The careening bus hurtles towards me head-on.
I am in the middle of the road, right on the yellow dividing line.
Terror engulfs all of my being.

How did I get here?
Why can’t I move?
I must move out of harm’s way.
I MUST!

But I cannot move…

It is impossible to react fast enough, impossible for my motor-neuron-based body to send the signal from brain to skeletal muscle to move myself out of death’s way.

The bus races towards me at an astronomical speed.
It’s so close now, I do not even see the body of the vehicle, only the oblong square ‘face’ becoming magnified at an incomprehensible rate.

The levels of fear inside me threaten to extinguish my existence before the bus does.

I’m about to die.
In milliseconds I will be dead.
And then…

I wake up. Sweating. Trembling. Half-Relieved.

A nightmare. One I keep having over and over again.
The same scene.
The same paralysis, powerlessness and terror.
The same ending where I wake up just before getting killed.

---

I began having this recurring dream shortly after the onset of my chronic disease in 2012 – an undiagnosable, rheumatological condition whose symptoms of extreme fatigue, body-wide pain, and swollen aching joints leave me feeling like I really have been hit by a bus.

At the time I was also dealing with a highly toxic boss in a new office job, supporting a terminally ill friend in the last months of her life, and caring for my sister who had just survived a serious suicide attempt at the subway and that had left her with amputated feet, multiple fractures and in an exceptionally fragile psychological state.

To say I felt depleted and despairing is an understatement.

I was living a nightmare.


My recurring dream mirrored how I felt about my waking life.
The same paralysis, powerlessness and terror.
It was only a matter of time before the behemoth set of circumstances coming at me collided with me head-on, crushing what was left of my life.

Of all these ordeals, my job was the only thing I had any real control over, the only thing I could actually change, but I could see no way out.

I desperately needed to quit but the lack of a diagnosis meant I didn’t qualify for disability benefits and my worsening health had brought me to the point where I couldn’t manage basic life tasks, like showering or cooking, let alone holding down a job.

What was I going to do about money and who was going to help me as my own abilities declined?

I felt doomed and trapped – hostage to the larger-than-life circumstances I found myself in.
No wonder I kept having this dream.

But then one night… the dream changed.

It began like it always did:

I am in the middle of the road unable to move.
An out-of-control bus is bearing down on me at an incomprehensible speed, ready to crush me any second.
The levels of fear inside me threaten to extinguish my existence before the bus does.
I’m about to die.
In milliseconds I will be dead.
And then…

Impact.

Lights out. Pitch-black darkness.
A screaming silence. A quiet that is not a result of the absence of atomic particles bouncing off matter, but the absence of matter and space altogether.
Time no longer exists.
But I do.

I am aware I am experiencing this moment but not as I’ve known existence until now. I no longer peer out from within a material body but radiate outward into infinity. I am boundless, lacking delineation, yet still have a sense of physicality.

It’s the most indescribable state – as if I’ve melded into space, a mixture of euphoria, exhilaration, and rapture… and here I was afraid to die.

----

I wake up stunned and astounded.

What I feared the most happened. I got hit by the bus… and it felt extraordinary.
Not only had I not ‘died’, I had expanded and achieved a state of being I couldn’t possibly imagine.

The dream allowed me to realize that what I was most terrified of – leaving my job without knowing how I would support myself or what would become of me – would not be my death but my liberation.

In the dream, getting run over by a bus had no possible positive outcomes, and in real life, quitting my job was the equivalent of a death sentence – but what we think will happen and what we are capable of are two very different things.

I ended up quitting my job and taking a year off with no pressure to come up with a plan. Before I could begin to address the ‘how’ I needed to direct some of my attention and energy toward my own life. I knew that if I restored some balance in body, mind and spirit, the answers would arise on their own.

And you know what?
That's exactly what happened.

I ended up becoming a life coach and merging all my prior knowledge as a scientist, personal trainer and entrepreneur into a unique online business. 

It is what has lead me here, to this moment, writing this to you and helping others free themselves from the invisible chains that can bind us.

Mind you, the path has not been easy, but neither was the one I was on.

The key difference has been how I feel inside; I feel free and expansive, no longer bound by the situations I thought were the dictators of my destiny.

What I learned was this: no matter what your circumstances are, or how doomed and fragile you feel, you are never truly powerless; you are as formidable a force as any plight that threatens to crush you. Even when it doesn't look like it and you think the end is near, believe in yourself and the astounding powers that lie within.