What’s the secret to happiness?
How can we stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? Are there ways to bounce back and thrive if everyday life and work is getting us down? Do you want to keep growing as you get older? How can you dig into your fears about the future and become more resilient? In this website, Alan Heeks offers practical answers to all these questions and many more!
Alan’s unique approach involves understanding human nature, and learning from parallels in the natural world around us. For example, balancing our roots and fruits (resources and outputs) composting waste energy (such as stress), working with uncertainty instead of overriding it.
This website offers you a wide range of online resources, details of upcoming events with Alan Heeks, past issues and a free sign up for Alan’s e-newsletter on natural happiness and resilience, informative and entertaining blogs, and information on Alan’s books and projects.
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. Since 2018 he has been closely involved in responses to climate change, including Jem Bendell’s
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
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.
Natural Happiness will show you how to cultivate your own human nature, and tend yourself like a garden: deepen your roots, and grow fruitfully through all kinds of weather. Alan Heeks has created a unique model, the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness to help you do just this. Organic gardening methods offer us many useful parallels for growing our own happiness, such as: If you’re overstretched, you need to nourish your roots or prune back your branches. ·
Alan’s new book: Not Fade Away- staying happy when you’re over 64
- Not Fade Away: Staying Happy When You’re Over 64! Is for women and men age 60 plus, due for publication May 1, 2018.
- Out of the Woods, published 2013, is focussed on men beyond 50, but is useful for both sexes.
Upcoming events
Resources
Creative Ageing Blogs
Creation Spirituality: what, why, how
Align your own creative power within the divine The essence of creation spirituality is this idea: that the creation of our world was not a one-off event billions of years ago: it is a process continuing in every moment, and each of us can contribute. As Neil...
Enjoying your elderhood
The term elder is used with various meanings: I’m using it to invite you to connect with the mature wisdom in yourself, and in our ancestors. Traditional tribal cultures, such as the Native Americans, Celts, and Bedouin, had great wisdom, including the role of the...
Not Fade Away Staying happy when you’re over 64! By Alan Heeks
THE BABY BOOMER GUIDE TO CREATIVE AGEING The late sixties and beyond are a landmark: a good time to choose what you want from the years ahead, and take stock of the story so far. This short, practical book offers you valuable guidance, new skills, and resources to...
Natural Happiness Blogs
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 others who are more severely affected....
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...
How much could you discover in a Wiltshire wood in February?
The Hazel Hill Wood Volunteer Building week February 17th-23rd 2020 Are you seeking fresh inspiration, practical knowhow, interesting contacts or just some fun? You can find all these and more at Hazel Hill, a magical 70 acre woodland retreat center and educational...
Resilent Futures Blogs
Food Security: Opportunity, Research, Action
It’s easy to feel disempowered these days, but this is an issue where we can all do something. Food security means reliable access to enough good quality, affordable, sustainably produced food. Many experts believe that food shortages and price rises will be a major...
BOOK BLOG: From What Is to What If, by Rob Hopkins
We Need to Reclaim and Reboot our Imaginations As the Covid crisis continues, there are many influences nudging us towards brain mush, despondency, helplessness. This well-evidenced book from Transition Network’s founder highlights those influences, and offers plenty...
Looking back from 2042
Coronavirus was just the start… I was just 12 back in 2020 when the First Plague happened. What’s strange looking back is that everybody thought this was just a terrible one-off crisis. At first, they told us the lockdowns would be a few weeks, but actually in the UK...
Get In Touch