Becoming Emotionally Strong

Welcome to Make America Healthy. My name is Beth Shaw. I’m the host of this podcast as well as the author of 4 best selling books on health and wellness, including one called Healing Trauma with Yoga and the founder of YogaFit Training Systems Worldwide, the world’s largest yoga mind body school. Today’s topic is all about mental health, and it is called becoming emotionally strong. We are joined by a very special guest, India Oxenberg.

She is an author, an activist, an actress, a producer, and she also produced and and starred in a great documentary that everyone should watch called seduced inside the NXIVM Cult. I watched this several years ago, and then India and I connected via social media. And we’re so happy to have her on the show because she really embodies someone who is emotionally strong and resilient. And as we know, May is mental health awareness month. So in honor of that, we’re going to talk today about how you can get inspired, empowered, and educated to become more emotionally strong.

India, welcome to make America healthy. Thank you, Beth. It’s so great to finally connect with you. I know it’s been a lot of back and forth. It’s definitely worth the wait.

So, I watched your documentary years ago. And for our listeners who haven’t seen it, if you don’t mind retelling that story one more time, I’m sure you’re probably tired of of talking about it. We’ll talk a little bit more about trauma in the show. Tell us your story. Let me try to do it as concise as possible because I know that you and I have a lot of common passions, and this is just one part of my story which has catapulted me into my loves, which is really just about recovery and and living life again.

I was involved in a high control group, which was called Nexium. And on the outside, it looked like a regular self help organization. But the farther and the deeper that I got in, the more nefarious it became. And there was a lot of red flags that I wish that I would have been able to identify on the forefront that not until I was out was I actually able to see clearly. And you could either call this a cult or a high control group depending on where you’re at and what your beliefs are.

To me, they’re 1 in the same because they use a lot of the same tactics to really just break people down and build them up into the form of the leadership and kind of strip you of your own personal identity, and that’s something that happened to me at a really young age. I was 19 when I was introduced to the group, and I was looking for answers. I’m someone who grew up in and around the spiritual self help community. I’m from Los Angeles, California originally. My mom is someone who you would consider, like, a seeker and also someone who’s constantly working on herself.

And it just seemed so innocent from the beginning, and that’s something that I like to share. And the truth is that I would have left if I would have known, and I think that’s the through line for a lot of people that get involved in groups like this. If they’re well intentioned people looking for answers, looking to grow, and they happen to fall into the grips of a leadership program or a spiritual group or a community that may or may not have your best intentions. So I was there until my late twenties. The longer that I was in the group, the more abuse that I experienced physically, mentally, and emotionally, and also spiritually.

And it took me a long time to really recognize what I had been involved in. There was also a criminal case involved that became very public, and I was also a part of that. And that was a big part of my waking up because I ended up working with the FBI for over 9 months as a cooperative witness. That taught me a lot about the reality of what I was involved in versus what they were teaching me in the group to believe. Once again, I was only 19.

So if you know anything about predators, there’s processes that they use to strip you away from your loved ones, your family, your community, isolate you, groom you into believing certain things about yourself and about them and about the people that actually love you. And it was really painful to wake up to that and realize that these people that I thought were my friends or people that really truly cared about me didn’t care about me at all and that they were really just there to exploit. So it was a growing up process at the very least, coming to terms with the fact that there are people out there who do not want the best for you. And I’m naturally a very trusting person, so I’ve had to learn to have discretion over that and to really pick and choose who I let into my life and who I open up my heart to. So long story short, I learned a lot in a short amount of time, but I also lost a majority of my twenties to being dedicated to this group that ended up being a very bad criminal organization.

There’s so much to unpack here. Also, I moved from New York City to Los Angeles right after college. I did a bunch of different self help groups in my twenties. Nothing Sure. Nothing like what you went through.

You come from a showbiz family. You’re living in Los Angeles. The path in LA is self growth and self help and becoming better. I started YogaFit when I moved to Los Angeles. I really just got into yoga in my twenties, and I feel very fortunate because I think that it saved me from a lot of the the bad people that are in LA because I could have definitely fallen into something at that time.

I was very naive. I totally get where you’re coming from. So for those listeners who have not watched this documentary again, it’s called seduced inside the NXIVM cult, and you can find it on Amazon Prime. So you go through this process. You’re isolated.

You’re broken down. Your mind is controlled by various techniques. You managed to escape what was it? 7 years? Yeah.

It was 7 years. And then later. And the and the escape part is really, like, more nuanced in my opinion because you can physically leave something, but you can still have mental chains attached to you. And so people will often be like, oh, then you were free after 7 years. I I might have been physically free, but I was not mentally free compared to what I’m experiencing in my life now.

And how old are you now, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m gonna be 33 next month. Okay. And I’m 6 months pregnant. So I Yeah.

It’s congratulations, and happy, great birthday. I’d like to ask you, like, moving out of trauma. Whether people are in an abusive relationship, they grow up in an abusive family, they are in an abusive work situation. There is a certain amount of guilt, shame, and blame. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with those three emotions and how you reconcile that within yourself?

Yeah. That’s a big one, and it makes me feel emotional just even, like, reflecting on that. Not only because I’m pregnant, but just in general because I put myself through a lot of additional pain and anguish grappling with those feelings and having survivor’s guilt and feeling like I needed to rescue everyone who is still under the influence of this group because there are even people today who still believe that this guy, Keith Raniere, is innocent and that those that spoke out against him are just disgruntled, and that’s just not the case. I’ve had to come to terms with forgiving myself, recognizing that I was also really young when I was introduced to this group, that if I would have known, I would have chosen differently, but I didn’t. And now I know a lot more than I did before, and I’ve learned a lot from those experiences.

But the guilt and the shame definitely keep you ruminating in the past a lot longer than I wish that I would have. I wish that I could have come out and forgiven myself a little quicker, been a little less hard on myself, been a little less self critical because depression and anxiety really took over my life a lot. For how long? Years. It wasn’t until I would say I made a real commitment into towards my mental health and towards recovery because I hit a rock bottom.

It was just after I had put out Seduced and my book, Still Learning, so a year and a half after that and you think the perception is, oh, you spoke out or reclaimed your voice, whether it’s through a book or a documentary. Oh, you must be perfectly fine now, and that’s not the truth. Actually, I felt completely exposed, totally vulnerable and raw and open and then additionally self critical because I was like, why am I not happy? What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just can I swear?

