I was raised by immigrants who built a life from nothing, I learned early that loud and unstoppable was just how we did things. I became an X-ray Technologist, spent nine years in a cardiac cath lab, and thought I had my whole life figured out.
Then, on Friday the 13th of July 2012, I woke up on vacation with the worst pain of my life. Five minutes later I could not move my legs. I was thirty years old and I was paralyzed.
Here is what nobody tells you about that. The hardest part was not the wheelchair. It was the world’s reaction to it. The physio who told me to stop trying. The people who looked away. The quiet assumption that my life had just gotten smaller.
So I got to work proving otherwise. I retrained my nervous system one toe at a time. I co-founded ReYu Paralysis Recovery Centre with my trainer Nancy and zero dollars, and we have helped over 750 people redefine what is possible for their bodies. I learned gratitude in a hospital cafeteria from a woman who would have been happy to move a single finger.
Now I do it from stages instead. I speak to leaders, teams, and rooms full of people who have never thought about disability this way, and I make them laugh while I take their assumptions apart.
I have been knocked down more times than most people will be in a lifetime, and I have gotten back up every single time. Long before anyone called me resilient, I was a kid in her room with the Westside Connection CD on repeat, building something in myself that nobody could touch. People have said it to me for years. Bean's a real gangster eh. Yes, they were Canadians saying it, and yes, I took it as the highest compliment I could receive.That toughness was never about the music. It was mine long before I knew what to call it, and it is the same thing that has carried me through every fall since.This is the story of how everything fell apart, and what I built out of the pieces.
I was born into a big, loud, beautiful Indian family and I have never once been quiet about it. My parents left everything in India to build a life in Canada, and my mom Raminder raised four very strong humans who were taught we could be anything we wanted to be. She never let me give up. Not once. Not ever.
Growing up Indo-Canadian in Alberta meant facing real racism and making core memories with my sisters Panji and Tin and my brother Jogi. I spent years feeling like I did not belong. It took me even longer to figure out what that really was.
After high school my mom, a health care aide, encouraged me to become one too. Neither of us knew how handy that training was about to become. I got into NAIT, became an X-ray Technologist, and spent nine years saving lives in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab.
This is where I honed my critical thinking skills and was pushed out of my comfort zone daily. This is also where I started drinking heavily to cope with the stress of a very stressful job. It’s also when I started numbing myself from my trauma and pain. But look how cool my lead was! Your girl loves a rainbow!
I was on vacation for a friend’s stagette when I felt the most excruciating pain of my life in my lower back. Five minutes later I could not move my legs. The MRI came back normal and I genuinely believed I would walk out of there. Then, in the middle of that first night, I overheard the nurses say they were waiting for a bed for me in the ICU.
Twelve days and a $124,000 hospital bill later, my mom and sister walked through the door and I burst out laughing, because my sister was wearing my tube top as a skirt. Even in the worst moments, my family finds the laugh.
I flew home in a wheelchair and turned recovery into my whole world. One September night, lying in bed with my mom nearby, I wiggled the big toe on my right foot. She ripped the covers off, told me to concentrate, and started recording while I did it again and again.
Lying there, I understood something that would carry me for the next decade: my toes are the part of me furthest from my brain.
That fall, an MRI finally showed a lesion in my spinal cord. Transverse myelitis. I read the report and felt something close in my chest, quiet and final, like a door shutting on its own without asking me first.
I did not want to be the girl in the wheelchair. I hated everything about my life. I hated the body that would not listen to me anymore. I hated the half second every morning where I forgot, and the one right after where I remembered all over again. That half second was the cruelest part of every single day.
You already took my legs. Just take the rest of me too.
I turned to food because it was the one thing I could still control. Roughly two hundred spicy chicken sandwiches from Wendy's in three months. Honestly, they should sponsor me.
I turned into Mean Bean. Sharp in a way I had never been. My mother, my siblings, the people working hardest to keep me afloat, they got the worst of me, because they were the only ones close enough to hit.
I can joke about it now. I could not back then.
Mean Bean still lives inside me somewhere. She always will. But my gratitude got louder than she did, and it started at a lunch table I never saw coming.
A girl with a c-spine spinal cord injury who could only move her head sat across from me while her mom fed her lunch, and she said it like it was obvious. That was it. In my head I said: Bean, you are not allowed to feel sorry for yourself anymore. From that exact second I started being grateful for what I have instead of grieving what I lost.
Her name is Oksana. Years later we made her one of ReYu’s first board members, and today she is one of the most talented mouth painters in the world. I showcase her art in my keynotes because without her, I don’t know if I ever learn the lesson that changed my life. Gratitude.
My psychologist, Sharon, taught me the rest. She met a version of me that did not know how to feel a feeling. She banned me from wearing makeup to her office so I could not hide behind it, and she taught me to label my emotions, feel them, and move through them in a healthy manner. She also taught me how to love myself again, disability and all.
I was misdiagnosed with conversion disorder, told my paralysis was in my head before anyone confirmed it was in my spine three months later. That misdiagnosis cost me time I will never get back, but it also handed me the biggest silver lining of my life, because it is the reason I found her in the first place. I still see her to this day.
