Blog
Check out our blogs below
Sunak’s Natural Happiness Manifesto
Prompted by months of low ratings, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a radical change of routes with a new manifesto based on the organic growth principles of Alan Heeks’ new book, Natural Happiness. Posing with his lectern beside a tree in St James’ Park,...
Green prescribing and Natural Happiness
Growing wellbeing from the roots I see green prescribing as one of the more hopeful innovations by the NHS in recent years. This blog explains briefly what it is, and shows how my Natural Happiness methods can contribute to it. NHS England’s website has a whole...
What others say about Natural Happiness
Feedback on the book, workshops and coaching Endorsements for the book Natural Happiness is inspiring and practical. Based on decades of hands-on experience, Alan Heeks entwines gardening strategies with mindful exercises that are proven to improve your...
Natural Happiness: Online Event | March 7
Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself This is a unique chance to hear Alan share the stories behind his new book, Natural Happiness: use organic gardening skills to cultivate yourself. He will describe how these methods have helped him and many others....
Natural Happiness: Online Event | March 20
Deepening the Roots of Resilience This event is hosted by the Association of Sustainability Practitioners (ASP) Alan Heeks shares some powerful insights from his new book, Natural Happiness, and from his research on raising community resilience. Compost your troubles!...
Natural Happiness book signing at North Books, Hay-on-Wye | March 22
Alan's new book, Natural Happiness: Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself will be published on 29 March. Get your copy of the book ahead of the launch at this event, where Alan will be sharing the stories behind Natural Happiness, reading short excerpts,...
Men’s Elderhood Retreat | May 10-12
A men's peer group This weekend offers a shared space to explore as a peer group how we harvest the fruits, enjoy the blessings and adjust to the downsides of getting older: a chance to look afresh and consider the future we'd like to help create. How can we serve as...
Natural Happiness: Use Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself | April 19-21
April 19-21, 2024 at Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, Stroud In these uncertain times, this workshop will help you deepen your roots and grow your resilience. With sessions in Hawkwood's gardens, you'll experience how organic skills like composting,...
Secrets of Natural Happiness: Mind Body Spirit Festival | May 26
Deepen your roots and blossom through the storms of midlife and beyond: cultivate your human nature with the skills that organic gardeners use. For example, organic systems compost waste to give energy for growth: learn how to compost negative feelings and stress as a...
Happiness in Gardening: Hay Festival | May 31
Growing plants, whether inside or outside, can foster feelings of happiness and bring people together. Community gardener and designer Tayshan Hayden-Smith and writer Alan Heeks discuss the importance of greenery of all kinds. Hayden-Smith’s Small Space...
The Roots of Wellbeing: Online Workshop | June 4
This is an opportunity to learn about the self-help approach developed by Alan Heeks and set out in his new book, Natural Happiness: use organic gardening skills to cultivate yourself. Alan will introduce the concept, offer a guided visualisation exercise, and also...
RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024 | July 3
Alan Heeks will discuss the approach set out in his new book, Natural Happiness: Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself. Facilitator: Alan Heeks Alan Heeks is a wellbeing expert and keen gardener with many years’ experience helping people to cultivate...
‘Deepening Your Roots’ Walk | September 8
Guided Walk around Talgarth, Brecon with special guest author Alan Heeks talking about 'Natural Happiness' An inner and outer exploration on foot from Talgarth, including magical woods and waterfalls, and Black Mountain College’s pioneering organic farm. Alan Heeks...
UK Health Radio podcast | Listen now
Alan Heeks joins Danielle Sax on her UK Health Radio show From Stress To Authentic Success. Episode title: How to work with natural processes to create your happiness and health Podcast now available to listen to or download direct from the UK Health Radio...
The Spiritual Forum | Watch now
Alan Heeks in interview with the Rev. Carol Saunders from The Spiritual Forum. Episode details Alan Heeks left his successful business career to start an organic farm from scratch. This bold transition led him to profound insights about cultivating human nature.🌱 In...
The Exploding Human podcast | Listen now
Alan joins Bob Nickman in this episode from The Exploding Human: Natural Happiness and the Nature of Nature. Episode details ALAN HEEKS is an inspiring guide to helping people cultivate their wellbeing through parallels with Nature. After a Harvard MBA and successful...
Spiritual Unity Today podcast | Listen now
Alan Heeks in conversation with Larry Bloomfield on US radio show Spiritual Unity Today on KXCR. Click here to listen to the podcast. KXCR's description of the show Join Larry Bloomfield, host of Spiritual Unity Today, to hear stories of hope, spiritual...
Seven Seeds Overview
How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? Are there ways to bounce back and thrive if life is getting you down? Natural Happiness uses skills from organic gardening and farming to help you cultivate your own wellbeing. The Seven Seeds...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 2: Natural Energy Sources
Do you find it’s getting harder to find the energy to get through the day? You’re not alone! Life and work really are getting more complex and demanding for most of us, so it’s no wonder if your energy feels depleted more often. One reason why this topic is so...
