Naomi Klein – Seeding Our Future

Right-wing chaos: control through fear

Naomi Klein’s 2018 book, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics, is the most lucid, convincing, and alarming account I’ve seen yet of what Donald Trump is really about, and much of it is relevant to the numerous other right-wing leaders gaining power in these chaotic times. She’s clearly right that Trump excels … 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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Front-line extreme: natural resilience for junior hospital doctors
Of all the front-line services we depend on, hospitals are among the most crucial, and a large hospital will have several hundred junior doctors. These are young men and women, from mid-twenties into thirties. They start right out of university, and the first two years are the Foundation phase. An amazing 30% of junior doctors drop out of their career during these two years, which is a huge loss of talent and money. I recently co-led a natural resilience workshop for Foundation Level junior doctors from a large London hospital, at Hazel Hill Wood. It was intense, demanding, and there was a lot of learning and fun for all of us. In my twenty plus years of leading workshops, I’ve not worked with this client group, or one like it. The vibe was how I’d imagine Spitfire pilots in World War Two: so young, so few, so bright, living constantly with life or death, and depended on by huge numbers of other people. We had planned a sort of alchemical process which proved broadly correct. We guessed that they would arrive very tired and stressed, and that getting them physically active in this beautiful wood was the best way to de-stress quickly. Early on, we did a half hour of mindful walking and movement/breath exercises. Soon after, we did an hour of conservation work, and its effects were greater than we expected. It provided surprisingly soothing for them to have a really simple physical task, whose ecological benefits they could readily understand. And deep conversations soon started as people worked together in small groups. The next activity wasn’t planned – it was requested by the doctors: playing hide and seek. I realised that physical games were a brilliantly functional way for them to de-stress quickly. Insights at the campfire A key part of the plan was a campfire after supper, and a chance to share and reflect on their stress and resilience. They plunged in deeply, and it was an illuminating conversation for all of us. To do this work, you need to be extremely bright and passionately committed, but the kind of daily challenges these doctors face need different talents. Here are some of their comments: “Staff teams change all the time – you don’t really know the people you’re working with, and I rarely feel recognised or appreciated.” “I was involved in a serious incident, where something went badly wrong. There’s a rigorous enquiry process, but no one ever asked how I felt, or offered me support.” “You are at the mercy of the consultants – they can easily bully you, and there’s no redress.” “I’d rather work anti-social hours, and in a very stressful department like A&E, if I feel appreciated by the consultant and I have some real responsibility.” After this deep sharing, the wine came out, and there was plenty of laughter as the conversation lightened. The work hard-play hard theme continued. On the following morning, we provided some more specific techniques to help them raise resilience in their daily work: the aim was to provide 5-minute processes they could do in the heat of the moment. We worked with three of the principles in my Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness model: At the campfire, we explored clean energy sources like appreciation and inspiration.In the dark wood, we looked at how to compost stress and negative feelings, for example by deep, connected breathing.By the pond, we considered what people can learn from the community qualities of an ecosystem, such as symbiosis and wild margins, and how these can help team working. We also did a constellations exercise, which made no rational sense beforehand, but provided a lot of insights. It’s a way of getting to intuitive and subconscious insights. Here are two comments: “We’re dealing with huge amounts of on-screen data, both at work and in our personal lives. We need to slow down so we can have meaningful contact with people” “Doctors are expected to show certainty for patients – we need to find better ways to handle uncertainty.” These young doctors were very articulate about the systemic problems that make their work and the whole NHS more depleting than it need to be. They were not cynical or despairing, but very frustrated. As one said, “the junior doctors’ pay dispute erased goodwill.” When I asked what else a highly-trained junior doctor could do, one explained that they were highly sought after in consultancy and business. They clearly have a huge capacity for handling complexity, stress and long hours. Three wishes for the NHS To describe all the issues we discussed would double the length of this blog. Instead, here are my three wishes for the NHS: Explicitly put the wellbeing of NHS staff above even that of patients. This follows the principle of ‘maintain the lifeboat’: if staff burnout and turnover keeps rising, patient care will suffer severely.Increase the funding! The NHS is very cost-efficient when you compare UK spend as a % of GDP with other countries.Whatever the budget, allocate a meaningful amount to trialling innovations to address the most burning issues. I’d hope that reducing the 30% loss rate of junior doctors would be one of these. Even a 0.5% innovation fund would be £0.6 billion. One of the pervasive problems of the NHS is what I’d call desiccation: you could also call it tickbox mentality, or one-dimensionality. With such a huge and crucial entity as the NHS, the pressure towards gesture politics and superficial responses is enormous. For example, the junior doctors are required to undertake a ‘quality improvement’ project, but as they explained, they have no meaningful time or support to do this. Other examples abound: politicians and managers can say, oh yes, we’re attending to this, but it has no real substance. Overall, it was incredibly satisfying to see that the combination of this magical wood and the processes we offered had enabled these doctors to renew, reflect, and learn some new approaches to resilience. Given the […]
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