Guest Blogs – Seeding Our Future

Tamarisk farm, Haypenny Market Garden and Edible Gardens at St Mary’s Primary

by Candida Dunford Wood and Rosalind Reynolds-Grey Tamarisk farm is polishing barley and experiment with millet Adam Simon says ‘It’s all about increasing resilience. The more we have support from the local community, the more we can experiment with new crops that are suitable to a changing climate.” Just as farmers need to be adaptable … Read more

Emerging from emergency

Hopes, joys, skills, support for life beyond lockdown Saturday July 17: 2-5pm, BridportWith Alan Heeks and John Harley In recent weeks, we’ve had a big loosening of lockdown, with hopefully more to come soon : so how will we use our new freedom? This workshop offers a hopeful, supportive space for us to explore: harvesting what we’ve learned, and forming a vision of the life we’d like now, as individuals and in our community. Our afternoon will include processes for exploration, sharing time, skills tips, and a simple ritual to help each of us step into the future. The covid pandemic has probably brought some blessings as well as setbacks for all of us. The outlook ahead is uncertain in many ways, but is also full of opportunity. Right now is a unique chance to learn from lockdown, and grow from it. Leaders Alan Heeks has been helping individuals and communities with resilience and wellbeing for many years. In Bridport, he started the cohousing project, and the Bridport Food Matters initiative on food security. John Harley is a facilitator, drama therapist and Unitarian minister who is passionate about creative and holistic ways to engage with the climate crisis and the current pandemic. Venue: The Yellow Room, Chapel in the Garden, East Street, Bridport. This is a large room which we’ll keep well ventilated. We’ll discuss any other covid-related guidelines at the start of the group. Cost: £10, concessions £8. Bookings and enquiries: Contact Alan on data@workingvision.com or 07976 602787.
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Woodland Resilience Immersion Retreat For Doctors

Nature-based ways to resource yourself and your practice Tuesday 20th July at 5pm until Thursday 22nd July at 5pmSingle accommodation. Vegetarian food locally sourced where possible. Total £275 The impact of prolonged overload, COVID working and the stress of facing ever-rising demands with shrinking resources, is calling us to respond creatively. This Woodland Resilience Immersion will offer you some insights and skills, and different ways for raising resilience and nourishing wellbeing. In 2018, Westminster Centre for Resilience recognised that health professionals need something more than the typical half-day resilience session in an urban training room. Hazel Hill Wood is an off-grid conference centre set in a 70-acre wood near Salisbury. Hazel Hill Trust and Westminster Centre for Resilience have jointly developed a woodland retreat programme. We have many years’ experience of delivering nature-based resilience programmes for front-line services. The next two-night, 48-hour residential Woodland Immersion will offer a unique combination of our teams’ expertise. There is growing evidence for the benefits of Nature contact in offsetting high levels of stress, ‘Directed Attention Fatigue’, information overload, and excessive ‘screen time’. The pilot programmes at Hazel Hill – evaluated by Westminster Centre for Resilience – showed statistically significant impacts. There is a brief summary below. Find peace in a beautiful 70-acre woodland – healing/nourishing in its own rightTry a range of ‘forest bathing’ and mindfulness techniquesExplore what nature’s cycles can teach us about our resilience as human ecosystemsTime to experience some movement, including some brief practical conservation workTo feel nourished by being part of a transitory community of shared experienceApplying the neurophysiology of the recovery responseCampfire circles: personal/professional stories of living in turbulent timesTime for resting and to share good food FACILITATORS David Peters worked for many years as a GP, and since 2000 in a range of professional and research roles in the NHS . He co founded and directed the Westminster Centre for Resilience (WCR), where he is now Emeritus Professor. https://www.londonfirst.co.uk/newspublications/blog/what-a-university-can-do-resilience-and-leadership-in-challenging-timeshttps://www.westminster.ac.uk/news/westminster-centre-for-resilience-in-conversation-with-michel-van-der-bel-of-microsoft Marcos Frangos has many years’ experience as a person-centred counsellor, and in groups working with ecosystems as a model for human resilience: http://www.wellspringchange.com For information please email David Peters. Link to Nourishing the Frontline Resilience: Intensive Preliminary Evaluation
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Grow your own Happiness

