Natural Happiness Blogs
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...
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...