26 The Reset: Subtle Energies
In which Amanda learns about love from a pot plant and discovers that Subtle Energies are being used to increase productivity on farms and stations across Australia.
All because Queensland based Terry McCosker and his future thinking business, Resource Consultancy Services, have joined forces with geomancer and earth acupuncturist Dr Patrick MacManaway to expand our consciousness.
Begin by observing your breath and breathing, and waiting for calm and inner connection to arise – then become aware that your in-breath is the out-breath of the plants around you, and that your out-breath is the in-breath for all that is green in the surrounding landscape.
Patrick MacManaway sent this meditative thought around to those of us who have done one of his Subtle Energies courses. I found the idea of breathing in and out in synchronisation with the plants around me very pleasurable.
It’s such a simple idea, here I am still writing about plants, months in, but I have never thought about how my breath relates to plant breath.
Now, when I think about breathing, it will be in connection to the crucial job I am doing as a co-creator with nature, a co-photosynthesiser cooperating in a shared ecosystem.
We are all in this together.
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT LOVE
Last year I had a lesson in how to love. Specifically, how to expunge neediness and yearning from my idea of love. This has been a weight off my mind. I was given an opportunity to reset my idea of love. To love what my heart draws me to love, without overwhelm, without exaggeration, without being extravagant or cloying or demanding about it.
I got the lesson during an encounter with a pot plant, a pelargonium, that very firmly rejected me. I’m not kidding. When you have been rejected by a pelargonium…it’s a real slap in the face. I had to take a long hard look at myself and the quality of the attention I was offering this poor pot-bound plant. So I did. I was shaken by the encounter and I realised what a try-hard I can be when it comes to loving. It also made me understand that plants can’t run, but they can defend themselves.
Who knew you could achieve such deep personal revelations while in communion with a pot plant from Bunnings?
TOUGH LOVE
The encounter with the pelargonium was during an exercise held on day 2 of a course on Subtle Energies of the Land, Level 1 presented by Dr Patrick MacManaway MD. The rest of the group (those brave enough to share their experiences) had breathlessly beautiful encounters with their pot plants. They emerged with fun stories of shared joy and pleasure, some even met their plant’s diva. I got rejected. I took it personally for a while and was pretty upset. But ultimately, I got the point.
This was just one of the exercises Patrick introduced us too – taking us through a process of learning that called on us to expand our consciousness. By the end of two days we were to understand that all living things are sentient and the world is awash with hidden energies that can be sensed and worked with if you are prepared to spend the time to suspend disbelief and tune into the
From Geraldton WA to Yeppoon, Central Queensland, it was a huge cross-country trek to meet this 2nd generation geomancer, dowser and land whisperer, under the auspices of RCS, Resource Consultancy Services, a respected Agricultural training and Consultancy group that operates in Australia and South Africa. And to meet Terry McCosker and some of his team, legends in advanced regenerative and holistic management training.
RCS have been involved in subtle energies since 2001 when Dr Phil Wheeler presented a series of workshops on dowsing , followed by The Dawson Program (www.dawsonprogram.com) which focused on human health.
PAGANISM FOR GRAZIERS
I soon worked out, that this was paganism for graziers.
I knew there were a few dozen people signed up for this workshop and was bracing myself to meet shamanistic types with eagle feathers, but what I got was – mostly – utterly respectable looking men and women of the land. Quite a few couples and a few farming women with health practice backgrounds on the complementary end of the scale. Fifteen women, 9 men – I might have been one of the oddest one’s there, and I am pretty damn respectable. Most had had a long engagement with RCS through their farm and station management processes – I guess when you have worked with a consultancy Ag group for a long time, trust will lead you down the stranger paths..
Whatever the individual intentions of the participants were, the economic message was unequivocal., Patrick opened the weekend by stating that after decades of consultancy work, he can report that Subtle Energies will lead to a 30% increase in production in a farm business.
So that’s how you talk about woowoo. Hit the bottom line and ripple out from there.
But I‘m having trouble shaping this story for the world of podcasting which is no doubt riddled with scoffers as well as people pitching their own kinds of woo. It’s all very well for Patrick to tell us that communicating with nature spirits was where agrarian life was calibrated for 6,500 years in Britain – right up until the last few hundred years in fact.
DON’T MENTION THE SUBTLE ENERGIES!
I am aware that most of us are steeped in the Anthropocene mindset where humans sit as conquerors at the top of all ecological systems – well, OK we’ve just been sensationally displaced by a virus – but surely that is a hiccup in our continued ascendancy. It seems to me that it is still news to many humans out there that WE ARE NATURE:
I’ve got a story about this: At my dad’s retirement village recently, I gave a talk to the residents on their regular Friday morning ‘speaker’ day. The focus was BodyTalk, the health care system I have been studying and practising for a few years and I drew lots of analogies with soil health. A simple clear talk I thought, pitched to get those interested in breakthrough health techniques to want to give it a go. After I finished, I invited questions from the audience. There was a general silence, and then one imperious voice rang out from the back:
Amanda, I knew your parents – how on earth did you end up like this? My sister who was in the audience thought it was hilarious. Was I daunted? Yeah! But it was funny and it was instructive. Clearly my idea of reasonableness wasn’t going to fly in certain quarters.