Yes. You can. Okay. I was like, why can’t you just fucking live your life? I honestly felt so absorbed by the past.

Everything was reminding me of my past. It it was so bittersweet. Like, I remember I was on a trip with my husband in Italy. Well, he’s a chef, so he was studying pastry in the south of Italy near Naples, and I was miserable. I couldn’t eat.

I couldn’t sleep. My PTSD was so bad. Everything was reminding me of how much pain I was in, And I was overusing marijuana. I had this, like, little vape pen, and I was smoking it all the time. And it was increasing my paranoia, but I couldn’t stop because I didn’t know how to relax myself otherwise.

I had learned enough tools at that point to self regulate and to regulate my nervous system on my own. And so I was just up and down, spiraling, and it was a very dark time. And I was really embarrassed because I thought you should be farther than this. Like, you should all these shoulds and Shoulds. Yeah.

All this bullshit. I then made a commitment that I was gonna work on my mental health and be serious about it and create a toolkit for myself that worked for me and that wasn’t prescribed by anybody else but me. And I kept telling myself, even though I didn’t believe it at the time, you know exactly what you need to heal. You know exactly what you need to heal. Like, it was my personal mantra and I was trying to reintegrate that into my body and my mind because at that point, I felt like a total loser that didn’t know how to fix myself and completely broken.

And I knew because I had experienced a lot of negative programming that I was very used to and very comfortable with, that in order to change my mind, I had to reprogram myself into a more positive viewpoint. Even if I didn’t believe it, I was gonna fake it till I make it. That’s such a beautiful statement because I wrote this book, Healing Trauma with Yoga, and I can relate. I shared a lot of very personal things about my childhood in this book. And once I put the book out, I was like, oh my god.

What have I done? People are gonna judge me. Have I ruined my career? All of that. So I can relate to that and also the the rumination because the longer you live in life, the more opportunity you have to make choices that are not the best, whether it’s career choices or relationship choices or real estate purchases, whatever they are.

We all have the opportunity if we’re self reflective people, which certainly you are, to self flagellate. And then we create those neural pathways and for you also being involved in a cult for 7 years, which I’m sure created a lot of neural pathways that you would prefer not to have had created. Very much so. Shifting your neurology is tough. And and you and I have something else in common, and that is our exploration into psychedelic medicine as a way to heal our trauma and our mental health.

I know we connected at the MAPS conference, and I have been interested probably for 12, 14 years now in various forms of plant medicine as a way to not take conventional antidepressant medication, which didn’t ever really work that well for me and always had side effects. So finding a more natural route, whether it’s psilocybin or ketamine, which is not as natural, but effective, or Ayahuasca or or different modalities, Tell us when you started to walk into that world and what some of your healing experiences have been because I think we both live in the state of Florida. There’s a ketamine clinic on every corner. It’s not too hard to find a plant medicine ceremony. It’s a gray area between legal and illegal.

Psilocybin is legal in many states now, including Colorado. So talk to us a little bit about what prompted you to walk down that road and what you have found impactful from that world. Such a good question because this has been a big part of my healing journey and my personal exploration. And I think one of the reasons why I was so compelled to try these types of therapies was because I had been in a environment that presented itself as therapy and as therapy groups and as 1 on 1 when, really, it was abuse disguised as therapy. And so I had a bigger version to working with any kind of therapist or counselor because it would activate emotions that were very difficult for me to work through, so it was, like, PTSD inducing.

Right. And I found that pretty limiting because anytime I would get into an environment where I had to open myself up or be vulnerable with someone who might be considered an authority figure, whether it’s a therapist or a counselor or even a friend, I would become totally overwhelmed to the point where I couldn’t communicate. And I found that in my relationships. I found that with my husband, and it would take me from being just on the brim of opening up and healing to totally debilitating. And I was like, there’s gotta be another way into these tough and sticky spots that we all have.

I don’t know of one person that hasn’t experienced at least one traumatic event, let alone years of either incubating in trauma as a child or having a traumatic experience prolonged as an adult. So I was really well, also, just, like, frustrated because I couldn’t get to the depths of the issues that I knew that I was struggling with, because some of it was too scary even to revisit in my own memories. Like, we’re talking about repeated sexual trauma that you don’t wanna go there. You don’t wanna go there because your your body and your mind can’t tell the difference of when you’re explaining a memory to somebody versus you’re reliving a nightmare every night and you don’t wanna go to sleep and you have extreme insomnia, and that was something that I dealt with. And I’ve always been someone who’s leaned more towards the natural approaches of things.

I’m not opposed to conventional medicine whatsoever. I just found that for myself. I’m a very sensitive person, and anytime that I would do something that was even alcohol would affect me in a way that might not be optimal. So I was looking for alternatives there as well. And when I came across psychedelics, it started with cannabis, and I found that was really helpful for certain things, including increasing my appetite, relaxing my body enough to enjoy sexual intimacy.

But then I also saw that it was a little addictive for me personally. And I don’t like to say that one drug is better than the other because everybody’s brain chemistry is so different that you can’t even really judge them that way. You just have to personally explore and know yourself well enough to be able to rein it in or explore deeper. Yeah. And so I found that with microdosing mushrooms, it helped as a a natural antidepressant.

And I had a better state of mind. I had a better viewpoint of my physical body. Instead of just looking at my body and feeling judgmental. I started to feel more appreciative, and I thought that I was beautiful again, which is something that I really struggled with. And then I noticed that I was still struggling a lot with anxiety.

So I thought more about what could be something that would help me regulate my nervous system and also regulate my brain chemistry at the same time, and it was actually my mother who introduced me to Ketamine assisted therapy. And like I said, when we first started this question, I was very averse to doing anything in a group context because I had lived that life for 7 years and I didn’t need another bad experience. Yeah. So the thought of being able to do something that was just for me with me in a private setting, which started as taking a lozenge at home in my bed, which was a place that was really uncomfortable and scary for me. Like, bed was not a good place.

And I wanted to be able to experience relaxing again and feeling comfortable in my own body. So I started with that, and I had amazing results. And I did that for a year and a half pretty consistently as a antidepressant and an antianxiety solution, I really improved. And I saw growth in myself that was a lot more rapid than just conventional talk therapy. And that was something I was looking for.

