spirit Plus tips to avoid side effects Having my first covid vaccination was a moving experience, which I hadn’t expected. I’m so...
Helping gardeners to grow their own happiness: an online adventure
There’s always a risk that life can become samey in a winter lockdown but at Natural Happiness we have some fresh approaches which can brighten life up: this is a story of an online workshop that lifted everyone’s spirits and we thank the Horticultural Society in Lyme...
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...
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