Conspirituality - 304: Twisted Tantric Yogi
Aired: 2026-04-16
Duration: 01:08:43


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=== Investigating Cults and Pseudoscience (03:20) ===

[00:01:43]  Spirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:01:52]  I'm Derek Barris.
[00:01:53]  I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:01:55]  I'm Julian Walker.
[00:01:56]  You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky.
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[00:02:27]  In Spirituality 304, Twisted Tantric Yogi.
[00:02:33]  It's not an unfamiliar tale, but effective techniques of spiritual manipulation are always new to someone.
[00:02:40]  In terms of targets, consider the bright eyed students who signed up for tantric yoga and sacred sexuality courses through their local yoga studios, only to eventually find they were sending the guru photos of themselves in bikinis to see if they qualified for a private initiation ceremony.
[00:02:57]  What's unique about this guru, Gregorian Bivolaru, is how his organization's in depth courses reached into over 30 different countries and delivered a steady stream of pre selected young, attractive, starry eyed women to be abused by him in Paris.
[00:03:14]  Now, a new documentary series, Twisted Yoga, tells the story of the women who've come forward to expose what they allege are the criminal actions of the guru and his cult.
[00:03:23]  I'll cover the nuts and bolts of this story, and Matthew will dig into Bivolaru's Soviet era Romanian background.
[00:03:30]  Stay tuned for segment three, where Derek interviews the director, Rowan Deacon, who reveals some information not covered in the series, such as the meditations for Trump going on at some of Bhuvalaru's yoga schools.
[00:03:48]  On March 13th, a new cult documentary titled Twisted Yoga dropped on Apple TV.
[00:03:53]  It covers an international network of yoga schools with branches in 34 countries where students sign up for courses on yoga and Tantra.
[00:04:02]  Though the schools had different names and were not initially presented as being connected to each other, they all traced back to one unlikely man, a Romanian yoga teacher named Gregorian Bivilaru.
[00:04:14]  He was revered across the network as an enlightened master of yoga and sacred sexuality.
[00:04:20]  Bivilaru called the organization he founded in 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, MISA, or the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute.
[00:04:32]  Was a syncretic combination of, amongst other sources, Western esotericism, traditional yoga and meditation, and Tantra via a take on Kashmiri Shaivism that emphasized sexual practices.
[00:04:46]  As students got deeper into the community and Bivalaru's materials, they were encouraged to change their diets, spend more time on coursework and practices, and move beyond ego by shedding boundaries to discover the truth of the secret teachings being gradually revealed to them.