I had just lost a lot of my twenties. I was ruminating in how sad my life was and all the things that I missed out, and I just wanted to, like, live a little. And it brought me back to this childish optimism that I thought that I had lost, but that is really a part of me, this kind of lightness and being able to bring levity to things that were very dark and very difficult to process. And I needed that. I needed to bring that back into my life.

And since being pregnant, I obviously haven’t done any of those things. I’m actually looking forward to post pregnancy and using this as maybe a postpartum solution for myself because I did see such great results. But I also know that none of these medicines are magic, that they take work, and that even if you are taking psychedelics, you still have to do the work in order to integrate and process the emotions and the memories that come up. I don’t wanna be a fault I don’t wanna give, like, false pretense that just take these things and you’ll be totally recovered because that wasn’t how it worked either. It also took a lot of digging.

But how courageous of you to delve into substances that I think a lot of people are very afraid to open Pandora’s box because they don’t know what’s going to come out. I was afraid to do Ayahuasca for a few years because it sounded so scary. And then when I did it, some nights were, like, 10 years of therapy in one evening. I I remember one particularly impactful evening in Costa Rica where I unpacked every single friendship and relationship that I’d had in my entire life over the course of 1 night. And, again, so courageous of you because a lot of people are afraid to pull back the veil and see what’s going to come out.

From personal experience, I can say that and I don’t do plant medicine that often, but as I did an assisted psilocybin therapy journey recently, they’ve become so much lighter. They’re recently, they’ve become so much lighter. There are very few times that I won’t cry out of any pain. I’ll cry out of happiness. I think that initially, people might have to go in, and it’s going to be more painful.

And I don’t know if this is your experience, but as time goes on, you see your own progress because you’re lighter Mhmm. And it’s the and the pain somehow is gone. That’s definitely something I can relate to. And in the beginning, my journeys were a lot darker and more startling, and then they did it start to change. I would get these little, like, nuggets of personal wisdom that was, like, my subconscious communicating with me, and I would just repeat them to myself because I knew through what I experienced in the negative programming that repetition can be used for a positive reinforcement or a very harmful reinforcement.

And I got one little nugget at at the very beginning of taking Ketamine, which was so lucky. And I hadn’t been feeling very lucky those past couple of years after exiting the group. I was feeling very unlucky. So to just be able to hear my own voice remind me of how lucky I am helped me when I would hit those darker days where I didn’t really feel like living, and I would struggle. And I would have to remind myself, no.

You’re lucky. You’re alive. You get to be here. And that is something that I contribute heavily to psychedelic medicine because until you feel something viscerally, it’s very difficult to believe it even if you’re saying it to yourself. And I think that’s where integrating bodywork like yoga or for me also boxing is really important because I felt very weak.

And it wasn’t until I started to actually practice physical strength training that I actually believed, you know what? I am really strong. I’m stronger than I think I I I wish that we prescribed weight training. I’ve been working out in the gym since age 15 as you can see. I can tell.

You’re so fit. And I may have about 20 years on you. So I’ve been working out for a long time, and I wish that t teenage girls was mandatory that they all went and did strength training. Because to feel strong in your physical body, and I have a goal to be stronger as I get older, so important. That’s also something that no one can take away from you.

You feel like you can kick someone’s ass? That’s empowering. That’s I did not feel like that. And when I turned 29, I told myself, when I’m 30, I wanna be stronger than I’ve ever been. Because one of the things that they told me in the group repeatedly was you’re weak, you’re ornamental, you don’t lack, you have no discipline, all of those things.

And I was like, you know what? Fuck them. Yes. I do. And so I needed to prove that to myself, though.

And what I found in boxing was so rewarding. It just brought me back to life in a different way, and I proved to myself not only was I stronger than I thought I was, but that I could get good at something that was really hard. And then I started to walk around with a different level of confidence even though I was still looking over my shoulder at times when I would feel like a guy walked by you on the street or something, I would be like, you know what? At least I now know that I could defend myself. Whereas before, if something was happening, I’d feel victimized and I might just free.

And I think you’re absolutely right. I do wish that it was mandatory that in instead of just general, what is it, a PE in school, if girls did get encouraged to do weight training, if they did get encouraged to learn how to do some kind of martial arts, I think we would feel a lot more confident in ourselves because the the reality is men are always gonna be bigger and stronger than us just biologically speaking, and that you’ve got you want to be able to take care of yourself or feel that strength. You have to work for it. Yeah. It definitely takes work, but the reward is so great on every single level.

When you were going through your therapeutic process after exiting the cult, did you and I know you said you didn’t trust therapists. Did you have a way to go back into your childhood and see what might have set you up for this experience that you had? Yeah. I did. I did actually as much as I didn’t trust therapists or counselors and whatnot, I did find a few good eggs along the way.

Some were cognitive behavioral therapists, others were psychedelic assisted therapists that I really grew to love and trust and were very helpful for me. But what I also found was that sometimes because of the experiences that I had in the group specifically, prolonged therapy wasn’t the healthiest route for me because I’d often get stuck in certain loops and that other things helped me more in letting go and transitioning out of negative emotions. But I did see a lot of correlations between things that I experienced in my childhood that brought me to believe that I didn’t have value and that were an emotional vulnerability for me that made me more vulnerable to being prey in the future. So I think the more emotional vulnerabilities that you have, the more opportunities there are for people to take advantage of you. And we see it all the time with women who are seemingly strong, who, again, get into abusive controlling relationships and can’t seem to find their way out of them.

We talked about guilt and shame and blame. I’d also now like to delve into the topic of trust, And this is something in my own life, listening to my intuition and then taking action on it has been a very long winded process. I’m sure I would like. How is it now for you to make friends, to trust others, and also to really trust your inner voice, which I’m sure at times during your 7 years of cult experience was screaming at you, but perhaps didn’t maybe listen to the whisper and then it became a scream. You’re absolutely right.

I didn’t listen to myself because I had abnegated a lot of my own authority to other people, and that’s something that can be really damaging. I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t trust that I knew how to make the right decisions for myself. I believed that other people knew better for me, and that’s not correct. That’s something that I’ve learned is actually the opposite, that I know what I need.

And it’s been like you said, it’s a long winded process. I won’t lie to you and say that I have no trust issues because I absolutely do. And even in my own personal Internet relationships, it’s difficult. I find myself questioning things or being paranoid about them, but the remedy for that for me is communication. And when I start to feel those scary feelings or that paranoia of, was this person actually lying to me, or are they trying to hurt me, or am I being foolish?

