Never Giving Up with Pollyanna Darling: From Bedridden to SUP Champion via Incremental Daily Improvements

Never Giving Up with Pollyanna Darling: From Bedridden to SUP Champion via Incremental Daily Improvements

David Pasqualone: Hello, friend. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Remarkable People Podcast with Pollyanna Darling. Today we’re talking about how Pollyanna went from bedridden to buff and how she became a standup paddleboard champion in her fifties After years of. Issues and injuries and hardships that you’re going to hear from childhood trauma all the way to physical ailments and injuries that doctors diagnose and progno that she’d be in bed for life.

So she’s gonna talk about incremental, small changes every day in our life, never giving up and having the vision and achieving it. That God has for you. So I’m David Pasqualone. Check out this episode of The Remarkable People Podcast with Pollyanna Darling now .

Welcome to the Remarkable People Podcast: The Remarkable People Podcast, [00:01:00] check it out,

the Remarkable People Podcast. Listen, do Repeat for Life,

the Remarkable People Podcast.

David Pasqualone: Hey Pollyanna, how are you today?

Pollyanna Darling: I’m really good. Thank you, David.

David Pasqualone: It is an honor to have you here and I just told our listeners a little bit about what to expect in this episode. But right from the source, we have listeners who have been with us for six years and 300 plus episodes, and we have listeners that this may be their first interview they’ve ever listened to.

If they stick with you, Pollyanna, what do you guarantee? At least one thing they’re gonna be able to take away, apply to their life and be a better human.[00:02:00]

Pollyanna Darling: That they will understand that you can have a diagnosis. You never have to accept a prognosis.

David Pasqualone: That is super powerful. And if someone has been sick, they absolutely understand what that means.

But for people who haven’t been sick, hopefully you won’t. But statistically, either you or someone you love will be probably in a quickly. What’s the difference between a diagnosis and a prognosis? So a diagnosis, you have something wrong with you, you go to the doctor. They say, they give you a diagnosis of what’s wrong with you, so maybe you’ve hurt your back or maybe you’ve got cancer, or whatever it is.

Pollyanna Darling: And a prognosis is what the me a medical professional tells you about your future. So they might say. What I was told was, your condition is only going to get worse and you’re [00:03:00] just gonna have to manage it. That’s a prognosis. It’s, it’s a prediction of what your future will be like and it’s a nonsense.

Fundamentally, a hundred percent. I today, my back has been hurting for like three weeks and. I would listen to conventional wisdom of the doctors and they say, don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t work out. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Today I went to the gym, did everything opposite. The average physician would say Not to do.

David Pasqualone: I did it and I feel better. I having three weeks. So that’s kind of what you’re talking about, but a more serious level as the listener’s gonna hear. Yeah. Absolutely. So ladies and gentlemen, we are only limited to our beliefs and what God wants. So we’re gonna talk to Pollyanna after the short commercial, and you’re gonna hear specifically what she dealt with, what she overcame, and hopefully we’ll hear the practical steps of how she did it. So you can too. We’ll be right [00:04:00] back.

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David Pasqualone: . Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, at this time, Pollyanna, where are you from? What’s your origin like? We don’t want to dwell the past, but everything that happens to us, good, bad, ugly, pretty or pretty ugly, it makes us who we are, right?

So we want you to kinda give us your background. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want, and then bring us up to your diagnosis. Prognosis.

Pollyanna Darling: So I was born in the uk. I had a pretty difficult childhood that left me with ongoing P C-P-T-S-D. So childhood, it’s complex, PTSD, from childhood trauma and.

I spent most of my early life plotting my escape from England. I never, I thought, always thought I never wanted to be there. So I started working at 12 and by 16 I went to the US on my own and hung out with friends and did a lot of travel. And eventually I [00:06:00] came to Australia in 1994. And I was somebody who was never, ever gonna get married or have children or have a mortgage.

And, and never say never is a really good phrase. ’cause it’s usually the thing that, exactly the thing that happens. So I was at a point in my life where I suddenly had all three of those things. I had three young boys and a marriage that wasn’t going very well. And a just a life that. I don’t know.

I felt like I wasn’t fully living and I remember going outside into the garden one day and, and just kind of shouting at the sky. There has to be more than this. There has to be more. And I fast forward a bit to my second marriage. I had this experience in 2009 of almost dying, and I, I had a ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, and I was only saved by the hospital, but I had a near death experience in [00:07:00] that in that hospital actually.

And I, it changed me fundamentally because I stopped being afraid of death at all. And I also had a lot of very strange experiences after that. Then I had another nearly dying episode. I went to Peru in 2015, right before my marriage completely broke down and I was in SCO at altitude and I had a bleed on the brain.

