ARD – Seelenfänger (Soul
Catcher – Soul Hunter)
Podcast – Toxic Tantra
24.04.2024
4. Lucky Love
https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/seelenfaenger/toxic-tantra-lucky-love-4/bayern-2/
13338327/
Anca, Christiane and I just left the Lucky Love strip club.
discussion between journalists: - What time is it?
- Well, it's almost half past two.
filmmaker: We lived a lot in this club and we have to reveal everything now, talk on the microphone, because we couldn't record inside. So, from the beginning. Let's jump back about an hour and a half.
Anca rings the bell of the men's nightclub and the door opens. Loud music reverberates towards us.
Anca, the Romanian language translator: I entered and the first person I met was the man on the stairs, the bartender.
Filmmaker: What did he actually say? Because he spoke to us in Romanian first.
Anca: I asked him if women are also allowed inside and he said, yes, of course, women are allowed inside.
Filmmaker: And then a stripper appeared from around the corner. Long brown hair, curvy figure, pale complexion, light blue strappy corset. She looks like she's only in her 20s and walks right up to us in super high heels. We call her Ella here on the podcast, but that's not her real name. Ella looks at us with a mixture of total surprise and pure joy.
Discussion between female journalists: - She immediately came to dance and was delighted that now women are also coming.
- "Yes!" she said. And she's from Sweden. "Yes, girls!" filmmaker: Finally some women here in the club. Inside me, there is total relief. Looks like we're welcome here. I look around and my heart rate picks up again. Apart from us and the staff, the hall is deserted.
Anca, Christiane and I are the first customers of the evening. We sit down on a long, black leather couch.
Me next to Christiane, Anca across from us. Ella asks us what we want to drink and the bartender gets down to business.
One by one, all three strippers on duty today sit around us.
discussion between female journalists: There is no question of reaching their height, they were above us. They weren't standing right above us, but close!
filmmaker: Ella starts talking right away and tells us that she's from Sweden, that she's been here in Bucharest for a while and that she hasn't been doing striptease for too long. "So please understand if everything doesn't work out perfectly for now!" Okay, interesting.
discussion between journalists: These beautiful young women are Swedish and Danish. What brings them here?
filmmaker: Why are the two of them doing this here, in a strip club in Romania? That's unusual.
We suspect they might be yoga students from Scandinavia. There are some yoga schools that belong to ATMAN.
In Denmark they also organize training courses for yoga and Tantra teachers. Scandinavian schools are designed to cater specifically to young people, including something like erotic dance classes.
So, while we are talking with the Dane and the Swede in the club, the Romanian goes to a white platform in the center of the room and starts dancing on the bar, just for us. I pretend to be excited about it, but I'm just thinking about how we can get women to tell us why they're here. As discreetly as possible. I mean, we can't ask them directly like that, I think to myself.
But then Christiane does just that with Ella. I laugh about it now, but in the club, when Christiane started asking her so directly, I was just scared. They shouldn't have, now we're about to be discovered and they'll bring their bodyguards.
Christiane: No, you know something, the story was my idea, like a part of me is looking for something.
filmmaker: Christiane tells the strippers that there's a desire in her, that she's searching, and that's what attracts her.
The women begin to tell Christiane about themselves.
This is Soul Catcher, Season 4, Toxic Tantra. A podcast made by Christiane Havranek and me, Katja Peisen-Petersen.
Episode 4, Lucky Love.
Filmmaker: We remind you, we are in this strip club because we want to find out if any women from ATMAN's yoga schools work here. Overall, our goal on this trip here in Romania, the country where MISA was founded, is to find out what all the women who come here to the yoga school from many different countries in Europe and around the world are doing.
Are they really only delving into Tantra here or is there something else behind it? Now, at three o'clock in the morning, on the way back from the strip club to the hotel, Anca and I can finally ask Christiane what exactly Ella and the Danes told her, because we both heard only fragments.
So Christiane tells us about Ella.
