Animism, Mediumship and Regenerative Farming: A Healer's Story

On the last afternoon of a two-and-a-half-day workshop, the wifi had died, the camera was misbehaving, and the friends who had driven down for a feed were already heading to the pub. In the sitting room of a property called Mona Vale, near the Tasmanian town of Ross, Charlie Arnott, an eighth-generation Australian regenerative farmer and host of The Regenerative Journey podcast, finally sat down with a man he had been trying to interview for years. Patrick McManaway, a Scottish healer and teacher of subtle energy, had a childhood that began in a household where mediumship was ordinary, a father who reportedly used psychic methods in wartime strategy, and a medical degree he set aside after a single year. What he brings to the conversation is a claim that sounds mystical on first hearing and becomes more practical the longer you sit with it: that imagination is a real organ of relationship, and that plants, animals, soil and weather respond to the way we think about them. The April 2025 interview, published on the podcast at the start of 2026, ranges across family history, the old animist worldview, and the work of blessing water and singing into land. This article follows that arc, from origin to the present practice, and explains the ideas along the way.

Where does a healer's story begin?

For McManaway, it begins at home, and he tells it with a sense of humour about his own arrival. He was born at home, to a vegetarian yoga teacher mother, and according to his account the timing was recorded to the second so the astrology could be done. His parents had already set up a centre in rural Scotland in 1959, devoted to spiritual healing and mediumship, both to practise and to teach. Their work sat inside a wider renaissance of alternative medicine and holistic therapies, and they approached it as lay practitioners working with what would now be called life-force energies.

That detail matters because it places his family outside the professional frame that most people associate with healing. Patrick described his father as someone who treated what he called the "celestial Civil Service" as a source of practical guidance, particularly for healing and healthcare. The aim, as he framed it, was the everyday renewal of spiritual gifts for ordinary women and men, not the cultivation of an elite. It was an unfashionable stance, and his account makes clear it was also a legally sensitive one. He noted that witchcraft laws in the UK were abolished only in 1952, and that for decades before that his parents had been practising natural therapy, spiritual healing and mediumship.

Read against that history, the rest of his life looks less like a sudden turn and more like a continuation. A child raised in a room where readings, healings and natural remedies were routine learns early that the boundary between the practical and the unseen is more porous than the adult world admits.

What was it like growing up among mediums?

Mediumship in that setting was not a parlour performance. It was closer to a working discipline, with teaching, practice and guidance woven into daily life. The episode's description places the family's approach within a period when many people were rediscovering their own intuitive capacities after decades of institutional medicine that had little room for them. McManaway's point, as he sets it out in the conversation, is that the gifts are common, not rare, and that the family's job was to make them usable.

The question that follows is the one most listeners will bring to the episode: how does a household like this survive contact with the outside world? The answer, at least in the portion of the interview that is publicly available, is that the family kept its practice grounded in healing and in the natural therapies of the day, rather than in spectacle. That grounding is also what makes his later move into environmental work feel coherent rather than eccentric.

How did a military officer's psychic work reach wartime strategy?

The episode description singles out one piece of family history that is difficult to believe on first encounter. It says McManaway's father, a military officer, used psychic practices for military strategy during the Second World War. The published summary does not elaborate on methods, outcomes or sources, and the transcript available for this article does not reach that part of the conversation. What can be said with confidence is that the episode treats this as one of the remarkable and often secret chapters in the history of psychic practice, and that the family's broader outlook, in which guidance from unseen sources was a normal part of decision-making, is the frame through which McManaway presents it. Readers who want the detail will need to listen to the full interview rather than rely on secondhand accounts.

Why would someone trained in medicine leave after a year?

The description also records a turn that most readers will find as striking as the wartime story. McManaway pursued a medical degree and retired after one year, to dedicate himself to holistic environmental work. The material does not spell out his reasons, and this article will not supply them. What the sequence does show is a person moving from the most conventional route to healing toward a practice centred on land, water and living systems. Whatever his reasons, the move is consistent with the family outlook he grew up with: healing as a relationship with the whole environment, not only with an individual body.

What is animism, and why does it matter to a farmer?

The idea that organises the whole conversation is animism. In the passage that opens the podcast, McManaway explains that sustainable cultures across history engaged with what we would now call animism: the lived sense that the weather, plants, animals, soil and water respond to human thoughts. He is not describing a quaint belief from the past so much as a working relationship with the world, one that many traditional land-based peoples took for granted.

For a regenerative farmer, that framing changes the question. Instead of asking only which inputs or practices produce a result, the farmer asks what kind of attention the land is receiving, and whether that attention is respectful or extractive. McManaway's claim is that the quality of the attention matters, and that it is not a metaphor.

Can you really communicate with plants and animals?

This is the claim that will divide listeners, and it is worth stating exactly how McManaway makes it. He argues that the imagination is the most powerful organ of the psyche, and that its proper function is not to generate fantasy but to engage with relationship. Once we accept that imagination is real in this sense, he says, we can truly communicate with plants and animals and with their wider environment.

"Once we allow our imagination to engage and recognize that the imagination is real, is the most powerful organ of the psyche, is the point, not where we create fantasy, but where we engage with relationship, then we can truly communicate with plants and animals and all of their environment."

Patrick McManaway, speaking with host Charlie Arnott on The Regenerative Journey podcast

The distinction he draws is between imagination as escape and imagination as perception. A farmer who stands in a paddock and senses how the land is holding up is, in his terms, already using the faculty he is describing. The skill lies in trusting that perception enough to act on it, and in testing it against what the land actually does. Readers approaching this as a skeptic should note that McManaway presents it as a practice to be developed, not a belief to be accepted on authority.

Where do singing, water and land fit in?

The episode's chapter list shows how the conversation moves from theory to practice. It runs from family background into alternative medicine and spiritual practice, then to the power of singing and love in agriculture, to connecting with nature's intelligence, to blessing water, to communicating with plants and animals, and finally to reflections on a long life's work. The published summaries name these topics but do not describe their content in detail, and the portion of the transcript available here ends before most of them. That is the honest limit of this article. What the sequence reveals is a teacher whose practice runs from the intimate (how one relates to a single plant) to the systemic (how a whole landscape holds together), and who sees singing and blessing not as ornament but as forms of attention applied to living systems.

For readers who farm, garden or simply want the land around them to recover, the throughline is the same one the opening passage sets out. Care is not sentimental. It is a way of paying attention that the land can register, and McManaway's life is his argument that the attention is worth practising.

Where to go from here

The most useful next step is to hear the full conversation. McManaway's own voice, with its Scottish cadence and its habit of moving from family memory to field practice in a single breath, carries much of the argument that a summary can only point toward. Listen for the sections on singing in agriculture and blessing water, where the abstract claims about imagination become concrete. If you want to test the ideas, go to the land you know best and spend a quiet hour simply noticing how it responds to your attention, then ask what you observed. And if you are drawn to the subtle energy work he teaches through his collaborators at Quantum Leap Subtle Energy, the podcast's show notes point to the relevant details. Treat the ideas as a hypothesis to examine with your own senses, and let the land be the final judge.