60-90-minute online workshop Cultivate your wellbeing with gardening skills! Available for group bookingsWith Alan Heeks In these stormy times, we need new skills to stay happy. A cultivated ecosystem, like a garden, is a role model for human nature: this workshop shows how gardening methods can help you grow your own happiness and deepen the roots of your resilience. For example: Mulching and pruning to nourish your rootsComposting stress as a source of energyUse gardening skills like observation and creativityFind new ways to adapt to the climate crisisDraw inspiration from Nature to guide you in uncertainty Alan Heeks has over 25 years of experience exploring Natural Happiness with groups. It grows from creating a 130-acre organic farm and education centre at Magdalen Farm in West Dorset, and from gardening with his wife at home. In this online workshop, Alan will describe the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, and participants will have a chance to try some of them out. Alan is happy to take bookings for this event from environmental, community and other groups, at a time of their choosing for a moderate fee by negotiation. CONTACT LINK
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NATURAL HAPPINESS:

Deepen your roots, nourish your fruits with the Gardener’s Way July 9-11 2021: at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury With Alan Heeks, Jane Sanders and Marcos Frangos As restrictions ease, we’re facing new freedom and possibilities. How do we stay steady and make fruitful choices, serving ourselves and the bigger picture? This weekend is a wonderful chance to explore these questions, in a magical wood and a supportive group, using Alan’s unique Natural Happiness approach to learning from ecosystems. This workshop is designed to help us all find clarity, stay centred, and see how we can grow and contribute in these exciting and worrying times. Let’s remember the hopes of shaping a better future after the pandemic! Our methods will include: nourishing our roots; composting challenges; using co-creative skills to handle uncertainties; cultivating our inspiration; and ecosystem insights about community. Along with workshop sessions, there will be solo times in the wood, plus good food, campfires and songs to nourish us. We will explore how to cultivate wellbeing and resilience for ourselves and our communities, especially in response to the climate crisis and the related pandemic. If you are interested in using this model in your professional work with individuals or groups, Alan will be happy to offer you advice and support: the content of this workshop relates to his fourth book, which is planned for publication in 2022. See more at www.naturalhappiness.net/books. Alan Heeks has been exploring resilience with people and nature for many years, and has led many groups on this theme, drawing on experience of resilient natural systems from creating an organic farm and setting up Hazel Hill. Jane Sanders has over 25 years’ experience in working with a mindfulness-based approach to wellbeing with groups and individuals, and has also incorporated deep ecology, ecopsychology and the wisdom of natural systems into her work in many different settings, including numerous groups at Hazel Hill Wood. Marcos Frangos is widely experienced in group facilitation, coaching, counselling and constellations work. He was General Manager of Hazel Hill Wood for 5 years, and has co-led many groups there with Jane and Alan. Cost: including food and accommodation: £240 per person, concessions £190: this includes a single bedroom. If two friends or family members share a bedroom, the cost is £220 per person. We will share cooking and other community tasks. To secure a place, we will need a deposit of £40, £30 for concessions: in the unlikely event that covid rules prevent us running the group, you will receive a full refund. Timings: from 4pm on Friday afternoon, finishing by 2pm, after lunch on Sunday. Covid precautions: although all Covid restrictions will hopefully be lifted by July, we are planning a number of precautionary measures for this group. These include: option of single bedrooms for everyone; sessions run outdoors where possible, and with plenty of ventilation when indoors; scope to maintain 1-metre distancing if desired. We will agree together at the start of the group guidelines we’re all easy with. Hazel Hill: is a magical 70-acre conservation woodland and retreat centre, 7 miles from Salisbury. It has simple, yet beautifully crafted off-grid wooden buildings with lovely indoor and outdoor group spaces, basic accommodation in bedrooms and sleeping lofts (or camping), good hot showers and compost loos. Please note there are deer ticks at the wood which can carry Lyme disease: we will brief you on precautions in the joining instructions. See more about the wood at www.hazelhill.org.uk. For bookings and enquiries: Please contact Carol Nourse via email on naturalhappinessoffice@gmail.com
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Book Blog: Your Brain on Nature

