The Only Planet of Choice – 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

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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Growing community from the roots: how Future Conversations helps
There are shedloads of good processes and theories about raising community resilience: applying them in practice is harder, especially in disadvantaged communities struggling with everyday needs. Future Conversations started as an unproven idea in Summer 2018: a series of eight facilitated discussions for 14-20 members of one community. We had material we wanted to offer: including some basic communication and group skills, and ways to face and respond to the climate crisis. Through contacts with a few community organisers, we took this idea to several disadvantaged communities, and got a very positive reaction. Despite all the immediate pressures, there were people who really wanted to understand and explore climate change, and had no space to do so. As one of them said: “I am used to people rolling their eyes every time I open my mouth. The conversation needs to be had, no matter how hard it is.” Crucial to our approach was offering Future Conversations in partnership with an organisation already well-established in its community. In January 2019 we ran a Train the Trainer programme, and our pilot programmes were mostly facilitated by one person from our core team, and one from the local partner. This made credibility and recruiting participants far easier. The question of how to create change in a community is a crucial one. Our experience supports the analogy of yeast leavening dough: our programmes with 12-20 participants had a substantial ripple effect. Typically, we had to help form our groups: they didn’t know each other well, but were part of a loose-knit population of 150-400 people involved with a specific community centre, which itself was part of an urban neighbourhood of several thousand people or more. Our guess was correct that early on we needed to provide skills in communication and handling differences. Some divergences in values and political preferences (eg Brexit) were heated, and the best answer was to live with them, not resolve them. This gave a basis for some deep, delicate opening-up of people’s fears and anger about climate change, which led on to some exciting creative togetherness about how their wider communities could respond. I attended sessions with all three of our pilot communities, and always came away uplifted and touched. We successfully adapted and simplified some powerful processes, such as Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects. We truly listened to our participants and shaped content to their needs. We created safe circles in which passion and confusion, laughter and fears could be shared, and which enabled collective creativity for local initiatives. In 2020, we have revised the content for online formats, and for the post-Covid outlook: for 2021, we can offer programmes for group or individual bookings online, and when restrictions change, we are happy to take bookings for groups to deliver sessions in person. We are also planning a Train the Trainer later in the year. For full details follow this link. There are shedloads of good processes and theories about raising community resilience: applying them in practice is harder, especially in disadvantaged communities struggling with everyday needs. Future Conversations started as an unproven idea in Summer 2018: a series of eight facilitated discussions for 14-20 members of one community. We had material we wanted to offer: including some basic communication and group skills, and ways to face and respond to the climate crisis. Through contacts with a few community organisers, we took this idea to several disadvantaged communities, and got a very positive reaction. Despite all the immediate pressures, there were people who really wanted to understand and explore climate change, and had no space to do so. As one of them said: “I am used to people rolling their eyes every time I open my mouth. The conversation needs to be had, no matter how hard it is.” Crucial to our approach was offering Future Conversations in partnership with an organisation already well-established in its community. In January 2019 we ran a Train the Trainer programme, and our pilot programmes were mostly facilitated by one person from our core team, and one from the local partner. This made credibility and recruiting participants far easier. The question of how to create change in a community is a crucial one. Our experience supports the analogy of yeast leavening dough: our programmes with 12-20 participants had a substantial ripple effect. Typically, we had to help form our groups: they didn’t know each other well, but were part of a loose-knit population of 150-400 people involved with a specific community centre, which itself was part of an urban neighbourhood of several thousand people or more. Our guess was correct that early on we needed to provide skills in communication and handling differences. Some divergences in values and political preferences (eg Brexit) were heated, and the best answer was to live with them, not resolve them. This gave a basis for some deep, delicate opening-up of people’s fears and anger about climate change, which led on to some exciting creative togetherness about how their wider communities could respond. I attended sessions with all three of our pilot communities, and always came away uplifted and touched. We successfully adapted and simplified some powerful processes, such as Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects. We truly listened to our participants and shaped content to their needs. We created safe circles in which passion and confusion, laughter and fears could be shared, and which enabled collective creativity for local initiatives. In 2020, we have revised the content for online formats, and for the post-Covid outlook: for 2021, we can offer programmes for group or individual bookings online, and when restrictions change, we are happy to take bookings for groups to deliver sessions in person. We are also planning a Train the Trainer later in the year. For full details follow this link.
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