=== Early Age Neurological Claims (14:58) ===

[00:05:04]  In so doing, they could attain spiritual awakening and even supernatural powers.
[00:05:09]  Included in the teachings were ideas about the chakras, manifestation, vibrational frequencies, alien beings, and the fundamental polarity of divine masculine.
[00:05:20]  And feminine energies, as represented by Shiva and Shakti.
[00:05:24]  Former students have described sexual practices between teachers and students, vomiting as part of purification techniques, orgies involving urine.
[00:05:33]  Yes.
[00:05:34]  So let's just be specific there.
[00:05:37]  So, yes, the collection of urine from students, from women students, that's then bottled and then distributed so that it can be sort of homeopathically applied in various circumstances, like.
[00:05:51]  I don't know, flavoring your water bottle.
[00:05:54]  There's a lot of this stuff around, like, they're generating some kind of spiritual energy that they're going to broadcast out, and it all emanates from their holy bodies, which, of course, I'll track back to him.
[00:06:05]  So we'll get to that.
[00:06:06]  Well, homeopathically applied implies that it was diluted, and I don't think it was diluted because one of the women just really didn't like having to use it in any capacity, right?
[00:06:18]  Oh, I thought they put it in their water bottles.
[00:06:20]  Like small amounts, you're saying?
[00:06:21]  Oh, small amounts.
[00:06:22]  It was diluting.
[00:06:23]  Okay.
[00:06:23]  Okay.
[00:06:24]  Right.
[00:06:24]  It was still going to be in there.
[00:06:25]  It wasn't diluted out of existence.
[00:06:28]  That's right.
[00:06:28]  That's right.
[00:06:29]  There were still drops involved.
[00:06:30]  It's fake on the Optica guys.
[00:06:32]  It's not the real end of it.
[00:06:33]  But I'm really glad you clarified, Matthew, because now it all makes sense.
[00:06:36]  It's totally legit.
[00:06:37]  Yeah, but I also feel bad because we've kind of started with a joke.
[00:06:40]  So let's get back to it.
[00:06:41]  Yeah.
[00:06:42]  Yeah.
[00:06:43]  Terrible story.
[00:06:44]  Well, in addition, pornography being used for sexual meditation is something that's been described.
[00:06:50]  Well, there you go.
[00:06:51]  As they applied themselves to the teachings, some, Apparently, lucky female students would be invited to submit an application to meet the guru and experience spiritual initiation.
[00:07:03]  And the application, as I've mentioned, included bathing suit photos.
[00:07:07]  And it turned out that the initiation allegedly involved an hours long ritualized sex session with the, as it turned out, quite odd and unattractive guru in conventional terms.
[00:07:18]  Yeah, so many of the survivors come eventually to call this rape.
[00:07:22]  And he was odd and unattractive, but also violent and verbally abusive when he didn't get full compliance.
[00:07:28]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:07:29]  The stories are quite disturbing.
[00:07:31]  All of this was apparently veiled in secrecy and required that they travel to France and delete all messages that were sent back and forth on Telegram about how this was going down.
[00:07:43]  And then, if things went poorly, they had to record video statements saying that nothing had been done to them against their will.
[00:07:50]  Some women say they were also then pressured into working as webcam models to pay off the supposed debt they had accrued for food and lodging.
[00:07:59]  Not only did they have to delete the telegram messages, they had their SIM cards removed from their phones upon meeting the handler at the airport.
[00:08:07]  And as soon as they got into the handler's car, they were chauffeured blindfolded so they didn't actually know where they were going.
[00:08:15]  And let's just make the point, too, here that this is in the 90s.
[00:08:21]  But he's doing stuff that's probably similar to this, dating back 15, maybe 20 years before.
[00:08:26]  So, this is the setup that the documentary is able to investigate.
[00:08:31]  They do a great job of it.
[00:08:32]  But, like, this is not this is sort of one thing in a sequence of ways in which this trafficking and all of this abuse happened.
[00:08:41]  Yeah.
[00:08:41]  And what we've been detailing for the last couple minutes here is a very methodical way of trying to get around legal culpability for these people.
[00:08:52]  Atrocious actions.
[00:08:54]  Now, listeners may detect from the language I'm using in some places here that all of these are allegations.
[00:08:59]  They're part of an ongoing legal investigation and trial.
[00:09:02]  In the Twisted Yoga documentary series, director Rowan Deacon chose to center the stories of four of the dozens of women who've come forward, while then also referencing the Tara Yoga Center in London and the Natu centers in Denmark and Sweden, as well as the larger umbrella organization called Atman Yoga Federation.
[00:09:24]  And with the exception of Tara Yoga Center, who declined to comment, all of those organizations have denied knowledge of any abuse or any wrongdoing.
[00:09:33]  Tara Yoga Center also sued my friend Uma Dinsmore Thule for one sentence that she wrote in a book, a whistleblowing sentence, because she had heard some of these stories.
[00:09:44]  I'll get to that in part two.
[00:09:45]  And Julian, you've said she does center it on four women, but as you're going to hear during the interview, she interviewed over 100 people involved, but including dozens of women, many of whom.
[00:09:58]  We were freshly out of the school and not willing.
[00:10:02]  They just weren't ready to face it yet to talk about it on camera.
[00:10:06]  Yeah.
[00:10:07]  So these very brave women out of a much larger group who've come forward.
[00:10:12]  The women whose stories we hear include Ashley Freckleton, who got involved through one of her brother's friends after a bad relationship breakup in 2018.
[00:10:21]  She describes her sincere journey of healing and self discovery and engaging faithfully in the teachings and practices before eventually being taken to France to meet the master.
[00:10:32]  But upon realizing exactly what the initiation involved, she refused.
[00:10:37]  And she says this led to abusive written exchanges with Bivilaru, in which she was told she was rejecting a divine opportunity, she was being manipulated by demons.
[00:10:46]  She says she was then held by the group for a further 24 hours before being allowed to leave after filming one of those videos, saying nothing was done to her against her will.
[00:10:56]  Ashley then sought professional help for PTSD, and she's at the center of the legal proceedings.
[00:11:02]  Against the guru and his organization.
[00:11:04]  Yeah, the documentary did a great job in finding those video statement waivers.
[00:11:10]  They're extremely eerie.
[00:11:11]  They're like hostage statements.
[00:11:12]  Totally.
[00:11:14]  They're by rote, so we see maybe three of the women reading identical statements, sort of strung together because the verbiage is the same from the same script.
[00:11:23]  It's very, very eerie.
[00:11:24]  Another woman named Bonnie describes being slowly indoctrinated, kind of like the frog being boiled in the pot, into what she calls cultish control after joining in 2012.
[00:11:36]  She says she was also manipulated into then generating revenue for the organization via doing webcam sex work.
[00:11:43]  Bonnie alleges being trapped in the secret house of the guru when she went for her initiation in France for five days before she realized what was about to happen in that ritual.
[00:11:54]  Agnes, who is from Romania, joined the group with her mother at 12 and says she was raped at 15 in her initiation with Bivolaru.
[00:12:04]  An interviewee identified as Andrea is noteworthy in that.
[00:12:08]  She found the initiatory ritual with Bivolaro to be as expected and didn't at the time feel abused by the group.
[00:12:16]  But we see her on camera in real time coming to understand the need for accountability as she recognizes the experiences of other women.
[00:12:25]  And she then says something very striking We can't keep staring up at the light while we're standing in a pile of shit.
[00:12:33]  Yeah, Andrea was a super interesting and ambivalent figure.
[00:12:37]  She wasn't willing to use.
[00:12:39]  The language of criminality to refer to her own experience.
[00:12:42]  And I think I got the sense that it was out of a sense of dignity around self responsibility.
[00:12:47]  Like she really did choose to be in that situation she feels.
[00:12:52]  And, you know, in the cult journalism I've done, there have been many people in her position I've come across who don't quite manage to express that contradiction like she does that two experiences can be parallel, that she made informed choices or she feels she did, but that others were the victims of crimes.
[00:13:09]  And then also, I think we have to say that there are two men in the group who were really helpful in Ashley's process.
[00:13:16]  So, Ziggy from Australia, New Zealand, I can't remember.
[00:13:21]  He was all in, but then utterly horrified when his group partner told him what Bivolaro had done to her and others.
[00:13:30]  And then there was another friend who provided a lot of validating feedback as well.
[00:13:34]  And I'm really glad that Deacon platformed those guys so that it's clear that people do make solidarity choices even in the worst.
[00:13:42]  Circumstances.
[00:13:43]  It's not like everybody is in the same position of, you know, sort of compulsory denial.
[00:13:49]  Interesting things, hopeful things happen.
[00:13:52]  Well, and what was interesting about Andrea, not only was she unwilling to use that language, she felt she had still learned something from the experience.
[00:13:59]  And I talked to Deacon a little bit about that.
[00:14:02]  The webcam work was the most shocking element to me.
[00:14:06]  And we unpacked that a little bit as well.
[00:14:08]  And I'll preempt that by saying the sort of metaphysics involved in thinking that you can help someone achieve a spiritual state.
[00:14:16]  By performing sex work over the internet was beyond my comprehension.
[00:14:20]  I expressed that to Deacon, and she actually explains how that happened pretty well.
[00:14:26]  The series also interviews investigative journalist Andrea Pocatila, who delves into Gregorian Bivalu's history, which I know you're going to talk about, Matthew.
[00:14:36]  The guru was arrested in France in late 2023, and he's currently being held on charges of sex trafficking, organized kidnapping, rape, and something new that we'll discuss called abuse of weakness.
[00:14:49]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  This is a really important part for the next segment.
[00:14:53]  And also, he's being held for a while.
[00:14:56]  There's a lot of buildup to this trial, which isn't expected to unfold until as late as next year, maybe the year after 2028.
[00:15:10]  So, the only early life biographical information we have on Gregorian Bivalaru, born in 1952 in Turtushechti, which is a village near Bucharest, Romania, comes from his own hagiographical website, which miraculously is still up, even as he sits in jail in France awaiting trial.
[00:15:33]  Quote, he was an introverted child, inclined toward contemplation, and with an immense thirst for knowledge.
[00:15:40]  I'll go on.
[00:15:41]  Since childhood, he has lived overwhelmingly.
[00:15:44]  Spiritual experiences and states of cosmic consciousness, giving him the intuition of an exceptional spiritual destiny.
[00:15:51]  Upon return to the normal state of consciousness, he would find himself crying for hours on end with overwhelming happiness, feeling a state of completeness and unity with a grandiose and, I don't know if they wanted to use the word grandiose, but they do, a grandiose and eternal reality that continued to exist and manifest itself in his being in all moments of the day.
[00:16:13]  So I have heard this before.
[00:16:16]  There's a great book called Prophetic.
[00:16:19]  Charisma by Len Oakes that goes through the personal histories of a number of gurus who talk about these early life, kind of mystical, radiant experiences and realizations.
[00:16:30]  And then the person who really went on at length about this, couldn't stop talking about his beneficent childhood was Adi Da.
[00:16:39]  He said all of the same things about himself.
[00:16:41]  So, yeah, I mean, this in some ways, Matthew, is sort of the standard fare in terms of claims of special spiritual destiny and awakening at an early age to realizing that you are.
[00:16:52]  Enlightened or something, it's sort of akin to having a PhD or some other kind of qualification in the more conventional world.
[00:17:02]  I think many of today's grifters have recognized this pattern.
[00:17:05]  And so they kind of make it up as part of their backstory to compensate for not really having qualifications.
[00:17:11]  But I think in the older days where Gregorian Brevillari was kind of hearkening back to, some of these people may actually have had neurological or psychiatric.
[00:17:22]  Predispositions to these kinds of intense early experiences?
[00:17:26]  Yeah.
[00:17:27]  I mean, is what you're saying is that this, the position of the spiritual influencer as it has become diffuse into an online sphere, you actually, the threshold for being able to embody or project those experiences or to have people feel that that's your particular charisma, that that's just sort of.
[00:17:47]  I don't know, more diffuse, but back then you probably had to actually have something going on.
[00:17:52]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:17:53]  Yeah, I'm saying I think it was, I think there most likely are certain people who really did have experiences like that as kids and they didn't know what it was.
[00:18:03]  And there was no one around them who could perhaps correctly diagnose, like, oh, this is an unusual kind of neurological thing or psychiatric predisposition.
[00:18:11]  But then as time has gone on, that sort of become the template for claiming to be awakened.
[00:18:18]  Being a guru figure, I knew from an early age I would see the orbs floating in the air, and my mother said to me, Oh, that's because you're spiritually special.
[00:18:26]  Yeah.
[00:18:26]  So I have this anecdotal impression, I mean, mainly based upon my own experience, but then also it gets twigged every time I come across one of these accounts, which is that I don't think they're describing something that is unrecognizable to me.
[00:18:41]  And what I relate it to is what Jacques Lacan says about the prior to the mirror stage.
[00:18:48]  Sort of moment in which, as a probably 18 months old or something like that, you have a pretty undifferentiated or monistic experience of you know connection with the mother, the self and other kind of division is not really sort of locked in yet, and then suddenly, you become aware of yourself as a separate being.
[00:19:12]  You know, he says you can see yourself in the mirror and you know there's a difference between your image and who you actually feel yourself to be, yeah.
[00:19:18]  And and what these guys.
[00:19:20]  Describe, like Adi Da talks about this.
[00:19:23]  He says, I fell out of my grace and I had a period of intense depression as a child, too.
[00:19:29]  So there's always these two parts to it where there's a mystical beginning, but then a period of like, oh, I differentiated from the universe, from my mother.
[00:19:40]  I became a separate person and I couldn't deal with that.
[00:19:43]  And that was my fall from grace.
[00:19:44]  And it was really painful.
[00:19:46]  And so I decided that I was going to get back to my original state.
[00:19:49]  Yeah, like a pre egoic kind of fusion with.
[00:19:52]  With everything that is.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:54]  Yeah.
[00:19:55]  But the interesting thing is that most of us don't have that kind of central narrative about.
[00:20:00]  Right.
[00:20:01]  Not the narrative, no.

