Resources
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Resource Toolkit for Natural Happiness Book
Resource Toolkit: Conflict Resolution Process
Many challenges involve conflict. This process is one I’ve used often myself, and have taught in training groups. You can use the gist in minor conflict, and the full process in major ones. Here we move on to human skills which can help you to compost difficult...
Resource Toolkit: Community Mapping Process
The four-stage approach I’ve set out below may look elaborate, and you could go through it more informally. Communities of various kinds are likely to become very important for all of us in the uncertain years ahead: the benefit of a thorough review is getting clarity...
Resource Toolkit: Embodiment, sound and movement
As you can imagine, these topics are hard to cover in a book. Many approaches of this kind are best experienced in sessions with a teacher, or at minimum from their videos. I’ve learned most in this area from Neil Douglas-Klotz: you’ll find a range of video and audio...
Resource Toolkit: Natural Communication
Natural Communication provides the skills to express yourself, hear others, have a fruitful conversation. These methods are part of my overall Natural Happiness model using gardening analogies. All this is closer to gardening than you might think: both need a dynamic...
Other useful resources and processes
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...
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Past Issues
Check out previous issues of the Natural Happiness Newsletter here.
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