Deep Adaptation Blogs
Is Earth a Karmic Enterprise Zone?
An extra-terrestrial view of our perplexities When even slightly plausible explanations fail, it's time to try some which look highly off the wall, so give this one a test flight. It came to me in a dream while on holiday in the wilds of the Pennines. In my...
Exploring the Future, some more…
Why organic navigation is better than analytical prescription In recent years, I've spent quite a lot of my time exploring the future outlook: recently, I feel I'm getting some valuable insights, but I've also been pondering why I spend so much time on this. It feels...
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...
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...
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Amazingly, this book is an international bestseller. For me and others who have worked with UK woodlands for decades, it has felt like a benign backwater of our society, but may its time has come. The sign that this could be true is the superb recent BBC TV...
Why magical thinking threatens us all – and how to antidote it
What I mean by magical thinking is an utter disregard for truth and reality, the delusion that I can make facts just by saying them, thinking them into reality. A great example was Donald Trump telling officials that he could eliminate secret documents just by...
Deep Adaptation in local communities
Two of my current crumbs of comfort are a sense that many more people now recognise that we're in a crisis, and that I hear the need for adaptation being widely accepted. Whilst I used to get annoyed that newer crises were distracting from the climate emergency, I now...
Book blog: Fairy tales are true, by Claudio Tomaello
A doorway to the subconscious, spirit world This short, readable book opens a doorway to different ways to see everyday life, through the medium of fairy tales and fables. Claudio is passionate and persuasive about the power of these stories, perhaps overlooked...
Feeling our way without a map
Subtle discernment for confusing times Imagine you're in a dream where you're trying to drive somewhere. Your satnav goes off. You realise you don't have an old-fashioned paper map. There's no mobile signal, so Google is no use. As you look for road signs, you see...
The Work that Reconnects: a way to face the future
If you’re working with hazardous materials, you need good methods and equipment. The future really is hard to face: it can easily feel bleak and overwhelming. Many people feel pain and despair about the state of the world and the environment, and blank out to avoid...
Emergency resilience: why you need it
Learning from Boiled Frog syndrome Climate psychologists tell us that humans aren’t good at dealing with complex, diffuse threats whose timing is uncertain. It seems we’d be great at handling a woolly mammoth attack, and our evolution is way behind reality. If you...
Mining for hope in the quarry of gloom
There must be some kind of way outta hereSaid the joker to the thiefThere’s too much confusionI can’t get no relief In this time of big troubles, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And if you’re an anxious type, like me, you’ll always find plenty to unsettle you. Yet the...
Deep Adaptation and climate change: an introduction
Back in 2018, the sense of urgency about the climate crisis rose sharply, helped by several key voices, including Greta Thunberg, and Professor Jem Bendell. Jem uses the term Deep Adaptation as a focus for facing and adapting to the major climate and related...
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...
Community climate responses: co-creative insights
I’m writing this thinks piece in January 2022, to see what I’ve learned from two years’ work in my hometown, and to share my hopes for the year just starting. On this journey, I’ve had to dig deep in my co-creative toolkit, and add some new approaches. So here’s a...
