Paula Hurlock goes from breakdown to breakthrough - Wellness practitioner helps people heal through ancient methods

Feeling the weight of the pandemic, local italist Paula Hurlock admits that she suffered a breakdown, but she has turned her life around and is now encouraging others to do the same.

"I had literally taken on this path of healing because I had a full breakdown of mind and body back in 2020, and I literally rebuilt my entire body and self," she said.

Hurlock is the creator and founder of Wellness Experience Jamaica, a service for which she and her associates provide coaching in various forms to tap into ancient holistic wellness methods. Now armed with a wealth of research from both online sources as well as her ancestral lifelines, she feels an urge to help others to avoid the pain she felt. As a contributor at the inaugural staging of the Ital Food Fest, which is to be held at Grizzly's Plantation Cove in St Ann on July 15, Hurlock said she will be taking her offerings to the people.

"I'm in a position to help people who are going through the very same thing that I went through and I'm in a position to show them step by step how I did it. I did it through meditation, I did it through exercise, I did it through controlled and conscious consumption of food and I also did detoxes," she explained.

Living by the tagline, 'If you eat like your great grandmother, you cannot go wrong', Hurlock said she feels particularly passionate about giving minority groups like Rastafarians, elderly folk and rural Jamaicans access to healing methods that are in line with their beliefs.

"Wellness Experience Jamaica really was a response to the pandemic and so I, Paula Hurlock, I am an advocate," she stated.

"When the pandemic struck I realised that there was a massive gap, a knowledge gap in Jamaica with respect to our traditional wisdom and how effective it has always been in keeping our population strong and healthy. And I found that there was a complete overlooking of that by our government," she said. "I felt as if the path of least resistance would have been to get them to strengthen their immune system the way that our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers strengthened our immune systems and that is through herbs."

She said through her services, she plans retreats, gives lectures, and offers alternate and ancient methods to cure and prevent certain lifestyle ailments.

"Nobody is being told that these lifestyle diseases are by nature reversible, because they were created from lifestyle behaviours. So that's kind of what Wellness Experience Jamaica wants to do, help people to understand that every disease that has been created can be reversed, or better still, prevented by being aware of things like what is alkaline food, what is acidic food, what foods are filled with preservatives and what foods are good for you," she said.