=== Implausible Literature Accessories (07:26) ===

[00:20:02]  Yeah.
[00:20:03]  Well, I wonder if I'm infected by it, right?
[00:20:04]  Like I picked up Lacan at, I don't know, 19 years old, and I was like, oh, that makes sense to me.
[00:20:10]  I do feel those things, right?
[00:20:11]  Well, I'll say, and of course, this is anecdotal, but it's also an area that I've read a fair bit about.
[00:20:18]  But I'll just say here, I do have a friend who.
[00:20:23]  You know, we speculate that he maybe had some kind of temporal lobe epilepsy experiences as a kid.
[00:20:29]  And he would have, he grew up in a cultish environment.
[00:20:33]  And he would have these moments when he was, you know, nine, 10, 11 years old, where he would suddenly stare off into space.
[00:20:39]  Yeah.
[00:20:39]  And he would go completely vacant.
[00:20:41]  Right.
[00:20:41]  And he would not be there anymore.
[00:20:42]  And he would have no recollection of the experience.
[00:20:44]  Right.
[00:20:45]  He had no other, like, no psychiatric disturbances.
[00:20:48]  He was like a completely otherwise normal kid developmentally.
[00:20:52]  But he would have those moments.
[00:20:53]  And because of that, he was identified within the group as.
[00:20:56]  Being the potential successor to the guru, and he was called the Buddha boy.
[00:20:59]  Right.
[00:20:59]  Well, I mean, there you go.
[00:21:02]  I don't think we have anything in Ceausescu's biography that has somebody like picking that out from his experience or anything like that.
[00:21:12]  You know, it's really a kind of solitary realizer story.
[00:21:16]  So he's growing up in, you know, traumatized and a traumatizing Romanian communist dictatorship.
[00:21:23]  Yes.
[00:21:23]  He says that he's pushed in his schooling toward manual labor.
[00:21:28]  Plumbing in particular is mentioned a couple of times, but that this couldn't possibly slake his first thirst for God, as he's talking about in retrospect.
[00:21:38]  So the biography says, the hagiography says, he attended high school in Bucharest, which allowed him access to the largest libraries of the capital.
[00:21:45]  There he studied thoroughly and sometimes for days in a row fundamental yoga treaties, alchemy, parapsychology, sexology, and esotericism.
[00:21:52]  You know, when this list starts going, I start rolling my eyes a little bit.
[00:21:58]  Fundamental yoga tradition was a great revelation, and throughout his studies, he translated directly from English and French, since spirituality books in Romanian were almost non existent.
[00:22:07]  Thus, at the age of 15, his life was already divided into two major parts practicing yoga with assiduity and reading books from various related fields, which back then were despised by the communist regime.
[00:22:19]  And that'll become a theme, right?
[00:22:22]  By 19, his interest seems to have narrowed down to trafficking porn.
[00:22:27]  In Deacon's documentary, we hear from the investigative journalist.
[00:22:32]  Andrea Pocatilla, who accessed Bivalaro's Securitate file.
[00:22:38]  This is the secret police of Romania at the time, and found that he's spending his time in the 1970s writing letters to contacts in Sweden and Germany, asking them to send him pornography.
[00:22:52]  And I think that's a huge part of the entire story going forward, because everything afterwards for this guy is about procuring sex for himself and exploiting women.
[00:23:02]  Now, the documentary interviews women who were trafficked to Bivolaro in France in the 2010s.
[00:23:09]  He would rape them under the guise of initiation, allegedly, after which their tantric practice would be to become unpaid webcam performers.
[00:23:18]  And they were told, as Derek alluded to, that if their viewers cranked their hogs to enlighten webcam performers, that the viewers would taste a bit of enlightenment.
[00:23:27]  But this pattern goes way back, because there's a 1993 report in a Romanian magazine that alleged Bivolaro was involved in trafficking VHS tapes.
[00:23:38]  The Danish MISA affiliate, Natha Yoga, became a recruiting pool for a Copenhagen porn house called Sublime Erotica.
[00:23:48]  And in 2006, one Natha member figured out what was going on when he recognized several colleagues from the center on adult film covers in gas stations, including a couple who was prominent in the group who starred in films with names like The Magic Passage and Ecstasy Water.
[00:24:06]  And then there were reports from 2013 that found MISA linked.
[00:24:09]  Porn DVDs again sold at gas stations in Denmark.
[00:24:14]  And there's something about this that I think, given my own cult experience, is so plausible to me.
[00:24:20]  Where, like, I can imagine the small town that I was in in Wisconsin going into some shop and realizing that, oh, yeah, wait a minute, what am I looking at?
[00:24:28]  What's going on here?
[00:24:29]  And then, like, I totally buy it.
[00:24:31]  I just, it's just completely on track.
[00:24:33]  And then also, I think that the shipping, the actual physical packages of getting this stuff and selling it was probably fully integrated.
[00:24:42]  To his system of sending out courses all over Europe as well.
[00:24:47]  Yeah.
[00:24:47]  I don't know.
[00:24:48]  It's impossible to know how delusional Bivolaro is, but on the face of things, it appears to me as though the entire yoga thing is an elaborate sort of retrospective screen for this very simple criminal obsession that he has.
[00:25:02]  Yeah.
[00:25:02]  I mean, I don't know about how reductive we can be because the courses and the teaching materials that he goes on to provide do show an obsessive interest in tantric yoga and esoteric.
[00:25:14]  Spirituality.
[00:25:15]  He's certainly spending a lot of time alone, and his various passions and obsessions are just getting sort of woven together.
[00:25:23]  It all exists in this synergistic relationship, I think, with an appetite for power and sexual novelty and violation of innocence.
[00:25:31]  So, yeah, I don't know that I would see it as sort of a causal thing where, like, okay, I want to do this.
[00:25:37]  And so I'm going to fabricate this whole yoga thing.
[00:25:40]  It seems like it all.
[00:25:42]  The tendrils all get woven together.
[00:25:44]  Right.
[00:25:45]  It's an interesting chicken or egg question.
[00:25:48]  Did he fall into this type of yoga due to its relationship with sexuality, or did his interest in yoga feed on conscious drives that manifest in sexual exploitation?
[00:26:00]  I was thinking, in terms of the history of Tantra, did he stumble into Victorian era translations, which focused on the pleasure of men pretty exclusively and use that to justify his own desire for power?
[00:26:12]  And given how much of his origin myth is in question, Which is pretty much everything as we were preparing for this episode.
[00:26:19]  Like, we'd have something in the script and it'd be like, oh, no, that seems like it might not be true.
[00:26:24]  So, I don't think we'll ever actually know.
[00:26:26]  And he's certainly not going to give us any insights.
[00:26:29]  No.
[00:26:30]  The one thing I can say is that it's not highly plausible that he had access to all the literature he said he did in the languages that he could read, which seemed to be limited to, you know, I don't know about the letters to Ashley.
[00:26:47]  Were they in English?
[00:26:48]  That were they communicated back and forth?
[00:26:51]  Don't remember.
[00:26:52]  Yeah, I imagine they were.
[00:26:56]  But anyway, he does not show polyglot facility, and that's what he would need to have for all of this stuff.
[00:27:03]  So the secret police back in the day seemed to have his number because Pocatila says that in the late 1980s, when the Securitate committed him to a psychiatric ward, it was for, she says it was for sociopathic sexual predation because in that report, He casually tells this official about asking a friend, a friend of his,

