Episode 3

 

ARD - Seelenfänger Podcast – Toxic Tantra
24.04.2024
3. State of Shakti
https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/seelenfaenger/toxic-tantra-shakti-state-3/bayern-2/13338351/

filmmaker (Katya Petersen): A park somewhere in Germany in June 2023. My colleague Christiane Hawranek has a meeting here with Liz. Liz is currently struggling to leave the yoga school. But now she wants to meet again in person after weeks of voicemails. In some of the messages, Liz was very angry.
For example, she asks: Liz: How is it possible that a school like this is opened in Germany, in the center of Berlin, and no one does anything about it? To me it's a question mark: what the hell is wrong here?
filmmakers: Not only in Berlin, but also in Munich, Dresden and Hamburg. In 2024, the German Traditional Yoga Academy will have offices in nine cities. Where does Liz's anger come from? Christiane hopes to find out today.
Like last time, Liz has the red blanket with her. He lays it out on the grass again. They both sit on the shore of a lake.
But something changed this time. Here are two people who know each other. And Liz smiles at Christiane. Unlike the last time they met, she seems genuinely anxious to talk to someone about her experiences at school. On her yellow hoodie it says in big letters: "Voilà la réalité" - "Here comes the reality!" It's a statement.
Liz: I'd be more interested in giving you more information. And I brought you the book.
Christiane: Great.
director: Liz takes out a book and puts it on the blanket: "The secret tantric path of love to happiness and fulfillment in a couple relationship".
Gregorian Bivolaru wrote it. I've heard that this pink book is sort of the bible of the yoga movement, and Christiane can look into it later. For now, Liz wants to finally tell her story. From the very beginning.
Liz: At university it was complete anonymity. There was an atmosphere of know-it-all, competition and pressure to perform.
filmmaker: Liz tells us that she moved to another city after finishing high school, away from family, away from friends.
Liz: But there was also an atmosphere of loneliness. There was no community at the university I was at. After the wonderful phase of childhood, there was more and more coldness and pressure for performance and competition, too little balanced with warmth, with joy of life, with community. And there was no better alternative.
Somehow, there was no one around me who was really interested in me.
filmmaker: But then a yoga school appeared in the neighborhood. Here, in a branch of the German Traditional Yoga Academy, Liz met people who welcomed her with open arms. People who would listen to her and talk to about her feelings. When Liz tells this to Christiane, she goes into ecstasy.
He says that there was finally a warmth, that she had the feeling that she could find real friends here, and that she thought she was doing real yoga for the first time. Traditional, original yoga.
Liz: It all seems very innocent and very interesting and makes you want to dig deeper.
filmmaker: Liz tells us that she really wanted to be initiated into these secrets that so many people at the yoga school have been talking about since the beginning. She wanted to learn the magic formulas of how to become more successful, more efficient, more attractive, better.
Liz: I studied it properly. I've taken it seriously a thousand times. And I was one hundred percent involved and so excited.
authors: Two folders full of teaching materials in English. In between, there were always images of yoga exercises, but also of women with large breasts or couples in various tantric positions. She had piles of such sheets lying around the house, on the desk, on the floor, on the bed and did not catch the dust. No, Liz flipped through them, page by page. She highlighted the issues and discussed them with the practitioners at the school. For weeks, months, three years. That's about how long Liz was at yoga school.
Liz: I'm finally here. It is like a door to a very durable house. It doesn't disappear, so it will take you home.
filmmaker: This new home will absorb Liz. It will take her to a world full of wonders, angels and secrets. There she will do yoga and tantra rituals. She will divide people into divine and demonic, believe in angels and cross herself for her guru. But then she feels like her new home is done with her. She lands hard on the ground of reality. Voilà la reality.
This is Soul Catcher, Season 4, Toxic Tantra. A podcast made by Christiane Hawranek and myself, Katja Paysen-Petersen.

