Posted by:
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Date: March 09, 2025 11:55AM
Here we go again: another religious cult shaman abuses his followers. Sound Familiar?
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/mar/09/the-disturbing-case-of-a-tantric-yoga-guru-and-his-followersUnder the guise of spiritual leadership, Gregorian Bivolaru allegedly exploited hundreds of people through an international network of yoga camps and retreats. Now he’s awaiting trial, accused of kidnap, trafficking and rape. Here, one of his victims reveals how she broke free
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After the retreat, Miranda began dating one of the teachers and was drawn into the Tara Yoga “inner circle”. The teachers spoke about their guru, Gregorian Bivolaru, and his organisation, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (Misa). Intrigued, she went on more retreats, including one in Costinești, Romania, organised by Misa, where students of Tara Yoga and other international yoga schools came together – it was huge, with group meditation and dancing at night. At times, she thought, “This seems a bit weird”, especially the regular playing of soft porn films, but there were 6,000 other people there, so she kept the faith. (In a statement, Misa claims there is a “clear and huge difference between porn and erotic movies” that “depict elevated, pure, artistic aspects”.)
“I thought, ‘Maybe these people know something I don’t or something I can’t explain’,” says Miranda. After all, it was this desire for a connection to something bigger than herself that had attracted her in the first place. And so, she threw herself in.
What she did not know then was that Bivolaru was wanted by Interpol. Tara Yoga teachers had advised Miranda not to look him up online; his questionable reputation had been briefly explained to her as persecution on behalf of the Romanian government, where he was born and began teaching yoga in the 1970s before founding Misa in 1990. A few years later, she would learn that, after charges of tax evasion, sexual exploitation and human trafficking in his home country in 2016, he fled first to Sweden, then into hiding in France. And that later, after extradition and imprisonment for sex with a minor, he returned to France, still wanted by the Finnish government as the leader of an international trafficking organisation.
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Bivolaru – or “Grieg” as many of his followers call him – is not the only self-styled yoga guru to have faced abuse allegations. Sri K Pattabhi Jois, an Indian guru who popularised Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, died in 2009. After his death, he was accused by dozens of students of sexual misconduct. The charismatic Indian-American guru Bikram Choudhury created a trademarked brand of hot yoga, with 650 studios worldwide at its 2010s peak. Allegations of rape and sexual assault at Choudhury’s yoga training camps led to the downfall of his empire, as detailed in the 2019 documentary Yogi, Guru, Predator. A 2021 report by the BBC, meanwhile, uncovered multiple reports of abuse at Canadian sites for the Sivananda Yoga School led by Swami Vishnudevananda. Often in these cases, sexual abuse was shrouded as the correcting of posture, an aligning of chakras or explained away in the name of Tantra.