Christiane: She's 28 years old, she's from Sweden, and I talked to her a bit more and more intensively. It's interesting that they started doing yoga on their own, that they do yoga and a lot of tantra yoga as well, and that they are totally convinced of this lifestyle. And they said it's just totally a lifestyle and they do this seven hours a day. Seven hours of yoga a day. This immediately makes us think of the dropouts we talked to, Liz and Nathalie. They too did yoga for hours. But there is also something else.
Christiane: The word spirituality came up, they talked about spirituality, they talked about healing.
Filmmaker: Once again, I mentally ticked off the clues, signs that there are obvious connections to the yoga movement.
Christiane: So, I went on to talk about secrecy as well. Yes, time and time again, when I asked something, it was secret.
producer: Boom, boom, boom. Tick, tick, tick. One reference to yoga movement follows another.
Christiane: There was another thought-provoking moment, I have to remember that they said "Express your femininity", because that's exactly the wording. That's what they said in the beginning, why they like to do it the concrete way so much.
filmmaker: Bivolaru's former lawyer also told us about this theory from the yoga school in the previous episode, that women who go to striptease were told that they can develop their femininity in this process.
Christiane: And then she wanted to start telling me how she came to do that. And then she said: "I started talking to you as if you were my sister, this happened to me." But actually it works like this: "you have to treat me to a drink and only then can you talk to me and then there's a show." Yes, I bought her a drink.
director: Christiane bought Ella a piña colada. Suddenly, we have Ella's bare breasts to the right and left of the tips of our noses. And she gives me and Christiane a private dance. All we want to do is talk to her, but that doesn't work anymore, because suddenly new guests arrive in the club. Three men. And Ella moves on.
Christiane: Unfortunately, she doesn't say anything more and goes to the other table, to the two men who are still sitting there. They lured them in, then left with them and almost certainly massaged them.
producer: Massages. Women also do tantric massages at Lucky Love.
Christiane: Then we also asked, where did you learn this?
filmmaker: One of the three women told us about a kind of massage school, the Esoteric Massage Academy. I remembered the name. Then I left the club. We have a feeling that this is the end for us, that we won't get any more information.
A strip club with a spiritual twist. A club where strippers unleash their femininity and convey the concept of sacred sexuality to others, the ignorant.
Christiane: I have to say I felt very uncomfortable there. You probably could tell by looking at me.
But it was so amazing to see this young Swedish woman who was so happy that women were finally coming to her to see her show, who was so warm and open and said, "Yeah, I just started practicing I haven't done all that for a long time." And she was very happy that someone was watching and applauding her. At the same time, I was thinking to myself: "Girl, what are you doing?".
filmmaker: After our trip to the club, we have the feeling that we managed to confirm our suspicions.
We believe these women here are part of the yoga movement. We were able to tick off a lot of clues. And I found another clue. This Esoteric Massage Academy, the one where one of the women said she learned to massage, this academy has staff overlaps with MISA. So, we have a lot of clues, but we have no real proof, no evidence. None of the women in the club said clearly that "I was sent to striptease by the yoga movement".
The spokeswoman of the Romanian yoga school MISA will later tell us that it is possible for individual yoga students to striptease, work on erotic video chats or give tantric massages.
If so, then they do it voluntarily and as private individuals. This is not managed by MISA.
The spokeswoman cannot imagine women doing all this as karma yoga, that is, expressing their femininity in the service of the yoga school, she says in the interview. And he's never heard of Esoteric Massage Academy.
Strange, we think, because MISA is currently following this Academy on Instagram. The women at the Academy did not respond to our request. I also wrote to the Lucky Love club and their response sounds a bit hokey. They give us a simple answer to our questions about MISA's ties to striptease and massages performed as karma yoga: "NO!" With capital letters.
The next morning, Christiane, Anca and I sit together again, this time in Anca's car.
She's driving us out of town, or at least she's trying to.
