Natural Happiness
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: it’s all in Alan’s new book, see more here.
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, Natural Happiness: Use organic gardening skills to cultivate yourself, 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
Here are some resources that may help you:
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
The Seven Seeds Ecosystem Model: Cultivating resilience and sustainability for people and organisations
The Seven Seeds is a unique approach using parallels with cultivated ecosystems to help individuals, teams and organisations to grow their resilience and their sustainability for both human and environmental resources. Alan Heeks has evolved this model through many...
Deepening with the Earth
How to nourish yourself with Nature connection Aiding our wellbeing through Nature contact has become a truism, but as life keeps getting more uncertain and demanding, we truly need to deepen with the Earth, for both emotional and physical health. That's what this...
Seeing life differently
Raise your spirits by changing your view Can I invite you to take a couple of minutes, and ask what gives you your sense of reality? Maybe your physical surroundings, other people, and news media and social media. But remember that most of us seek out others who share...
Losing control – the nomad way of living
A different approach to future happiness One of my big life-changing experiences was co-leading a dozen retreats in the Tunisian Sahara with Bedouin guides. They had grown up as true nomads, moving around the desert with their camels and goats, but now living mostly...
Book blog: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler
Communication insights from an octopus If you’d like to appreciate the upsides of present times through a book about a dysfunctional future, this novel could suit you: but that’s only half its story. Without being at all didactic, Ray Nayler draws us into a deep...
Embracing the future – plenty we can do! Insights from new Future Risks report
Insights from new Future Risks report It’s hard to make sense of the future outlook: there are so many issues, risks and trends which could worry us, at every scale from local to global. And we have to discern real news from fake news, objective facts from mountains...
Faith, hope and clarity… in uncertain times
These days, it's easy to be worried, but it takes some skill and conscious choice to stay positive. That's what this blog hopes to help with... Your top worry may be personal, national or global: in one sense, it's all the same problem, the shift from an era of...
How devotional movement and chants can help us with climate distress
One of the reactions I bring to my challenges is a search for understanding, and systemic solutions. In recent years, I've reached the painful conclusion that the climate crisis is too large, complex and alarming to be understood. Systemic solutions are absolutely...
How adaptive networks can help future resilience
There’s a widespread view that strengthening local communities will be crucial in the years ahead, to help us all to live with increasing levels of disruption, e.g. to food supplies, utilities, weather patterns, and probably social cohesion. During a recent pilgrimage...
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