Episode 3, Shakti-State.
filmmaker: Liz sits in front of Christiane, in the candle position. She says that comes from yoga.
She practices it even now, in June 2023, up to four hours a day.
Liz: Doing yoga has become an anchor for me and because doing yoga is also good for my body. It's a way of moving that's unique and it's a way of getting in touch with myself that I haven't experienced in other sports.
filmmaker: Yoga is about the only good thing left from school, says Liz. She now takes Christiane back to a time when she was already deeply immersed in the world of school thought, after a few months at the German Traditional Yoga Academy. Her alarm clock always went off very early every morning.
Liz: I tried 3am for a while. It has a specific name, but I can't remember it.
(Brahma Muhurta, n.trans.) filmmaker: Between 3 and 4 in the morning, that's what the Dalai Lama and others do. The Dalai Lama also crept into the teachings of the school, which is made up of elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Catholicism, all on all levels.
So Liz woke up at 3 a.m. every day for a while.
Liz: There is a certain time when consciousness is at its highest on Earth and when everything is at its most still, which is perfect for meditation.
filmmaker: Liz tells us how she used to sit on the floor in a yoga position. Now, here in the park, she is transported back to that moment. Close your eyes, inhale and exhale. Just like then.
Liz: You always first consecrate the day. So you would always do a prayer meditation, where you would focus on your heart 21 times and say, "Lord, have mercy on me and bless me!" to get blessings for the day, so to speak, and divine protection against all evil, negative energies around you. Then you say a prayer to the archangels three times, like this: "Dear holy Archangel Michael..." director: Christiane sees Liz standing and praying like this. She realizes how much this prayer must have entered her blood, and how much her thoughts were centered on this teaching. That was the first thing she thought of when she woke up.
Liz: It's always very much about protection, protection, protection. Protection from the evil world, which is full of demons and negative energies. They all follow you and affect you all day through other people and everything else.
filmmaker: Liz says her time at yoga school was immediately characterized by fear.
She was always told that there were demons in people and in the works created by people: in movies, in music, in the world of fashion. On the Internet, on a page belonging to the Romanian yoga school MISA, we find an essay on this topic that describes how bad certain television series are for children, because they promote, quote, violence, stupidity and homosexuality, for example The Simpsons, Spongebob or Family Guy. It is also said that Lady Gaga made a pact with the devil and that fashion magazines like Elle or Vogue are filled with evil to the point of saturation.
Liz: If anyone doubts, wavers, or expresses displeasure, they are silenced to their faces. She is talked down to, she is invalidated, she is immediately seen as a weakness. They make you do it, do it, do it, do it. It is only your ego, it is only your mind that opposes the process of transformation. It will be worth it, this is your test now, this is your divine test.
producer: "The divine test, the spiritual test". Again, terms we already know from research. Liz tells us that at one point, her entire life consisted of such tests, and yoga students stimulated each other. For example, they fasted to cleanse their bodies and souls, but to the extreme.
Liz: If you're too thin, it can be dangerous to eat only grains. I also found it too dangerous for me at one point because I became very thin during this yoga experience. I also did a 3 day water fast once. There are also much more extreme programs where you don't eat or drink anything.
filmmaker: Liz describes that it felt like playing a game. If she kept up with the post, she moved on to the next level, a step up to enlightenment. If she couldn't keep up, the mission failed. Even today, she feels guilty when she eats pizza.
Liz: We were like kung fu students all the time, pushing and challenging each other. When you always wake up so early and go to bed so late and do these things excessively and then fast and so on, it's bad for your psyche. Then you just go "boom!" and you went Being carried around like this makes you even more manipulable.
filmmaker: Liz felt like the yoga teachers were even able to tell her what to think and what not to think at any given time. Cursing, for example, is demonic, so Liz banished that from her thoughts.
Liz: Everything has an energetic effect. You must try to keep the frequency as positive as possible and think as pure and positive as possible. Preferably all the time, 24 hours a day, even overnight. You are physically captured, conditioned and mentally and emotionally captured.