=== Sociopathic Sexual Predation Reports (03:52) ===

[00:27:29]  to rape a 12 year old Roma girl who is somewhere close to his neighborhood so that he could rape her after under the guise of tantric initiation.
[00:27:38]  To me, the obvious parallel to the cursed creeps we know about is Keith Ranieri, who was also abusing girls from his teenage years and then organized everything around recruitment of an endless supply of women.
[00:27:51]  And he used basically any MLM and business coaching scam he could find.
[00:27:57]  But with Bivolaro, there's an historical backdrop that provides a kind of chaos, but also cover and gives leave for what Pocatilla identifies as his dual persona of hero and victim, which persists to this day in the eyes of his remaining followers.
[00:28:11]  So he's writing to these Swedish sweathogs for porn mags in 1971 because porn was banned throughout the Soviet Union.
[00:28:18]  The original communist rationale wasn't puritanical, though, it dated back to the feminism of people like Alexandra Kolontai, who wrote about sex in terms of bourgeois.
[00:28:28]  Property relations, commodifications of sexuality, and the treatment of women as objects of exchange.
[00:28:34]  So in 1921, Colin Tye publishes Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations.
[00:28:40]  She writes Moral censure is consequently directed at prostitution in all its forms and at all types of marriage of convenience, even when recognized by Soviet law.
[00:28:49]  The buying and selling of caresses destroys the sense of equality between the sexes and thus undermines the basis of solidarity without which communist society cannot exist.
[00:28:59]  So for her, The commodification of sex is the flip side of Puritanism.
[00:29:05]  However, Romania at that time is a totally other story.
[00:29:10]  And because all of this is taking place during Romania's Sovietization, which begins in 1944, but when Ceausescu inherits party leadership in 65 and quickly reveals himself as a paranoid autocrat alongside his totally freakazoid wife, Elena, who is pretending to be a Chemist, communist morality becomes this contradictory puritanism.
[00:29:39]  And it's partly because Romania's birth rate is in the gutter.
[00:29:43]  And so there's a 1966 decree in which sexuality was more directly policed, abortion and contraception were banned, and the state presented sex as a duty to national reproduction.
[00:29:55]  Of course, this leads to the orphanage scandal later on because there's all kinds of babies who are being born that can't be taken care of because, you know, there's High poverty rates.
[00:30:06]  But the general feeling from the administration was that sex was a necessary evil for making babies.
[00:30:13]  But meanwhile, Elena got herself off by bugging the bedrooms of her friends and enemies to listen to them fucking.
[00:30:21]  And then their youngest son, Niku, was a drunken serial rapist who allegedly sexually brutalized the gymnast Nadia Cominici.
[00:30:31]  According to the Romanian press, And her mother, although she denied it.
[00:30:37]  You guys remember her?
[00:30:38]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:40]  Incredible generational athlete.
[00:30:43]  Niku died of cirrhosis at 45.
[00:30:46]  This is an absolute train wreck of a family that tortured generations of a country.
[00:30:51]  And there's this great moment in the documentary where, in 2004, after one of the post Soviet raids on dozens of Misa halfway house or trafficking ashrams, Bivalaro thought that it was a good idea to appear on this Larry King type interview show to defend his honor.
[00:31:11]  And what he says, I think, shows the logic of how he played on, but also distanced himself from both communism and Ceausescu.