And that was another extraordinary episode of, I guess I’ll tell you a little bit about it because it’s interesting. So I. I was in this room, we’d landed in sco. I didn’t feel right from almost the moment we got there. I got into a state where I could, couldn’t really speak. I could hear what people were saying and I could hear my own thoughts and I could think what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say it.

It wouldn’t come out or it came out really [00:08:00] slurred or it was the wrong words. I couldn’t move properly and for some reason I. Nobody took me to hospital, which is probably just as well because the hospital was at altitude and I started dropping in and out of consciousness and I was lying there with this oxy shot thing, which is like a mask that you put over your face and I heard this voice.

I heard a voice like a Morgan Freeman God voice say, go down. And so I’m lying on this bed and I thought, am I going mad? Am I going crazy? And then I heard it again. I said, go down. And if anybody was telling me this story, I wouldn’t believe them ’cause I’m not, you know, and I’m a pretty skeptical person.

But I heard it and I managed to explain to the people I was with that we, I needed to go down. And so they the, the guy who ran the Airbnb was this wonderful French [00:09:00] Canadian guy, and he said, I, I will go and I will see what I can do for you. And he came back and he said, I have spoken to my friend in the valley who is a prince among men, and you can stay with him.

And I’ve spoken to my other friend who is the. Ex-chief of the anti-corruption police in sco, and he will drive you down the mountain and I trust him with my life. So they put me on the back of a porter and. Shuffled me into this car and I was in the back of the car. It was a really, really old car with vinyl seats.

And we, this, this amazing man drove us down the mountain at 90 miles an hour, which was insane. And because the seats were vinyl and I was lying in the back every time we went round a corner, I’d like whoosh across one way and then whooshed the other way. And partway down. Everything went translucent.

So it was as if everything was a tracing and I could see through the people in the car in the front and I could see through the car and everything and,

David Pasqualone: [00:10:00] and at this point, I don’t wanna interrupt you, but you didn’t know what was going on. Nobody knew what was happening. They just knew you were sick.

Pollyanna Darling: Well, my sister-in-law is a midwife, and so she was like madly googling my symptoms and, and she said, oh, you’ve got all the symptoms of oxygen starvation that babies get when they’re born, you know, starved of oxygen.

Anyway, so we knew I wasn’t all right. Anyway, so I’m lying in the back of the car and everything had gone translucent and all I could see was this. Geometric grid of tiny filaments of light. Tiny, tiny filaments of light. They looked like little matchsticks and they were all joined together in this crazy grid.

And so I was lying in the back of the car going, everything is filaments of light. And it lasted for about 10 minutes and I can still see it in my mind. I can still see it. So we went down to the [00:11:00] Sacred Valley. And to this wonderful man’s house. And he, he was married to one of the the daughter of one of Peru’s greatest artists.

And so everything in this house was incredibly beautiful. And there was art everywhere. And there was a, it had a walled garden and through the walled garden, ran this little creek and beautiful trees and flowers and he was so. Artie that he would go out every morning and he’d cut flowers into bundles in his own garden from, and then, and then arrange them in these stone urns in the garden.

So he was making, anyway, it was beautiful. And I was there with his three dogs and I was sitting. And they, they never left my side. One of them was called Culpa in Quechua, which means force. So I had the force with me, which was funny. Nice. A great big dog, like a [00:12:00] mastiff. And I was sitting in the garden and they were hummingbirds all around my head making these wonderful sound that they make.

And I looked up over the walled garden and there with the Andes were there. And I spent the whole time asking myself why. Why is this happening? Why have I, why have I nearly died again? You know, what is this about? And. As I was looking at the mountains, I suddenly felt this rush through my whole body of, you’ve half, you’ve half-assed your life up to this point.

And I would never use that language now because now I know that it was it was trauma that stopped me from taking opportunities and from being kind of. Not really engaged with being alive, but that was the language I had then. And I made a promise in that moment to stop doing that. And also, I made a promise to the planet that I would devote whatever was left of my life to seeing it thrive.

So.[00:13:00]

I came home, it took me a couple of years to recover. I had these weird episodes every six weeks to two months where I’d start dropping things and my language would go a bit funny and I’d be exhausted. But I, and

David Pasqualone: was it diagnosed at that point? Oxygen, oxygen deprivation, and like brain damage? Or how did they classify it?

Pollyanna Darling: It’s high altitude, cerebral edema. It’s apparently, it’s a rupture in the blood-brain barrier. So I had a MRI or a CAT scan, I can’t remember which one I got back. And it seemed like it was all right that by then, so, but I spent three weeks in Peru with this terrible pain in my head. Like this terrible, terrible, very specific campaign.

And just wiped out. From what I’ve read, it seems like it’s similar to having a stroke, but slightly different ’cause it’s caused by altitude. And most of the people who get it are climbers who climb a altitude. And [00:14:00] it’s not like altitude sickness. ’cause with altitude sickness you have a headache and you feel sick and you’re vomiting and those kind of things.