Christiane Hawranek: What about sleep?
Liz: Sleep is seen as negative, Tamas (inertia, n.trans.). So I was always very tense when I was sleeping, because you are most vulnerable to all the negative energies around you when you are sleeping. That is why you should always wake up half asleep and always be half awake.
filmmaker: Not only sleep is controlled, but also sex life.
Liz: You can't even just lay down and fall asleep, cuddled up. You should always do at least 2 hours of yoga after sex, otherwise something really bad will happen. They say it's a liberating sexuality but at the same time it becomes totally compulsive again because it makes you feel so dirty all the time.
I just had sex and now I really need to do yoga. It becomes more and more narrow and strict.
It becomes like a cell: to be fair, to think and to do good. Anything else is not good. This makes her very unfree again and leads to tension again.
filmmaker: Liz says she felt constant pressure for years to show no weakness, to follow all the guidelines. Playing the perfect game.
Liz: I was totally in this mindset that all the other people were sleeping. The word "sleeping sheep" is also used, so derogatory. It was just them and us.
Christiane Hawranek: You once said "elite".
Liz: We are the chosen ones, the chosen ones, and you are the ones in a satanic sleep.
Always looking down on you: "And you, poor lost soul!" Filmmaker: Liz laughs at all these things. She says it's good for her, it brings him some relief. She talks about how she sent videos to a friend from her old life before school to open her eyes. Conspiracy theories, from the Illuminati to Bill Gates out to screw us all. And she also conveys to her friend what Gregorian Bivolaru preaches. For example, that homosexuality is a sin, a mistake, a disease that can be cured.
Liz: She was totally horrified and told me it was something homophobic. This totally confused me because I couldn't see it yet. I was so blinded by all this yoga and all this ethics and stuff. And I knew nothing about all this. I had no idea. And I was asking myself: "What, are you stupid?". So, I didn't know.
filmmaker: Now, here on her red fleece blanket in the park, Liz can't believe how petrified she was back then.
Liz: And it looked damn right! To take on these very bad views of the world, when I had never been like that before, and then suddenly see that now I had become like that too, that was very bad for me.
producer: Experts in sects call this differentiation from others an "alarm signal": "We have divine knowledge, everyone else is deluded".
There are several such warning signs in Liz's story.
The rules Liz has subjected herself to - even down to sleep deprivation, estrangement from old friends and family - are all red flags. So if you ever have to deal with something like this, be careful.
Christiane talks to Liz about another feature of cults.
Christiane Hawranek: Is it actually proselytizing as well? So I also had to...
Liz: One hundred percent. It was like a boot camp, a training camp to become a missionary. Our angelic fight against evil and our training camp for the evil world.
filmmaker: Although Liz has now finished school, the nightmare is not over for her. Even now, in June 2023, the rules are still in effect.
Liz: It was like a straitjacket that I sort of trained in. And gradually I come out of it and allow myself more and more to lie down, sleep more, eat when I want, what I want. Right now I am freeing my thinking, because I have censored my thinking a lot.
filmmaker: Liz told Christiane her story for two hours, and Christiane wants to give her time to catch her breath.
Christiane Hawranek: How are you feeling right now? Are you hungry, thirsty?
Liz: I'm thirsty.
Christiane Hawranek: Thirsty?
Liz: Yes.
Christiane Hawranek: Well, I have a Bionade with me, if that's what you like. I haven't opened it yet, you're welcome.
Liz: With pleasure.
Christiane Hawranek: And I have two more croissants.
Filmmaker: Liz widens her eyes. She eats his croissant and drinks Bionade with gusto. For Liz, it's a luxury she can't afford. A few minutes later, a guy collecting bottles walks by. He wants to take the bottle from her, but Liz keeps it and says, "No, I need it!" As long as she's been in the yoga movement, she's been keeping herself afloat with odd jobs.
