ARD – Seelenfänger (Soul Hunter) Podcast – Toxic Tantra 04/24/2024
2. The Holy Guru
https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/seelenfaenger/toxic-tantra-holy-guru-2/bayern-2/13338389/
Author: Tuesday, November 28, 2023, early in the morning, in Ivry-sur-Seine, very close to Paris.Police in dark clothing, with guns and balaclava, approach an apartment located on the ground floor of an apartment complex. White shutters on the patio windows and door block the view inside.
The police storm the apartment. They are looking for Gregorian Bivolaru, the so-called guru of the ATMAN yoga movement. That's roughly how it would have happened.
A few hours later, messages appear on my colleague Christiane Hawranek's and my cell phones from the dropouts. We are in contact with over a dozen women and men at that time. Several of them informed us that Gregorian Bivolaru would have been arrested in France. They knew this from reliable sources. We are trying to check the news, contact the police and the prosecutor's office in Paris, get as much information as possible. And then, later that day, the news is suddenly all over the French press, even the main news program. The operation was a success. The police arrested Gregorian Bivolaru.
Instead of a door, television footage shows only wooden boards blocking the entrance sealed off by police. On it is written, in French, "GB Apartment" and a list of criminal offences.
The Paris public prosecutor's office is investigating rape, human trafficking, breach of trust of a protected person and kidnapping in an organized gang. Apart from Bivolaru, 40 other suspects are placed in police custody, all with Romanian citizenship, we later learned from the Paris Prosecutor's Office.
And 58 women were found during house searches. Most of them from Romania, but also from other countries.
For example, one woman from Germany, one from Argentina and one from America. The media claim that the women have been released and that they had previously been imprisoned in cramped and unsanitary conditions. In the main news show of the main French television station TFA, a neighbor of Bivolaru speaks in an interview, under the condition of anonymity. The man says: "Once I saw a woman blindfolded, but I never suspected anything was wrong." Interesting neighborhood...
And we report on Bayerischer Rundfunk about the arrest of the so-called yoga guru.
In the meantime, former followers we are in touch with keep us updated. Here, for example, is Nathalie's voicemail. She was informed by insiders that Bivolaru is in preventive detention.
Nathalie: Hello, Bivolaru is now in pre-trial detention, so he is not coming out now. That's very good, I was a little worried that he would somehow find a way out again. But now, yes, it's a big relief.
filmmaker: At some point it's official. The magistrate ordered the preventive arrest of Gregorian Bivolaru and five other people, important members of the movement, according to some sources.
And Bivolaru risks up to 30 years in prison. That is if the investigators will confirm the charges and he will be convicted. First of all, of course, the presumption of innocence applies.
The Romanian yoga school MISA, which Bivolaru founded, issued a press release shortly thereafter. The allegations are baseless. It also states that the women who were released were in no way victims. At most, they were victims of alleged brutal behavior by the French police. None of them considered themselves exploited, abused, trafficked or victims of rape.
At the very end of our research, we will interview the MISA spokeswoman.
She will say in English that she has no doubt that Bivolaru is innocent.
Christiane and I keep asking ourselves these days, what does this arrest do to those who have abandoned the group? What turns Nathalie and Liz on? And what happens next with Bivolaru?
This is Soul Hunter Season 4, Toxic Tantra. A podcast made by Christiane Hawranek and myself, Katja Paysen-Petersen.
Episode 2, The Holy Guru.
In this episode of Soul Catcher, we want to find out what drew Nathalie and Liz to the yoga movement. How it happened that at first they only wanted to do yoga and Tantra and ended up alienating themselves.
Nathalie, who is on an island in Thailand, tells us her story through the Teams platform.
Nathalie takes us where we left off with her story in episode 1, to Rishikesh, India.
Here she got involved in the yoga movement, founded by Gregorian Bivolaru. Here she practiced yoga and Tantra, took part in the "walk of angels" and meditated on her guru. And it was also here that she met and fell in love with the handsome Australian Jasper.
But now, in April 2020, it all ends suddenly. Because suddenly Corona appears. Nathalie stays alone in her hostel and takes yoga classes online. But at some point, she can't take it anymore and her parents start stressing her out. So she flies home to Germany to her rather worried mother.
Nathalie: I remember the first day I came home we had a really big fight.