If I’m close enough with that person, I’ll just say it to them and and say, right now, I’m feeling really vulnerable and scared that I can’t trust you. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s just what I’m feeling. And that’s been really helpful for me because even just making girlfriends has been really difficult because I was burned so many times physically and metaphorically by women. I leaned more towards developing relationships with men because they felt a little bit safer and easier for me to control, but I still had issues there. It’s a process.

And are you in touch with anyone who was in the, cult with you? Are there support groups for survivors of this organization? Is the organization still intact? I think that the man who was the head of it went to prison. Is that correct?

Yeah. He’s in prison for a 120 years, although he still attempts to appeal, which is laughable. So we’re happy about that sentence. Yeah. I’m not really in touch with that many people from my time in Nexium.

I think there I was in the beginning of my recovery, and there were support groups, and there were people who were, like, communicating and staying in touch and being supportive of each other’s coming out journeys. But then there came a point where I really wanted to just move forward, and I found that constantly being in contact with those people and reliving our experiences wasn’t helping me anymore and that I wanted to step into a new stage of life. And I felt guilty about that because, like, we talked about in the beginning, there was a little bit of survivor’s guilt of, can I do this? Can I just separate myself from this huge period of my life? And then what now I look back, and I’m 5, 6 years out.

And I’m like, am I still friends with everybody from high school? Nope. I’m not. You know what I mean? And not to compare the 2 because they were not equally as traumatic, although I didn’t love high school.

But I it’s okay to let go and to move forward into the new stages of who you are and who you wanna be because I’m not the same person that I was 5 years ago, and I have to be okay with that. And that means sometimes separating yourself or losing friendships, developing new ones. I’m in my thirties creating new friends. I have some good golden friends from the past who even precede Nexium. But, really, my focus now, especially as I’m gonna be a mother in a couple months with a new baby, is really being present in my life that I’m creating now and not letting the past dictate all of my decisions.

And you made a conscious decision to leave Los Angeles, to move to a different state, to Mhmm. Have kind of a a fresh start. Exactly. And Florida is that for me. As much as I miss California in a lot of ways, especially the food and the mountains and my family, I really did want a fresh start.

I wanted to feel like I could walk around the streets and not be reminded of everything that happened to me in my twenties. And I feel a little different in New York City because New York City, even though it has a lot of remnants from my cult days, it’s also where I met my husband and where I started to blossom and become my own person out of that shell. So it inspires me in a different way. And so I often feel like if I could go between LA, New York, and Florida and just get a little dose of my places, I’m good to go. I I can relate.

I those are the only three places I’ve lived in my life. And I moved to Florida during the pandemic like everybody else because I didn’t Yeah. Wanna be locked up in New York, but I ended up staying there for 3 months anyway, and it was quite traumatic, actually. I had a lot of opportunity to have conversations with self during that time. So what’s next for you other than becoming a mother and embarking on that journey?

Do you have any projects in the works? I am currently working on reprinting my memoir. And what is the name of it for our listeners? It’s called Still Learning Okay. In the Oxenberg.

And it’s, it’s really a lot of it is about my time in the cult, but also my childhood, and it’s anecdotal. It’s just like a coming of age story, and I wanted to reprint that because I wanted a physical book. And right now, it’s just in an audible version, and that will come out in the fall. I’m looking to collaborate with a couple more active activism groups who are working on legislation around institutionalized child abuse. And so that’s something that I’m really compelled to continue working on, but I’m also gonna take a little break after I have my baby and just recover and just try to live life.

I bought a house with my husband down here. We’ve got lots of things to work on. Little, old, humid houses have plenty of problems to fix, but I’m just trying to live more and worry less. And I and that’s hard for me some days. That’s awesome.

And you mentioned you have tools. Would you wanna just share with my listeners what you’re being emotionally strong tools are other than using the boxing and and psychedelics? Those are the those are up there on the totem pole of tools because I honestly, like, I have to rate them of what is gonna help me the most in certain situations. And sometimes it’s just even listening to music, going for a walk outside, hanging out with my cats, taking a nap, making myself a good meal. All of those things really feed me and feed my soul, but definitely, psychedelics, are a tool that I use, not currently, but in my life.

As well as rhythm therapy, I find just, like, moving and being in your body and just letting yourself let go can be really helpful, and you don’t even have to talk about it. You just move a little. So anything that really just helps me process stuff without getting stuck in my head is helpful. And what what’s your favorite positive affirmation currently? I got this.

Okay. Because it’s it’s not too overwhelming, and it can be right there in the moment. Even if you’re just broaching something that’s difficult right then and there, you’re like, alright. I got this. Or it could be something really big, like, I got this.

And so I just I I taught myself that a lot. Wonderful. I’d like to thank you so much for coming on to make America healthy and and and telling your story and sharing with our listeners how you have become emotionally strong. We wish you all the continued success in your journey and in your journey into motherhood, and please tell our listeners where they can find you. They can find me on Instagram at India Oxenberg, or I’m putting out a new website in the next couple months, which is India oxenberg.com so you can also find me there.

Great. Wonderful. India, thank you so much for being on the lookout for your coffee. We’d like to thank our sponsors of today’s show, Lifeboost Coffee, making clean, organic, mold free coffee that is shade grown, and they pay their farmers an equitable wage. Check out my new mindfulness blend.

It’s half calf dark roast, and it’s available on lifeboostcoffee.com. You can use the code yoga fit to save 15%. We’d also like to thank our title sponsor, Yoga Fit Training Systems Worldwide, the leader in yoga mind body fitness education, offering conferences. We’re having one in Scottsdale in July. And then in Orlando in August, we’ve got plenty of trauma informed yoga and a 900 hour yoga therapy program, as well as our warriors program and warriors kids for PTSD and anxiety and trauma.

You can find me at bethshaw.com. You can go to yogafit.com and on Instagram at Beth Shaw Health. If you enjoyed this show and know someone who needs to be emotionally strong, please share it. And, again, India, thank you so much. A big namaste to you.

Thank you so much. Thank you. If you wanna text me a mailing address, I would love to send you my book. I will. Thank you, ma’am.

Though. That’s great. So much. I really appreciate you coming on. Likewise.

Alright. Take care. Bye. Sounds great. Yeah.

That’s really good. Yeah. And she has been our biggest, like, Hollywood type celebrity. Will be as a documentary, or is it not? It’s a doc no.