It doesn’t really have any symptoms except you just start going. Unconscious. Eventually you go into a coma and then 60% of people who get it die because they don’t know what’s going on. Anyway, I recovered and then my marriage broke down and I was very sad and I, I decided randomly that I. I’ve skipped a bit here.

Let me rewind a bit. I, in 2017, I hurt my back really badly and that was on top of a, a whiplash injury that I had not attended to from 2012 in a car crash, and I herniated a disc and it set off this. It set off a whole cascade of spinal symptoms that related to this unresolved [00:15:00] whiplash injury and other, other back injuries that I had.

And I ended up in bed for pretty much six months, like just bedridden. I was in agony a lot of the time and I went to various. Doctors, and you know, I did all the things. I did acupuncture and bone therapy and energy healing. I did all these, I did all the things you can do. And one of the things that helped me was something called Ortho Bionomy, which is a really gentle form of treatment that.

Gives the ner your body’s, gives the nervous system the information it needs to ch create change in the body. So there’s no forcing or manipulating like chiropractic or osteo those things. Anyway, I spent six months in bed crocheting, face washers, and listening to podcasts [00:16:00] and eventually. It, it’s very slowly got better with the help of the ortho Bionomy guy.

But at the point where I was lying in bed, I thought, I’m never going to do anything I love again. I had a big dog that I couldn’t walk for and we, I had to give her up. I’m a very keen gardener and I couldn’t, I could barely go out in the garden, let alone do any gardening. So it was pretty. Dark kind of time.

It’s, and it’s an interesting thing to be confined to bed. It makes your world get very small because your world becomes your room and, you know, whoever chooses to come and see you in your room. So, fast forward a bit past that that, that marriage ended in 2020, in the middle of COVID and I, I still wasn’t.

Okay. But I had a, a whim [00:17:00] to join a standup paddleboard club, and

I don’t know why, but I went and I, I, they let me, they lent me aboard, they lent me a paddle, and they were very encouraging. I started to paddle once a week, and when I first started I was in so much pain. Afterwards, my, my shoulders would come up here, my neck would be out, and I’d have these terrible headaches and they’d go for three or four days, and I just kept going, but listening to my body and doing it very slowly and over time, the number of days that I would be in terrible pain reduced.

So I started, I decided that when the number of days in pain reduced to three, I would start training twice a week, which I did. And long story short, I [00:18:00] started racing and I won my first race. And then I did a lot of training, which I had to really manage in a different way from everybody else because of the.

Pain in my back, but I became the over fifties women’s standup paddleboard champion in 2023 in Australia.

David Pasqualone: Congratulations.

Pollyanna Darling: Yeah. Much to my enormous surprise, and I mean, it was surprising on in so many ways. One, because how is this even possible? How is it possible to go in five years from bedridden to winning a championship?

How is it possible? Nobody told me that as a, an older woman, you know, that a, a woman over 50 could become stronger and fitter than ever before. Women are often written off. You know, once you get over a certain age, it’s like all downhill from there. Well, this is certainly not true. So I wrote a [00:19:00] book about that journey.

It’s called Bedridden to Buff and part of writing the book. So I, I wrote the whole thing. Then I read it back and it was boring. It was really boring. I thought, this is rubbish. So I threw it away and I sat for a long time with what, what I really wanted to say. And what came up was that, that my child, self, the child that had experienced a lot of situations that were not okay, wanted a voice.

She wanted a voice. And so I. I ended up writing this book where I was giving some of the chapters to my child self, and it was as if she came through me and spoke. So when, like, even when I read back, it’s like a child has written some of the chapters in the present tense in, in her experience. So [00:20:00] it was really difficult to write that book because.

It was very confronting to, to, it was while I was writing, it was like the child was right there in the experiences she had. So that was very confronting and difficult, but also incredible as a healing process, like really incredible. And then I, when I recorded the audio book, it, she came through in my voice.

So there have, people have told me it sounds like a child is speaking in some of the chapters, so. That whole process was extraordinary as a way of self-healing. But the whole thing, the, the process of healing from the back injury and becoming an athlete at 51 or however old I was, that was incredibly healing.

And then the process of writing about that story and bringing the child through was incredibly healing. And it was all directed by my inner. [00:21:00] Wisdom. So it wasn’t anybody else saying, you need to do it this way, you need to do it that way. You need to try this. It was all coming through me. So you might have some questions.

Yeah, I do. I wanna make

David Pasqualone: sure I clarify first. You had the neck in. I wanna make sure, what was the timeline? You had the neck injury from the car accident, the whiplash. Then you hurt your back, then you had the stroke. What was the timeline that got you to the point of what the timeline, what was?