First, Nathalie's mother has to let go of all the worries she had about her daughter while she was somewhere in India and Corona was wreaking havoc around her. And now that Nathalie is finally back, her mother realizes that this yoga group in India has changed her daughter. It is, for example, about the meat thing. Her daughter, who used to eat chicken all the time because she was bodybuilding, is now suddenly a vegetarian. There is nothing dramatic at first, on the contrary. But there are more changes.
And these not only surprise Nathalie's mother, they alarm her. Instead of going out and going back to her normal everyday life, her daughter retreats to her room. She does yoga there, for hours.
They are also taking online classes at the school in Rishikesh. She fasts every Sunday to cleanse her body and soul. Once she even ate only cereal for 10 days straight.
In fact, Nathalie's thoughts are mainly focused on the yoga school and her friend, Jasper.
He also left India. Together with several other students from the yoga school, he flew to Romania.
The origins of the ATMAN yoga movement lie there, in Romania. There is the school that started it all. And that's why she packs her bags and waits for the planes to take off from Germany again.
Nathalie: I boarded the first available plane and left for Romania.
filmmaker: Nathalie will fly to Romania to live there. This decision will prove disastrous and her guru will play a very important role. The Guru. The Guru, again and again.
Here is a YouTube video from a MISA sympathizer channel, MrLeonte.
https://www.youtube.com/@mrleonte We see kitsch images of waves reflecting sunlight. Women holding hands and spinning in circles.
Then there are images of Catholic saints included. And over all this, the voice of Gregorian Bivolaru is heard. He praises the benefits of blessings.
"The Art of Blessing", by Gregorian Bivolaru: "The effects that appear after a blessing and that intensify over time, are complex and diverse. Some of them last for days, weeks, months or even years.” When Christiane and I start our investigation, we already know that he is on the Interpol list for serious human trafficking charges. For which he is liable to 10 years in prison. And for sexual abuse. However, this offense is time-barred.
But we also know that he is still revered by his followers. Framed photos of him hang in several yoga schools, dropouts tell us. We saw it with our own eyes during our test session in Berlin.
A framed photograph of Gregorian Bivolaru hung there, surrounded by photographs of other spiritual masters. Jesus Christ, for example. What is with this guru as many call him? Why is he so revered by his followers, even though he has been internationally persecuted for years?
Gregorian Bivolaru grows up in Romania in the 1950s. In the 60s, Nicolae Ceaușescu comes to power. An unscrupulous dictator who has huge, imposing buildings built for him while his people starve.
Ceaușescu's secret services, the Securitatea, authorize the brutal persecution of all those who think differently. Gregorian Bivolaru is one of these nonconformists, as we read on the Internet. He already does yoga when almost no one in Romania knows what it is. At 15, he is already reading books in English and French on parapsychology, sexology and esoteric traditions.
This is what a yoga teacher from the movement writes. And it is said that he was doing 8-9 hours of yoga a day, and at the age of 18, he was also teaching it. But at some point he has to do it secretly, because yoga is banned in Romania in
1982. Bivolaru is arrested several times and even sent to psychiatry, like many other critics of the regime. In a televised interview, he talks about how he was persecuted.
He states that he has always told Security that the allegations against him are not true. A real discovery for us is a documentary film about Gregorian Bivolaru from 1995, also posted on the MrLeonte channel. Bivolaru tells a truly adventurous story about how he managed to escape from the custody of the Security.
Gregorian Bivolaru: The truth is that I organized my own escape from the Security prison, from which, as far as I was told later, no one else had escaped. It is certain that yoga procedures helped me a lot, and by combining certain telepathic and hypnotic procedures I was able to achieve this feat.
This is his version.
filmmaker: Here is the revolution of 1989, the people of Bucharest shouting freedom, freedom in the streets. Ceaușescu's regime is collapsing, and Bivolaru is now celebrated by his followers as someone who upholds spirituality and free thought. Shortly thereafter, in 1990, he founded MISA, officially known as the Absolute Spiritual Integration Movement.
This is the first school of the Yoga Movement, the one that started it all. In the 90s, it is very big in Romania. It is said that there were 40 ashrams in Romania alone. And it is expanding to other countries. In a YouTube video published by a local newspaper in Romania in 2017, Bivolaru praises himself and his school.
It's a kind of press release.
Gregorian Bivolaru: I am satisfied with the activities at the MISA yoga school. It is the largest yoga school in Europe and is constantly expanding.
filmmaker: Even today, Bivolaru is considered by his followers to be a sage, an enlightened person and a spiritual master. And because of his past, he is also seen as a person who has always been unjustly persecuted for political or religious reasons. His followers still believe this in 2004. Someone denounces Bivolaru for allegedly having a sexual relationship with an underage yoga student. Bivolaru is imprisoned for a short time, but then he is released, disappears abroad and goes into hiding. He is even granted political asylum by Sweden.
