In times of uncertainty many of us are carrying more stress than our bodies were designed to hold. A personal reflection on illness, resilience and how permaculture design can help us create healthier systems for living.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. You can feel it everywhere. The constant stream of news never really stops, the pressures of modern life keep accumulating, and many people are carrying far more than their bodies were ever designed to hold.
For me this reflection has become deeply personal.
At the end of last year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was caught very early and I am doing well, which I feel enormously grateful for. Yet a diagnosis like that is still a shock to the system. Cancer is widely recognised as a trauma, and the moment you hear the word the ground shifts a little beneath your feet.
What has struck me most in the weeks since is how different this experience feels from other health struggles I have had.
The body keeps the story
For a long time I have been living with the effects of chronic stress. Only recently did I discover the term allostatic load. I had never heard it before, but when I came across it I felt an immediate sense of recognition. Allostatic load describes what happens when the body is exposed to repeated stress over long periods of time. The nervous system remains on alert. Hormones that are meant to surge briefly in moments of danger stay circulating in the body. Over time the system becomes exhausted.
Finding language for that experience was strangely validating. I realised that many of the health challenges I have faced over the years, including autoimmune conditions and periods of burnout, made much more sense when seen through that lens.
I have always believed that it is important to look at the whole person. But there are moments in life when that understanding stops being theoretical and becomes essential.
This was already something we were thinking about when the idea for the Coed Hills Permaculture Design Certificate began to take shape.
When Stevie, Steve and I first started talking about hosting a course at Coed Hills we knew that we wanted to do something a little different. Of course we wanted the course to be grounded in good permaculture design. Observation, patterns, energy flows, soil, water, food systems. All the foundations that make permaculture such a powerful design framework.
But we also wanted to bring in elements that are often left out.
We wanted the course to be deeply practical, rooted in the land and in real experience. And we wanted to start with the body.
That instinct came from lived experience. Having spent long periods of time under stress I knew how easily the nervous system can become stretched beyond capacity. When that happens it becomes incredibly difficult to think clearly, to plan well, or to imagine positive futures.
Designing systems that genuinely support health has to include the nervous system. It has to include food. It has to include rest and rhythm and connection with nature. These things cannot be add ons. They need to be built into the design from the beginning.
This is where Gemma comes in.
I first met Gemma when I attended a somatic and elemental body training that she was running. It was genuinely one of the most powerful experiences of my life. At that point my nervous system had been running close to empty for a long time. Like so many people, I had simply learned to keep going.
What Gemma offers is deceptively simple. Movement. Attention. Listening to the body. Connecting with the elements and with the living world around us.
But something extraordinary happens in that process. The nervous system begins to soften. The body remembers how to regulate itself again. A sense of safety returns.
Being in nature in that way feels completely aligned with permaculture. It is another form of observation. Another way of learning to listen to living systems.
Bringing that work into a permaculture course at Coed Hills felt like a natural fit. The land there is an extraordinary place to learn. To me it feels almost magical. It is beautifully designed, with one of the most impressive forest gardens I have visited. The buildings themselves have been created with care and aesthetic attention, echoing an arts and crafts spirit that sits gently within the landscape. Growing spaces, paths, structures and gathering places all seem to belong to one another. There is a peace there that is difficult to describe but very easy to feel. It is the perfect place to immerse yourself in nature and to think about how we might live differently.
We also wanted to include coaching within the course. Learning something new can be exciting but translating that learning into real life change is not always easy. Coaching provides a space for reflection and support so that participants can explore their own visions, clarify what matters to them, and begin to plan the steps that come next.
In many ways the course is designed as a support system in itself. A place where people can learn practical skills, reconnect with nature, and think about how they want to design their lives going forward.
Since we first imagined the course my own health journey has taken an unexpected turn.
Being diagnosed with breast cancer has inevitably deepened my reflections about health and design. I do not know whether the cancer itself has any relationship to accumulated stress, I believe it is but I cannot prove that but I do know that my other health conditions are closely tied to the long periods of pressure I have experienced.
The difference this time is that cancer is a recognised story. When you receive that diagnosis people understand immediately that something serious has happened. There is support. There are systems that respond.
In the weeks between diagnostic tests and surgery I found myself with an unusual gift. Time. Time away from work. Time to think.
Designing a healing journey
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I began using my permaculture design skills.
I started to map out what I began to think of as a healing journey. Not in a dramatic sense, but in a practical and grounded way. What would it mean to design my daily life to support recovery and long term health?
A lot of that exploration has focused on gut health, which was already a path I had started to follow. I began planning what I wanted to grow and eat to support that process. I looked again at how I could support my autonomic nervous system and create conditions where my body could spend more time outside the constant pull of fight and flight.
Permaculture offers such useful tools for this kind of thinking. Observation. Patterns. Small and slow solutions. Designing systems that regenerate rather than deplete.
Designing for resilience
Recently people have said to me, kindly, that I must be very resilient. That I have been through so much and that I will be fine. I never quite know how to receive that word.
But when I sit with it and think about what resilience actually means, it begins to make more sense.
In ecological systems resilience is not about toughness. It is about diversity. It is about designing systems that have more than one way of functioning, more than one path for energy to flow, more than one way of responding when conditions change.
I realise that much of what I am doing now is simply applying those same principles to my own life. Observing my body carefully. Listening to what it needs. Paying attention to my yes and my no rather than overriding them. Designing a lived experience, within the constraints that exist, that supports rather than depletes me.
Permaculture is remarkably well suited to times of uncertainty because it teaches us how to design with change rather than against it.
The more I explored this healing design the more I realised how many people around me are reaching similar points. Friends who are exhausted. People facing health crises. Others simply recognising that the pace and pressure of modern life is not sustainable.
Perhaps some of it is age. But I do not think that is the whole story. The world is genuinely a stressful place right now for many people. Ecological uncertainty, economic pressure, social fragmentation. These things are felt in our bodies whether we acknowledge them or not.
What we need are pathways through.
Often those pathways are collective. They are built through community, through shared learning, through spaces where people can reconnect with themselves and with the living world.
This is part of what A Wild Life is exploring as a community interest company. We are looking for ways to create accessible and affordable opportunities for people to engage with this kind of work. Workshops, courses and gatherings in nature where people can step back, reflect, and begin to redesign parts of their lives in ways that support wellbeing.
The Coed Hills Permaculture Design Certificate is one expression of that vision.
I feel genuinely excited about what the course could offer people. Not just knowledge about growing food or managing land, but a deeper understanding of how living systems function and how we can design our lives in relationship with them.
I also feel excited about what might grow from this work closer to home. One of my hopes is to help develop a natural health pathway in Sussex. Something rooted in nature, community and practical skills that supports people navigating the pressures of modern life.
This recent chapter of my own health journey has made that intention even clearer.
When we learn to observe carefully, permaculture teaches us that every disturbance in a system contains information. It invites us to ask different questions. Not only how do we fix this problem, but what might this moment be asking us to redesign.
I do not yet know exactly where this path will lead.
But I do know that designing healthier systems for ourselves and for each other feels more important than ever.
If you would like to learn more about the Permaculture Design Certificate we are hosting at Coed Hills, you can explore the course here:
https://awildlife.org.uk/course/the-2026-coed-hills-pdc/
If you would like to talk more about some of the points raised in this article then do feel free to get in touch.