Pollyanna Darling: Okay, so I, I nearly died in 2009 from the ectopic pregnancy.

I in 2015 I went to Peru and had the bleed on the brain. In 2017. Oh, so in 2012, sorry, in 2012, I had a car accident where I hit a stationary vehicle at 80. ’cause my baby was crying in the back and all the traffic suddenly stopped and I hit this vehicle and I had terrible whiplash. But because I, I [00:22:00] think because of the C-P-T-S-D, I didn’t go and get any help.

I just rang my husband and he came and picked me up and he took me home and I went to bed. I didn’t, I didn’t seek any help. It was so strange when I think about it now, I think it’s such a strange thing that I didn’t go to a doctor. I didn’t go get looked at. I didn’t get an x-ray. And I eventually, after six weeks, I almost couldn’t move.

Like I was just and I went and got some treatment from a, I can’t remember what it was. Craniosacral treatment or something that helped me get moving again, but it never came right. And when my back got, was injured in 2017, they x-rayed my whole spine and they said that two of my neck vertebrae are fused.

And there was calcification in my neck and all this problems from the whiplash. And so. I, I haven’t actually looked at it as a timeline before, so [00:23:00] this is an interesting exercise. Yeah, so I hurt my back in 2017 and then became a, an athlete at 51 and won this gold medals in 2023.

David Pasqualone: And how long was it between when you became bedridden to when you started paddleboarding?

Pollyanna Darling: Like how long were you

David Pasqualone: bedridden for?

Pollyanna Darling: About six months. I couldn’t really do anything. I spent most of my time in bed. I, I’ve got four boys. I’ve raised four boys. Three of them are men now. One of them’s still only 15. But I talked to him recently about that period and he said, I just thought that mums were in bed.

I just thought that’s, he was only five. He thought I was in bed most of the time. He thought that’s, that’s what mothers did. They just lay in their beds. So. I was about six months bedridden, and then I, I started paddling in towards the end of [00:24:00] 2020.

David Pasqualone: So there’s people now listening and whether it’s them or someone they know and love, they’re getting a prognosis right from the doctors saying, oh, there’s gonna be herring for life.

Take these drugs in your life when you look back. If you were to give step one, step two, step three, try this. You know, this worked for me. It may not work for you, but this is what I did. What was the steps that you took to get out of bed onto that paddle board?

Pollyanna Darling: So I, I never give up. I’m one of those people that you can push over and I just get back up again. And in that circumstance, I couldn’t. And as I mentioned right at the beginning, I went to see all kinds of doctors. I went to an orthopedic surgeon. He looked at my X-rays and he said, you are, this is, this condition is just gonna get worse.

You are going to have to manage it, but it’s going to get [00:25:00] worse. And you have this, and you have that, and you have calcification and you have, you know, all these things. And I left his office that day and I felt so defeated, you know, that I. Would not be able to do the things that I love to do. And I remember walking down the street and just feeling this heaviness, descend on me of, well, what is my life gonna be now if I’m just gonna be managing this thing that, you know, this person has said, this is what your life will be.

And, and he was top, top of his field. So he was in his seventies and, you know, he was a, he’s a well renowned orthopedic surgeon. So I felt miserable for a while, and when I was bedridden, bedridden, I felt miserable. And I think it’s legitimate to feel miserable because it’s the grief of a change in your life, right?

So anytime you get [00:26:00] a diagnosis that’s difficult, there’s a grief for the life that you feel is gone now because something’s changed. So I, I spent a, some time grieving and, but I feel like number one, my spirit is kind of irrepressible. It, it doesn’t stay squashed for very long. And number two, I always feel supported.

So somewhere along the way, and I can’t say exactly when I started trusting my life. So I, I, I realized that looking back at my life, I had, even though I’d had this very difficult childhood and I wasn’t necessarily supported by my parents in the way, that would’ve been lovely. I had always been supported by life.

So. Life had risen up to support me at all these different times. [00:27:00] With the right information or the right help, or the right resource or whatever was needed, it would, it was always there. So I tried different therapists and one of the things that I think really matters if someone is, is unwell and seeking help is that you trust your own body and your own instinct around who helps you.

So I went to see. Various different people who, some healers and therapists are very invested in being the person that heals you and. I don’t like that at all. I don’t like how that feels, that a person’s identity is bound up in fixing me. So I had different experiences with therapists where I just wasn’t comfortable in my body with them.

And because of the way I was raised, I thought, oh, it’s not okay to stop seeing this person because, you know, I don’t know. It’s like you [00:28:00] enter into an agreement with a therapist around, you know, a physical therapist around what. What the course of treatment they’re gonna take. And it seems like they know what they’re doing and they know what they’re saying and in a way they’ve got all the power.