Authorities have spoken to some of his followers and believe that, yes, that's right, Bivolaru is being persecuted because of his religious beliefs. Only later, in 2013, he was sentenced to six years in prison in Romania for having sexual relations with a minor. He is not in the country.
When Bivolaru is investigated, he has a lawyer that I have read about repeatedly on the Internet. His name is Mihai Rapcea. What's interesting about him is that he was apparently a follower of the movement himself, but has since broken away and posts warnings about the school on his blog. He is still a lawyer and lives in Bucharest. We write to him. Maybe he has documents from that time, notes, something that can help us.
While we wait for an answer from him, we talk to Nathalie, who lives on the Thai island. We want to know more about the time she spent in Romania. We are connected with her again through Teams. Nathalie tells us that no one at school made a big deal about Bivolaru's presence on the Interpol list.
Nathalie: So everyone knows he's hiding, that he's being followed. This is somehow of absolute notoriety.
filmmaker: Nathalie, like other yoga students, is told that Bivolaru is being persecuted for political reasons, just like under communism, and that there are some pretty evil forces at play.
Nathalie: Because, of course, he wants to bring a lot of good to this Earth. And then, of course, all the demons somehow start stalking him again. And the demons, of course, infiltrate all the people and then begin to hunt him down.
filmmakers: Demons. That's how the school justifies a lot of things.
Nathalie: That's why he has to hide now. Not because he really did anything bad or anything, but because there are just demons trying to stop him from doing good.
Filmmaker: Well, from the beginning Nathalie doesn't like the demon story. She's too rational for that.
When she arrives in Bucharest, Nathalie is not too interested in the whole story with the guru. She just wants to be with her boyfriend and do yoga in this wonderful community. But others are talking about Grieg more and more often, she says.
Nathalie: And then I was also told to do a daily meditation with his photo.
filmmaker: Nathalie is handed photos of Bivolaru. She places them in front of her and looks at the first photo. Bivolaru, a complete stranger to her, looked at her with a gentle smile. Nathalie calmly tries to connect with him.
Nathalie: That was, when I think about it now, wow, it didn't work at all.
filmmaker: In the man others see as their guru, Nathalie sees only an old, unattractive guy with seductive eyes and white hair.
Nathalie: I actually had trouble with that when I was doing this meditation. I wasn't in the mood for that at all, and that's it, so I got really angry. I just didn't feel like doing it.
filmmaker: Nathalie's yoga teachers are trying to convince her to do this meditation with Bivolaru, she says.
Nathalie: Of course I was also told that it's all just a spiritual test. If you have trouble with this guru thing, it's a spiritual test. These are the demons who want to prevent you from contacting your guru.
filmmaker: For cult experts, it's a red flag, a feature we need to pay attention to.
Powerful people manipulate others so that they no longer trust their own intuition.
This is also known as gaslighting (manipulation and psychological control) Nathalie continues to not believe in demons, but swallows the "spiritual tests" thing. She knows this theory from her Tantra classes. So, life holds various tests for you. You either master them and level up, or you don't and fall.
Ultimately, is meditation with Bivolaru such a test for Nathalie?
Nathalie: In retrospect, it was totally my intuition that it was all bullshit. And then, at some point, I gave up, so I said: "I don't feel like it anymore, it's not going to work anyway".
director: Nathalie puts Bivolaru aside and now does what she came to do in Bucharest.
She does yoga, does tantra, meditates, hangs out with the yoga school folks, and hangs out with her boyfriend, Jasper.
Everything goes well for a while, but then Nathalie finds out something. Something that will change everything for her. She finds out that Jasper isn't just with her. He has had another girlfriend for a long time, one from school.
Nathalie: When I found out he was with someone else the whole time, that was my spiritual test. Not to say "well, that's it, dear, we won't see each other again", that was my test.
filmmaker: One more test...
Nathalie: I've been told all the time: "If you have a problem, it's just your demons and you have to let them go." filmmaker: When Nathalie said that on the Teams platform, Christiane had to step in: Christiane Hawranek: Who said that?
Nathalie: And she said, Jasper, he was totally involved. That's how he justified everything, like: "Yes, it's all your stuff."