It’s a documentary, and that’s really intense. Let me see it. It’s called seduced inside the Naxian cult. Welcome to Make America Healthy. My name is Beth Shaw.

I’m the host of this podcast as well as the author of 4 best selling books on health and wellness, including one called Healing Trauma with Yoga and the founder of Yoga Fit Training Systems Worldwide, the world’s largest yoga mind body school. Today’s topic is all about mental health, and it is called becoming emotionally strong. And we are joined by a very special guest, India Oxenberg. She is an author, an activist, an actress, a producer, and she also produced and and starred in a great documentary that everyone should watch called seduced inside the NXIVM Cult. And, I watched this several years ago, and then India and I connected via social media.

And we’re so happy to have her on the show because she really embodies someone who is emotionally strong and resilient. And as we know, May is mental health awareness month. So in honor of that, we’re going to talk today about how you can get inspired, empowered, and educated to become more emotionally strong. India, welcome to make America healthy. Thank you, Beth.

It’s so great to finally connect with you. I know it’s been a lot of back and forth. Definitely worth the wait. So, I watched your documentary years ago. And for our listeners who haven’t seen it, if you don’t mind retelling that story one more time, I’m sure you’re probably tired of of talking about it.

We’ll talk a little bit more about talking about trauma further down in the show. For our listeners who haven’t watched that very powerful documentary, tell us your story. Let me try to do it as concise as possible because I know that you and I have a lot of common passions, and this is just one part of my story which has catapulted me into my loves, which is really just about, like, recovery and and living life again. I was involved in a high control group, which was called Nexium. On the outside, it looked like a regular self help organization.

But the farther and the deeper that I got in, the more nefarious it became. And there was a lot of red flags that I wish that I would have been able to identify on the forefront that not until I was out was I actually able to see clearly. And you could either call this a cult or a high control group depending on where you’re at and what your beliefs are. To me, they’re 1 and the same because they use a lot of the same tactics to really just break people down and build them up into the form of the leadership and kind of strip you of your own personal identity, and that’s something that happened to me at a really young age. I was 19 when I was introduced to the group, and I was looking for answers.

I was I’m someone who grew up in and around the spiritual self help community. I’m from Los Angeles, California originally. My mom is someone who you would consider, like, a seeker and also someone who’s constantly working on herself. And it just seemed so innocent from the beginning, and that’s something that I like to share because people will say, why didn’t you just and the truth is that I would have left if I would have known, and I think that’s the through line for a lot of people that get involved in groups like this. If they’re well intentioned people looking for answers, looking to grow, and they happen to fall into the grips of a leadership program or a spiritual group or a community that may or may not have your best intentions.

So I was there until my late twenties, and the longer that I was in the group, the more abuse that I experienced both physically, mentally, and emotionally, and also spiritually. And it took me a long time to really recognize what I had been involved in. There was also a criminal case involved that became very public, and I was also a part of that. And that was a big part of my waking up because I ended up working with the FBI for over 9 months as a cooperative witness. That taught me a lot about the reality of what I was involved in versus what they were teaching me in the group to believe.

Once again, I was only 19. So if you know anything about predators, there’s processes that they use to strip you away from your loved ones, your family, your community, isolate you, groom you into believing certain things about yourself and about them and about the people that actually love you. And it was really painful to wake up to that and realize that these people that I thought were my friends or people that really truly cared about me didn’t care about me at all and that they were really just there to exploit. So it was a growing up process at the very least, coming to terms with the fact that there are people out there who do not want the best for you. And I’m naturally a very trusting person, so I’ve had to learn to have discretion over that and to really pick and choose who I let into my life and who I open up my heart to.

So, like, long story short, I learned a lot in a short amount of time, but I also lost a majority of my twenties to being dedicated to this group that ended up being a very bad criminal organization. There’s so much to unpack here. I also I moved from New York City to Los Angeles right after college, and so I’m familiar with all and I did a bunch of different self help groups in in my twenties. Nothing Sure. Nothing like what you went through.

You come from a showbiz family. You’re living in Los Angeles. The path in LA is self growth and self help and becoming better. And I started yoga fit when I moved to Los Angeles. I really just got into yoga in my twenties, and I I feel very fortunate because I think that it saved me from a lot of the the bad people that are in LA because because I could have definitely fallen into something at that time.

I was very naive, and so I totally get where you’re coming from. So for those listeners who have not watched this documentary again, it’s called seduced inside the NXIVM cult, and you can find it on Amazon Prime. So you go through this process. You’re isolated. You’re broken down.

Your mind is controlled by various techniques. You managed to escape what was it? 7 years? Yeah. It was 7 years.

And then later. And the and the escape part is really, like, more nuanced in my opinion because you can physically leave something, but you can still have mental chains attached to you. And so people will often be like, oh, then you were free after 7 years. And I was like, I I might have been physically free, but I was not mentally free compared to what I’m experiencing in my life now. And how old are you now, if you don’t mind me asking?

I’m gonna be 33 next month. Okay. And I’m 6 months pregnant. So I’m Yeah. It’s congratulations, and happy, lovely birthday.

I’d like to ask you, like, moving out of trauma and whether people are in an abusive relationship. They grow up in an abusive family, they are in an abusive work situation, there is a certain amount of guilt and shame and blame. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with those three emotions and how you reconcile that within yourself. Yeah. That’s a big one, and it makes me feel emotional just even, like, reflecting on that.

Not only because I’m pregnant, but just in general because I put myself through a lot of additional pain and anguish grappling with those feelings and having survivor’s guilt and feeling like I needed to rescue everyone who was still under the influence of this group because there are even people today who still believe that this guy, Keith Raniere, is innocent and that those that spoke out against him are just disgruntled, and that’s just not the case. And so I’ve had to come to terms with forgiving myself, recognizing that I was also really young when I was introduced to this group, that if I would have known, I would have chosen differently, but I didn’t. And now I know a lot more than I did before, and I’ve learned a lot from those experiences. But the guilt and the shame definitely keep you ruminating in the past a lot longer than I wish that I would have. I wish that I could have come out and forgiven myself a little quicker, been a lot little less hard on myself, been a little less self critical because depression and anxiety really took over my life a lot.

