At 53, I was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease (HD), a genetic affliction that runs in my family. Though shocking, this news was also therapeutic, because it freed me from the writer's block that had for years kept me from telling the story of how, when I was a young girl, the guru of an Indian cult abused me sexually.

At the age of 16, I dropped out of a London secondary school and moved with my brother to an obscure ashram in Kullu, India. Hoping to seek enlightenment by a gifted swami, we found instead, a belittling autocrat who raped me and many other young women while preaching absolute celibacy.

After enduring fourteen years of abuse in Kullu, I returned to London, hoping to heal myself from the traumas I had suffered. Instead, I became depressed and suicidal, and began drinking. Fortunately, at my lowest point, I received an e-mail from an ex-Kullu friend who invited me to join him in the Andes, where he was searching for a ceremonial healing medicine. I flew to Lima, and tried huachuma, This experience taught me to heal myself instead of living life as a perpetual victim. Since then, I have traveled widely and learned, with the help of several benevolent mentors, to escape the psychic cages of my youth. I hope this book will remind others facing adversity that there is nothing that cannot be transformed and redeemed.