About Me
Hi! I'm Rupel
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As a nurse who has worked in hospitals and in the community, I am familiar with our conventional approach to health. From what I see, we’ve been “doing healing all wrong,” and as a result, we’re leaving people sick, tired, and suffering. We are missing the fundamental steps toward recovery and relying instead on band-aid solutions. When we overlook the root causes of illness, we end up chasing symptoms rather than long-term results. This can leave many of us feeling frustrated, unsupported, and lost in the quest to heal our body. Over the years, I have studied functional medicine, a holistic discipline that seeks to uncover the root causes of illness or chronic conditions and addresses them through changes in diet and lifestyle.
After enduring my own struggles with a debilitating illness that left me paralyzed and very sick, I was told to manage my symptoms with strong medications without any guidance about what to eat in order to heal. I knew at that moment that this was not the answer for me. I designed my own approach to healing, instead—one that included nourishing my body with wholesome food and pursuing a lifestyle in harmony with meditation, breathwork, movement, and a supportive community. In one year, I was able to reverse my symptoms, and, most importantly, to walk again. With this experience, Blue Hammock Wellness Inc. was born, out of my own frustrations in not receiving adequate support, knowledge, and guidance in how to get back to my own wellness.
My journey has been a gift. My trust in my own body’s inner wisdom to heal itself has shown me that miracles can happen. This experience has propelled me with a purpose to help others see this for themselves and use their innate wisdom to heal their bodies. I use these same principles to support my clients to live their healthiest lives.
My Story
How did I get here!!!
From highly functioning to paralyzed to healthier than I’ve ever been? Well, it hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned a lot over the last few years. After I struggled profoundly with a sudden debilitating condition that left me paralyzed, it awakened something in me. I started to look at all aspects of my life and question why I got so sick in the first place
Before I got sick, I thought I had been doing everything right. I was living a healthy life, working out consistently, practicing yoga and meditation, and eating a fairly good diet. Like so many people, I juggled the pressures of a stressful job, motherhood, marriage, and managing a household. I was hard on myself and in a constant state of “fight or flight,” like I was being chased by something, and I needed to keep up or everything would fall apart. What I didn’t know was that my body was keeping score of all my stressors. I was in a continuous state of overwhelm which was compromising my brain, immune, nervous, digestive, and endocrine system. I had ongoing gut issues, food sensitivities, brain fog, extreme fatigue, chronic back pain, mood swings, insomnia, and an overall sense of feeling unwell.
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It all came crashing down in June 2019, when I contracted food poisoning after eating spotted prawns from our local fisherman’s wharf. Initially, I suffered from extreme fatigue, weakness, and the need to make many trips to the bathroom. Within three days after eating the prawns, however, I became paralyzed. That’s right! I lost all mobility and sensation from the chest down. I could not stand, walk, or move, and was mostly confined to a bed, requiring a wheelchair to get around. After extensive diagnostic testing, I found out I had Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an autoimmune disease involving the body’s immune system attacking its nervous system. My body was suffering, and I wasn’t paying attention. Finally, my body gave up on me demanding I finally listen.
At 52 years of age
The Road to Recovery...
I experienced a long journey of recovery, with many nights of excruciating nerve pain. I found myself tossing and turning and making late-night calls to my husband from the hospital, crying, telling him I was scared that pain and paralysis were now my new life.
I felt intense guilt around burdening my family with my disability. I’d never been good about asking for help, and here I was, forced to depend on others to comb my hair, dress me, shower me, and push me around in a wheelchair. It was not easy, but one day I woke up and said to myself that if I didn’t make changes, I would never again have a normal life. I decided in one moment to fight this illness.
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This is the program I began to follow for myself:
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I used breathwork to regulate my nervous system to keep me in a calm state while enduring highly invasive medical procedures.
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I used song and mantra-chanting to manage my state of mind and pain threshold.
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I surrounded myself with a community of positive and uplifting people to motivate me to keep pushing forward.
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I completely surrendered to what was in front of me with acceptance, rather than succumbing to seeing myself as a victim or obsessing over the worst-possible outcomes.
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I decided I was going to heal my body naturally with good nutrition, making food my medicine.
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I removed external and internal toxins from my life, which included inflammatory foods, destructive habits, limiting thought patterns, and toxic people.
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My journey was a process of cleansing the old and replacing it with “the new me.” I experimented on myself to see if I could heal by augmenting the conventional care I was receiving with the system of healing I had started developing for myself.
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The medical professionals were stunned by how fast I had recovered from such a debilitating condition. They began to believe in what I was doing and encouraged me to continue. In one year, I was able to heal my body and achieve my goal of walking again, and I did this through nutritional and lifestyle changes. By no means am I 100% recovered, but I am functioning and living my life.
I now use these same principles to support my clients to live their healthiest lives. It’s the most rewarding experience to work alongside someone who is on a health journey to feeling better and reclaiming their life, and i am honoured to be part of their journey.
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