But I learned through that when, when it didn’t feel right for me, when people weren’t listening to me about how sensitive my system is and about when things were hurting. ’cause sometimes people would say things like, oh, you know. I know you say you are sensitive, but I’ve worked with people like you before and you know it’ll be fine.

And then I’d be in terrible pain for weeks because they’d done something and not listened to me. So that’s one of the steps is it’s really important to listen to your own body and your own intuition about who you let heal you in inverted. I don’t know that anyone else can ever heal you. I think you. In the end, you heal yourself.

But to listen to that, [00:29:00] to listen to when it doesn’t feel right, and to know that it’s okay to say, I don’t want to come and see you anymore, you know, to say, no, this isn’t working for me. I’m going to seek help elsewhere. Because it’s your body and it’s your life, and you are the one that has to live in it.

So that’s part one. Then I, I found something that worked for me, and it worked for me because it was gentle. So Ortho Bionomy is very gentle. There’s no forcing, there’s no pushing. It just works with your body’s natural wisdom to give the nervous system the information it needs to go, oh, something’s not right.

Let me adjust and it will, it adjusts itself. So that really worked for me. But the place where I had to overcome that prognosis the strongest was when I was training because I started paddling and I. [00:30:00] It was, it hurt so much to paddle, just it hurt my neck, it hurt my shoulders, it hurt my back. It was horrible.

And, but I loved it because I was out on the water. I was outside and, and it was during COVID when I started, so it was pretty tricky to be outside anyway, but I loved it because. I was outside in the open with the water with the, there’s all these beautiful stingrays that are in the river where I paddle and sea eagles, and when you’re on a paddleboard, you don’t have an engine, so you’re not disturbing any of the natural environment.

You can paddle right up to pelicans and it’s really lovely. So, but the thing that was difficult was not going into catastrophizing over. What happened every time I paddled. So I’d go, I’d, I’d get off the board, I’d go to bed the next day I’d wake up and [00:31:00] I’d be like, Ugh. And my, he head would be pounding and, you know, everything was wrong.

And it’s easy from that place. It’s really easy to do, to go, oh no, you know, I’m, I can’t do this thing because it hurts and I’m in pain. And, and for me, once I get into pain. My body just goes into this cascade of sort of panic and freezing up and all of that. So working with that, working with that tendency to catastrophize, especially if you’ve come from any kind of background of trauma is, is really a thing.

Like it’s a trick to do that too. To manage that in a way that is kind to the parts of yourself that are freaking out. So I, I had to do things my way, and I think that really matters [00:32:00] actually on any kind of healing journey, is that you are listening to yourself and doing it your way. So I remember there was a day, there was a day once when we were training, and the guy that was leading the session.

I felt that I’d got to a point where I needed to stop. I could feel it in my body. I need to stop now because if I don’t, I’m gonna push it too far and I’m gonna pay too big afterwards. So I stopped training and he went, oh, you can do more Pollyanna. Get back on the water. Get back on the water. And I said, no, I’m not, I’m not going to get back on the water.

And he was sort of unpleasant to me about that. And, and, but I felt. Proud of myself because I, I run with what was true in my own body and protected my, the integrity of myself.

David Pasqualone: Yeah, it reminds me when I was in high school, right when I graduated, they found a tumor in my [00:33:00] head after years of doctors telling me nothing was wrong.

And I had Dr. William Montgomery, who is the head of mass Eye and Ear. At that time, he was also like the top guy at Harvard Medical School, and after they removed the tumor, it grew back. Then it grew back again after they removed the second time. Either after it grew back the first time or after it grew back.

The second time he told me, ’cause what happened was I was, I went back to the hospital and said, Hey, I know this isn’t supposed to happen. I know you guys took it out, but I’m feeling the same way again. And the doctor just not Dr. Montgomery, he was literally in the Middle East like. Working on a chic or a salt or some huge political figure.

And the person that took care of me in his place was an established physician, and he belittled me and mocked me and said, it’s just residual. You know, my mind’s so used to having it that I don’t know how to be healthy [00:34:00] again. Tell me I’m making it up. So long story short, when I got back, they took an MRI.

When he got back, they took an MRI. They confirmed the tumor grew back. And he said to me, we might have PhDs. He’s like, but nobody has a better PhD than you on your body. He’s like, don’t listen to anybody. Not even me. He’s like, if you know something’s wrong or something’s not working for you, it’s like, tell ’em all to where the sun don’t, you know, put it where the sun don’t shine.

He’s like, you need to listen yourself now. He was from the old school. He did my surgery in his seventies. And he was from the old school where medicine was to help people. And it was still a practice, it wasn’t a profession. And I know everything, but yet he was the best in the world. So what you’re saying lines up with common sense and lines up with scripture and it lines up to the reality.

I know. So thank you for sharing that.