For how long? Years. It wasn’t until I would say the past I made a real commitment into towards my mental health and towards recovery because I hit a rock bottom when I was it was just after I had put out Seduced and my book, Still Learning. So a year and a half after that, and you think the perception is, oh, you spoke out or reclaimed your voice, whether it’s through a book or a documentary. Oh, you must be perfectly fine now, and that’s not the truth.

Actually, I felt completely exposed, totally vulnerable and raw and open and then additionally self critical. Because I was like, why am I not happy? What’s wrong with you? Like, why can’t you just can I swear? Yes.

You can. Why okay. I was like, why can’t you just fucking live your life? I honestly felt so absorbed by the past. Everything was reminding me of my past.

Every it it was so bittersweet. Like, I remember I was on a trip with my husband in Italy. Well, he’s a chef, and so he was studying pastry in the south of Italy near Naples, and I was miserable. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.

My PTSD was so bad. Everything was reminding me of how much pain I was in, and I was overusing marijuana. I had this, like, little vape pen, and I was smoking it all the time, and it was increasing my paranoia, but I couldn’t stop because I didn’t know how to relax myself otherwise. I had learned enough tools at that point to self regulate and to regulate my nervous system on my own. And so I was just up and down, spiraling, and it was a very dark time.

And I was really embarrassed because I thought you should be farther than this. Like, you should all these shoulds and Shoulds. Yeah. All this bullshit. And I then made a commitment that I was gonna work on my mental health and be serious about it and create a toolkit for myself that worked for me and that wasn’t prescribed by anybody else but me.

And I kept telling myself, even though I didn’t believe it at the time, you know exactly what you need to heal. You know exactly what you need to heal. Like, it was my personal mantra, and I was trying to reintegrate that into my body and my mind because at that point, I felt like a total loser that didn’t know how to fix myself and completely broken. And I knew because I had experienced a lot of negative programming that I was very used to and very comfortable with, that in order to change my mind, I had to reprogram myself into a more positive viewpoint. Even if I didn’t believe it, I was gonna fake it till I make it.

That’s such a beautiful statement because and I wrote this book, healing trauma with yoga, and I can relate. I shared a lot of very personal things about my childhood in this book. Once I put the book out, I was like, oh my god. What have I done? People are gonna judge me.

Have I ruined my career? All of that. So I can relate to that and also the the rumination because the longer you live in life, the more opportunity you have to make choices that are not the best, whether it’s career choices or relationship choices or real estate purchases, whatever they are. And we all have the opportunity if we’re self reflective people, which certainly you are, to self flagellate. And then we create those neural pathways.

And for you also being involved in a for 7 years, which I’m sure created a lot of neural pathways that you would prefer not to have had created. Very much so. Shifting your neurology is tough, and and you and I have something else in common, and that is our exploration into psychedelic medicine as a way to heal our trauma and our mental health. I know we we connected at the MAPS conference, and I have been probably for 12, 14 years now in various forms of plant medicine as a way to not take conventional antidepressant medication, which doesn’t really or didn’t ever really work that well for me, and I always had side effects. So So finding a more natural route, whether it’s psilocybin or ketamine, which is not as natural, but effective, or Ayahuasca or or different modalities.

Tell us when you started to walk into that world and what some of your healing experiences have been because I think we both live in the state of Florida. There’s a ketamine clinic on every corner. It’s not too hard to find a plant medicine ceremony. It’s a gray area between legal and illegal. Psilocybin is legal in many states now, including Colorado.

So talk to us a little bit about what prompted you to walk down that road and what you have found impactful from that world. Such a good question because this has been a big part of my healing journey and my personal exploration. And I think one of the reasons why I was so compelled to try these types of therapies was because I had been in a environment that presented itself as therapy and as therapy groups and as 1 on 1 when, really, it was abuse disguised as therapy. And so I had a bigger version to working with any kind of therapist or counselor because it would activate emotions that were very difficult for me to work through, so it was, like, PTSD inducing. Right.

And I found that pretty limiting because anytime I would get into an environment where I had to open myself up or be vulnerable with someone who might be considered an authority figure, whether it’s a therapist or a counselor or even a friend, I would become totally overwhelmed and to the point where I couldn’t communicate. And I found that in my relationships. I found that with my husband, and it would just, like it would take me from being just on the brim of opening up and healing to totally debilitating. And I was like, there’s gotta be another way into these tough and sticky spots that we all have. I don’t know of one person that hasn’t experienced at least one traumatic event, let alone years of either incubating in trauma as a child or, you know, having a traumatic experience prolonged as an adult.

So I was really but also just, like, frustrated because I couldn’t get to the depths of the issues that I knew that I was struggling with, because some of it was too scary even to revisit in my own memories. Like, we’re talking about repeated sexual trauma that you don’t wanna go there. Like, you don’t wanna go there because your your body and your mind can’t tell the difference of when you’re explaining a memory to somebody versus you’re reliving a nightmare every night and you don’t wanna go to sleep and you have extreme insomnia, and that was something that I dealt with. And I’ve always been someone who’s leaned more towards the natural approaches of things. I’m not opposed to conventional medicine whatsoever.

I just found that for myself. I’m a very sensitive person, and anytime that I would do something that was even alcohol would affect me in a way that might not be optimal. So I was looking for alternatives there as well. And when I came across it started with cannabis, and I found that was really helpful for certain things, including increasing my appetite, relaxing my body enough to enjoy, like, sexual intimacy. But then I also saw that it was a little addictive for me personally.

And I don’t like to say that one drug is better than the other because everybody’s brain chemistry is so different that you can’t even really judge them that way. You just have to personally explore and know yourself well enough to be able to rein it in or explore deeper. Yeah. And so I found that with microdosing mushrooms, it helped as a a natural antidepressant. And I had a better state of mind.

I had a better viewpoint of my physical body instead of just looking at my body and feeling judgmental. I started to feel more appreciative, and I thought that I was beautiful again, which is something that I really struggled with. And then I noticed that I was still struggling a lot with anxiety. So I thought more about what could be something that would help me regulate my nervous system and also regulate my brain chemistry at the same time, and it was actually my mother who introduced me to Ketamine assisted therapy. And like I said, when we first started this question, I was very averse to doing anything in a group context because I had lived that life for 7 years and I didn’t need another bad experience.

Yeah. So the thought of being to do something that was just for me, with me in a private setting, which started as taking a lozenge at home in my bed, which was a place that was really uncomfortable and scary for me. Like, bed was not a good place. And I wanted to be able to experience relaxing again and feeling comfortable in my own body. So I started with that, and I had amazing results.