Natural Happiness Seed 3: Compost Your Troubles
Imagine that you can tap into a major new source of energy and insight, that’s already within you: it’s free, abundant, and just needs a bit of effort to process it. What’s more, you’ll be creating benefits out of problems that drain energy and pollute your inner...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 5: Cultivating Community
When I think about how we can all prepare better for the turbulent times ahead, raising the resilience of local communities comes up as a top priority: this is something we can all contribute to, without waiting on all the many policy steps which national government...
Natural Happiness Seed 6: Growing Through Climate Change
The climate crisis can easily feel overwhelming, bewildering and depressing. Human nature needs something to hope for, and that’s hard to find when the outlook appears bleak. We need to redefine what kind of hope is possible, and to keep managing our perception of...
Natural Happiness Seed 7: Natural Inspiration
The future outlook for all of us is turbulent. We’re going to need a quantum step up in our resilience, and that’s what this blog aims to offer you. I believe the fastest way to do this is by a deeper connection with inspiration, and what we might call higher...
Tailored Workshops and Coaching
Our Advocates team can deliver workshops in person or online, tailored to a wide range of outcomes.
The physiology of joy: how to feel safe
I believe it is stress and related anxious feelings which pull us away from joy, and I have learned a lot about the physiology of stress by co-leading resilience workshops for doctors alongside Professor David Peters, himself a doctor, and an expert in this field. I...
Elderhood: A Sacred, Earthy Calling?
Elderhood: A Sacred, Earthy Calling? A men's peer group: December 1-3 Llanthony Valley, Black Mountains, Wales We're living in a world of rising crisis and turmoil. We're growing older, we have some talents and resources, but limited time here. How do we use...
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...
Sunak’s Natural Happiness Manifesto
Prompted by months of low ratings, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a radical change of routes with a new manifesto based on the organic growth principles of Alan Heeks’ new book, Natural Happiness. Posing with his lectern beside a tree in St James’ Park,...
Green prescribing and Natural Happiness
Growing wellbeing from the roots I see green prescribing as one of the more hopeful innovations by the NHS in recent years. This blog explains briefly what it is, and shows how my Natural Happiness methods can contribute to it. NHS England’s website has a whole...
What others say about Natural Happiness
Feedback on the book, workshops and coaching Endorsements for the book Natural Happiness is inspiring and practical. Based on decades of hands-on experience, Alan Heeks entwines gardening strategies with mindful exercises that are proven to improve your...
Natural Happiness: Online Event | March 7
Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself This is a unique chance to hear Alan share the stories behind his new book, Natural Happiness: use organic gardening skills to cultivate yourself. He will describe how these methods have helped him and many others....
Natural Happiness: Online Event | March 20
Deepening the Roots of Resilience This event is hosted by the Association of Sustainability Practitioners (ASP) Alan Heeks shares some powerful insights from his new book, Natural Happiness, and from his research on raising community resilience. Compost your troubles!...
Natural Happiness book signing at North Books, Hay-on-Wye | March 22
Alan's new book, Natural Happiness: Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself will be published on 29 March. Get your copy of the book ahead of the launch at this event, where Alan will be sharing the stories behind Natural Happiness, reading short excerpts,...
Men’s Elderhood Retreat | May 10-12
A men's peer group This weekend offers a shared space to explore as a peer group how we harvest the fruits, enjoy the blessings and adjust to the downsides of getting older: a chance to look afresh and consider the future we'd like to help create. How can we serve as...
Natural Happiness: Use Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself | April 19-21
April 19-21, 2024 at Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, Stroud In these uncertain times, this workshop will help you deepen your roots and grow your resilience. With sessions in Hawkwood's gardens, you'll experience how organic skills like composting,...
Secrets of Natural Happiness: Mind Body Spirit Festival | May 26
Deepen your roots and blossom through the storms of midlife and beyond: cultivate your human nature with the skills that organic gardeners use. For example, organic systems compost waste to give energy for growth: learn how to compost negative feelings and stress as a...
Happiness in Gardening: Hay Festival | May 31
Growing plants, whether inside or outside, can foster feelings of happiness and bring people together. Community gardener and designer Tayshan Hayden-Smith and writer Alan Heeks discuss the importance of greenery of all kinds. Hayden-Smith’s Small Space...
The Roots of Wellbeing: Online Workshop | June 4
This is an opportunity to learn about the self-help approach developed by Alan Heeks and set out in his new book, Natural Happiness: use organic gardening skills to cultivate yourself. Alan will introduce the concept, offer a guided visualisation exercise, and also...
RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024 | July 3
Alan Heeks will discuss the approach set out in his new book, Natural Happiness: Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself. Facilitator: Alan Heeks Alan Heeks is a wellbeing expert and keen gardener with many years’ experience helping people to cultivate...
‘Deepening Your Roots’ Walk | September 8
Guided Walk around Talgarth, Brecon with special guest author Alan Heeks talking about 'Natural Happiness' An inner and outer exploration on foot from Talgarth, including magical woods and waterfalls, and Black Mountain College’s pioneering organic farm. Alan Heeks...
UK Health Radio podcast | Listen now
Alan Heeks joins Danielle Sax on her UK Health Radio show From Stress To Authentic Success. Episode title: How to work with natural processes to create your happiness and health Podcast now available to listen to or download direct from the UK Health Radio...
