O-Books, 2024
ISBN 978-1803414966
Reviewed by Piers Warren
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The author, Alan Heeks, has decades of experience of helping people with their wellbeing through Nature. He is also an experienced gardener, has run an organic farm, and aptly subtitles this book ‘Use Organic Gardening Skills to Cultivate Yourself.’
As an organic gardener for many years myself, I appreciated his description of techniques such as composting, crop rotation, mulching and so on in relation to our own states of mind and how we mentally approach our lives and the various challenges that may arise. As the title suggests, this book is about cultivating happiness in the same way we cultivate our gardens, but it certainly doesn’t shy away from difficult and sometime overwhelming issues such as climate change and possible future societal breakdown.
The organic factor is important and the author describes how the way much food is produced these days – using pesticides, fertilisers, soil disturbance etc – is damaging the environment that we depend upon and is not sustainable. In other words these methods are only a short term fix at the expense of our descendants’ future health and happiness. As he points out, short term fixes or distractions can also be damaging to our own personal wellbeing. He describes how to use clean resources rather than polluting ones and includes many tips for personal regeneration.
The book aims to help us transform negative feelings, and to find constructive ways to process conflicts. I particularly liked his description of we can ‘change our story’ to uproot negative patterns. Although many of the techniques described are applicable to the reader as an individual, the author also embraces community and devotes a chapter to how mutual support, from a wide variety of groups, can be hugely helpful. He includes projects to learn from and a community-building toolkit.
It is a practical and accessible guide with numerous case studies, suggested activities, bullet-points and references. The author is clearly well read and discusses many of the relevant books that have inspired him along the way. I particularly liked that each chapter ends with a resources section that lists and briefly describes all the books and websites mentioned in, or relevant to, that chapter. This is much easier to take advantage of than just a long list of recommended reading at the end of the book as so many others do.
There is much wisdom in this book, and the analogies with tending a garden are useful on both the day-to-day managing of your mood as well as dealing with major difficulties such as climate change. The author has thought a lot about our future, has researched widely, and been involved in many activities at all levels to mitigate problems and increase our resilience – at a personal level, as communities and as a species.