Therapist and sexual abuse survivor, Ananda Sarita, describes her healing journey and the various methods that can help.
Between the ages of 3 and 7, I was sexually abused by an older family member. Before perpetuating the abuse for the first time, he asked me to promise never to say anything to anyone about what he was going to do. Since I was only three, and had no idea what he was going to do, I felt privileged to be entrusted with a secret by someone so much older and wiser than me. I promised to keep the secret.
The secret became a torment, especially because I had so much physical pain in my genitals after each repeated visit by him to my bed. As a survival mechanism, the moment he would touch me, I would fly out of my body and simply watch what was happening from above. I thought of this as ‘playing dead.’ However, afterwards when I would re-enter my body, it was agony. I used to scream and cry to my mother, begging her not to send me to the back room for a nap, praying she would understand my torment and save me from what I could not speak about.
Finally at age seven, it dawned on me that this family member was mentally ill. I realised I could avoid him if I was clever enough. And at age 12, great good fortune allowed me to move out of the family home into a Free School founded by my mother. In the free school, there was a therapy session called Encounter Group. I found myself in the same room with adults and teenagers, all going into emotional meltdown while the local Unitarian Minister played the role of therapist.
In this environment of emotional release, a dam broke inside of me and all the anguish I had bottled up erupted. I screamed and raged at my mother, asking her how in the world she had never noticed the abuse happening under her nose all those years and blaming her for being a terrible mother. She was devastated! She sought to make amends. And that is how my healing journey began.
When I discovered Dynamic Meditation in India with Osho at the age of 17, Dynamic became my saviour. I did it each day for 1 1/2 years. However, because of the enormous amount of anguish which had been repressed inside, I was not content with just one Dynamic per day. I would go back to bed after Dynamic and continue screaming the rest of the day. I was literally screaming my way to God! I also practiced Prati Prasav, a meditation Osho speaks about which helps one unwind backwards in time, reliving and releasing this and other lives.
The first time I found myself hurtling backwards into my past life death and from there continuing to unwind into the entirety of that last life, it was a revelation to me. I used to believe I was a victim of circumstance, that by some cruel twist of fate, I had been born into a poor family and been sexually abused at such a young age.
By reliving my previous incarnation I discovered that I had called each and every negative event in this life towards myself due to stupid mistakes and beliefs I had manifested in my past life. In that lifetime, I was a woman from India, following a celibate path of karma yoga. I betrayed my vows and ran off with a man. Subsequently, I felt very guilty and judged myself for forsaking spirituality for a life of being the mistress of a man. This led me into a downward spiral where I eventually escaped from the man and ended up dying in despair. This was not a belief kicking in. At that time I had no idea of karma or even of past lives. It was a huge shock to find myself with vivid memories and feelings from another life. The memories were as real as memories from this life but the body they were happening in was different!
Through seeing and reliving the events from my last life, I could for the first time take responsibility for what I had attracted in this life, including the abuse. It may sound shocking that a child of three is calling something as cruel as sexual abuse towards herself, but it is so. I am not saying the perpetrator of the abuse was to be condoned for his actions. Not at all! Sexual abuse is a horrendous crime! And yet, when we are able to journey to the soul level and find out, from there, why we have chosen this experience; what is the lesson our innermost soul wished us to learn through this? – we are finally set free. By owning responsibility, we simultaneously gain the power to change the situation, to rewrite our inner script.
My original mistake in that life was believing that one has to give up sexuality and material comforts in order to be spiritual. This inner division is what led me into anguish and despair and the stain of my choices in that life manifested as karmic patterns in this life.
By first passing through powerful emotional release and then taking responsibility for what had happened to me, I was liberated from the victim mentality. I could then discover multidimensional healing.
I continued Prati Prasav and the unwinding of my past lives for five years. This gave me innumerable insights in regards to human nature and victim / aggressor roles. I discovered that behind every victim, there is an aggressor. And behind every aggressor, there is a victim. True healing happens when we own the opposite role to which we normally identify with.
15 years later, I found myself in the role of healer, offering the method Colorpuncture in Osho’s community. I had the great blessing of being able to facilitate profound healing journeys for innumerable people from all over the world. Healing breakthroughs invariably came about when the client ‘owned’ the opposite role to what they had presented in the beginning of their session series. This healing would happen spontaneously as the client relived their past lives and found themselves at the very root of their ego pattern. The ego, in my understanding is a protective shell created around a deeply buried wound. In most cases, the roots of the ego pattern will be exactly the opposite of the person’s persona.
