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
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...
Discerning at the end of life
Discerning at the end of life Guest blog from Palden Jenkins Alan Heeks writes: Palden is an old friend, who plays a Merlin-like role in my life, popping up periodically with cryptic insights. He’s a deep thinker out of the box, a seer and astrologer, who usually...
Making sense of the covid times
I'm writing this in April 2022: we're into the third year of the covid time, and over 70% of us in the UK have had covid at least once. This is the biggest global pandemic since 1918… so what can we learn from it? Probably all of us have had many conversations where...
Climate distress: trauma and Nature immersion
I'm a big fan of Bob Doppelt's book, Transformational Resilience, which sees individual and collective trauma as one of the biggest, most pervasive issues of our times. Doppelt defines trauma as "an experience (that) seriously undermines or shatters at least some, if...
Beauty, outrage, shared humanity: all in Trafalgar Square
I've just had a rare visit to London, and one of my treats was a classical music concert in St Martin in the Fields, the beautiful old church on Trafalgar Square. Right across the road, in the big central area, was a vigil and protest for Ukraine, which is happening...
Transformation goaded by crises: Palden Jenkins
A bigger view of our possible future… Alan Heeks writes: Palden is an old friend, who plays a Merlin-like role in my life, popping up periodically with cryptic insights. He’s a deep thinker out of the box, a seer and astrologer, who usually offers a radically...
Book blog: Navigating the Coming Chaos, by Carolyn Baker
A handbook for inner transition Carolyn Baker is an American psychotherapist who has been deeply involved in Transition groups in the US for many years. This book is a valuable guide to spiritual and emotional resilience as stability erodes around us. She sees the...
Navigation aids for a world beyond normal
In the past two years, the world has been rocked by three huge events: covid, the rapid acceleration of the climate crisis, and now by Ukraine. Most of us did not see any of this coming: a few people did, and the ones I know are telling us to brace for more major...
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...
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