Pollyanna Darling: What you’ve just shared with me reminds me that when I, I think we, we have [00:35:00] another sense and it’s a sense of the body understanding that it’s dying. And nurses that I know say they call that an impending, impending doom. They’ve the sense of impending doom. ’cause apparently patients report it.

But when I had the ectopic in 2009, I, I had this feeling that I was dying and I was, and then the re I think the only reason I’m here after the bleed on the brain is because. I started having that same feeling again, and I recognized it from when I had the ectopic. I recognized this feeling in my body of, it’s kind of like all your cells go uhoh.

And so I told my sister-in-law, I managed to tell her, I, I feel like I did when I had the ectopic pregnancy, and that’s when she started, people started taking it seriously that something wasn’t right, and I, I knew in my body that [00:36:00] something wasn’t right.

David Pasqualone: And you gotta take that into account. And there’s always balance.

’cause some people get outta control and they panic and they start making stuff up in their brain. But when you’re of a sound mind and you’re not a, urgent situation. You know, especially if you’ve trusted Christ as your savior savior. Once you trust Christ as your Savior, savior, the Holy Ghost in dwells in you.

And the Bible says you have an unction from the holy one and you know all things. So if God’s leading you a certain direction, he’s the only one that really matters. Right? It’s like he put that in you. That is your opinion and that’s what you should be listening to, not a doctor. ’cause they’re gonna go back and drive their BMW and play golf on the weekend.

Whether you live or die, they don’t care. Most of them.

Pollyanna Darling: I think some of them probably do care.

David Pasqualone: I I, in my experience, I’ve seen a lot of doctors over the years and I would say two out 10, Karen are qualified, six outta 10 just [00:37:00] float, and two out 10 should be beat like pinatas and have their license removed.

That’s my experience.

Pollyanna Darling: I think really, I think what’s really interesting about. What we’re talking about right now is that your intuition is a very quiet voice. So, you know, you, you were mentioning about, you know, people getting all in a panic and getting up in their heads. If the voice that you are hearing is very loud, it’s most likely your mind and not your intuition, and not the, you know, the deep.

In a calm voice. So when I, when I was having the ectopic pregnancy, I was actually doing an interview. I was in the middle of an interview with somebody on the phone, a journalist. ’cause I, I’d published my first book and I was promoting it. So I’m on the phone with this guy and I had this terrible pain suddenly and I managed to get to the end of the interview and I went [00:38:00] and laid down on my couch and I thought, I’m just gonna.

Drop in and see if I can feel what’s going on. And I heard a very quiet voice, and it somehow showed me in my mind’s eye that something was torn. And I didn’t even know what an ectopic pregnancy was at that point in my life. I had no idea. And but it was quiet. The information was quiet.

David Pasqualone: Mean, the Bible talks about God’s voice is a still small voice.

Pollyanna Darling: It’s a quiet voice. It’s not a big panic stations, you know, like, oh my God, you better do something, bully. You’re gonna die. And I think it really matters to listen to that quiet, calm voice. And if you’ve got a voice shouting at you, it’s probably something that needs tending and care rather than being listened to.

David Pasqualone: Yeah, I, I [00:39:00] agree. So now you are, let’s talk about pushing through the pain, because as the old saying, things get worse before they get better, and that goes along in almost everything, but you can overdo it. Like you said, that guy was trying to push you and you knew your limit. That, okay, this is the point where if I go any further, it goes from pushing and stretching myself.

To injuring myself and setting things back for our listeners who, whether they’re grossly overweight due to illness or you know, you know, people can get a car accident, break their neck and they get it to 500 pounds, their first steps hurt. So. Whether they broke their neck in a car or hurt their neck in a car accident, whether they had something happen, maybe they’re just depressed.

It always hurts to start moving again. It always hurts to start exercising again, but for you to change your life and not only go from, like your book says, bed to buff. [00:40:00] But just to get out there, there was a million steps before you won your championship. What kind of advice do you have for our listeners that consistency each day to keep yourself in the right mindset and find the balance?

Pollyanna Darling: For me, it was experimenting, so I. Didn’t go. I didn’t say, oh, right, I’m gonna just get out there. I’m just gonna do it. And like that whole, like, you’re gonna do it, do it. That thing. I don’t, that’s not the world I play in. I decided that I would just take myself out of my comfort zone a little. So I went once a week to paddle.

When I began, I couldn’t even finish a session. But I just go, I’m just gonna go a little bit further than I think I can, just a little and see what happens. And my Ortho Bionomy guy who was amazingly [00:41:00] helpful, just, he said to me, just see if you can build your resilience. And so that’s what I started working on, is building resilience.

So if it’s somebody who, you know, if you’re somebody at home and you, you, very not mobile. It would be thinking about what could I do that would just be a little bit more than I usually do. So if you normally walk down to the mailbox or something once a day, then maybe you go a little, little halfway down the street or walked past the mailbox and out onto the road.