WHO IS PATRICK?
But who is this Patrick? He holds a medical degree from the university of Edinburgh and is an internationally in-demand holistic therapist, specialising in work with buildings, landscapes, geopathic stress and earth acupuncture. There are YouTube videos that will get you in tune with his thinking.
Patrick has a wonderful way of introducing topics – self-deprecating humour has obviously stand him in good stead in workshops when it comes to talking about communicating with invisible energies of the land. Plant divas, presences, the spirits that reside in all animals, soil and rock come naturally to him. He grew up steeped in this stuff, basically took on the family business, accepting he was the keeper of knowledge – and accepting that it would not be knowledge valued by all.
CHILDHOOD INFLUENCES
In Patrick’s words: I was raised with an understanding that all of nature is at source a vibrational, interactive intelligence, with our physical, experiential world being a reflection and expression of that vibrational content and tone.
In his own family’s six acres of garden and pastures his mum held a Disney-like sway over Team Nature: Rabbits and moles dared not enter her garden and were rapidly and fiercely admonished if boundaries were transgressed – Birds were advised season by season which trees in the orchard were theirs to take all fruit from, leaving the rest for the people – amazing and consistent compliance. Throughout the few days we spent together in workshop Patrick shared many such anecdotes.
WHAT IS SUBTLE ENERGY?
To backtrack a bit. David McLean, an RCS consultant who wrote an introduction to Patrick’s workshop notes that for Westerners, it was Einstein who mooted the science of Subtle Energy which later became the science of Quantum Physics. But I want it noted that these discoveries have still not seeped into all aspects of our lives or created the kind of changes we humans need to embrace for a RESET:
If I accept the concept that all living things are sentient beings, That all matter has vibrational intelligence and that by using my own intentions I can affect everything that falls within my awareness or my imagination ….this represents a huge expanse of my sense of my ability to act in the world…I am going to have to be a lot more alert and sensitive to all aspects of existence than I have been up till now ….
WHAT HAVE I DONE???
Gardening has taken on a whole new light. My past thoughtless and careless approach to plants doesn’t bear thinking about. It is not so much that I think the plants have suffered terribly – I am pretty sure they aren’t like us, they don’t bear grudges or fear annihilation - it is more of the connection that I have missed out on. So many opportunities to expand my awareness, to learn from other living beings, have been squandered.
WHAT SCIENCE CAN’T MEASURE
We are talking about frequencies which cannot be measured by science, and are thus usually consigned to the ‘anomaly’ end of the spectrum when it comes to explaining how the world works. I have raised this before when talking about BodyTalk and Agriculture – the anomaly part – anomalies are the trials or test that are rejected because the readings are so out of step with the old mechanistic way of thinking (Let’s call this pre-Reset thinking).
….. a simple example… An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a medical test that detects cardiac (heart) abnormalities by measuring the electrical activity generated by the heart as it contracts and expands. Normal medical procedure and a tool the medical profession uses to evaluate how the heart is functioning.
But to call that heart electrical activity : chi, or ‘spirit’ or ‘prana’ and detect it in all other organs and systems in the body and all other beings in the world without a machine? Oh no that’s ‘woo-woo’; despite centuries of cultural and tribal knowhow. Despite Einstein, and despite all those scientists now paddling around in integrative disciplines like psycho-neuro-immunology and despite those farmers achieving off-the-scale carbon readings in their soils by natural means . Science has met, has even hopped into bed with spirit – but there are those who would still rigidly separate the head from the heart, the body from the soul and glorify the practices that maintain these separations….
EDGES
One of Patrick’s oft said comments was: ‘I don’t know what the edges of this are’. And he has had a lifetime of extraordinary stories. Here is one of them….
During an on-farm field day in NSW for farmers in the area interested in exploring subtle energies, we as a group blessed the farm bore hole, which supplied water to troughs for sheep in approx. half of the 120 paddocks, the other paddocks having ponds for stock water instead.
In tasting the water directly from the bore before and after blessing, we were amazed and delighted in the enhancement of palatability, sweetness and the sense of a refreshing drink.
I, this is Patrick’s voice, received communication 2 weeks later from the hosting farmer letting me know that since the water blessing, the sheep, who hitherto had shown a mild but not substantial preference for the trough water over that in the ponds, now when released through rotation from a pond field to a trough field, were galloping as a herd up to 1.4 kms to the trough and staying there until all had drunk their fill…
AND SO IT GOES
Many such stories of water quality improving, springs returning without rain events, even improvements in mineral or salt contents of water…’we were amazed and delighted’ becomes a bit of a catchcry, and a particular expression of Patrick’s gentle charm. It clearly never gets old to be part of this kind of restorative work..achieved with clear intentions and loving communication. Patrick tells story after story that speak of his understanding that nature wants to help, nature and the spirits that animate her, are on our side!
And if being figuratively slapped by a pelargonium is part of this learning, I am going to take my medicine.
