Natural Happiness Blogs

Seeing life differently

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...

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Losing control – the nomad way of living

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...

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Deep Adaptation in local communities

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...

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Feeling our way without a map

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...

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Emergency resilience: why you need it

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...

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Mining for hope in the quarry of gloom

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...

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Could a pilgrimage renew you?

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...

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Discerning at the end of life

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...

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Making sense of the covid times

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...

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Navigation aids for a world beyond normal

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...

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2022 Climate Outlook: pray for miracles

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...

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The Book of Joy: Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu

The Book of Joy: Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu

Lasting Happiness in a Changing World   This deep and delightful book, published in 2017, became an immediate best-seller worldwide. The wisdom of these two great men in their eighties is surprisingly fresh and practical, and relevant for all of us in handling daily...

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Co-creativity – dancing with problems

Co-creativity – dancing with problems

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...

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Teach your children well

Teach your children well

Teach your children well What do younger generations need to learn? Do you ever wonder how we can help to prepare young people for the future they face, and whether what they learn at school really helps this? These questions become more acute as the climate crisis...

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Digging into Regenerative Agriculture

Digging into Regenerative Agriculture

Digging into Regenerative Agriculture A model of de-intensification for humans too! Ever since I co-founded an organic farm in 1990, I've tried to stay aware of trends in sustainable farming. The latest is regenerative agriculture: there's a lot of hype and froth...

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An introduction to Soul Resilience

An introduction to Soul Resilience

If you hope to thrive and grow through your life, not just cope and survive, how will you do this in the stormier times we can see ahead of us? It needs a quantum step up in resilience, and that’s what Soul Resilience could offer you. Exploring the soul’s journey is...

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Climate alarm? Learning to live with it

Climate alarm? Learning to live with it

The IPCC report this week on the climate crisis has left me alarmed and unsettled, maybe you too. I’m writing this blog for myself as much as anyone, as part of my long-running search for ways to live with this. There are plenty of good processes out there, and many...

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Alan Heeks

Alan Heeks

Alan was born in 1948, went to a grammar school in Reading, and studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University 1966-69. He comments “Those three years were an intense awakening after a pretty lousy adolescence. The music and politics of the time are still for me deeply entwined with the beauty of the city and with my love for poetry and literature, from the Anglo-Saxons through Shakespeare to George Elliot.”

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