Liz: I'm a bit shocked myself of my ideas. I've accepted a lot of them, I still believe a lot of them. Sometimes I'm scared of myself and I have to reprogram myself somehow accomplishing things: "Reprogramming" is an appropriate keyword, because the German Academy of Traditional Yoga, says Liz, is also about reprogramming women, and that brings us to the pink book that Liz put it on the blanket at the very beginning: "The secret tantric path of love to happiness and fulfillment in the relationship of a couple". Author: Gregorian Bivolaru.
Liz now initiates Christiane into this sacred book.
Liz: Yes, look, you can see such beautiful photos here!
filmmaker: Christiane sees black-and-white photographs in which a lot of naked people appear. Couples having tantric sex with each other in seemingly artistic positions. A woman lying on the floor. A rose is stuck between her buttocks. Curious blonde meditating in wave yoga pose, naked. And again and again photos of women with very large breasts.
Liz: The perfect picture, isn't it? Big breasts. You can do certain magical, occult yoga postures to make your breasts very big.
filmmaker: Liz tells us she's been in certain women-only groups where they did exactly these exercises to make their breasts bigger, to suppress their periods, and to be generally sexy. Liz says they learned to be perfect mistresses.
Liz: To awaken the feminine goddess within you, who is truly so connected to everything, who is omnipotent, who is very wise, and who can initiate all men, sexually or just in terms of the wisdom of life. This high expectation is placed on women. It is called the permanent state of Shakti, for it has a certain magical, sensual, sexual, attractive, savory state, so to speak.
The word "savory" is also used very often, savory.
filmmaker: Liz feels that sexual training takes place in these groups. Why all this? For whom are women transformed into sexual figures? For themselves, for their tantric partner, or for someone else entirely?
Liz pulls out several photos and places them on the blanket. And here is Gregorian Bivolaru again. In one photo she is looking straight into the camera, in the other he is hugging someone, her eyes are closed and she is smiling.
Liz: There are pictures like this of gurus. They should always meditate on their guru.
Christiane Hawranek: There was once a report where the official statement was that they distanced themselves from the guru whose photo you showed me.
Liz: When was that?
Christiane Hawranek: A few years ago, not long ago.
Liz: When I was there, from 2018 to around 2022, there was talk of the guru Gregorian Bivolaru, and ashram students were writing him letters asking for advice and life advice. And they always said "Grieg says", so always with his affectionate diminutive: "Grieg says, Grieg says, Grieg says, Grieg says, Grieg says", always "Grieg, Grieg, Grieg, Grieg, Grieg, Grieg". It was always about him.
filmmaker: Currently, DAtY writes on its website that some of its instructors and students have chosen Gregorian Bivolaru as their spiritual master, but that, however, this is the free decision of each individual.
Are women trained to be sexy for Bivolaru? Does he have his perfect girlfriends modeled in these groups, just the way he wants them, with big breasts and other very special features?
I've talked to 20 dropouts and many of them have this assumption. Some of the women have been to so-called guru Grieg themselves and know the groups that Liz told us about.
But they also say it's not just about Grieg. Some go further and suspect that there is a whole business behind the school, a sex business.
People who wish to remain anonymous tell us how schoolgirls masturbated live, naked in front of the video camera, on sex sites, on the Internet. One of the interviewees says she did it herself. Others tell us about strip clubs in Japan, Austria and Bucharest. Strip clubs where schoolgirls are said to have bar danced in nothing but bikinis.
One of the women interviewed says that she did it herself, in a club called Lucky Love in Bucharest.
Almost every dropout I talked to knew about it. Some have only heard of it, others have been there but cannot prove it. No wonder, because they weren't allowed to take pictures in the strip club, and there are no payrolls either, because the women say they did everything on a voluntary basis or for little pay. How can we confirm or at least support this suspicion without any evidence?
There is only one way: we must go and see with our own eyes.
