active hope – Seeding Our Future

Book Review: Active Hope by Macy and Johnstone

An excellent guide to personal resilience I have taken part in workshops led by both Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, and regard them as two of the best teachers on personal resilience in a full sense of the phrase. Working in depth with this book could be a good start to exploring super-resilience. This book … 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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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 ecosystem. This is what composting offers you. The ancient alchemists sought to turn base matter into gold. Composting in gardens and farms achieves this. It starts with rubbish, animal crap, rotting vegetable matter, even weeds. All this “waste”, useless in these forms, ends up as humus, highly fertile, rich in biological activity, able to renew the earth’s vitality. Recycling your waste gives your garden a free source of energy which raises the vitality and resilience of your soil, and avoids the pollution and depletion caused by artificial fertiliser. Physical composting takes several months – but the human equivalent can happen in minutes, days or weeks. Plant and animal waste usually looks bad, and smells worse. Yet it’s a major supply of natural energy, if only we can change its form. And the same is true of human energy waste: composting this is a vital element of super-resilience. Human Energy Waste This may be a new idea for you, and it’s an example of how the natural happiness approach can help you see your life differently, and discover new resources. By human energy waste, I don’t mean car exhaust fumes or old plastic cups: I mean personal energy that’s stuck or stagnant in a negative form. Here are some examples: Physical: stress and toxins that build up in your body, due to anxiety, unhealthy food and drink, etc.Emotional: negative feelings like anger or depression, and unresolved conflicts.Mental: habitual worrying, going round in circles in your mind, about big issues or everyday ones.Inspirational: a sense of hopelessness or pointlessness about aspects of your own life and work, or the state of the world. Most of us carry a lot of negative energy, stuck in our ecosystem. The first two steps are starting to notice it, and having faith that you can compost at least some of this into a source of positive energy. Five Tips for Good Composting in Practice There are several methods of composting. In this chapter, I’m referring to hot aerobic composting, because it offers the best parallel for the human system. This summary of the main principles of hot aerobic composting shows how they can apply to human energy waste. To get the benefit of the composting process, waste materials have to be gathered, sorted, and brought together. This is an investment of labour, and when you’re dealing with smelly waste it may not be very pleasant! In the same way, your first step is to identify and gather some of the waste in your life and work. This requires patience, good observation, and resilience. Your waste may include difficult feelings and festering situations that smell nasty, and you might rather bury them. 1. Gathering your rubbish You need to see where it has been buried, suppressed or thrown out. Start with physical waste, reviewing tensions and health issues. Then consider mental waste: insoluble problems, unresolved questions. Why did that friendship or that project fail? Facing such questions reveals their emotional content: many issues that may seem quite rational also involve our feelings. Observe your feelings as clearly as you can: this is part of the collection stage. Next, gather the emotional waste, identifying negative feelings and where you feel stressed. Go into this, identify the sources, such as particular situations or relationships. Keep breathing as you do this, aerating the compost. Explore any negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety, uncertainty, anger. Think of these waste feelings as a flow of energy that is stuck, and see what outcome would unblock them. Possibly you are angry because someone has not acknowledged you, or fearful because you haven’t faced the implications of a problem situation. Negative inspirational energy can be the most depleting and difficult to face. A sense of pointlessness is like a major pollution problem: pervasive and hard to clear. Use the parallel with air pollution: it can arise from one main source like a dirty factory, or from a diffuse problem like road traffic. Either way, a systemic change is probably needed: a switch to clean energy sources and processes, and more recycling. In counselling it is often said that expressing a problem is already half way to resolving it. Gathering and identifying your waste issues is a significant step in the recycling process. And avoid judging yourself or the issue as far as possible. 2. Sorting and Heaping If you’ve done your gathering thoroughly, by now you may be feeling rather daunted and overwhelmed. The sorting stage should help. In garden composting, you don’t put all waste on the heap: some stuff is hard to break down, or simply unsuitable. Especially when you’re starting on human energy composting, pace yourself, and don’t tackle the big issues too soon. Build up your skills and confidence by starting on smaller, easier issues, and getting some early wins. Typically physical and mental issues are easier to compost than emotional or inspirational ones, and work or practical problems may be easier than family and community issues. In human composting, some issues may be so big that you need professional help: for example a marriage breakup, or a life-threatening illness. Be realistic about the issues you can tackle yourself. You build your compost heap by facing your waste issues fully and deeply. If this leaves you feeling overwhelmed or despairing, just allow the feeling, observe it, and don’t deny it or judge it. Keep your sense of purpose and perspective: remember that you are more than your feelings. Adapt the Buddhist mantra: “I feel fearful, but I am not my fear.” And ensure that you have support available to you. 3. Air Supply A plentiful supply of air is essential to fuel the biological activity in the hot aerobic composting […]
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