AI – Seeding Our Future

Carbots, carebots, therabots and more…

Coming to your life soon Whilst robots and artificial intelligence are just one of a swathe of major technologies which will impact our lives in the next 10 years, I’ve chosen to focus on them because they are likely to be one of the most visible and unavoidable big changes on the technology front. Here … Read more

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: cultivate your resilience with the Gardener’s Way

July 9-11 2021: at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury With Alan Heeks, Jane Sanders and Marcos Frangos How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? This workshop shows you how: to cultivate yourself like a garden, and grow your own wellbeing by learning from natural ecosystems, using Alan’s unique Natural Happiness model. In this workshop we’ll explore these questions, with the natural ecosystem of this magical wood as our guide. Our methods will include: nourishing our roots; composting problems; using co-creative skills to work with nature; growing 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. This will be a residential group at Hazel Hill Wood: if Covid restrictions prevent this, it will be run with a series of online sessions with personal time in between. We will explore how to grow resilience for individuals and 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 late 2021. 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: £220, concessions £180. We will share cooking and other community tasks. To secure a place, we will need a deposit of £40, £30 for concessions: if, nearer the time we have to run this as an event online event, your deposit will cover the cost of this, or you can receive a full refund. 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. See more at www.hazelhill.org.uk For bookings and enquiries: Please contact Carol Nourse via email on: naturalhappinesscontact@gmail.com
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To raise your wellbeing, learn from extremes
Insights from a Woodland Resilience Immersion for GP’s This is embarrassing for me to admit as a resilience expert, but I have been struggling to sustain my own wellbeing and morale in recent months. The combination of huge, apparently insoluble problems on the climate change and political fronts has really ground me down. However, I came back from co-leading a resilience workshop at Hazel Hill Wood for GP’s feeling quite perked up. My mother’s adage, “there’s always someone worse off than you,” is certainly true of GP’s. Figuring out what could help them with such ongoing, systemic stress was a challenge, but I learned a lot for myself. The basic problem for GP’s is there for all of us to see, but few of us look. A ‘normal’ session for a GP is four hours, during which they’re expected to see a new patient every ten minutes. My main co-leader for these groups is Emeritus Professor David Peters, who has practisedas a doctor for over forty years, and is an expert on the neurophysiology of medical work. As he eloquently explained to us, “humans are able to find empathy for a few strangers, but not for twenty-four sick patients coming at you every ten minutes”. It’s clear that something will have to give. David described how, somewhere during a four-hour session the sympathetic nervous system will be overwhelmed and exhausted, and the parasympathetic will take over. David explained, “at that stage you’ll get stupid and unfriendly, and you won’t have the awareness to know it.” This helps explain why the burnout rate among GP’s is so high, and why their depression rate is three times the UK average. So what can help? We offered a range of interventions that need only take a few minutes, recognisingthis is as much as is realistic. David offered a simple breathing exercise. We talked about mindfulness and simple body awareness. I took the group into the wood, invited them to lean against a tree to relax, and to remember that tree as a cue in the workplace. The doctors also liked a very brief centering meditation, which could help with daily aggravations in a few minutes. This is the Treeheart Process, now on my website. In essence, this is another way of using the analogy with trees as a model of resilience. It invites you to root yourself in the reality of your situation, to stand patiently like a tree trunk to observe it, and then to find trust that can branch out into a fruitful outcome. We have run three resilience immersions for hospital doctors at Hazel Hill Wood, but this was the first for GP’s, and the contrast is intriguing. For GP’s, isolation is a big issue: they can easily work all day without talking to a colleague. And they often have to diagnose from limited data, whereas hospitals have a great array of test equipment. Another process which clearly helped reduce stress was some circle time: a chance to share issues, and get support and insights. My work with GP’s and hospital doctors has shown how hard it is for them to find this: in their culture, it’s a sign of weakness to talk like this to colleagues, and they often rule out sharing with family or friends, because “non-medics wouldn’t understand”. But all of us need this kind of support. What’s very evident for GP’s is that they need to choose to interrupt the inherent exhaustion of their sessions, for a few minutes, probably every 60-90 minutes. Doing this helps not only their own wellbeing, but their ability to deliver patient care effectively and empathetically. We also looked at more systemic issues. The GP’s liked my ‘roots and fruits’ analogy: if you’re cultivating a fruit tree, you have to balance resources and outputs. To do so, you either need to nourish the roots more, or prune back on the branches. Some of our GP’s had already found ingenious ways to do this. Several worked only part-time as GP’s, alongside less exhausting roles. One told her practice to keep paying her for ten minutes per patient, but actually booked them all in on fifteen-minute slots. The stress level on GP’s is obviously outrageous. For most of us, it’s far less obvious, but I believe we’re all having to live with an ongoing and rising overload of stress and uncertainty. The key lesson I learned for myself from the GP’s was that I too need to intervene, consciously and very frequently, to reduce my stress levels. And that’s the insight I offer you. For more information on resilience programmesat Hazel Hill Wood for healthcare professionals see https://www.hazelhill.org.uk/woodland-resilience-immersions/
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