We have to go to a strip club in Romania, in the country where the first school of the international ATMAN yoga movement is located. The place where it all began. So let's go.
"Bucharestians, dear guests, please keep your seat belts fastened until the belt signals are turned off. If you want to adjust your watch to local time, it's now 10:00 PM." Bucharest greets us at night, with massive neon signs of casinos and nightclubs and a taxi ride, without seat belts in the back seats. It's the start of a business journey so bizarre, adventurous and scary that Christiane and I will probably be talking about it for years to come. The next morning, we're standing in a park again, and someone else is there.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: I read in the travel guide that Bucharest is the Paris of the East. Is this true?
Anca: In the interwar period, it really was the Paris of the East. Everyone spoke French.
producer: She is Anca. She just came to pick us up from the hotel and is part of our team here in Romania.
She will translate for us and will be a real blessing to us on this trip. Anca is tough.
Christiane Hawranek: Of course we need you to translate because we are now on our way to the trial course.
filmmaker: Today there is an introductory lecture on the courses at MISA. Another trial lesson for us. But we want to go, because we want to know what makes the yoga movement work here in its home country and if the classes here are different from those in Germany. We're going undercover. Anca registered us and talked to the teacher. The course is in Romanian. We do not speak Romanian. Will we be discovered?
Anca: We wanted to discuss with you, what we say, why we participate.
Christiane Hawranek: Well, I would say that we are just interested and that we know a little bit of Romanian. But I don't even know how to say "Good morning" in Romanian!
Anca: "Hello!" Christiane Hawranek: We go in and say "Hello". My plan would be for us to remain silent.
filmmaker: So we go in without a microphone, we keep our mouths shut, we pretend we understand everything, we hope we won't be found out and nobody will get mad at us for it.
Christiane Hawranek: What is our safe word?
Filmmaker: Oh, yes, because the whole thing might be a bit complicated for us: keywords, undercover operation, sex work, Bivolaru on the Interpol list.
Anca: Suggest.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Our bosses told us to use a safe word.
Anca: It got cold.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Yes. It got cold.
filmmaker: So if we're ever in a situation where one of us feels uncomfortable, scared, threatened, say the safe word and then we stop.
Christiane Hawranek: So "It got cold!" is our safe word and "Hello" means "good day".
Anca: Good.
filmmaker: On the way to school we see a bit of the city. Apart from a few neat houses, we see a lot of prefabricated buildings with crumbling plaster. People begging, stray dogs and ...
Anca: Romania is the country with the most cat owners.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Amazing!
Anca: There are a lot of cats.
filmmaker: Anca loves cats. She even has food for them and knows where most of them sleep, because she has lived here in Bucharest for a long time. She knows about MISA, the Romanian yoga movement, since the 90s. Back then, mostly students attended Bivolaru's classes in the huge halls, says Anca.
Christiane Hawranek: One minute, we have a little more and we're done.
Anca: Here it is.
director: 30 years after the big debut, here we are, in front of the yoga school in Bucharest. At first we are surprised, because here nothing looks like yoga at all, but rather like a company headquarters. Several white vans are parked in the yard in front of the deep green, bungalow-like building. It looks a bit dilapidated and dirty. Time to turn off the mic and hide it. We go inside.
Three hours later, while I was at the yoga school, we sit in the taxi and turn on the microphone again.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Okay, we're recording.
Filmmaker: We're already on our way to the next meeting, so we're talking about what we just experienced here while we're driving.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: I just got out of yoga class, let's call it that.
filmmaker: It wasn't actually a traditional yoga class, but a lecture where MISA, as the Movement is called here, introduced itself.
About 40 rickety wooden chairs were lined up, but almost all of them were empty. Including ourselves, there were nine in all. That's why the woman who gave the lecture kept looking directly at us, and we had to pretend we understood everything for 3 hours.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: It was entirely in Romanian.