Anca: It's terrible, it's chaos here. I can't turn back. To be honest, I have no idea how we're going to get out of here.
filmmaker: We want to get out of Bucharest and go to the Black Sea. We are traveling to Costinești, a seaside resort in Romania. It is not only frequented by regular tourists during the summer, but is also a place of pilgrimage for the ATMAN yoga movement. Thousands of yogis from different countries have been gathering there for decades, because the famous international esoteric yoga summer camp, organized by the Romanian yoga school MISA, takes place for almost five weeks during the summer. With lectures, events and messages from Gregorian Bivolaru played through loudspeakers and with a special gathering for which they seem to have a cult. The yogis meet outside at the edge of the village in a large field and hold their spiral meditation there. Thousands of people form a huge spiral holding hands and meditate.
On the way to Costinești, we document again how to participate in the yoga camp.
Two 10-15 centimeter photos, front and half-profile, in a two-piece swimsuit for ladies, in which the body can be seen in its entirety, must be submitted for registration. These must be recent, taken after June 1, 2023. A negative HIV test and a negative syphilis test are also prerequisites for participation. This yoga camp - it's clear - is not a normal yoga camp.
And Costinesti is a special place, practically the heart of the yoga movement.
We want to see it with our own eyes, even if it is autumn now and the big crowds have passed. We want to talk to people and we want to see a house where things are supposedly happening that are top secret even within the yoga movement. They are not part of the official summer camp program.
In this house, selected women are said to meet to be taught how to be sexy. At least Nathalie thinks so, because she was one of these chosen women.
Nathalie: So, this house is in Costinești, where this summer camp takes place, and Viluta is a relatively big house with lots of small rooms, where all the girls sleep together on one mattress.
filmmaker: Nathalie is a school dropout who discovered the yoga movement during a trip to India and now lives in Thailand. She leads us to this Villa, as there is no official information about it. She recorded a video for us using Google Street View. We're watching it here in the car.
Nathalie: This is Viluta, this building. The building next to it, right here, is also the school's. They call it the Lotus Hotel.
producer: Hotel Viluța. There are several buildings on a single street in Costinești, where yogis come and go, especially in the summer. And Nathalie is about to take us into this world. But until we get there, in just under three hours by car, we still have time to tell you something. Something that is somehow related to Viluța and which is basically a kind of precursor to it. These are special groups, only for women. These are called Shakti groups, after the Indian goddess. They also exist in Germany. We know this because one of them included Liz, the school dropout who had a date with Christiane in the park.
Liz: It's kind of preparatory steps. These were the bikini photos that I took and then sent via stick and where I've been. And the next step after that was the invitations to the Shakti group.
maker: Liz tells us through an audio message about this group, which she attended at a school of the German Academy of Traditional Yoga.
Liz: I was in lingerie, sensual, and there were a lot of exercises that had a lot to do with the lingams. I mean penises, so to speak, because there's Shiva energy around us and we're supposed to imagine that it's a lingam, that it's a penis and then we actually did these supposed mudras and yoga positions where it was about moving the hips , of sensual movements, of having a certain attitude. And it was always about opening up to the male Shiva energy and sexual training.
filmmaker: Although she is convinced by these teachings, Liz does not feel at ease within the group.
This attitude of being sexy is not for her. She has a strange feeling about it.
Liz: Yes, and in the Shakti group there is also a feeling that "if I don't do it now, if I question it, if I oppose it, if I think it's stupid, if I don't come here dressed in sexy clothes, then I'm doing something wrong. Then I'm a stinker, I'm full of ego, I expose myself to risk, I'm spoiled. So there was a double message: "You can be who you are. Maybe you would do that, but if you don't do what we say, then you're nothing."
filmmaker: Liz feels like she can no longer trust her own intuition. This reminds us of Nathalie. And she told us that at some point she didn't trust herself anymore. Red flag, sect characteristic. Liz hopes that all of these courses will help her progress on the tantric path to enlightenment. That's why he keeps going, despite the negative feeling, and even takes a very special dance class...
Liz: ...Where women are taught how to dance sensually and sexy on the bar, for example, and where you're also taught how to turn someone on with a very hot and sexy dance, for example, when they're sitting on a chair .
filmmaker: But at some point Liz also wonders: why all this? And for whom should she become a perfect Shakti? She remembers a meeting to which only those who had been attending the yoga school for some time were invited. And that brings us back to Gregorian Bivolaru.