It’s like, how? How can you move? Just a little bit further than what you usually do, and it can be tiny, but your body starts to understand that we’re gonna be doing a little bit more and it, wherever you start moving, your body will make that part of you stronger. And it’s [00:42:00] okay. It is okay for it to take as long as it takes.

Because I think we have these crazy expectations in modern life that everybody should be winning all the time and that, you know, and that everyone can do everything. And if you’re not succeeding, you are sort of failing at life or something. You know? There’s all these ideas that are. Propagated by social media and advertising and everything else to try and make you feel incredibly inadequate and need to buy their stuff so you feel better.

And it’s all just rubbish because. You don’t have to do it that way. You can do it gently and you can do it kindly, and you can do it in a way that means that you are just incrementally improving. And for me, it was very frustrating to be incrementally improving because I always like to have everything I want happen right now.

So it was a bit of a struggle to deal with my mind. You know, I remember paddling [00:43:00] really early in the morning. We used to go. At five 30 on a winter’s morning, and it was stunningly beautiful so the water would be really dark and there’d be a little line of midnight blue along the horizon and maybe a crescent moon.

And then the touch of Dawn coming and everybody else would, was miles ahead of me. You know, I could barely see them. They were miles ahead of me and I thought, I’m never gonna be able to catch them up. But there, there were people in that club who really, really encouraged me, and I think that’s. Something else that matters is who you surround yourself with.

Who are the people that you spend time with? Are they people who are saying you can do it? You know, I, I’ve got faith in you. I trust that you can do it and not I’m gonna support you to do it however you wanna do it. That’s, I’m here for that. Like, are those the people you have in your life or do you have people who are like reinforcing your unwellness or your.[00:44:00]

Whatever’s wrong with you. ’cause there there is, there are people who like to be around to feel, to make themselves feel better, that you are not okay. And they are. And so I, I think it really matters that you are, that you have people in your life who will encourage you and cheerlead you and, and not rush you or hurry you or put you down or, you know, all of the ways that humans are.

That’s really important too.

David Pasqualone: I agree. And I think no matter where we are in life, we need to be that person to someone else as well. I mean, we can’t give what we don’t have, but all of us can give a kind word or encouragement. And I know in my life there was people I didn’t even know at times and they said the what seemed to be the smallest thing to them, but it changed the course of my life.

Like I was gonna quit and it kept me moving forward. So God put them in my life. To gimme just what I need at the right time to keep going. So I think [00:45:00] you’re spot on with being around life suckers versus life givers.

Pollyanna Darling: Yeah, and there’s a, there’s a way I think that,

I really think that that thing of what you focus on grows, whatever it is. What is that phrase? There’s, I know there’s what you resist persists, which is an annoying phrase, but also turns out to be true. But there’s another one about focus our attention. I, nevermind, I

David Pasqualone: know what you’re saying, I can’t remember either.

But basically says what you put your energy

Pollyanna Darling: flows where attention goes. That’s it.

David Pasqualone: That’s it.

Pollyanna Darling: So if you, if you have someone in your life who does give that encouraging word, or who does. Offer support in a way that feels like it’s helping you towards where you want yourself to be. Then having gratitude for that person and really noticing, oh, here is somebody who is offering me the kind of encouragement that I need, and I [00:46:00] have so much gratitude for that.

You don’t have to necessarily express it to them, but internally, having that enables your mind to start looking for that elsewhere because you then you’ve got your attention on, oh, here’s the encouragement, here’s the support. Whereas if you have your attention on, I’m not being encouraged, I’m not being supported.

This is shit. You know, then that’s, it’s almost as though you will find more of that, because that’s where your attention is. And so taking care of your mind really matters. And I also think that taking care of any unresolved trauma makes a really big difference too. So a lot of the pain that I had in my body was.

From this sense of unsafety in my own body, which was a result of my childhood experiences. And so I would continuously look for safety outside myself, which I did in both my marriages. I kind of pinned my safety to this other person, and so [00:47:00] whatever they did made a difference to whether I felt safe or not.

And it also made a real difference to how I experienced pain. So when I would have some kind of pain or problem. My whole system would freak out and panic because I, I didn’t feel safe in my own body. So I did quite a lot of work myself on trying to get to a point where I could just go, yep, I, I feel safe in my own being.

And a lot of that was nervous system work, like working on. Nervous system safety and that work is out there. You can find it, chat, GPT can even tell you what to do. But that matters too. So there’s, there’s a whole. A lot of different ways that you can attend to your wellbeing. And I think it can be overwhelming.

Like even in this conversation, I’ve, you know, we’ve talked about a bunch of things. If you’re not in a good place, [00:48:00] it’s easy to get overwhelmed by, well, you gotta do this and you gotta do that. And you need to attend to your mindset. And I think the thing to do is to, is to ask yourself what would feel good to me right now?

