Trigger Warning: This essay includes descriptions of child sex trafficking, sodomy, suicidal ideation, violence, and demonic themes. Please take care while reading.

Time and again, life keeps presenting me with the same fork in the road: stay with what is emerging, or turn away. For years I chose away. But what I turned from never disappeared. It waited—patiently.

As a kid, I had a bunch of pus boils erupt on my skin in 10th grade. I remember secretly enjoying the hot, painful experience of popping them and squeezing out the pus. In the moments where I’ve fully met Agony, it’s felt like that but throughout my body, like lava surging through me, spliced with moments of being pierced from within by knives. It was a relief to finally be able to name this at the somatic level. And I wonder—do you experience agony similarly too?

If I were to summarize my spiritual or trauma-healing journey, I’d call it an arduous process of saying No to whatever takes me away from the emergence of that agony. And it seems to emerge cyclically. As if I was a woman on a menstrual cycle. And when it starts emerging, it always comes to the same question: can I stay here, or am I going to run away from it?

For a long time, I chose away—into alcohol, into weed, into pornography, into sex. Away into relationships, away into connection. Away into my breath. Over time, I tracked a pattern that each time I circled back from the distraction, the same thing was still there. Waiting. Patiently. It feels funny to ascribe patience to what was waiting, because some of these things were absolutely horrific to face. Yet there they were—patiently waiting as I moved into distractions and then came back after the cycle of distraction settled.

Through that journey, I uncovered (and there is still no independent verification of these claims) fully repressed memories of sexual abuse by my maternal grandfather and later, his friend.

As horrific as that was, the journey also brought me a surprising amount of physical relief—my body slowly came alive again. I went from physical weakness & tightness to strength & mobility. I cherish movement now. Oh, it feels so luscious to be able to feel the different muscles in my body move in harmony—whether I’m walking, dancing, or lifting weights. The slow, soft surety of strength and capability. There is something deeply satisfying in noticing how much agency my mind now has over my muscles. Muscles that, for years, were sealed off, inaccessibly wrapped under the adipose tissues of memories too horrific to face.

And I sense there is more. When I reach the edge of another layer of trauma, I can feel my body resisting and freezing. My mind attempting to find escape into distractions. I still emotionally eat. That hasn’t gone away, though it has shifted—from bingeing on midnight pizzas to snacking on oranges. But then I also lift pretty heavy, so part of me justifies it by saying the food serves as fuel. At least that’s the story I tell myself right now, the mental calculation I use to make peace with it. I still distract myself with devices too. Yet my old ways of numbing and the frequency of it has fallen away. Alcohol, weed, porn, sex—they no longer hold me. The conviction not to choose them is strong.

When I do ease past distraction, I meet what is there: the agony itself. Oh! The agony! Like lava surging through my body. Like many knives piercing me from the inside. When I allow myself to feel it fully, and weep, I come alive again. Like a soldier returning home from the trenches into the embrace of his lover.

I theorize that it is the physical agony of dissociation – the soul surgically and suddenly separated from the physical body at the moment of forced sodomy – cycling through over and over. I imagine that’s how it’d feel like at death too. That theory comforts me into thinking I’ll be better prepared for death than the laity. And I understand now why so many who were abused in the most innocent stages of life—when they embodied pure, godly childlike innocence—resort to numbing substances and numbing lifestyles. It is so hard not to.

As much as modern trauma healing culture loves to wax eloquent about non-duality, the choice at the point of the emergence of agony is a firmly dualistic choice. To stay or to turn away.

For a couple of years in this journey, I kept turning toward revenge. I held the possibility of taking what I saw as righteous action—violent action—against my grandfather’s friend who is still alive. Nothing before I encountered Christ had convinced me that killing another human being was wrong. The Buddha taught against it, but the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna exhorts Arjuna to take up arms against his extended family, seemed to muddy that message. When I added to this the historical lens—that the embrace of Buddhist non-violence paved the way for the Islamic invasions of India, and that Gandhi’s policies of non-violence only carried weight when the British were already weakened by World War II, along with Gandhi’s own shadow of sexual abuse toward his nieces—I remained convinced there was still a place for righteous vengeance.

