Myth – Seeding Our Future

Dreams against Despair: Thomas Berry and the power of myth

Dreams, in the sense of inspiring visions, and myths, in the sense of powerful beliefs, have a huge influence on our world. Think of Mandela and Gandhi: two lone figures whose dreams overturned a myth which upheld a powerful Establishment. Deep down, I feel a lot of pain and despair for the state of our … 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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A Sufi View of Climate Change

I’ve been exploring Sufi spiritual teachings for over twenty years, and felt it might be useful to explain how these help me to live with and respond to the climate crisis. My sense is that a spiritual path and practices can help a lot in this process. So what do I mean by Sufi? It’s an elusive idea: there’s no creed or text to define it. Here’s one summary I like: a Sufi is one who takes a heart-centred approach, seeing the divine unity in all forms of life. I’ll share examples of how I put this into practice. I believe a change in consciousness is crucial to the transformations the climate crisis needs: seeing Nature as including all forms of life, including the human and divine. A key Sufi belief can help with this, summed up in an Arabic phrase: la illaha ill’allah. Which could be interpreted: there is no reality except divine unity, which is beyond our conceptions of it. Try a Wazifa practice Many Sufis use wazifas: typically a sound mantra which evokes an aspect or quality of divine unity. The sound of certain languages has particular power, and Arabic mantras are often used by Sufis. This sequence of four wazifas is one that I find especially effective in handling feelings of overwhelm around climate change, and seeing a bigger picture. If you want to try this, read the whole section, and give yourself some quiet space and clear time. The best way to work with wazifas is to speak to the sounds out loud, and repeat each one quite a few times, e.g. 33. The sound ya before each wazifa helps to call in or invoke the quality. These four wazifas are all named in one Sura or chapter of the Koran, 103, to help individuals and communities to find a sense of purpose and coherence in life. Ya haqq (pronounced hukk): starting where you’re at, recognising the truth of the situation, the ground you stand on. For climate change, this probably means letting in and feeling the alarming scale of the crisis. Ya sabur (pronounced sahbour): this invokes patience, stepping back to see the situation in perspective, and give time for insights and responses to evolve. A useful antidote to understandable panic. Ya iman (pronounced immahn): this wazifa is linguistically akin to the word amen used to affirm prayers. Both invoke trust, opening for support from divine power and wisdom, and also grounding, a reconnection with the support of the Earth. Ya salik (pronounced salleek): here, we’re opening to the greater good we can find in a situation, and in particular to how our own life purpose can flow through us to serve in this. In many Middle Eastern spiritual traditions, what we might call prayer took quite active and embodied forms. When I lead retreats using this sequence of wazifas, we often do so as a walking meditation, where we chant them as a group, and use hand movements to help us feel the full meaning of each one in the body. Transforming your viewpoint A feature of many Sufi teachings is to seek entirely different viewpoints to illuminate a situation. One of these is seeing all of Nature – trees, mountains, as well as animals – as having sentience and intelligence, a view shared by Thomas Berry and others. The climate crisis is getting ever more difficult to cope with by conventional thinking, so this is a good time to consider totally different viewpoints. Sufi poets like Rumi, Hafiz and Shabistari can help with this. An example is Rumi’s famous poem, A Chickpea Leaps. While life in general, as well as climate change, gets more challenging, I find that the fellowship and support of groups gets even more valuable. Sufi gatherings are part of this, and I like their inclusiveness: they are often open to people of any spiritual belief, and draw on practices from a range of traditions. If you’d like to know more about the Sufi order I’m part of, and events they offer, see www.ruhaniat.org.uk NOTE: The interpretations of the wazifas above are based on the work of Neil Douglas Klotz, including his book The Sufi Book of Life, which is a good introduction to the topic.
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