Pauline Scanlon shares her story of mental health recovery through diet. A wonderful and joyful episode full of hope. To follow up on her protocol do ask her more about The System of Natural Life.
https://www.poemhunter.com/priti-pauline/
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Hannah Jewel · Mental Health, Food and Joy with Pauline Scanlon
Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of Building for Peace with Hannah Jewel. Today we have Pauline Scanlon here. Pauline and I have been friends for a long time and she’s got an incredible story which I’m so excited to open up with. Let’s just start with introducing you Pauline, I know you have a background in Engineering and that leads into your story. And then there’s the beautiful circumstances of how we met – what would you like to share first?
Pauline: Well – how did we meet?
Hannah: I believe we met with the whirling, and with your shared passion for Rumi as a poet.
Pauline: That’s right, yeah I do, I love Rumi – dearly. He speaks to me, he speaks to my heart. I can remember years ago, someone telling me a joke that was about Hafiz: “I’ve lost my camel! I’ve lost my camel! I’ve lost my camel!” – distraught, apparently. The people around him in the village said: “Oh that’s terrible! That’s terrible – you’ve lost your camel!” And he said: “Yes! But – if I were with my camel I’d be lost too.” I thought it was so funny – that joke is 800 years old and it’s still funny. That to me is the timelessness of Rumi and the consistency that we have in all of our lives which is this connection to nature. Nature has always been there, it is here now, and it always will be. So, we have a constant factor in all of our lives that sometimes we neglect to see and we don’t know that it’s there. That was my great, great love of Rumi and his poetry speaks to me in a way that is timeless – and when you can access that timeless quality of life, you’re in a very very safe place.
Hannah: Mmm, and that sense of safety is so important to healing. We’ll talk more about that a little bit later. Pauline came to the whirling sema with me – the first one that we produced here in the UK. Because of your love of Rumi, you were drawn to it, and then we had 3 days together – and more times since we’ve met since then – and may it continue, this shared joy of coming into a place of wonder, and safety, and health, and purity, and all of the many ways we meet there.
Pauline: And, the beauty of whirling is that you really have to be very present in that holy instant all the time in order to be able to whirl.
Hannah: Yeah – otherwise you fall down!
Pauline: Yes!
*laughter*
Pauline: I know all about falling down.
*laughter*
H: Well it’s often a blessing when we fall down.
P: It is
H: As you know, it helps us on our journey.
P. It does.
H: On the Sufi path, they say we all suffer at some point in this human existence. So if you suffered as a child, be thankful because you did it early on. But we all suffer at some point, in some way, and it’s a blessing. They say, ‘I am thankful for your suffering.’
P: Completely, yes – yes. And in nature, nothing is wasted so that suffering is put to very good use. It’s been a driver for me in many ways, because I would never have said that I’m a malnourished person. I had a background in engineering, and I had a very good job. My ex husband was an electrician, so he had a very good job as well. We had a lot of income – or enough income shall I say – to live a very nice life, you know. We could afford to go out to restaurants, Chinese takeaways, and Indian takeaways at whim. We would never bother about where the next meal was coming from because there was no need to bother about where the next meal was coming from, it wasn’t anything that was of any concern. We were more interested in getting up in the morning, getting out to work, getting our son to school, just doing this normal treadmill stuff. Until such time that he became redundant, and at the same time there was an economic crisis, a huge amount of people were having their houses being repossessed – and as luck would have it, or not, I was promoted and moved from engineering training over to management training and management consultancy. Such that I was up and down the country all day long and driving many, many, hundreds of miles, doing some training and then moving on somewhere else. My life was completely totally occupied with the work that I was doing and I was on the road, thinking that I was eating very well. I was very careful about my diet following the government guidelines of low sugar, low salt, low fat – but I was obviously eating up inside and my nervous system was on edge an awful lot of the time. I was drinking alcohol as well, not a huge amount, but enough to calm the whole process down to such an extent that I ended up having a nervous breakdown.
H: Yeah, this nervous breakdown ended up being a huge part of your life and redefining the whole next phase – or phases. I think a lot of people have experienced this kind of intense, corporatised lifestyle that brings some rewards but ultimately destroys the health. Tell us a little bit about the breakdown.’….listen to the full cast for more!