Christiane Hawranek: Exactly, but you understood some things, the essential ones.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: I understood once that "we are not a sect, with us you can decide and if you want to be vegetarian or eat meat, you don't care about any of that, it's freedom, here is freedom", possible ?
Anca: Yes, she also said that the press always wrote bad things about them, about MISA and so on, and that they were called a sect. But it is not true that they are a sect. Everyone has total freedom to believe what they want.
Freedom of religion, freedom of choice and so on.
Christiane Hawranek: And then she took the devices out of the box.
filmmakers: The devices, exactly. At one point, the yoga teacher walks over to a small wooden table stuck to the wall. On it is a black cloth. The teacher picks it up and reveals two small black devices with a metal gear on the top. At the bottom, there are two rows of numbers from 1 to 24 with bright red, yellow and green dots. Anca whispers to Christiane that these are measuring devices.
Anca: The aura measurement was a surprise and a gift for us.
makers: Aura measuring devices, just for us. Special Secret Information. We later learn that the devices are called Egely Wheels and are not an invention of MISA, but have been used in the esoteric scene since 1990.
Christiane Hawranek: Then I whispered to you that I would try if you didn't have to talk.
Anca: Exactly. And you just hold your hands next to this device and it measures your aura with values ​​from 1 to 24.
Filmmaker: So Christiane and Anca sit at this table, they hold their hands next to the device and their aura is measured. One is the lowest value, 24 the highest.
Christiane Hawranek: Now guess how much I had?
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Three.
Christiane Hawranek: Zero. Unfortunately, I have no energy at all because I haven't been relaxed enough.
Anca: Yes, that's what the woman said.
Christiane Hawranek: The woman said I wasn't relaxed enough.
Filmmaker: Of course, a German journalist, driven by demonic forces.
Anca: I had a good aura.
Christiane Hawranek: Five, right?
Anca: Yes, I almost had five, yes.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Congratulations.
Anca: Thank you.
filmmaker: We're still laughing now, here in the taxi, because we find this whole thing too bizarre.
At one point, the yoga teacher turns on the TV and starts a video that looks like amateur footage. The registration date, 2007, is written in yellow in the lower right.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: And suddenly Gregorian Bivolaru appeared on TV.
Christiane Hawranek: Yes.
filmmaker: No one mentions his name, but Anca, Christiane and I recognize him immediately.
Gregorian Bivolaru appears in the school video. They walk around a table. On it is a large compass.
Anca: They say that through yoga you can develop magnetic waves so strong that you can even move a compass needle.
filmmaker: Bivolaru does exactly that. He doesn't touch the compass, he just waves his hands around it and moves the needle as if by magic.
Anca: It was a comment from the hall. Someone in the back said he was a very famous yogi. And she said he's more than known, he's famous.
filmmaker: Famous and infamous. It seems that Bivolaru still plays a central role in the school. So was this the yoga lecture or rather the magic show?
We continue by taxi to our next meeting. The man we are about to meet is not a magician, but a lawyer. And he worked for Gregorian Bivolaru. That's all we know about him.
He was a supporter of MISA but left and now warns against the school on his blog. We want to speak to him because we think that as Bivolaru's lawyer he may have been very involved in the MISA system and we hope to get information from him. That's what we specifically want to do when we talk to him.
We want to know the truth about allegations of sex work in the yoga movement.
Christiane Hawranek: There it is.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: It is him.
Christiane Hawranek: Yes.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Katja, hello.
Christiane Hawranek: Hello, Christiane Hawranek.
Mihai Rapcea: I apologize for the delay.
Christiane Hawranek: No problem.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: No problem.
Mihai Rapcea: Okay, so what is the plan? What do you want to do?
Christiane Hawranek: Should we sit down somewhere?
Mihai Rapcea: Yes, of course.
director: Mihai Rapcea is around 50 years old. He is bald and wears a red t-shirt that is a bit tight on his stomach. He smiles a lot, seems gentle and likeable. Its appearance does not match at all how it is described online. On a MISA website, he is also referred to as the devil's advocate. He and the yoga movement did not part on good terms. We have to keep this in mind. Everyone has an agenda, and what Mihai Rapcea is going to tell us is his version. And it started with him in the 90s, as a young student and supporter of MISA in Bucharest.