And I did that for a year and a half pretty consistently as a antidepressant and an antianxiety solution, and I really improved. And I saw growth in myself that was a lot more rapid than just conventional talk therapy. And that was something I was looking for. I had just lost a lot of my twenties. I was ruminating in how sad my life was and all the things that I missed out, and I just wanted to, like, live a little.

It brought me back to this childish optimism that I thought that I had lost, but that is really a part of me, this kind of, like, lightness and being able to bring levity to things that were very dark and very difficult to process. And I needed that. I needed to bring that back into my life. And being pregnant, I obviously haven’t done any of those things, and I’m actually looking forward to post pregnancy and using this as maybe a postpartum solution for myself because I did see such great results. But I also know that none of these medicines are magic, that they take work, and that even if you are taking psychedelics, you still have to do the work in order to integrate and process the emotions and the memories that come up.

I don’t wanna be a fault I don’t wanna give a false pretense that just take these things and you’ll be totally recovered because that wasn’t how it worked either. It also took a lot of digging. But how courageous of you to delve into substances that I think a lot of people are very afraid to open Pandora’s box because they don’t know what’s going to come out. I was afraid to do Ayahuasca for a few years because it sounded so scary. And then when I did it, it was some nights were, like, 10 years of therapy in one evening.

I I remember one particularly impactful evening in Costa Rica where I unpacked every single friendship and relationship that I’d had in my entire life over the course of 1 night. And, again, so courageous of you because a lot of people are afraid to pull back the veil and see what’s going to come out. From personal experience, I can say that and I don’t do plant medicine that often, but my journeys have even as I did an assisted psilocybin therapy journey recently. They’ve become so much lighter. There are very few times that I won’t cry out of any pain.

More I’ll cry out of happiness. So I think that initially, people might have to go in, and it’s going to be more painful. And I don’t know if this is your experience, but as time goes on, you see your own progress because you’re lighter Mhmm. And it’s the and the pain somehow is gone. That’s definitely something I can relate to.

And in the beginning, my journeys were a lot darker and more startling, and then they did it start to change. And I would get these little, like, nuggets of personal wisdom. It was like my subconscious communicating with me, and I would just repeat them to myself because I knew through what I experienced in the negative programming that repetition can be used for a positive reinforcement or a very harmful reinforcement. And I got one little nugget at at the very beginning of taking Ketamine, which was I’m so lucky. And I hadn’t been feeling very lucky those past couple of years after exiting the group.

I was feeling very unlucky. So to just be able to hear my own voice remind me of how lucky I am helped me when I would hit those darker days where I didn’t really feel like living, and I would struggle. And I would have to remind myself, no. You’re lucky. You’re alive.

You get to be here. And that is something that I contribute heavily to psychedelic medicine because until you feel something viscerally, it’s very difficult to believe it even if you’re saying it to yourself. And I think that’s where integrating bodywork like yoga or for me also boxing is really important because I felt very weak. And it wasn’t until I started to actually practice physical strength training that I actually believed, you know what? I am really strong.

I’m stronger than I think I am. I wish that we prescribed weight training. I’ve been working out in the gym since age 15 as you can see. I can tell. You’re so fit.

And I may have about 20 years on you. So I’ve been working out for a long time, and I wish that t teenage girls was mandatory that they all went and did strength training because to feel strong in your physical body, and I have a goal to be stronger as I get older, is so important. And that’s also something that no one can take away from you. And if you really feel like and you bought you feel like you can kick someone’s ass Awesome. That’s empowering.

Empowering. I did not feel like that. And when I turned 29, I told myself, when I’m 30, I wanna be stronger than I’ve ever been. Because one of the things that they told me in the group repeatedly was you’re weak, you’re ornamental, you don’t lack, you have no discipline, all of those things. And I was like, you know what?

Fuck them. Yes. I do. And so I needed to prove that to myself, though. And what I found in boxing was so rewarding.

It just brought me back to life in a different way, and I proved to myself not only was I stronger than I thought I was, but that I could get good at something that was really hard. And then I started to walk around with a different level of confidence. I felt less even though I was still looking over my shoulder at times when I would feel like a guy walked by you on the street or something, I would be like, you know what? At least I now know that I could defend myself. Whereas before, if something was happening, I’d feel victimized, and I might just freeze.

Right. And I think you’re absolutely right. I do wish that it was mandatory that in instead of just general PT or what is it, a PE in school. If girls did get encouraged to do weight training, if they did get encouraged to learn how to do some kind of martial arts, I I think we would feel a lot more confident in ourselves because the the reality is men are always gonna be bigger and stronger than us just biologically speaking, and that you’ve got if you want to be able to take care of yourself or feel that strength, you have to work for it. Yeah.

It definitely takes work, but the reward is so great on every single level. When you were going through your therapeutic process after exiting the cult, did you and I know you said you didn’t trust therapists. Did you have a way to go back into your childhood and see what might have set you up for this experience that you had. Yeah. I did.

And I did actually as much as I didn’t trust therapists or counselors and whatnot, I did find a few good eggs along the way. Some were cognitive behavioral therapists. Others were psychedelic assisted therapists that I really grew to love and trust and were very helpful for me. But what I also found was that sometimes because of the experiences that I had in the group specifically, prolonged therapy wasn’t the healthiest route for me because I’d often get stuck in certain loops and that other things helped me more in letting go and transitioning out of negative emotions. But I did see a lot of correlations between things that I experienced in my childhood that brought me to believe that I didn’t have value and that were an emotional vulnerability for me that made me more vulnerable to being prey in my in the future.

And so I think the more emotional vulnerabilities that you have, the more opportunities there are for people to take advantage of you. And we see it all the time with women who are seemingly strong who, again, get into abusive controlling relationships and can’t seem to find their way out of them. We talked about guilt and shame and blame. I’d also now like to delve into the topic of trust, And this is something in my own life, listening to my intuition and then taking action on it has been a very long winded process. I’m sure I would like.

How is it now for you to make friends, to trust others, and also to really trust your inner voice, which I’m sure at times during your 7 years of cult experience was screaming at you, but perhaps didn’t maybe listen to the whisper and then it became a scream. You’re absolutely right. I didn’t listen to myself because I had abnegated a lot of my own authority to other people, and that’s something that can be really damaging. I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t trust that I knew how to make the right decisions for myself.

