Author Archives: Alan Heeks

About Alan Heeks

Alan has been involved with the Dances since 1992, and leading occasionally since 1995. He is a highly experienced facilitator of personal and spiritual development groups, having trained at Findhorn Foundation. He is now a mentored Dance leader and doing the training programme with Jilani and Gulzar. Alan is passionate about helping people to cultivate their own wellbeing and resilience, especially by learning from nature. He mainly leads dances as part of workshops on themes. Alan has founded and created the retreat centre at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury, and he includes some Dances within many of the events he leads there. See more at www.naturalhappiness.net.

Dancing Adventures in the USA

These are snapshots from a five-week trip to the US this summer by Linda and me, which included a strong DUP and Sufi flavour.

On the East Coast…

This began on Day 3, with the monthly zikr group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organised by Abraham and Halima Sussman Abraham is a wonderful presence and a great musician, who has worked with Saadi on Bridge and other masterpieces. It felt to us like being with family, and there was great power and vitality about a group of forty people, with a wide age and ethnic range, who know the dances and needed little teaching. This was the day after the Malaysian airliner was shot down over the Ukraine, so our dances for peace had a real passion to them. Continue reading →

Inner Peace in Changing Times

by Alan Heeks

Do you remember the looting riots of 2011? It was a sudden, large-scale breakdown of the norms of our society. They scared me, because I fear that whatever pressures provoked these riots are minor compared to the problems we’ll face in the 2020s.
And I wonder what Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad would say if they were with us today. What practical wisdom, what grace and insights would they distil from these ugly scenes? And surely they could discern the gifts in the problems ahead of us? Continue reading →