Mihai Rapcea: At first I practiced with Grieg, I was in his group. He was a very, very ordinary man, you know, he was... even now, he kept this appearance of a man who... a very decent man, with the same clothes, not something extravagant or expensive.
filmmaker: Rapcea was Bivolaru's student and tells us what experiences he had with this modest, common-looking, reserved man, who became a kind of guru.
Mihai Rapcea: He had an extraordinary knowledge about yoga and all that, so that's why his authority was growing more and more.
Filmmaker: Says that Bivolaru was considered an authority on yoga due to his vast knowledge.
And there was something else about him, says Rapcea, something supernatural. He gives us an example.
Mihai Rapcea: Grieg told a woman not to leave the house for 5 days, because she risks having an accident, dying. After 4 days she went out and was hit by a car.
filmmaker: Bivolaru once advised a woman not to leave the house for 5 days because she is in danger of having an accident or dying. However, the woman only stayed at home for 4 days. She was then hit by a car, says Rapcea.
Mihai Rapcea: These kind of events, you know, have a big impact around because people know each other, look, these guys have complete trust in Grieg, his advice is quite correct!
filmmaker: His followers have unconditionally trusted him ever since. Rapcea still believes this today, but he still broke up with him.
Mihai Rapcea: Because of this kind of sex and money and power.
Filmmaker: Sex, Money and Power. Rapcea says that in his opinion, at one point, it was all about turning his peaceful hippie yoga movement into a business. And that this was the beginning of the end.
Mihai Rapcea: There was a moment in the year 2000 when a lot of online video chat activities started in Romania.
filmmaker: Rapcea explains that it all started at the beginning of 2000, when video chats with sexual content took off in Romania. Users paid money to watch women undress on
camera or masturbate themselves. Rapcea says that those from MISA also became aware of these video chats. Why not start something like this yourself? Big internet business with yoga school women.
Rapcea knows this for a reason. He helped establish all of them, he says.
Mihai Rapcea: It was my first year as a lawyer and a lot of colleagues were asking me for help to start a business like this with video chat and everyone was looking for girls, beautiful girls, to expose online, you know...
filmmakers : Rapcea was only a first-year lawyer and had been in MISA for a long time. That's why they came to him with their business idea, he explains. They needed his help to start the company and he helped them. But first, he tells us, he had to ask Bivolaru's permission.
Mihai Rapcea: Someone told him, you know, "we can use women from the ashrams to do this" and they asked for his approval.
filmmaker: Could they use women from ashrams for video chats? What would Grieg have said?
Mihai Rapcea: I think he thought that "yes, yes, it's good if you bring money, you know, let them do that because they can also become more feminine, expressing themselves and maybe they will attract more people", something of this kind.
filmmaker: "Yes, do this. Women bring money, perfect their own femininity. And that's crucial."
Mihai Rapcea: Because they don't just have sex, normal sex, it's sacred sex, so it's a sacred sexuality because your intention is good and so on and so there's a theory behind it, you know, it's not simple manipulation.
filmmaker: They don't have normal sex, no, they have sacred sex. And now, with the help of video chats, this can be conveyed to all those who do not know. It is proselytizing.
"And this justification is offered to women", says Rapcea. As an offering, a gift, completely voluntary. Become a sex goddess with sex chats and spread the good message all over the world.
Mihai Rapcea: It's not something spectacular because I was thinking "yes, we do Karma yoga on construction sites" and so on.
Filmmaker: Everything is done under the name of karma yoga. Do good to elevate yourself spiritually.
Voluntary work for karma is nothing unusual in the yoga scene. Rapcea says he has worked on construction sites, delivered school supplies and translated yoga books.