Liz: I always felt like I was conditioned to idealize him in the most extreme way possible.
You spent about half an hour watching a slideshow of photos of Grieg, with obviously idealized music, and you were told that he channels your energies, so to speak, which constantly purifies you and transforms your energy system and accompanies you and prepares you on your way. But it was just mental manipulation, training you like a dog. And that's so disgusting.
Filmmaker: Naturally, we want to find out what the German Academy for Traditional Yoga has to say about all this and send them an interview request. However, we are initially delayed by a few
weeks. The President writes to us that he has used this time to meditate and apologizes for the delay.
So, it still takes some time to decide whether an interview will take place or not.
Costinesti, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. It won't take long and we'll get there. And we are delighted to be in this place, because these sexual trainings are said to have taken place here, in Viluță, in the house we are moving to now. But everything should have been even more special, even more secret, with the cream of the cream of women in the yoga movement, with women like Nathalie.
Nathalie: The first time I actually heard about Viluta was in India. Then my teacher said: "Oh, yes, and the villa." It's so cool because all the girls go there and then we're all together." filmmaker: Nathalie learns that the villa can only be visited by special invitation and only after several years.
But then everything happens very quickly.
We told you about it in episode 2. Nathalie came to Bucharest in 2020 and that's when she realized that her boyfriend, Jasper, had someone else besides her: a girl from school. Instead of breaking up, Nathalie tried to overcome her jealousy, as her yoga teachers had advised. But it didn't work so at some point Nathalie wrote a letter to Gregorian Bivolaru. He asked her for advice and added a photo of her. Nathalie now tells us that her guru answered her rather quickly, also by letter or at least she is told that the letter came from him. And it's not handed to her personally, but read to her by her yoga teacher.
Nathalie: He praised me so much, how great I was and that I had such great qualities, that I was so pretty and that I had such a beautiful smile. It was still a great delight.
filmmaker: Nathalie would later call this "The Love Bombing Letter." Nathalie: ...That I can still achieve so much and that now I've basically opened up to him, that this is the best thing ever.
filmmaker: It's amazing, Nathalie thinks. Her guru says how beautiful she is. He sends her gifts: a dress, body oils, herbal mixtures, and she receives an invitation to Viluță.
Nathalie: Wow, that's amazing, because the first year I was there, I was allowed to stay at Viluță for the whole month of August. Normally you only stay for two weeks and I was there all August. That was really special.
filmmaker: A very special honor for Nathalie. She has one more thing to do. She must take a sacred oath - she says - and promise a teacher at MISA that she will never reveal anything that happens in Viluță. Nathalie does this. She swears on the Bible.
Nathalie: So you don't get any information about what it's about. At the beginning, when you're invited, you get a letter with your invitation in it, which you have to take with you to Viluță, and then in this letter are all these testimonials from other women saying "oh, it was so great and it was the best thing I've ever done' and things like that.
filmmaker: Nathalie just says that this Fairy basically changes your life, but she has no idea what's happening to it.
Today he knows that, obviously, the women are prepared in Viluță for the meeting with their guru, Gregorian Bivolaru.
We'll get there soon, we'll get to Costinesti soon. We take another look at the video that Nathalie recorded for us. The school is organizing an event in this ashram today, a yoga camp that will last for a few days. This is what we read on the MISA website from Romania. But we won't participate, we didn't send any bikini pictures in advance. That would have been a prerequisite, I repeat Christiane: You can see the sea flashing in the distance. And not a soul on the streets.
filmmaker: The tourists have already left at this time. Christiane looked out the car window at the vast wasteland of this place.
Christiane: I wonder if it shows that we are actually journalists. That's why I start to feel very tense and agitated. Because you have to wonder what are these three women doing in this desolate place?
filmmaker: Now I'm getting agitated too. Will we be discovered today?