And our teachers always said that, the boundaries are a little weird. You always go to your yoga teachers with your relationship problems and say "Yes, this and this is happening right now". Then their input is always like "Yeah, it's all demonic and divine and blah blah blah", so harsh.
filmmaker: Yes, Nathalie also goes to yoga teachers with her relationship problems. They teach her that the freedom of an open relationship is good for spiritual development. Jealousy has no place there.
So Nathalie's yoga teachers advise her to overcome her jealousy through various exercises. With yoga, meditation and so on. Try as she might, Nathalie can't deal with sharing Jasper with someone else. Jealousy almost consumes her.
Nathalie: When things got really crazy with Jasper, of course I was told again that he could help me, because I was in so much trouble now.
filmmaker: He is Bivolaru, her spiritual master, her guru. The guy on the Interpol list. The guy she can't meditate on, no matter how hard she tries, because everything inside her is against it.
Of all people, should he help her now? Nathalie is desperate. She wants to save her relationship.
Nathalie: And then, at some point, the idea really came to me "Okay, now I'm going to write him a letter!" filmmaker: She sits down and writes to Bivolaru, asking him if he can help her overcome her jealousy and if he has any advice for her. Attached to the letter is a photo of her, a selfie with her face.
She heard that Bivolaru needed it to read your aura. We will come across aura reading more often. It seems that Bivolaru is best at this when the women are only wearing bikinis or are naked.
When Nathalie finishes her letter to her guru, she gives it to the women at the yoga school, she tells us.
She hopes he will answer her. You've listened as Nathalie from the island of Thailand takes us deep into her yoga school experiences. She even tells us about her journal entries. She seems completely relaxed, as if she has already put what happened behind her.
With Liz it's completely different. We met her in episode 1, she's the one with the straight back on the red fleece blanket in the park. We are about to enter into an exchange of lines, at the end of which we are very worried for her. So far, Liz has only hinted at her time at school.
But when we wanted to ask her about the guru, she was silent. Shortly after our meeting with her in May 2023, she sent us voicemails and explained what was preventing her from speaking to us.
Liz: So what's happening to me is... The mainstream media, the satanic media, the mainstream media, so that kind of accompanies everything in the background. You are part of this category that you should avoid.
So, I took that over somehow.
filmmaker: Christiane tries to reach out to Liz and convince her to get back together.
Christiane Hawranek: I'll admit it, I think this is already the fifth voicemail I'm starting to send you because I'm struggling to find the right words without saying the wrong thing or something.
Maybe we can talk again, because then I'll see more of your face, even if I might say something that sounds stupid.
Filmmaker: But Liz doesn't want to meet with us in person right now, not even via video link, and she doesn't want to talk on the phone either. The only thing she's okay with is voicemails, because she says she can answer them anytime and quietly.
Liz: Part of me feels that it's sacred, and when I connect with you now and talk to you, I also feel, in part, that I'm initiating you into some knowledge. And that's why I feel like a total pathetic traitor right now.
filmmaker: It's only now that we really realize what it means that Liz is still on the way out. She still walks between worlds, as she says herself. In other words, between the world of yoga school and our normal world.
She still believes things that were obviously drilled into her at school.
Liz: The more I integrated into this community, the more I adopted their way of thinking, their way of speaking, their slang, the words that are used there, the customs, the attitude, the inner attitude and a view of the world. And I was also given a certain confidentiality appeal.
producer: And now she's talking to Christiane, a representative of the satanic media.
Liz: Definitely, I have an inner voice that says, "This is your ultimate test. And now you're being tested, so to speak, to see if you're actually somehow honoring this call to secrecy, and you're not doing it at all." filmmaker: Maybe that's why, out of this guilty conscience, she's so keen to point out that she also had good experiences at the yoga school.
Liz: I also got a lot of beautiful and positive insights, especially about femininity. I received a very beautiful perspective on myself. I also gained a lot of courage to allow myself to live and radiate a certain feminine sensuality and sexuality. Also, I've really noticed it in contact with other women who realize I have a glow or something and I realize they want it too.
Christiane Hawranek: About this ambivalence, about the fact that you also experienced good things, many people have already told us. But what I'm ultimately trying to find out now is, so to speak, what are the points where things tip over, where people just don't feel good about it anymore.
filmmaker: Christiane is getting more and more voicemails from Liz. Sometimes 20 in one day, then none for a week. Sometimes they are just very short, recorded quickly on the way to the bus or train, then again very long, 20 minutes, intense.
filmmaker: Liz is almost talking to herself on a walk in the park or at home, it's like an audio diary.