What’s the thing that I could do right now that would feel good to me? I don’t need to think about all those other things that Pollyanna and David are talking about. What’s the one thing that I could do and start there. Like start small. Because when you start small, you don’t overwhelm your nervous system.

You don’t trigger past trauma. You don’t push too hard. You’re just going, all right, this is gonna happen in increments. So that matters.

David Pasqualone: And when she says that, ladies and gentlemen, you know what she intended she means healthy thing. One new healthy thing that’s not a shot of heroin or a shot of whiskey or going out and, you know, doing [00:49:00] something immoral.

It’s doing something healthy for yourself. That, that next step. And she knows that and I know that and you know that. Everybody knows it, but don’t be a politician and twist it around. Well, Pollyanna said to do it. No, she didn’t. Yeah, so, so yeah. Well, let’s do this, Pollyanna. Where are you at today? Where are you heading next?

If somebody wanted to reach out and connect with you, everything from checking out your website, buying your book, what’s the best way to reach you?

Pollyanna Darling: My books are on Amazon and I have a website, which is pollyanna darling.com. But I have just been through a horrendous burnout. In the last I’ve recovered now, but it was late last year, so I’ve reinvented myself and my website is not quite finished.

So I went from I spent the last 15 years working in reforestation and I in a leadership role. And I’ve decided now after this crazy burnout that I’m actually much better [00:50:00] I can. Do more to support the planet by supporting the people who are working for the planet. So I’m offering coaching and support to people who are in leadership positions in businesses that are, you know, social enterprises or working for the planet.

And I also providing something called Birth Your Book, which is a kind of deep dive for people who wanna write their story into. What’s motivating them what the key elements are, who they’re writing for, so that the beating heart of the story can really come out. So those are the two things that I’m doing at the moment, and you can go to my website, my homepage works, but the rest of it is a little bit of a shemozzle at the moment, so you’ll have to forgive me for that.

David Pasqualone: Can they contact you through the website or is there a social media outlet that’s best to read to

Pollyanna Darling: you? Yeah. They can contact me through the website. I’m also on LinkedIn and I have a substack called True to type with [00:51:00] Pollyanna, which is writings of mine. I’m also running a spring writing challenge.

If there’s any writers watching, it’s free to join. You just have to subscribe to my Substack, and that starts on the 22nd of September. It’ll be six days of writing prompts and there is a prize. So, and, and yeah, just, I’m happy for anyone to reach out if they wanna chat.

David Pasqualone: Continue the conversation. So before we wrap up this episode, thank you again for Pollyanna for being here today and ladies and Gemma, as always, you can check out the show notes, get links, learn more, reach out to Pollyanna if you have any questions or want to continue the conversation.

But as for final thoughts, encouragement, inspiration, is there anything you wanna leave our audience, Pollyanna before we wrap things up today?

Pollyanna Darling: Yes, there is. There is one more thing and that is to have. A vision of [00:52:00] where you want to be and to remind yourself that of that often, and I never had a vision that I wanted to win races or anything.

That wasn’t, that wasn’t my aim ever. It just happened over time because I just kept thinking. Well, I wonder if I could get a little bit faster and I wonder if I could beat that person. I wonder if I could do this race. So there’s a curiosity there. So there’s a lot of people who say, you gotta have a vision and you gotta focus on who you wanna be and blah, blah, blah.

But I think you have a vision and you hold it gently. And then you just be curious. Can I, can I, can I, can I walk to the end of the driveway? Can I enter that race? Can I write a page or two of my memoir? Can I, you know, and there’s a way in which curiosity will allow you to reach a little further than you ever [00:53:00] thought was possible.

David Pasqualone: Yes, I know with God all things are possible and I know from firsthand experience that you’ve had, firsthand experience I’ve had that doctors don’t know everything and we rely way too heavily on doctors, like we talked about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re just men. You know, men are women, mankind, and they’re not always right.

And the best thing, one of the best things in the world is just proving ’em wrong and to go. I’ve gone back to doctors and said, Hey, this is what you told me and this is the reality. How many other people have you told those lies to that you’ve ruined their lives? So don’t be afraid to challenge a doctor just ’cause they have a PhD.

It means nothing in reality if it’s not working and helping people. So, Pollyanna, thank you for being here today.

Pollyanna Darling: That’s my pleasure. Thank you very much, David.

David Pasqualone: It’s been an honor. Ladies and gentlemen, reach out to Pollyanna. Reach out to me if I can help you and share this with your friends and family, so we cannot just grow the [00:54:00] podcast, but so we can help more people.

I’m David Pasqualone. This was Pollyanna Darling, and thank you for listening to The Remarkable People Podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Ciao.

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