Christiane: So now we turn down a side street. We should get closer and closer to Viluță. I'll hold the mic down now. We still have 130 meters to go. Okay, here it is.
producer: Nathalie's little villa. We drive right by Viluță. But before we look closer, we have to keep walking because in front of us, on the other side of the road, someone is walking. A young, red-haired woman dragging a green suitcase behind her.
Christiane: This woman must have been in the camp. And it was already there, on the left side I just passed it. There are a lot of cars here. So are they still there? I'm still there, that's right.
Realist: Yogis are in their camp. We go further out of the small street and park around the corner. The small street is now completely empty in front of us.
As we pass the ashram room, we hear the "music of the spheres" through the open windows. Yogis probably meditate. A few minutes later, we are right in front of Viluţa.
The villa is a drab, older building with flowery white curtains like grandma's on the windows.
But we don't see much. The entire building is surrounded by a green, opaque metal fence.
On a sign it says "Private property" in Romanian. "We do not offer accommodation". There is no plate or buzzer, just a code you have to enter. The villa seems deserted. All windows are closed.
For Nathalie it was different. When she arrived, it's summer and the MISA summer camp is in full swing. Costinești is full of ATMAN followers and a lot is happening in Viluța as well. Nathalie stands in front of this beige building with her luggage and watches the women go in and out. She introduces herself and shows her invitation.
Nathalie: I was excited because I didn't know what was going to happen, because no one told me what we were actually doing. So, yes, of course I was excited.
filmmaker: He had heard somewhere before that everything at Viluță was free and relaxed. But instead of that Woodstock feeling, Nathalie expects to do boring administrative work.
Nathalie: You get there and then you have to do hours of paperwork.
filmmaker: She is handed a lot of forms, just like in an office.
Nathalie: There you have to read the rules three times, you have to copy the rules.
producer: I mean the rules of the house that apply in Viluță.
Nathalie: "You are not allowed to sleep outside. If you don't want to sleep in Viluță for a night, you have to let us know, you have to attend all the classes." Yeah, so it's super strict somehow.
maker: Nathalie fills out other forms. Name, place of residence, current year of yoga and Tantra and so on. And then it begins. Someone pulls out a video camera and points it at Nathalie. She has to photograph herself so that her guru can read her aura. Nathalie already knows this, but this time it's more extreme, she tells us.
Nathalie: I was completely naked. So before it was always like that, with bikinis for camps and stuff, there you were completely naked. And it was also the first time I was filmed naked.
filmmaker: Nathalie really wants to get into this exclusive villa that so many people talk so positively about at school. But taking nude pictures for it? Allow her to be filmed naked?
Nathalie takes a deep breath and lets herself be photographed. But after that, she is still not allowed to enter the villa. First he must answer one last question. Answer correctly!
Nathalie: Do you want to meet the guru? So. The only answer that's okay is YES, of course. Because if you check "NO", you will be kicked out immediately.
Christiane: Is that what you were told?
Nathalie: No, we weren't told that, but it happened to a girl who was there with me. And that was exactly the point.
Then there is the question: "How do you feel when you think about meeting your guru?" Things like this are specified: "so excited, happy, ecstatic", something like that. And exactly, only positive things. You can't tick anything negative. Then, you also need to specify the periods of time in which you would have time to meet with him.
filmmaker: That's how Nathalie remembers it. She doesn't really want to meet the guru, this old man with whom she still has no real connection, even though she has already meditated on him and written him a letter. She just doesn't feel any connection with him, but she wants to get into this little house. And then?
Nathalie: Well, I checked "YES".
filmmaker: She just does it. She says she wants to meet Bivolaru.
Nathalie: And then I put these periods very, very late. So next year, sometime next year.
Filmmaker: Now Nathalie can enter.
Nathalie: It was really cool in itself because of course it was all the girls you knew a little bit before and then they were all together.
filmmaker: With Nathalie, there were around 40 women there, from different countries. That's what she says. Many Romanians, some of them people Nathalie already knows from Bucharest. But also German, Scandinavian, English, Australian. Each room is a bedroom with mattresses.