=== Legal Risks of Coercive Control (15:27) ===

[00:31:21]  So the interviewer asks Have you had sex with any of the followers of Misa?
[00:31:26]  And he replies, I have never had sex with anyone because having sex is something degrading.
[00:31:32]  And then the interviewer says, Have you made love with any of the followers of Misa?
[00:31:37]  Did I make love?
[00:31:39]  Yes, I did make love.
[00:31:41]  I feel like it's kind of almost like Pepe Le Pew speaking and smelling his own farts.
[00:31:46]  Not sexually degrading, but natural, loving relationships as we all know them based on mutual love and respect.
[00:31:53]  And then there's this great video cut, either made by Deacon or.
[00:31:58]  From the original broadcast edit, where we see the interviewer look down at his papers with, like, holy shit, what a whack job expression on his face.
[00:32:05]  Yeah, incredible lack of self awareness that he's like, this would be a great idea to go on.
[00:32:10]  And I'll just show them how wonderful I am.
[00:32:13]  He's clearly not well.
[00:32:15]  He's completely out of touch with any of how this is coming across.
[00:32:19]  And there's also this really weird moment where he does some kind of energetic transmutation meditation and he's like, kind of, he's like pulsing his throat and he just.
[00:32:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:29]  He's like, he's gulping something.
[00:32:31]  Thing he's doing.
[00:32:32]  I don't know.
[00:32:34]  Yeah.
[00:32:34]  It's like his tongue thing.
[00:32:35]  Yeah.
[00:32:35]  It's like he's Kakari Mudra.
[00:32:37]  It's like he's pulling cards or something like that.
[00:32:39]  He's pulsing stuff from his testicles up into his brain, but live on TV with his eyes closed for like a full 15 seconds.
[00:32:45]  You're like, what?
[00:32:46]  The problem with these guys is that he's probably been on film with, he's been filmed by his own acolytes for years and years and years.
[00:32:55]  And he just thinks that the TV studio is the same thing.
[00:32:58]  Totally.
[00:32:58]  He thinks the audience is the same thing.
[00:33:00]  He thinks that he can do whatever he's been doing in front of his dumb little camera.
[00:33:05]  In his stupid little room in front of everybody, and it's going to fly.
[00:33:09]  That's really the only source material Deacon had to work with in presenting Gregorian to the audience.
[00:33:14]  And it's kind of wild because for all the contrived reality TV America has concocted, I can't think of any similar situations in which someone on trial goes in front of a camera and speaks for hours on end about the case.
[00:33:32]  That just doesn't happen here due to our laws, though since MAGA, we've seen an uptick in politicians.
[00:33:38]  Reframing cases and using the media as a sort of court of public opinion, which is also somewhat new, at least the volume they're doing it with, but that's even still different from this case.
[00:33:49]  So, what I would say about that particular moment is that it carries a lot of his kind of technique that he was able to echo this old communist morality that, of course, is now distorted around mutual respect between men and women, but then also.
[00:34:10]  Echoed the Ceausescu Puritanism while claiming to be their political victim and distinguishing himself from their opulent excesses.
[00:34:18]  Because after all, he's always photographed in dungarees and some like mopey, shitty sweater, moldy sweater, sitting around in dumpy apartments while the Ceausescu's own dozens of villas and lived like royalty.
[00:34:34]  But the women Bivalaro initiated, you know, they're just describing rape as a precursor to being trafficked into webcam work.
[00:34:45]  So let's go back to the content, though, and this question of like, is it content or bullshit?
[00:34:52]  Because I don't know if you got this eye rolling feeling while, you know, some of the story unfolded, but what I found very interesting in the documentary was this persistent vagueness about what the actual content of Misa and Bivalaro was.
[00:35:08]  Like, nobody is able to really say anything specific about teachings or philosophy or practice.
[00:35:15]  And So, when I looked into it, the answer that I sort of came to was that there was just too much of it, content wise, for anyone to make sense of.
[00:35:25]  Like, Bivalara was like a gish galloping polymath production machine who created this incredible wave of bullshit.
[00:35:33]  He was like, you know, he had hypergraphia.
[00:35:35]  Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff.
[00:35:38]  To me, it had echoes of Madame Blavatsky, kind of eclectic syncretism.
[00:35:43]  It's incoherent, but it's filled with profound, seeming esoteric mysteries that are going to be revealed as you continue down the path.
[00:35:50]  Yeah.
[00:35:51]  Well, one thing Deacon told me was there was a lot of material she had to leave on the cutting room floor.
[00:35:56]  Specifically, she wanted to focus on the psychology of the women more than anything else.
[00:36:01]  Right.
[00:36:02]  She does say she wishes she had a four series deal instead of three episodes.
[00:36:07]  So a lot of the focus on Bivolaro had to be abandoned in order to work within the format.
[00:36:13]  Well, I mean, maybe we'll have the trial for, you know, the raw material of another series later on.
[00:36:19]  Yeah.
[00:36:20]  It'll be fascinating to see.
[00:36:21]  I don't know if it's going to be televised.
[00:36:22]  Misa Marketing said that B. Valara was the author or translator of over 100 publications, 100 articles.
[00:36:30]  He allegedly translated Yogananda's autobiography of a yogi, the Shiva Samhita, the Yoga Sutras, and Mircea Iliadi's writings on yoga and tantrism into Romanian because he was writing in English.
[00:36:44]  He also claimed to have corresponded with Iliadi, who was Romanian, about esoteric sexuality.
[00:36:51]  So that's super fascinating.
[00:36:54]  He claims that he started all the learning and translation in the 1960s, but that's when these texts were all contraband in Romania.
[00:37:02]  And to have had scholarly reading competence in French or English in his teens without any language training, I don't think is very likely.
[00:37:09]  I haven't found any interviews in which he's speaking anything other than Romanian.
[00:37:13]  Okay, another early influence he claimed in raids in the 1970s, the Securitate seized a bunch of Playboy magazines alongside a copy of Julius Evola's Metaphysics of Sex.
[00:37:26]  So, this is the Italian fascist philosopher loved by Steve Bannon.
[00:37:30]  And, you know, Evola thought that Eros was the residue of a primordial state prior to the individuation of male and female.
[00:37:38]  And he jazzed up that understanding by reading Arthur Avalon, you know, the greatest hits.
[00:37:43]  But this might be a red herring too, because the earliest English translation we have.
[00:37:48]  For Evola is 1983.
[00:37:51]  And the book was only available in Italian and French prior to that.
[00:37:55]  Again, there's nothing showing that Bivaluru was a polyglot.
[00:37:58]  So, this is an organization that pumped out not just hundreds of pages, Juliet, it's like 14,500 pages of course material to tens of thousands of students across 30 countries.
[00:38:12]  And what about the money?
[00:38:14]  There isn't a lot of clarity on the financial empire.
[00:38:18]  There is a former member who gave testimony in 2014 to say that he'd built up a lot of real estate wealth and his organization took in approximately 4 million euros from membership fees one year.
[00:38:31]  The real estate stuff seems to be something to follow up on for sure because in one of the raids, I think the 2004 raid, they're talking about a particular neighborhood in.
[00:38:42]  Bucharest, I think, where there's like 20 or 15 houses or something like that that get raided at the same time.
[00:38:49]  So he's sitting in jail in France now, waiting to be tried.
[00:38:53]  He denies everything.
[00:38:55]  His organizations say that everything that happened to anyone happened consensually.
[00:39:00]  And, you know, in a lot of legal systems, that's the end of the story, especially given these weird disclaimer statements and hostage videos.
[00:39:09]  But there's something new happening.
[00:39:13]  There's a new legal framework being deployed in France called emprise mentale or abuse de faibless basically, coercive control or abuse of vulnerability.
[00:39:25]  There are similar laws in the UK and Ireland and some other places.
[00:39:30]  Great secular anti sect tradition.
[00:39:32]  France is extending this legal theory to be able to cover groups, and in Bivolaro's case, a religious group.
[00:39:39]  Now, this idea came up like 10 years ago when I was doing some journalism on cults, and it was very exciting to me.
[00:39:47]  Like, how amazing would it be if the legal system recognized coercive control?
[00:39:51]  And then I started thinking about it a little bit more just in this round as it came up, and I don't think I was thinking it through very much because I think it raises all kinds of amazing questions about.
[00:40:02]  Human subjectivity and internal states, because the emprise framework requires courts to assess a mental state to determine that apparent consent was not real consent because it was produced by a prior process of psychological manipulation.
[00:40:19]  So the legal claim is that X's capacity to say a meaningful yes or no was itself compromised before the moment of apparent consent.
[00:40:28]  And as a former cult member, this makes a lot of sense.
[00:40:34]  I think it makes intuitive sense, I think, for many people.
[00:40:37]  But in legal terms, there's part of me that wonders if it's playing with fire because the same logic could be reversed, right?
[00:40:44]  Like, X was consenting, even though outwardly they were saying no, which is what standard rape apologism has always argued.
[00:40:53]  Because the implicit claim is that a prior pattern of behavior interpreted by the defendant or their lawyers reveals a truer inner state than the expressed refusal in the moment.
[00:41:03]  Ooh, that would be, yeah, that would be an incredibly dark manipulation.
[00:41:08]  I mean, one of the ways that I think you're right, Matthew, it does make intuitive sense is that we think about consent with regard to age.
[00:41:16]  We think about consent with regard to being intoxicated and not being able to make good judgment calls.
[00:41:21]  And so, to me, it seems like it's an extending of that to say, under certain conditions, Your capacity to make adult, sober decisions about what you're doing can be compromised through some sort of undue influence, right?
[00:41:37]  This is like where the meat of the matter is in terms of the cult studies topic.
[00:41:42]  Right.
[00:41:42]  Well, and it makes me wonder what the other possibilities are.
[00:41:45]  Like, for instance, could it inform labor relations?
[00:41:48]  Like, you know, where an employer takes care, takes advantage of a vulnerability.
[00:41:52]  Like, will we have Marxists argue that wage labor at some poverty level is like a form of coercive control perpetrated on a person that?
[00:42:00]  You're just totally conditioned.
[00:42:01]  You've been conditioned to birth, by birth, from birth to accept it.
[00:42:05]  So, what would the antithesis of that be?
[00:42:08]  What would the solution, like higher minimum wage, which we've been arguing for in America, for example?
[00:42:15]  How would you fight such a thing?
[00:42:17]  How would I fight the claim that the person was indoctrinated to believe, to accept wage if the claim was true?
[00:42:23]  If the claim was true, yeah.
[00:42:25]  What sort of policy would be put in place to actually make sure that could not happen?
[00:42:31]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:42:33]  It would seem to me that.
[00:42:36]  Any wage labor that wasn't mediated by some kind of collective bargaining would be a start, right?
[00:42:41]  Because somebody would stand in between you and the employer in terms of contract law and act in your interest so that you're not like an individual who's simply being sort of bamboozled by this system or by an employer or something like that into believing that you have to accept whatever you're given.
[00:42:58]  I don't know, though.
[00:42:59]  I don't know.
[00:42:59]  But like if we're talking about sort of group influence impacting your consent, that is a very interesting sort of thing.
[00:43:08]  New sort of legal theory.
[00:43:10]  I don't know.
[00:43:11]  It's never existed that we know of, correct?
[00:43:13]  Well, no, but that's what makes this new sort of application of coercive control law in France so innovative.
[00:43:20]  It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't exist.
[00:43:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:22]  And I mean, it's not that we haven't heard those kinds of arguments be made politically, but you're talking about in a legal kind of sense.
[00:43:28]  In court.
[00:43:28]  Yeah.
[00:43:29]  What's interesting to me is that right away it makes me think of all of the stories that we've heard from the music industry and how full, like, clearly they'd often be really young, but, you know, still.
[00:43:40]  Grown adults who want to sign record contracts, who are thrilled to be making a career out of music, were completely taken to the cleaners by exploitive record companies and managers.
[00:43:52]  And that having representation where you have informed consent hey, here's how this works, and these are your rights, and here's what you really should be able to advocate for in terms of how big a slice of the pie you get.
[00:44:03]  It's very similar.
[00:44:04]  And just to roll with that, because I happen to be working with a music startup that's trying to attend to some of these questions right now.
[00:44:11]  One of the forces pushing back against that, which I'd also would say, I would hope would align with Matthew's answer about labor union organizing, which I hope to see more of here in America, is that.
[00:44:25]  Gen Z and across the board, people are just buying more physical products.
[00:44:30]  We just hit the first billion dollar year in vinyl sales in America ever last year in 2025 because people both want a physical product, they're tired of everything being on their phone, and they want to support the artist directly.
[00:44:45]  So I actually think there could be a cultural force as well as a legal force that could help keep those things in check, at least I hope.
[00:44:53]  And with the music reference, that seems to be the case.
[00:44:56]  In terms of what's happening.
[00:44:57]  Yeah.
[00:44:57]  And what would the lie be to the young musician?
[00:44:59]  The lie from the distributor or the label would be with this contract, this is the best contract that you can get.
[00:45:10]  It's going to get you a lot of exposure.
[00:45:13]  Nobody gets anything better.
[00:45:15]  I just did this segment for another platform about how Gordie Howe, like the most famous hockey player in Canadian history, was told by his Detroit Red Wings manager.
[00:45:28]  For 20 years, that he was getting the highest salary in the league, and he was getting one of the like a very shitty salary, in fact.
[00:45:36]  And this is the guy who broke up unions, Jack Adams.
[00:45:41]  And, you know, he was just like an incredible tycoon, but he was lying to everybody.
[00:45:47]  And I don't know, like, what's the difference between that and sort of indoctrinating somebody into a religious organization in which, you know, these are the ways in which you have to pay in?
[00:45:59]  You just, and this, you're not really going to ask questions, and I'm in control.
[00:46:02]  Well, you jumped from music to sports there.
[00:46:04]  But if you want to go to sports, I mean, we have a great representation of it here in America where the union laws in baseball are extremely pro athlete.
[00:46:14]  And so, Juan Soto, who's out two to three weeks right now, if he were out for the rest of the season, he would still get his full pay for this year.
[00:46:22]  Whereas in the NFL, if you get injured, they can just say, You're not getting paid, see you later, because they do not have strong union laws.
[00:46:31]  And then you get to the case of college basketball where now they're getting paid as athletes.
[00:46:35]  Which sounds great, but it's consolidated all the power to a certain number of universities that can afford it, that can afford to pay the athletes.
[00:46:44]  So, sports, I mean, it's just there's tons of minutiae in all these conversations.