I recommend a good therapist to everyone I meet. Not the kind who nods along and tells you what you want to hear. The kind who calls you out on your nonsense. The kind who points you toward the parts of yourself you would rather not look at, the parts most of us spend our whole lives avoiding. That is uncomfortable. It is also exactly where the growth happens. So let's grow baby!
Recovery became my obsession. Physio in Edmonton, activity-based training in Regina, Calgary every single Friday then three weeks at Project Walk in California, where the music was bumping and people talked to people with disabilities like people.
Before I left Edmonton, a physio told me I would get fat, be on medication forever, and shouldn’t even try. In California, my trainer said: “Girl, you have so much activation in your legs. You are going to be just fine.” That contrast built my entire philosophy: the medical model says the person is the problem. The social model says the environment is.
Back home I hired a kinesiology student named Nancy Morrow, a tank of a human who had been researching activity-based therapy since the seventh grade. She did not just teach me how to walk again. She rebuilt my entire body with me, piece by piece, on days when I did not believe it was possible. We are complete opposites in almost every way, and somehow that is exactly why we work. Nancy will always be part of my life. Some bonds are not built. They are earned, one hard day at a time.
In 2017 we co-founded ReYu Paralysis Recovery Centre with zero dollars and one goal: to bring Canada to the forefront of neurorecovery. We grew from six clients to over 750, and I lived it from both sides leading ReYu as Executive Director while being a client of the centre I was running.
In 2014 I watched Rick Hansen speak in Edmonton, and I knew it in my bones: I want to do that. I had been sharing my story since 2013 and never stopped hospital rooms, classrooms, boardrooms, ballrooms. Every room confirmed the same thing: this is what I am here for. I joined the See Agency roster and incorporated Call Me Bean Inc.
Then I starred in and produced PUSH Canada’s first prime-time television series with an entirely disabled cast, airing on CBC. Two seasons of my wheelie peeps and me, showing people what our real lives look like. Our season-one protest helped change Alberta government policy on catheter coverage.
My body started screaming under the weight of leading two businesses, and I lost most of my hair to alopecia areata. It forced a very difficult decision: I stepped down as Executive Director of ReYu.
Not because I failed. Because I was half-leading two companies and fully serving neither and it was time to take this message to bigger stages. I remain ReYu’s Board Chair and a lifelong client.
People tell me they will never look at an accessible washroom or parking stall the same way again. A woman newly facing her own diagnosis told me my talk gave her hope. And my favourite: after a virtual school assembly, a mom found her five-year-old playing with his stuffies, acting out a scene where I visited the city councillor to explain why she needed a ramp. That is the ripple. That is the point.
Because the discomfort around disability doesn’t disappear on its own. Someone has to disrupt it in boardrooms, classrooms, and ballrooms and I’ve been doing it since 2013.
You can’t be what you can’t see. I spent years saying representation matters. Now I am the representation on prime-time TV, on national stages and I do not carry that lightly.
The medical model says the person is the problem. The social model says the environment is. Environments can change, I’ve watched one physio’s ceiling become another trainer’s starting line.
The Fall. Feel. Rise. Repeat. framework, a new lens on accessibility, and a question you won’t be able to shake: which hard will you choose?
Disrupting the discomfort of disability: resilience through the Fall. Feel. Rise. Repeat. framework, gratitude as a turning point, accessibility and inclusion, and the shift from the medical model to the social model of disability. Every talk is grounded in lived story, not theory.
Corporate teams, healthcare and education audiences, government, HR and DEI leaders, conferences, associations, and schools, any room that needs a perception shift on disability, adversity, or possibility.
I’ve lived every side of it: nine years as a medical professional, then a patient, then a founder who led a paralysis recovery centre while being its client plus prime-time representation as star and producer of PUSH on CBC.
Yes. Every keynote is shaped for the room your industry, your audience, and the outcome you need. No two rooms get the same talk.
I’ve spoken on stages across North America so far and I’m open to going further. Accessibility requirements are simple and provided well in advance.
Absolutely. Virtual keynotes and school assemblies work beautifully, one virtual assembly ended with a five year old roleplaying accessibility advocacy with his stuffies.
Formats are flexible, typically a 45–60 minute keynote with optional Q&A. Reach out with your agenda and we’ll shape it to fit.
Formats beyond the keynote are available on request from fireside chats to interactive sessions built around the resilience tools I share. Ask when you inquire.
People rethink accessible washrooms and parking stalls, leaders rethink the environments they build, and everyone leaves with a resilience framework and a question that sticks: which hard will you choose?
Email Bean’s agent Christa at See Agency — bookbean@seeagency.com or send an inquiry through the contact page. You can even text Bean directly at 780-709-2468. Tell us your event, audience, and date, and we’ll take it from there.
One keynote can shift how a room sees disability, accessibility, and its own hard things and what people do about it afterward. Perception shift. Accessibility awareness. A resilience mindset your people will actually use.