**Warning: Some graphic imagery ahead.

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There are some days when I just don’t believe in myself.

It’s always when I’m about to do something that makes me feel vulnerable, when I’m comparing myself to others or when my past is just gripping me so tightly I can barely breathe.

I don’t know how it happens, but there’s always surrender on the horizon—and with that surrender comes the spaciousness of my spirit.

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was expressing myself to someone I used to be afraid of, someone who truly had harmed me in many ways—physically, sexually and emotionally. I was finally speaking the truth. He listened for a moment and then poured wax all over my hair. I immediately felt heavy and weak. I continued to try to speak, and he walked directly up to me with a knife and tried to slit my throat.

I woke up in a panic and felt a buzzing all around my throat. I looked around and realized I was safe. After a bit of deep breathing, I fell back asleep.

I continued to dream—and I dreamt that a different man, one I experience as safe and gentle, brought me two eagles in a cage as a gift. One was white and one was black. He let them out of the cage, and they flew out the window. I watched them fly away, just bearing witness to their ease and freedom.

The next morning I meditated on these dream symbols. After several minutes of just “sitting” with them, I tapped into what it would feel like to have all that wax in my hair. I surrendered to the weight of it all.

Almost immediately, it began transforming—seeping into my skin, turning my blood, bones and nervous system into pure gold until every single strand of my hair was radiating a most luminous light. Next, I felt a familiar pain in my shoulders and out of my bones shot these enormous black wings.

I looked down at my body—I had become an enormous black bird. Strange, yet immensely powerful.

My black wings had the ability to absorb and transmute all negativity, particularly from outside myself. The gold in my veins represented truth and the part of my being that can never ever be harmed by anyone or anything, despite the inevitably of suffering.

In that moment I remembered that my spirit is completely impenetrable.

I remembered that our nervous system houses our spirits. We are vessels for magic, medicine and a power of healing that sometimes seems elusive and mysterious and is often waiting for us to awaken—especially in the midst of fear, self doubt and even violence.

If I never surrendered to the weight of the wax, I wouldn’t have been able to alchemize anything at all. We often forget that what we resist, persists—and that difficult emotions like shame, fear and self doubt are actually impermanent.

Through the courage of fully surrendering to what is inevitably stirring deep within us at any given moment, the spirit is always sure to reveal itself—much like the force and pressure of the earth as it pushes the rarest veins of pure gold closer and closer to the surface.

It’s all a matter of searching deeper and being willing to rise up in all of the strange and mysterious ways we are invited to do so, in this strange and bizarre flight we call life.

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Author: Karen Prosen

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina

Photo: Flickr/Jack