The Spiritual Forum | Watch now
Alan Heeks in interview with the Rev. Carol Saunders from The Spiritual Forum. Episode details Alan Heeks left his successful business career to start an organic farm from scratch. This bold transition led him to profound insights about cultivating human nature.🌱 In...
The Exploding Human podcast | Listen now
Alan joins Bob Nickman in this episode from The Exploding Human: Natural Happiness and the Nature of Nature. Episode details ALAN HEEKS is an inspiring guide to helping people cultivate their wellbeing through parallels with Nature. After a Harvard MBA and successful...
Spiritual Unity Today podcast | Listen now
Alan Heeks in conversation with Larry Bloomfield on US radio show Spiritual Unity Today on KXCR. Click here to listen to the podcast. KXCR's description of the show Join Larry Bloomfield, host of Spiritual Unity Today, to hear stories of hope, spiritual...
Seven Seeds Overview
How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? Are there ways to bounce back and thrive if life is getting you down? Natural Happiness uses skills from organic gardening and farming to help you cultivate your own wellbeing. The Seven Seeds...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 2: Natural Energy Sources
Do you find it’s getting harder to find the energy to get through the day? You’re not alone! Life and work really are getting more complex and demanding for most of us, so it’s no wonder if your energy feels depleted more often. One reason why this topic is so...
Natural Happiness Seed 3: Compost Your Troubles
Imagine that you can tap into a major new source of energy and insight, that’s already within you: it’s free, abundant, and just needs a bit of effort to process it. What’s more, you’ll be creating benefits out of problems that drain energy and pollute your inner...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 5: Cultivating Community
When I think about how we can all prepare better for the turbulent times ahead, raising the resilience of local communities comes up as a top priority: this is something we can all contribute to, without waiting on all the many policy steps which national government...
Natural Happiness Seed 6: Growing Through Climate Change
The climate crisis can easily feel overwhelming, bewildering and depressing. Human nature needs something to hope for, and that’s hard to find when the outlook appears bleak. We need to redefine what kind of hope is possible, and to keep managing our perception of...
Natural Happiness Seed 7: Natural Inspiration
The future outlook for all of us is turbulent. We’re going to need a quantum step up in our resilience, and that’s what this blog aims to offer you. I believe the fastest way to do this is by a deeper connection with inspiration, and what we might call higher...
Tailored Workshops and Coaching
Our Advocates team can deliver workshops in person or online, tailored to a wide range of outcomes.
The physiology of joy: how to feel safe
I believe it is stress and related anxious feelings which pull us away from joy, and I have learned a lot about the physiology of stress by co-leading resilience workshops for doctors alongside Professor David Peters, himself a doctor, and an expert in this field. I...
Elderhood: A Sacred, Earthy Calling?
Elderhood: A Sacred, Earthy Calling? A men's peer group: December 1-3 Llanthony Valley, Black Mountains, Wales We're living in a world of rising crisis and turmoil. We're growing older, we have some talents and resources, but limited time here. How do we use...
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...
Green prescribing and Natural Happiness
Growing wellbeing from the roots I see green prescribing as one of the more hopeful innovations by the NHS in recent years. This blog explains briefly what it is, and shows how my Natural Happiness methods can contribute to it. NHS England’s website has a whole...
Sunak’s Natural Happiness Manifesto
Prompted by months of low ratings, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a radical change of routes with a new manifesto based on the organic growth principles of Alan Heeks’ new book, Natural Happiness. Posing with his lectern beside a tree in St James’ Park,...
What others say about Natural Happiness
Feedback on the book, workshops and coaching Endorsements for the book Natural Happiness is inspiring and practical. Based on decades of hands-on experience, Alan Heeks entwines gardening strategies with mindful exercises that are proven to improve your...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 2: Natural Energy Sources
Do you find it’s getting harder to find the energy to get through the day? You’re not alone! Life and work really are getting more complex and demanding for most of us, so it’s no wonder if your energy feels depleted more often. One reason why this topic is so...
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...
Natural Happiness Seed 6: Growing Through Climate Change
The climate crisis can easily feel overwhelming, bewildering and depressing. Human nature needs something to hope for, and that’s hard to find when the outlook appears bleak. We need to redefine what kind of hope is possible, and to keep managing our perception of...
Natural Happiness Seed 7: Natural Inspiration
The future outlook for all of us is turbulent. We’re going to need a quantum step up in our resilience, and that’s what this blog aims to offer you. I believe the fastest way to do this is by a deeper connection with inspiration, and what we might call higher...
The physiology of joy: how to feel safe
I believe it is stress and related anxious feelings which pull us away from joy, and I have learned a lot about the physiology of stress by co-leading resilience workshops for doctors alongside Professor David Peters, himself a doctor, and an expert in this field. I...
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...
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...
Dreams against Despair: Thomas Berry and the power of myth
Dreams, in the sense of inspiring visions, and myths, in the sense of powerful beliefs, have a huge influence on our world. Think of Mandela and Gandhi: two lone figures whose dreams overturned a myth which upheld a powerful Establishment. Deep down, I feel a lot of...
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...
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...