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 TBA

Alan Heeks will join Danielle Sax on her UK Health Radio show From Stress To Authentic Success.  Further details to follow. Date and time: April, TBA Tune in to: UK Health Radio

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...

Events

Open launch events:

April, date TBA: UK Health Radio in conversation with Danielle Sax
May 26: Mind Body Spirit Festival, London Olympia, 10.30-11.30
May 31: Hay Festival, 4pm
June 4: The Roots of Wellbeing Online Workshop 7.30-9pm
July 3: RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024, 12-12.30 and 4-5pm
September 8: ‘Deepening Your Roots’ Walk, 10am-2.30pm

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.

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...

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...

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...

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