Nathalie: Of course, we didn't have to pay for food or anything, so everything was completely free. It wasn't like we were locked inside.
filmmaker: So the women go to the sea every day, on their beach, further away from the usual tourist beach. Rougher, more natural. But in the morning, noon and afternoon they have to go back to the camp and listen to lectures.
Nathalie: Of course it was interesting to learn all these things. It was very much for women too.
filmmaker: In these lectures, women learn, for example, how to better control their jealousy or how to suppress their periods. "It's bad", teaches Nathalie, "because it consumes your energy".
Nathalie: That's where we had to evolve as women, basically become as much like Mahashakti as possible, and Mahashakti is basically God in female form. And that's what we had to learn.
filmmaker: That's why women get feedback on their performance at some point, on the nude photos and videos they took to get into the Villa, at first.
Nathalie: You will then receive a personal message from Bivolaru in response to your videos and photos.
filmmaker: Nathalie is in her room right now. She knocks on the door and someone hands her a note. It is supposed to be from Gregorian Bivolaru himself.
Christiane: What did Grieg say about your photo or video?
Nathalie: I don't think it was anything negative or anything like that, so I think it turned out really well. But after that it was the same with many other girls who were around me, and they got these answers, like "yes, if we had a belly, it's not possible". So they were told that "you need to do more yoga and do more exercises on your chakra here in the belly so that it harmonizes again". They were also told along the lines of "yes, you need to get your breasts enlarged". We were also told that we could do this by somehow working on them energetically and so on.
director: "Okay, thanks for the tip!" Nathalie: What is so normal? That's just the thing. So no one takes it as an insult or anything, but it's like "yeah, of course I have to get rid of my belly, of course I have to". Doubt it and say, "Man, what kind of person is he to tell me that my breasts need to get bigger?" Such a thing would have been completely forbidden.
filmmaker: In Vilută, women are supposed to be given skills to transform their bodies and shown how to be perfect mistresses, as Nathalie tells us. They watch porn together and prepare for the great tantric ritual that is said to lead them to enlightenment.
Yes, according to the doctrine, women can also make love to each other, so they say. Men don't make love to each other, but women do. For Nathalie, it all seems like a boot camp to become a sex goddess.
MISA's press officer will tell us later in the interview that she doesn't know some things or can't comment on them.
The oath to the Bible, the rules of the house, the nude filming. Maybe the individuals have had certain experiences, but then "please let them prove it!".
She denies that Bivolaru receives photos from women. And although the MISA lessons are also about eroticism, they are against porn. They call them "erotic films", which are also shown in the camp, but supposedly without any sexual activity on the part of the camp participants.
It's getting dark here in Costinești in the fall of 2023. However, Anca, Christiane and I still really want to talk to the locals. We want to know how they perceive the yogis, who have been organizing summer camps here for decades, and that's why we go to the center of Costinesti village.
Because there is nothing going on in the village streets, we almost want to turn back. But then we see only one lighted building, a small supermarket. The supermarket is actually a small grocery store. The sidewalk in front of him is brightly lit. Three men are sitting outside drinking alcohol.
Two middle-aged and one in his 70s, he's already pretty robust. While Christiane and I feel slightly out of place here, Anca runs straight to the dog. A huge creature is lying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the grocery store. Anca, our animal lover, bends down to him, pet him, caress him and hugs him.
And we earn the respect of the villagers. Good, Anca earns their respect. The man holding the dog looks just as huge and massive to us. He is the owner of the grocery store. He sits behind his cash register and looks with interest at our blue BR microphone.
The man in the supermarket: I have my family in Deutschland, in Deggendorf, I don't speak German.
Christiane: So we're doing research on yoga and yoga...
Supermarket Man: Yoga?
Christiane: Yes, yoga camp here. What do you think about this?
Supermarket man: Please stop!
Christiane: Good!
Supermarket Man: Please stop if you want to know the truth!
Christiane: Good!
producer: He asks us to turn off the microphone. The supermarket owner is watching very carefully. Only when he sees that there is no red light left on him does he start talking to us. He introduces himself as Luca.