=== Post Lineage Practice Ideas (03:56) ===

[00:46:49]  So, the last thing I want to shout out here is the appearance of my friend Uma Dinsmore Thule in the third episode of Twisted Yoga.
[00:46:59]  I'm sure that, as you've mentioned, Derek, there's a lot of time constraints for three episodes.
[00:47:04]  And I'm sure that that limited the story of how instrumental she was in not only talking with and validating.
[00:47:10]  Ashley and other women from the Tara Center, but also how she found her bearings to support them decades before in her own break with the Satyananda Yoga Organization, which happens to be the publisher of the Bihar School of Yoga books, which permeated the more serious yoga training world from the 1980s onward, maybe 1970s even.
[00:47:31]  Uma had married into the organization because her partner's mom had been a swami in Satyananda's ashram in Rikya, India.
[00:47:40]  But in 2014, there was an Australian human rights investigation into their Australian affiliate, and it uncovered years of clerical abuse and child abuse at this particular school.
[00:47:54]  And Uma and her partner, Nuralipta, were among the first senior students to renounce the organization and its lack of safety and accountability.
[00:48:03]  Because they realized that top administrators had known and covered up the abuse for decades.
[00:48:08]  Now, what's really interesting about Uma is that she took the material, and this reflects back on what we were saying about Andrea in the documentary.
[00:48:17]  She took the material that had really moved her in her yoga life, especially a practice called Yoga Nidra, and she sort of took complete thematic and political ownership of it.
[00:48:29]  In a way, she had to, you know, along with other practitioners, because Yoga Nidra.
[00:48:34]  As taught by the Satyananda Swamis, it was a form of hypnotic trance that you do in a lying down position.
[00:48:42]  And of course, nobody wants to be put into a hypnotic trance by somebody who's not safe or somebody who doesn't have their power dynamics interrogated, somebody that you can't explicitly trust, somebody who doesn't know anything about consent.
[00:48:57]  So now Yoga Nidra has this whole post lineage culture to it.
[00:49:01]  And one of the many innovative teachers of it is friend of the pod, Theo Wildcroft, who theorized this notion of the post lineage.
[00:49:09]  Output transcript Out of the experience of circumstances like these.
[00:49:13]  And Wildcroft's basic idea is that spiritual practice is authorized by the community that practices it, not by the leader, not by the founder.
[00:49:20]  And I think a lot of the refugees from Bivolaru would appreciate that idea, especially if they sort of feel like they're losing everything that they knew.
[00:49:33]  And I think that the post lineage practice idea is probably also going to be really.
[00:49:39]  You know, generative, really healing for waves of folks who are likely to leave like white Christian nationalist formations in the coming years when they, you know, realize that, oh, we voted for this guy who, you know, put this AI Trump slop Jesus icon onto Truth Social while he was, you know, dissing the Pope.
[00:50:12]  Deacon Rowan is a documentary filmmaker based in London whose work has been recognized by BAFTA and the Royal Television Society.
[00:50:20]  Her previous work includes the BBC's How to Die, Simon's Choice, Sudan, The Last of the Rhinos, and Health Food Junkies, which focuses on wellness's penchant for extreme healthy eating.
[00:50:34]  I want to give a shout out to conspirituality listener and twisted yoga music supervisor Leon Dixon Golden for connecting me with Deacon for this interview.

