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.

Introducing Natural Happiness

Start sowing the seeds to cultivate your very own, organically grown, Natural Happiness

 

Tailored Workshops and Coaching

from the Natural Happiness Advocates

 

How to compost your troubles!

One of the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness

 

Natural Happiness: Use Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself

April 19-21, 2024 at Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, Stroud

 

UK Health Radio | April 11

Alan Heeks will join Danielle Sax on her UK Health Radio show From Stress To Authentic Success.  Further details to follow. Timings: from 9-9.30am, April 11. Tune in to: UK Health Radio

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Events

Open launch events:

April 11: UK Health Radio, 9am
April 19-21: Stroud, residential
May 26: Mind Body Spirit Festival, London Olympia, 10.30-11.30
May 31: Hay Festival, 4pm
June 4: Online 7.30-9pm

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.

The Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness

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...

Resource Toolkit: Personal Energy Audit

This can be a powerful process to help you understand your sources and uses of physical, emotional, mental and inspirational energy. Gardeners and farmers manage the energy mix for their land, and you can do this for your personal ecosystem.   Asking yourself “How’s...

Cultivation Cycle checklists

For gardens and farms, every stage of the cultivation cycle and all four seasons are important.  This holds true for people’s work and life generally, but we often over-focus on some stages of the cycle, and neglect others.  This quick checklist will help you see how...

Composting: the upsides of your downsides

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...

The Diamond Process: drawing on both sides of the brain

As we try to handle ever more complexity and uncertainty in our lives, co-creative skills are essential. Co-creativity is about both-and, combining action and reflection, balancing your needs and aims with the realities of the situation and other people in it. One way...

Mapping your wild margins

This matrix can help you recognise and value wild margins in yourself, or you could use it for a group such as a work team. Start by listing a few activities, skills, interests which may seem marginal and unproductive. Then explore how they could help you, and how you...

Self-help Process: Circle of Voices

This is a method I’ve evolved for integrating multiple viewpoints: see Chapter 4 for a fuller introduction. Before you do this process, read this briefing thoroughly, and get clear on basic decisions such as aim, location, and who’s involved.  Set aside more time than...

Community insights from ecosystems

Community insights from ecosystems Cultivated ecosystems shape natural processes to achieve outputs for us humans: we can learn a lot from the community aspects of Nature. Community on the farm Wild margins: This is one of my favourite principles in organic systems....

The Hero’s Journey: an archetypal growth map

The five stages of positive change It was the American anthropologist Joseph Campbell who coined the term hero’s journey to chart the archetypal stages of change which he identified through many years of research. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he...

Featured Posts

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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