I had to lean on that qualifier—righteous—to stay convicted. And in its own way, the vengeance served me well while I carried it, because it allowed me to channel the violence that was being directed inward, into suicidality, outward instead into action. I believe that’s a possible blueprint for emerging out of suicidality. Redirect the inwards violence outwards towards one person who you believe has wronged you most, and then find a way to forgive that person.

It is still a little scary to talk so openly about it. I had considered making a public spectacle of this man. He and my grandfather were business partners of some sort and had a farmhouse out in the woods in my village.

I remember, even as a child, wondering: what is it that they grow here? It seemed like a business, but they never seemed to be actively farming. My grandfather would take me there often. I’d ride on the back of his scooter. A few of my earliest recovered memories of abuse are at that farmhouse. Having just repressed what had happened, child-me would sit there in wonder: what is this business he is running?

Lately, I’ve wondered if money was being exchanged. The word that comes to me is trafficking. I used to think trafficking only meant kidnapping—children taken by strangers, sold into sex slavery, and eventually rescued by organizations, often Christian. Just as I once thought childhood sexual abuse was only “stranger danger.” Now I see trafficking as much broader than that. You don’t need to be taken far to be trafficked. There is enterprise trafficking, and there’s small-business trafficking.

In my reflections on capitalism, I often distinguish between wage laborers and asset owners. A wage laborer exchanges time for money. An asset owner owns something and deploys it strategically to generate revenue. Over the past year, I’ve been making the transition from being a wage laborer to being an asset owner. Along the way, I’ve come to see the value of small, family-owned businesses and even looked into acquiring established local blue-collar operations. Before this, I thought there was only one playbook for business: the VC-funded tech startup. Everything else seemed unsexy, uncool. Now I can appreciate the strength and dignity of running a small, enduring enterprise.

If you know much about my Marathi upbringing, you may understand what it’s taken to open up to this. Marathi culture prizes education and service. The dream is to secure a stable corporate job and stay there for life. Among the many traumas of British rule in India, I’d say the Marathis paid one of the highest prices. The Maratha Confederacy once ruled most of India, having taken power from the Mughals—the first Hindu conquerors since the Islamic invasions of the 10th century. That power was broken in the Third Battle of Panipat, where invading Afghans under the Durrani banner decimated the Maratha warrior class. It was a profound shift: from being sovereign over land to aspiring to be lifelong servants.

The Gujaratis are our neighbors, and their orientation is completely different. They prize family enterprise over education and service. Growing up, it was common in Marathi communities to mock Gujaratis for running small businesses instead of going to elite engineering schools, like the one I went to. And yet, when I look at India’s growth, it has been driven largely by Gujaratis. I’m reminded of the commandment to “love thy neighbor.” God places in our proximity the things we most need to learn. The Marathi dream is to be a lifelong wage laborer. The Gujarati dream is to build and pass down family businesses.

You see the same cultural split among Indians in the U.S. as well. There are those who pursue education and wage labor in high-paying jobs, and then there are the motel and gas station owners—most of them Gujaratis. Two entirely different orientations toward life: wage labor versus asset ownership.

And I’ve wondered if as a child, I was an asset in such a small family-owned business—taken to that farmhouse to generate revenue–while I sat there in my post-assault daze wondering what is it that they grow in this farmhouse.

When I first asked my mother if she remembered anyone misbehaving with me as a child, she said: “Oh, does that happen to boys? I just never thought of that, so I never looked out for it.” Her response revealed how easy it would have been, in my culture, to traffic pre-pubescent boys—when mothers focused only on protecting their daughters, unaware that grown men target boys too. And for a fallen man seeking a vessel to thrust his own agony into, there is little difference between a pre-pubescent boy and girl. In fact, it may even be easier for an otherwise heterosexual pedophilic man to share a boy, since the heart can become possessively entangled with a girl.