By Eva Selhub and Alan Logan This is an important and exciting book in my view, as it gives extensive research validation for the natural happiness approach, and the aims of Hazel Hill Wood as a natural learning centre. This will be a longer blog than most, because I’d like to highlight the main insights from the book. This book was first published in 2012, and could not have been written even ten years earlier. It’s only very recently that research is emerging about the effects on our brains and bodies of the much longer time many people spend in screen world – smartphones, computers, televisions etc. Good research on the benefits of time in nature is also surprisingly recent. The authors are both doctors, who teach at Harvard Medical School, so their views have some authority. Your Brain on Nature offers extensive research support for the many benefits of time in nature, including stress reduction, physical health and creativity. Forests are a particularly positive natural setting, and the book quotes research from Japan on the benefits of Shinrin Yoku, or forest bathing. One of the biggest new stresses most people face is massively increased info consumption via screens. This is happening both in the workplace and in leisure time. Americans now consume about 12 hours of information per day from screen sources, and since 1980, info consumption which is not work-related has increased 350%. Their exposition of the problems this is causing is fascinating and disturbing. In effect, most people are now living pretty continually with information overload, and physiological over-stimulation. They point out that heavy internet users score low on emotional intelligence, and that general levels of empathic concern have halved in the past 30 years. This links to greater self-absorption: “Recent studies have documented significant increases in narcissism among young adults, with 89% more students answering almost all personality questions in a narcissistic direction in 2009 compared with 1994. Users with the highest scores on narcissistic personality tests are the most frequent daily visitors to Facebook.” Directed Attention Fatigue describes the mental fatigue and stress which arise from a sustained effort of giving our attention to a task or situation. Now imagine how often your attention is distracted by new information from text messages, emails and so on. The problems of DAF have got far worse in recent years. One antidote to this is more experiences of involuntary attention where there is a degree of fascination in the situation, which is just what nature can provide. If you suspected that screen world is addictive, this book confirms it: “We are wired to crave information – big time… The brain… uses dopamine to reward information seeking.” However, the major good news of this book is that nature contact is an effective antidote to the problems arising from screen world. Research shows that a key aspect of nature experiences is that they have “intrinsic fascination”, hence they are an effective counterbalance to many modern stresses. Time in nature actually induces positive feelings, which can outweigh stress and anxiety. Chapter 7 explores some specific kinds of nature exposure. Horticultural therapy, and gardening in general, can help wellbeing, motivation, self-esteem, and depression. Gardens in schools have clear benefits on learning ability, social skills and practical problem solving. Longer nature immersion programmes, like wilderness treks, can clearly have deep benefits, especially if they are combined with mindfulness or similar methods. One of the fascinating parts of this book is its exploration of ‘synthetic nature’. It’s clear that man-made devices like ionisers, digital images of nature, and recordings of birdsong do have health benefits, but substantially less than the real world of nature. The authors paint a poignant picture of a society where increasing numbers of people don’t have real experiences with nature, and think that synthetic nature is all there is to it. It is hard for these people to realise and feel for what is being lost in human degradation of the natural world. Many thinkers, such as Thomas Berry, believe that deep empathy with nature is the best way to get human behaviour to change and nourish the planet and this book supports that view. It’s also clear that the ways nature is presented in screen world are not helping: “A study… indicates that the highly selective presentation of nature scenes by the commercial media and simulated nature experiences involving scenes highly rated for beauty… cause a decline in support for the… preservation of local natural areas. Google media content is shaping… children’s brains with a bias toward the exotic animals (the giant panda, for instance) and away from the more important aspects of local biodiversity.” This is an important, helpful, practical book. Buy it for yourself, give it to your friends for Christmas!
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