Liz: I went to this yoga school with the intention of getting even healthier, and stronger, and more stable, and it ended up being such an obvious pile of shit. And I'm completely confused and I feel like I've been in a car accident and I'm completely broken inside. And also so hurt and disappointed deep down, but most of all, so confused.
filmmaker: We realize that Liz really has a lot to say, she wants to say a lot, but she only sticks to these hints. She is locked in a struggle: "Am I breaking my oath and silence? Can I trust the media?” And only now do we really realize that Liz is afraid. She is afraid of the people at the yoga school.
Liz: Because they really have a lot of power now, they have schools all over the world. They are very professional in what they do and I am alone. I'm not attached to anyone or anything, I don't have an employer or anything like that to support and support me, I'm alone.
Filmmaker: Above all, Liz has no money for a lawyer. And that's what this is about. She is afraid of being sued for defamation.
Liz's fear is justified. In 2018, some colleagues of ours broadcast a short TV report about Gregorian Bivolaru and the yoga movement, and lo and behold, a letter from a lawyer appeared. But the court application was rejected.
Bayerischer Rundfunk had made no mistake. It just showed us that even now, members of the yoga movement can put pressure on us and threaten us with lawsuits to stop us from reporting and those who drop out of the movement, like Liz, from speaking out.
Liz: And then I shut up and I'm left alone with this huge load of shit that I've been through. And nothing happens and it actually repeats itself.
filmmaker: Liz is not only concerned with herself. She is also concerned about all those who still make it to these yoga schools.
Liz: The doors are wide open. They are spreading more and more. And more and more young people ... creep in.
So, in my opinion, this is unthinkable. It's impossible. And I see an urgent need for action to stop them.
filmmaker: But what exactly did Liz experience at this school, which is part of the German Academy for Traditional Yoga? The more time Liz and Christiane spend on voicemails, the more familiar they become with each other, the more we realize that what she's been through has hurt her deep down.
Liz: Well, since I don't go there anymore, my way is very difficult. In fact, I just need a safe space to cry, to rest, to have someone deprogram me and say, listen, this and this and this and this, what did you been planted in my mind for years is absolute bullshit, it's not the truth.
filmmaker: Liz already has one such person trying to help her. She goes to therapy. But she actually needs a lot more help. Help in all areas of life.
Liz: And I need someone to tell me every day that someone is there for me all the time, to help me get out of these damn movies. But I can't, because I'm busy and I need money to pay my rent, to pay my bills, to have something to eat. I haven't had money for food for a long time. I have been hungry for a long time. And it's a continuing miracle that I'm still alive and that I survived all this shit.
filmmaker: It's perhaps a small miracle that Liz hasn't returned to her yoga movement, as many others do who have left sectarian groups. They return to their group because they simply have too much difficulty finding their way in their new life, because they do not have a social network, a job or institutions to turn to.
filmmaker: But then, after all the voicemails between Liz and Christiane, the moment finally comes. Liz trusts us and wants us to meet again. In person.
Of course, we want to learn more about this yoga movement and talk to as many people as possible about their experiences. So we contact a large number of practitioners. We look for them in affected person forums, through social media groups, through reports from other media, all over the world.
Christiane Hawranek: What's really amazing is how many locations they have around the world. And I think there's a very, very large number especially in Europe.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Spain...
Christiane Hawranek: France, Italy, Hungary. Great Britain, Iceland, Scandinavia, in Oslo, in Stockholm.
Even in Athens.
filmmaker: And, moreover, in almost every country the movement has a different name and is organized independently.
What they all have in common is that they are based on the same teaching and use the same course materials.
Christiane Hawranek: Well, they decided not to follow the McDonalds strategy, where you have the same name everywhere in the world, but to call yourself something different everywhere. And of course, that's what makes it so difficult to know that in the end it all comes together.
filmmakers: We spend weeks scouring the yoga school's websites and videos. We talk to former followers from Finland, Romania and Germany.
Women who don't know each other but whose yoga school experiences sound very similar.
We are trying to better understand their stories. We ask them all if they still have documents. For example, some send us their secret didactic materials, invoices, "Bivolaru meditation cards" or plane tickets to Paris.
The others have nothing left but their memories and nightmares.
And then, while doing background research and sifting through sources, we suddenly receive an email from Bucharest.
The email is from Mihai Rapcea, the person I wrote to. He knows Bivolaru personally, was his lawyer and wants to meet with us.
This was Holy Guru, the second episode of Seelenfänger, Toxic Tantra.
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