This contemplation of whether I was trafficked started seeding in me after I noticed how hatred from online strangers hooked into my nervous system, triggering me into the cycle of agony that I described before. I had plenty of opportunities to explore this as I was creating content presenting the progressive case for voting for Trump in the 2024 elections. When I discussed this with my collaborator about how hatred from strangers affected him, it seemed like he was able to shrug it off a lot easier. Why wasn’t I able to do the same? I remember my mother’s words throughout my childhood “just shrug it off, Vighnesh. Don’t get so affected by such things”.

In the two sets of memories that I have recovered, my bodily response has different flavors of pain. With my grandfather, it was betrayal. Being hurt by someone I loved and trusted. And yet, on the shadow side, there was also a feeling of being chosen by someone I loved and trusted to share intimacy with. With his friend, I felt pure hatred coming from him and my own response was one of pure disgust. But then I still knew this guy. Abuse from a family member carries a fallen form of love. Abuse from someone without a bond lands as pure hate.

I’ve wondered if that means there were others—strangers I never knew, my first interaction with them being sodomy. Or if it means earlier trauma already hooked so deeply that later non-sexual casual hatred that I experienced as a child still strikes those same places in my nervous system. To be honest, I don’t know. I just know the felt experience. Like lava. Like knives within.

And it makes me grateful (oh so grateful!) for being born after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and at a time where the good news of his life and resurrection could reach me.

Without Christ, I would have had no example of holding steady without sin. No model for not distracting myself. No model for not turning inward with anger and becoming suicidal. No model for not turning outward in rage and wanting to kill. Without the crucifixion, I would have had no example of a sinless orientation toward the world in the very midst of agony.

Praise the Lord. (TRULY, TRULY, PRAISE THE LORD!)

In the depths of my agony, with lava surging through my body, I have felt myself absorbed into the body of Christ on the cross, staying steady through the torturous experience.

As I have deepened into my connection with Christ, the ingenuity of God astonishes me. To send His Son into a fallen world to bring salvation to all, God was faced with a choice. Where to send Jesus? As an Indian, for a while after coming to Christ, I felt sad that God sent His son to the Levant and not India. But it makes sense to me now. India would not have been the right stage for the Son of God. India was not depraved enough at that time, having been exalted due to the influence of the Buddha. It had to be a corrupt empire where torturous practices were normalized. The depravity of Rome was essential to set the stage for this event that absolved us all of all our sins. So that we could all meet in the Body of Christ. United in our agonies. To choose that stage, so that this act could stand forever as inspiration for those of us who endure demonic acts as children. Ingenious. Divinely ingenious. A theme of ingenuity you also see in the story of Krishna, but not in quite the same way in the stories of Rama or the Buddha.

The lava-like texture of this felt experience carries something unmistakably demonic. In those hateful acts of sodomy, it’s as if I absorbed demons and took on their experience—which was hell itself. And in those moments of hellish agony where a new layer of trauma is releasing, the demons come through to the surface and present that dualistic choice—to sin or not sin.

Often at the point of release, the very thing you’re letting go of is felt most intensely. Colloquially, this idea is captured in the saying, ‘darkest before dawn.’ In more graphic depictions of exorcisms, you see people foaming at the mouth, as the demons get full control. The pain becomes fully expressed in the body—and if you can stay there—it can be released fully.

I’ve since brought this lens to fever as well. When fever burns through the body, I believe it is often burning out past sin or karma. The Western medical approach of suppressing inflammation doesn’t recognize that this might also prevent what needs to be burned from being fully burned. Interestingly, the more I’ve healed my trauma, the less often I fall sick.

So when I feel the lava, when the knives surge, I remember Christ. When I pray, I ask God that in those moments of agony, I may be reminded of Christ.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord!

Father, I pray that You bring this divine inspiration to every survivor of these horrendous acts. When the lava surges in their bodies, when the knives pierce from within, when hell itself moves through them—may they remember the crucifixion. The crucifixion that brought us Victory over Death. Victory over the Body of Flesh–its desires and its accompanying agonies. May they remember Jesus Christ, who in His agony prayed for forgiveness of his persecutors. For they knew not what they did.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.