=== Proving Commitment to Teachings (15:16) ===

[00:50:45]  Also really awesome music, Leon.
[00:50:47]  Agreed.
[00:50:51]  Covered in your work assisted suicide, the Afghanistan war, rhino preservation in Sudan.
[00:50:58]  You've also covered extreme wellness eating, which is right in my personal wheelhouse on this podcast.
[00:51:04]  How do you get to making a series on human trafficking by a Romanian yogi sex cult leader?
[00:51:13]  Yeah, I enjoy the kind of more fascinating, darker, intriguing aspects of.
[00:51:22]  Human life in the documentaries that I make.
[00:51:24]  And so when it was actually Lightbox, who are a production company, came to me and said that they had access to a couple of former members of an organization which was being investigated at that point for sex trafficking and mind control, essentially by the French police.
[00:51:47]  The documentaries about cults, it's not like there's a shortage of them, right?
[00:51:51]  So there was part of me that felt like, gosh, does the world need another cult documentary?
[00:51:56]  I listened to the, they had done so, or they had interviewed or spoken to some of the former members.
[00:52:04]  And I sort of read what they had said and I read these women's kind of testimonies.
[00:52:10]  I just thought that they were so articulate and intelligent and compelling in terms of their ability to kind of understand or try and make sense of what happened to them that I couldn't resist kind of digging into those people's experiences.
[00:52:26]  The kind of like, how had this happened?
[00:52:29]  Was what appealed to me more than the, oh, let's look at this cult.
[00:52:33]  I was interested in the human psychology of it, I suppose.
[00:52:36]  So you started with a few women that Lighthouse came to you with.
[00:52:39]  Did you try to contact more and were any unwilling to talk to you for the film?
[00:52:45]  Yes.
[00:52:45]  So we started with a small number of people who Lightbox were talking to.
[00:52:51]  Because the school is very, it's kind of like lots of schools all over the world under this umbrella organization called the Atman Federation.
[00:52:59]  So it's Very dispersed globally.
[00:53:01]  So we kind of had to go on a bit of a mission to go and meet people and speak to them.
[00:53:04]  And we wanted to find as many women who had been deeply involved in the school as possible because we needed the evidence.
[00:53:11]  We needed the kind of journalistic evidence to, you know, first hand experiences to tell the world about what goes on in this organization.
[00:53:18]  Yeah, we spoke to 50, maybe more.
[00:53:21]  I mean, we spoke to a lot of people and we kind of met up with, there were groups of people who'd been involved in the school and had left who were still friends.
[00:53:28]  So we met up with kind of networks of people.
[00:53:31]  And to your point, yes, we did speak to people.
[00:53:34]  Who had left very recently, like literally within weeks of us, you know, and they were left.
[00:53:41]  Able to feel they didn't feel able, they were ready to speak publicly because they hadn't really processed what had happened to them.
[00:53:47]  There were people involved in some of the legal proceedings in Finland who just for like personal reasons didn't feel robust enough.
[00:53:54]  In order to kind of tell this story, we needed people to be really kind of quite open about quite intimate things that had gone on in the school.
[00:54:01]  And so we were very clear from that, you know, when we met people.
[00:54:05]  And it was very much a case of like, do you want, do you feel able to join us in telling your story?
[00:54:11]  So yeah, we did speak to a lot of people.
[00:54:13]  Outside of the women who testify in the series.
[00:54:16]  Before we started recording, you mentioned there was so much you couldn't fit into three episodes.
[00:54:20]  I completely empathize.
[00:54:22]  One of the questions I was left with was the fact that there are so many yoga schools operating under different names in different countries.
[00:54:32]  Do you know how the businesses were even set up in the first place?
[00:54:37]  And they're still in operation, I assume, at least most of them, from my understanding.
[00:54:42]  Is that correct?
[00:54:43]  Yes, a lot of them are.
[00:54:45]  And you can actually go onto the Atman Federation website, and all of the partner schools are there.
[00:54:49]  It's a franchise system, so it's very easy and publicly available information about where the schools are.
[00:54:55]  I think there are two or three in the UK.
[00:54:59]  And as far as I know, certainly the one in London is still open, and Tari Ober in London is around the corner.
[00:55:05]  And in terms of how they were set up, so what we learned in the research was after Bivolari left Romania in 2004 and set up in Sweden, although he very quickly made a base in Paris.
[00:55:17]  So he's been in Paris for a long time.
[00:55:20]  Question of why Paris is an interesting one.
[00:55:23]  We had theories, but I don't know.
[00:55:25]  Our understanding is that Bivolari had lots of, not disciples, Probably a slightly over the top word, but he had lots of associates working with him in Romania when the school was huge.
[00:55:36]  MISA was a hugely popular, well known organization in Romania in the 1990s.
[00:55:42]  I mean, like bizarrely massive.
[00:55:43]  We would bump into people and they were like, oh, yeah, I was a member of MISA.
[00:55:46]  You know, it's a very small school in London, you know, a yoga school is much, but in Romania, everybody knows what you're talking about when you mention MISA.
[00:55:54]  And so there were lots of disciples or associates, and what we understood is that they were sent to different countries to set up schools in different places.
[00:56:03]  We know of one associate of Bibulari's who set up a school in Argentina, in India, and then some of them grew organically, I think.
[00:56:11]  So there would be a lead teacher at one school who would then go to another school and set up a new base.
[00:56:16]  And they were often, a lot of our interviewees had been on teacher training courses within the school.
[00:56:22]  So they might be then encouraged to set something up, perhaps in there.
[00:56:25]  I think they were trying to set something up in Australia at one point because a couple of the people that we spoke to were originally from Australia.
[00:56:31]  So that's kind of how the organization grew.
[00:56:34]  It was shortly after Bibulari left Romania for Western Europe.
[00:56:37]  Did you notice there were different LLCs set up for each one?
[00:56:41]  Do you know how deeply entwined he was in the operations of each, or was his thing more of just getting the schools out there and running?
[00:56:49]  There are links between the Atman Federation and Bibolario still available online.
[00:56:55]  So he's mentioned as, I think, spiritual guide publicly.
[00:57:00]  The way that I learned from the women's experiences and the men's experiences who were in the school, Bibolario is still.
[00:57:07]  There are photos of him and he's spoken about as the spiritual leader, but there's a lot of mystery around him.
[00:57:13]  So it's not like you get a pamphlet that's got his face on the front cover, you know, when you join.
[00:57:19]  But as you kind of graduate through the different levels of teaching, you're introduced to the idea of the spiritual guide who you can meet him and go and visit him.
[00:57:29]  But if you look online, it's less easy to make a connection, although not impossible.
[00:57:34]  So a bit of Scientology where you don't find out about the aliens until a certain level that you reach in the organization, then.
[00:57:41]  Totally.
[00:57:43]  So the way that it works, absolutely, is it's a school.
[00:57:47]  So you graduate through different courses, I guess.
[00:57:50]  Yeah, there are echoes with something like Scientology, but also with like a normal school.
[00:57:55]  So there's lots of it that doesn't feel kind of off putting because.
[00:58:00]  So you can join like the level one yoga class and then you can advance to sort of, you know, Tantra level one.
[00:58:08]  And at the end of each, I think you get a certificate and you're introduced to.
[00:58:13]  Deeper ideas or more advanced teachings.
[00:58:17]  So it's very much structured as you know, you're not given the secrets at the beginning.
[00:58:21]  You have to keep progressing in order to kind of.
[00:58:24]  This isn't my experience.
[00:58:25]  I'm speaking from the lived experience of the women that I interviewed, but that you have to kind of prove your commitment before you're introduced to some of the more advanced teachings.
[00:58:36]  So you just mentioned sequencing.
[00:58:38]  I was a yoga instructor for a long time, and the sequencing in the film is shot beautifully, but it's also a beautiful sequence is that.
[00:58:47]  Part of their sequence, or did you have someone choreograph that for the film?
[00:58:52]  Yeah, so actually, the form of yoga that is practiced.
[00:58:57]  In the school is a lot slower than what we had a choreographer.
[00:59:03]  For the purposes of artistic license, they're practicing real yoga poses.
[00:59:08]  What we wanted to do was to get through the kind of physical practice of yoga, we wanted to get across to the audience because I practice yoga.
[00:59:18]  So I was like, oh, it's really easy.
[00:59:19]  And the editor I was working with has never done yoga.
[00:59:22]  He's like, what is this?
[00:59:24]  We knew that we might face people saying, hang on a minute, you wouldn't do a downward dog after that pose if you were following a True Ashtanga sequence.
[00:59:34]  But we took liberties there because what we wanted to get across is that feeling that I think anyone who's practiced yoga gets, which is this it's extremely beneficial.
[00:59:43]  It really does kind of create a feeling of wellness and relaxation and physical kind of wholeness.
[00:59:52]  And also this sense of practicing with a group where everybody, you know, when I think most yoga classes, everyone kind of goes through a routine at the same time.
[00:59:59]  So you feel in unison with people.
[01:00:01]  And I think that that sense of kind of unison and community and Kinship is something that really appealed to the women in the school, you know, and kind of drew them further on to things that perhaps when they started, they wouldn't have chosen to do.
[01:00:16]  Right.
[01:00:16]  And that rolls right into my next question, which will probably require a bit of speculation on your end.
[01:00:27]  Are self reflecting and can't believe they were sucked into this.
[01:00:31]  And then you have at least one woman who can't answer that he didn't help her in some capacity.
[01:00:38]  Like, do you have any knowledge of how he manipulated people to begin with?
[01:00:44]  He doesn't seem charismatic to me, right?
[01:00:47]  He doesn't come across as someone.
[01:00:49]  Sometimes I see people, I'm like, oh, I get it.
[01:00:51]  I don't get it with him.
[01:00:52]  Yeah.
[01:00:53]  So, absolutely.
[01:00:54]  And we really struggled with this ourselves as well.
[01:00:56]  And there's huge amounts of footage that we did dig out of Bibilaru.
[01:01:00]  You know, there's long interviews done with him when he was in prison briefly.
[01:01:05]  He did serve a sentence in Romania for the crimes that he was found guilty of.
[01:01:09]  They managed to extradite him from Paris.
[01:01:11]  It's a chapter in the story that we don't tell.
[01:01:13]  We just weren't able to fit into the series, but he did serve a short prison sentence in Romania and it conducted interviews with television stations there.
[01:01:21]  So there were these long interviews available with the Velario.
[01:01:24]  And we, I mean, they're in Romania and he, exactly as you say, and all the women who've met him testify, he is not a typical charismatic cult.
[01:01:33]  Leader or authoritarian at all.
[01:01:37]  And we really struggled with this.
[01:01:39]  It's not Bibelaru who's drawing these women further and further into the organization, it's the teachings.
[01:01:46]  And the teachings are all imparted by people who have themselves found lots of kind of disciples or other women even who are encouraging the benefits of being part of this organization.
[01:02:01]  I couldn't quite ever understand what the allure of Bibelaru himself is.
[01:02:06]  I genuinely.
[01:02:07]  Can't, except for perhaps in the complete absence of any sort of charisma or you know, seeming manipulation, he almost appears to be the real deal.
[01:02:21]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:02:22]  In his complete absence of that, um, because he's so sort of far, he's so not like you would imagine, or indeed other very kind of persuasive, charismatic leaders of high control organizations like that.
[01:02:37]  He does have people who work.
[01:02:40]  In the organization as associates.
[01:02:43]  Who do have some of that charismatic appeal, though?
[01:02:46]  That's probably worth mentioning.
[01:02:47]  And some of those people hold courses that the women attend.
[01:02:50]  So I can imagine if you are under the spell of someone with charisma and you're told about this teacher, that when you show up, you're so primed for it at that point that you're just, you're already bought in.
[01:03:05]  And I can also understand and empathize with the idea that real life physical sex as a form of spirituality would appeal to people and they would be looking for something through that.
[01:03:17]  I totally get that.
[01:03:19]  The one piece that I can't wrap my head around is the next jump, which is selling webcam sex as a similar form because it requires a form of metaphysics that I don't understand.
[01:03:35]  Because you're telling someone through this screen, you are doing the same thing.
[01:03:40]  Did you think about that at all as you were interviewing the people?
[01:03:43]  I mean, I know it's a very tender subject because of what the women went through, but that whole moment just really jumped out at me.
[01:03:50]  Yeah, and I think, and I'm, you know, obviously hugely grateful for the generosity of Miranda in particular, who kind of took us there and that part of the storytelling.
[01:04:01]  The way that I understood it when I finally did understand it, because like you, I really kind of was like, wow, how does this happen?
[01:04:09]  Is that when you're in school, I think there is a gradual belief that you, because you're evolving through this spiritual path and you're kind of progressing, the people who are on the outside, the unevolved, like the people who aren't in the school, They're less evolved and they see sex in a really basic way, always like, they're like muggles.
[01:04:28]  They're like the normie people, right?
[01:04:31]  And they don't get the magic.
[01:04:32]  They don't get the sex magic.
[01:04:34]  They don't get it.
[01:04:35]  They haven't evolved.
[01:04:36]  So they just see sex as this like transactional base.
[01:04:40]  There's no spirituality to it.
[01:04:42]  It's just kind of a way of like pleasuring yourself.
[01:04:45]  That's it.
[01:04:46]  There's no heart.
[01:04:47]  You're in a school that, you know, a lot of the tantra that these people are practicing with each other is kind of.
[01:04:53]  A really cool UDU tantra, right?
[01:04:55]  It's like it's a way of experiencing elevated states of consciousness, or you know, it's all cool with that belief system.
[01:05:05]  It's that you are actually the educator.
[01:05:07]  I mean, Miranda she describes stuff, she believed she was helping those men, she didn't see herself as being exploited because she believed in the ideology, she believed the dogma.
[01:05:17]  And it's only after she almost like reframed it and left and started speaking to people outside that she saw it.
[01:05:23]  It's almost like stepping through the looking glass and going, Oh my goodness, but if we look at this differently.
[01:05:28]  The exploited person is she saw the men as the kind of pitiful creatures who were sort of only able to engage with sex through this way.
[01:05:36]  And perhaps she could help them see the way that she understood sex as the spiritual goddess that she was.
[01:05:44]  It's why we sort of labored so hard to kind of try and get some of the slightly more wacky kind of visuals and I guess the sort of POV, the kind of interiority of the women.
[01:05:55]  Because I thought, unless you even, and you know, depending on the audience member, some people will.

