positive change – Seeding Our Future

An ET view of earth

The Only Planet of Choice: book blog Are the mysteries of life on earth explainable from other planets? Someone once said, when you try to understand a situation, start with the probable, move on to the unlikely, and if need be, look at the almost incredible. This book may feel to you as if it … 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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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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