Liz, who I met in the park in Germany, says she cleaned the yoga school without getting paid.
Nathalie says she translated videos for the yoga school in Bucharest. Well, some of the ATMAN women also did video sex chats for karma yoga. And later, says Rapcea, they also did striptease or tantra massages.
Mihai Rapcea: And they made a lot of money, but with this kind of clubs, more money came with karma yoga.
filmmaker: We ask Rapcea if he has anything in writing for us, documents, receipts, but he disappoints us.
Mihai Rapcea: At the last meeting with them, I returned everything and said: "I don't want anything to do with you!" filmmaker: He says he gave them everything back. He wanted nothing more to do with them.
But his account matches what dropouts have told us, speaking anonymously.
It started with video chats and later switched to striptease. So he takes stock of Bivolaru himself, he says. He writes him a letter and asks him to make a change.
Mihai Rapcea: I told him "please, stop, please, do something, change something here to separate the activities, let MISA do yoga and don't use the people from this for the other"... you know, and he never answered that.
director: Bivolaru never answers him, and that annoys Rapcea. Of course, no one is forced to masturbate live on the Internet, but he calls it manipulation.
"That's how it was with the women in Lucky Love," he says.
Lucky Love, that's why we're here. This is the strip club here in Bucharest where ATMAN women are supposedly sent to strip. Rapcea has memories from the club's beginnings.
Mihai Rapcea: We can do something very different from other bars, you know, something more sophisticated and like this, to do something spiritual in this area.
director: "They wanted to create a strip club with a spiritual touch. But that was a long time ago," says Rapcea, adding that he had not been there for years.
Mihai Rapcea: I think Lucky Love hasn't been working these days for several years, it's closed.
Christiane Hawranek: But the club is still open!
Mihai Rapcea: I don't know, I didn't enter. It is open?
Katja Paysen-Petersen: Yes, yes, I think so!
filmmaker: At least that's what we read on the internet. The site is still active. We will show him.
Anca: Okay, so Lucky Love which still... see here, for example, the team...
Rapcea: Yes, yes...
filmmaker: We look at photos of half-naked women, at the bar and see what it has to offer the club: tantric massages and striptease. We also have research papers on the strip club with us. Rapcea indicates the name of a woman.
Mihai Rapcea: I remember the name, I know it.
Anca: Yes, luck...
Mihai Rapcea: ... Because she is...
Anca: "Luck" means "luck" in Romanian...
Mihai Rapcea: ... She is from my generation.
filmmaker: Rapcea knows the woman from before, since she was at MISA.
Anca: She runs it, yes, the empowered person.
Filmmaker: Well, obviously Lucky Love is still active and there seems to still be a connection with MISA.
And now we want to see if there are women from the yoga school dancing on the pole. So, a few hours later, we are sitting on some bar stools, outside, in the outer area of ​​a pub in the center of Bucharest.
We relax for Lucky Love, the strip club we are going to.
Katja Paysen-Petersen: What time is it now? It's half past eleven. I arrived just in time.
Are you excited, Christiane?
Christiane Hawranek: Oh, we'll take a look now. We will go there and then we will have to see if we can actually talk to them. I can imagine the strippers probably have their own group, I don't think you can get close to them unless you slip them bills. I think it's difficult to engage them in a conversation.
filmmaker: But we have to talk to the strippers. We want to know if they really come from yoga schools that are part of ATMAN. We have money with us, banknotes.
And then, at one o'clock in the morning, we head to Lucky Love. The strip club is off the beaten track. The further we walk, the quieter, emptier and darker the streets become.
"Lucky Love" is written in pink letters above the door of a beige building. The symbol of love, a heart.
And below, Gentleman's Nightclub. We are three women and to get in we have to ring the bell.
Christiane and I look at each other. We hesitate. We're about to start discussing whether or not we should really call, but then Anca comes and rings the doorbell, as if it's perfectly normal for three women to go to a strip club for gentlemen at night.