When we relive the opposite, it immediately heals the tendency to project our core wound on others, outside of ourselves. From that healed state we begin having compassion towards ourselves and towards others. Instead of carrying hatred towards others, we seek to find ways and means to offer healing and wholeness for all. We understand the nature of human frailty and wish to find Forgiveness.
Forgiveness does not mean we condone the action done by another. It simply means we let go of the huge burden of pain we have been carrying around since time immemorial. As we let go of this burden, our heart opens, we experience a flood of love and compassion. We are set free.
As Ram Dass said, “We are all just walking each other home.”
In our various Osho Communities around the world, people were experimenting with testing the edge on everything… From violent encounter groups to free sexual exploration. This was also reflected in the society as a whole. When the sexual revolution happened in the 1960’s and 70’s people threw themselves into the enthusiastic exploration of all forms of sexuality with wild abandon.
In this milieu, many children and young adults were exposed to too much, too early, whether that be drugs, sex or loud music. In my case, I smoked my first joint at age 12. I took my first LSD trip at age 14. I had consensual sex the first time at age 15. This was not so unusual in those days. Yes, we were bruised, scarred and fucked up. And we learned valuable lessons, and moved on. Since the culture as a whole was going through vast upheaval and change so quickly, it would have been very unusual for anyone to point a finger at anyone else for sexual misconduct. The society as a whole was in a state of misconduct!
Now we are in a different era. The #MeToo Movement has given women permission to voice their great displeasure at not being treated with respect and even reverence by men. This era of the divine feminine demands patriarchy to give way, allowing the goddess in every woman to shine.
When women complain in today’s world about abuse carried out 30 or more years ago, two different cultures are colliding. Men may feel very confused by this. What was accepted as normal just a few years before is now called abuse and men are being asked to go to prison for offences which were not seen as offences at that time. The world is changing and women will not rest till they take their place as the embodiment of the divine and are treated with a worshipful attitude. Along the way, there will certainly be many earthquakes!
One of my students recounted her extraordinary story in regards to sexual abuse and the healing of it. She and her two sisters were all sexually abused by their father for years. They didn’t know it happened to each one of them till they grew up and shared their stories with each other. They decided to bring it out into the open and told their mother.
The entire family then went for family therapy. They were into therapy for one or two years all together; father, mother and daughters. They cleared and purged everything and finally came to a space of Forgiveness. The father and mother stayed together through all of this. And the entire family came to a space of healing and genuine love and appreciation of each other’s frailties and strengths.
Miracles can happen when we share. I highly recommend for abusers and abused to come together with a skilled therapist and work on releasing and healing the trauma that happens with abuse for both aggressors and victims. For such situations, I use already existing tried and proven effective methods and have also created some methods, that can accelerate this process of healing.
- Conscious emotional release (Osho’s Pillow Beating Meditation)
- Projection Exercise (Gestalt Therapy)
- Forgivenness Ritual (a Tantra ritual that heals the very roots of suffering)
- Freedom is Technique (from Brandon Bays, in the lineage of Papaji)
- Whole Listening (from David Wagner of Tachyon Technologies)
In addition to this:
Colour Light Therapy sexual abuse treatment is very effective for releasing the last vestiges of the abuse from the body memory. Colour Light Therapy Transmitter Relays will unwind past life memories, greatly accelerating healing on all levels. Craniosacral healing is a powerful and even miraculous method for one-on-one sessions. The Journey work, developed by Brandon Bays, is amazing for healing trauma from the past.
Wholeness is achievable by anyone who is dedicated to the path of meditation. Osho’s meditations are simply genius, because many of them contain an emotional fluidity stage as well as silence and celebration. Through these methods, if practiced with totality, we can find true healing on all levels. We are blessed! It is my sincere prayer that anyone drawn to Osho’s path will give themselves the gift of wholeness he has offered to us with so much love and compassion.
Related articles
- To go beyond your parents – “Eastern psychology says that it is not the parents who decide your life. Really, you have chosen them,” states Osho
- The last Bardo: Search for right parents – Nirbija writes about Osho’s suggestions for dying meditators and loved ones
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