Natural Happiness
Learn from nature to grow your wellbeing and resilience
Now available to buy, Alan’s new book, published March 2024.
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.
This unique book shows how you can use gardening methods such as composting, mulching, and crop rotation to cultivate human nature, too. A gardener applies skills like observation, patience and creativity — and you can adapt them to deal with daily stresses and big issues such as climate change.
Natural Happiness is a simple, practical guide that supports people in their personal lives, in their work, in their communities and in making sense of wider issues: it’s all in Alan’s new book, see more here.
The Natural Happiness Newsletter, every two months, will share useful resources, event info and fresh insights: sign up here.
Events
Open launch events:
April, date TBA: UK Health Radio in conversation with Danielle Sax
May 26: Mind Body Spirit Festival, London Olympia, 10.30-11.30
May 31: Hay Festival, 4pm
June 4: The Roots of Wellbeing Online Workshop 7.30-9pm
July 3: RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024, 12-12.30 and 4-5pm
September 8: ‘Deepening Your Roots’ Walk, 10am-2.30pm
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 offer ways to cultivate your wellbeing and resilience through parallels with organic gardening: for example, nourishing your roots, composting stress, natural energy sources.
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.
Resources
In this section of the website you’ll find a range of processes and resources I have created which can help you to grow your own natural happiness and resilience. These are explained and explored in the new book.
Featured Posts
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 organic gardening and farming, created by Alan Heeks. For an overview of all seven seeds, click here. In...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 4 – Shaping Uncertainty – The Co-Creative Way
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...
Newsletters
Natural Happiness sends out newsletters with interesting features and new updates on a range of subjects associated with gardening and wellbeing. Please sign up below.
Past Issues
Check out previous issues of the Natural Happiness Newsletter here:
Issue 60 – March/April 2024 – Book launch issue
Issue 59 – January/February 2024 – Growing through 2024 with Natural Happiness
Issue 58 – November 2023 – Joy and Resilience
Issue 57 – September 2023 – Add new dimensions to your outlook
Issue 56 – July 2023 – Exploring the Future – some more!
Issue 55 – May 2023 – Deepening with the Earth
Issue 54 – March 2023 – Seeing life differently
Issue 53 – January 2023 – Embracing the Future
Issue 52 – November 2022 – Reality vs. Magical Thinking
Issue 51 – September 2022 – Rooting for local communities
Issue 50 – July 2022 – Exploring future hopes
Issue 49 – May 2022 – Discernment or distraction?
Issue 48 – March 2022 – Navigation aids for a world beyond normal
Issue 47 – January 2022 – Natural Happiness Seed 4: Co-creativity