I believed that other people knew better for me, and that’s not correct. That’s something that I’ve learned is actually the opposite, that I know what I need. And it’s been a like you said, it’s a long winded process. I won’t lie to you and say that I have no trust issues because I absolutely do. And even in my own personal Internet relationships, it’s difficult.

I find myself questioning things or being paranoid about them, but the remedy for that for me is communication. And when I start to feel those scary feelings or that paranoia of, oh, is this person actually lying to me, or are they trying to hurt me, or am I being foolish? If I’m close enough with that person, I’ll just say it to them and and say, like, right now, I’m feeling really vulnerable and scared that I can’t trust you. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s just what I’m feeling. And that’s been really helpful for me.

And because even just making girlfriends has been really difficult because I was burned so many times physically and metaphorically by women. I leaned more towards developing relationships with men because they felt a little bit safer and easier for me to control, but I still had issues there. So it’s a process. And are you in touch with anyone who was in the, cult with you? Are there support groups for survivors of this organization?

Is the organization still intact? I think that the man who was the head of it went to prison. Is that correct? Yeah. He’s in prison for a 120 years, although he still attempts to appeal, which is laughable.

So we’re happy about that sentence. Yeah. I’m not really in touch with that many people from my time in Nexium. I think there I was in the beginning of my recovery, and there were support groups, and there were people who were, like, communicating and staying in touch and being supportive of each other’s coming out journeys. But then there came a point where I really wanted to just move forward, and I found that constantly being in contact with those people and reliving our experiences wasn’t helping me anymore and that I wanted to step into a new stage of life.

And I felt guilty about that because, like, we talked about in the beginning, there was a little bit of survivor’s guilt of, can I do this? Can I just separate myself from this huge period of my life? And what now I look back, and I’m 5, 6 years out. And am I still friends with everybody from high school? Nope.

I’m not. You know what I mean? And not to compare the 2 because they were not equally as traumatic, although I didn’t love high school. But I it’s okay to let go and to move forward into the new stages of who you are and who you wanna be because I’m not the same person that I was 5 years ago, and I have to be okay with that. And that means sometimes separating yourself or losing friendships, developing new ones.

I’m in my thirties creating new friends. I have some good golden friends from the past who even precede Nexium. Really, my focus now, especially as I’m gonna be a mother in a couple months with a new baby, is really being present in my life that I’m creating now and not letting the past dictate all of my decisions. You made a conscious decision to leave Los Angeles, to move to a different state, to have kind of a a fresh start. Exactly.

And Florida is that for me. As much as I miss California in a lot of ways, especially the food and the mountains and my family, I really did want a fresh start. I wanted to feel like I could walk around the streets and not be reminded of everything that happened to me in my twenties. And I feel a little different in New York City because New York City, even though it has a lot of remnants from my cult days. It’s also where I met my husband and where I started to blossom and become my own person out of that shell.

So it inspires me in a different way. I often feel like if I could go between LA, New York, and Florida and just get a little dose of my places, I’m good to go. I I can relate. Those are the only three places I’ve lived in my life. And I moved to Florida during the pandemic like everybody else because I didn’t Yeah.

Wanna be locked up in New York, but I ended up staying there for 3 months anyway, and it was quite traumatic, actually. I had a lot of opportunity to have conversations with self during that time. What’s next for you other than becoming a mother and embarking on that journey? Do you have any projects in the works? I am currently working on reprinting my memoir.

And what is the name of it for our listeners? It’s called Still Learning Okay. In the Oxenberg. Really, a lot of it is about my time in the cult, but also my childhood, and it’s anecdotal. It’s just like a coming of age story, and I wanted to reprint that because I wanted a physical book.

Right now, it’s just in an audible version, and that will come out in the fall. I’m looking to collaborate with a couple more activism groups who are working on legislation around institutionalized child abuse. And so that’s something that I’m really compelled to continue working on, but I’m also gonna take a little break after I have my baby and just recover and just try to live life. I’ve got a house with my husband down here. We’ve got lots of things to work on.

Little, old, humid houses have plenty of problems to fix, But I’m just trying to live more and worry less, and that’s hard for me some days. That’s awesome. And you mentioned you have tools. Would you wanna just share with my listeners what you’re being emotionally strong tools are other than using the boxing and and psychedelics? Those are up there on the totem pole of tools because, honestly, I have to rate them of what is gonna help me the most in certain situations.

And sometimes it’s just even listening to music, going for a walk outside, hanging out with my cats, taking a nap, making myself a good meal. All of those things really feed me and feed my soul, But definitely, psychedelics, are a tool that I use, not currently, but in my life. As well as rhythm therapy, I find just, like, moving and being in your body and just letting yourself let go can be really helpful, and you don’t even have to talk about it. You just move a little. So anything that really just helps me process stuff without getting stuck in my head is helpful.

And what what’s your favorite positive affirmation currently? I got this. Because it’s not too overwhelming, and it can be right there in the moment. Even if you’re just broaching something that’s difficult right then and there, you’re like, alright. I got this.

Or it could be something really big, like, I got this. So I taught myself that a lot. Wonderful. I’d like to thank you so much for coming on to make America healthy and and and telling your story and sharing with our listeners how you have become emotionally strong. We wish you all the continued success in your journey and your journey into motherhood.

Please tell our listeners where they can find you. They can find me on Instagram at India oxenberg, or I’m putting out a new website in the next couple months, which is India oxenberg.com so you can also find me there. Wonderful. India, thank you so much for being on Thank you. We’d like to thank our sponsors of today’s show, Lifeboost Coffee, making clean, organic, mold free coffee that is shade grown, and they pay their farmers an equitable wage.

Check out my new mindfulness blend. It’s half calf dark roast, and it’s available on lifeboostcoffee.com. You can use the code yoga fit to save 15%. We’d also like to thank our title sponsor, Yoga Fit Training Systems Worldwide, the leader in yoga mind body fitness education, offering conferences. We’re having one in Scottsdale in July.

And then in Orlando in August, we’ve got plenty of trauma informed yoga and a 900 hour yoga therapy program, as well as our warriors program and warriors kids for PTSD, anxiety, and trauma. You can find me at beth shaw.com. You can go to yogafit.com, on Instagram at Beth Shaw help. If you enjoyed this show and know someone who needs to be emotionally strong, please share it. And, again, India, thank you so much.

A big namaste to you.