We talk with him about MISA, about Bivolaru, about the yoga camp. What we learn from Luke is quite interesting. So interesting that we really regret not being allowed to record on the microphone.
But we have Anca. At one point, Anca speaks to Luca in Romanian from the sidelines. And then Luca suddenly says "Ok, turn the microphone on again!" Supermarket man: We can have a good conversation.
filmmaker: Later, Anca told us that she provoked Luca a little. Such a powerful man with such a big dog, how could he be afraid to talk about the people at the yoga school?
Supermarket Man: I have no problem telling the truth. And don't scare me at MISA.
Christiane: How do you feel when there is a yoga camp here? How many people are there and where do they come from?
Supermarket man: Oh, like... There's 10,000, 15,000 people here. They come from Romania and other places in the world.
Christiane: And what do you think of this guru, Bivolaru?
director: Luca seems to think for a moment what to say. Then he tells us that yoga itself is a good thing.
Supermarket man: I think yoga in the world is good. It is about mind, soul, God. But here he's just...
achiever: But the sex thing is going too far for him.
Christiane: How do you know that?
The man from the supermarket: Ladies, because I have lived here for 42 years and I know everything that has touched this land of Costinești and I live in front of the camp about... 100 meters?
Supermarket man: 25 years ago, I pay. They go in, follow them.
Christiane: What did you see there?
The man in the supermarket: Porn.
Christiane: Porn?
Supermarket man: Yes, a girl with five boys, ten boys.
Christiane: Were they watching porn or filming porn?
Supermarket Man: No!...
Filmmaker: It's getting difficult with English here. Luca first wants to describe him to us by making signs with his hands. Then Anca helps us.
Supermarket man: What do you call this, it's a screen... what do you call this on the floor, like a desk...
Christiane: They had a huge TV or something, a screen?
The man in the supermarket: A floor like that where they used to do shows.
Anca: Oh, like a stage!
Supermarket Man: Stage, exactly!
Christiane: There was a stage at the back.
The man in the supermarket: They put a woman on stage there and she was having sex with five guys, ten guys. Or two girls and ten guys. And they are watching, everyone is watching. They masturbate.
filmmaker: That's how Luca remembers it, everything happened 25 years ago. We can't prove it, but it sounds familiar.
Dropouts told us similar stories.
filmmaker: We're going home, back to our hotel in Bucharest. Later that night, we let the experiences from Costinești sink in. We get to thinking. We always burst out laughing.
But what we are actually talking about here, about the many women who first just did yoga and then at some point they found themselves in this little house, what they lived about, is no laughing matter.
Nathalie, for example. She had the impression that most of the women in this villa were ready for only one thing: a meeting with Gregorian Bivolaru. Just like her.
Remember the form Nathalie had to fill out at the Villa in the beginning before she was allowed to actually enter?
Nathalie: Do you want to meet the guru? The only good answer is "YES", of course.
filmmaker: When Nathalie's time in Viluța comes to an end, there is a meeting with the women who organize Viluța. And suddenly they start talking about what it's like to meet your spiritual master.
Nathalie: That everything is really wonderful and that it is super important for our spiritual evolution.
And ... then they also talked about their experiences, of course. In the sense that it was absolutely... a change in their lives.
Filmmaker: Nathalie listens to all this. Before Viluță, in fact, he didn't like Bivolaru.
But now something has changed.
Even the few weeks at Vilută did not change the problems between her and Jasper. The other woman is still there. And Nathalie's jealousy is there, despite all the yoga and meditation.
Nathalie has the feeling that nothing she tries helps her.
Nathalie: It was very, very bad. It was very difficult for me.
filmmaker: Nathalie is desperate. She desperately wants to save her relationship. But how? What else can she do?
Nathalie searches and searches and searches and searches for a solution, a saving grace.
And when she hears that such an encounter with Bivolaru can apparently change everything in her life, that such an encounter can turn her into a tantric enlightened person, Nathalie thinks that maybe everything will be all right after all .
Nathalie: Because I was so sick of the world that I said I'm going there now. I will do it now.
And then I went there and said "Yeah, I know I specified next year, but I want to go now!"