=== Seeing Things Differently (02:40) ===

[01:06:02]  Be able to empathize and understand it, and some still won't.
[01:06:05]  I get that, but it was only when I put myself in their shoes and thought, That's how they sit in the school.
[01:06:11]  This is how you're seeing the world, this is how you're seeing the people outside of the school.
[01:06:14]  It's actually lesser, they're lesser than us.
[01:06:16]  That sense of superiority, I think, is part of what stops you seeing that actually the school is perhaps or both things are going on.
[01:06:26]  Maybe that belief is true, but also there's exploitation and financial and sexual and physical exploitation going on at the same time.
[01:06:32]  It's complicated, I think.
[01:06:34]  Yeah, it's very complicated.
[01:06:36]  Last question, you had mentioned that there was another aspect you didn't get into, which is a sort of right wing crossover that we often cover here on the podcast with yoga.
[01:06:47]  What did you notice in your research that fits that bill?
[01:06:52]  Well, we know from testimonies from women who were involved in the school in Denmark that during COVID and in the UK, that during COVID, the school practiced a very strong anti vax mentality.
[01:07:06]  And actually, Interestingly, a lot of the women that we interviewed, their kind of departure from the school was during COVID.
[01:07:14]  Partly because they weren't attending the classes so regularly, so they weren't exposed to the kind of dogma as regularly, but also because they were told not to see people who had been vaccinated.
[01:07:24]  So they weren't allowed to see one woman, she wasn't allowed to see her parents because they had been vaccinated.
[01:07:30]  And that was the first moment where a schism appeared in her kind of sense of what the school meant and what, interestingly, more than anything else that had happened to her previous to that.
[01:07:41]  And another woman, again, interestingly, the moment where she started to actually see.
[01:07:46]  Seek a therapist outside of the school, which was the beginning of her kind of, I guess you might call it de indoctrination or introduction to kind of seeing things differently.
[01:07:55]  Because I think indoctrination is a really, I never really appreciated this, but it's a really deep process and like it requires quite a lot of work to undo it.
[01:08:04]  I think anyway, this woman, she had been alerted to something that was problematic in the school when they were doing weekly prayers for Trump.
[01:08:12]  And for her, the weekly meditations, they were doing meditations for Trump.
[01:08:17]  And she was just like, I don't get it.
[01:08:19]  It doesn't fit.
[01:08:21]  Whereas, actually, some of the kind of sex positive, tantra, all of that, the orgies, but for her, like meditations for Trump.
[01:08:30]  And then it was that that led her to start sort of actually seeking therapy and thinking about what the school, you know, much deeper harms, I think, than she had been aware of while she was in the school.