Transcript of Soul Hunter - Toxic Tantra The Man in the Shadow
Seelenfänger – Toxic Tantra – Bonus: Der Mann im Schatten
Translation
Soul Hunter - Toxic Tantra - Bonus: The Man in the Shadow
Katja Paysen Petersen:
This is a bonus episode from the fourth season of the show Soul Hunters, Toxic Tantra. If you haven't listened to the season yet, you might want to start with the first episode, Yoga for Beginners. You can find it here, in this feed.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
An isolated farm in the countryside near Copenhagen, in the winter of 2007.
Lara remembers her first tantra retreat.
Lara:
It was like an old farm, a farm, but not a super luxurious romantic farm, but more like an agricultural farm. Maybe cows lived here or had lived there once.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Here, in the desolate barn, the wind whistles through the cracks.
Lara:
We all sat on the floor, with pillows at most, with blankets, in the full draft.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Together with Lara, there are about 80 people in the room, men and women, she says. They speak German, Swedish, Danish, English, French and Romanian. They come from schools of the ATMAN yoga movement. Lara knows almost no one here, but many are her age, around 20 years old.
Lara:
Mostly the women were young, a few older men.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara looks out the window. It's getting dark outside. The day has been long, full of meditation and yoga exercises. She already knows most of them from her classes at the German Academy for Traditional Yoga in Berlin. But Lara has a feeling that there might be something new in tonight's session. Something new. A tantric secret? A new tool for moving further on the path to spiritual enlightenment?
Lara:
These Unlock Next Levels were always things that you didn't know in advance, what was coming next? And it was always a surprise package, we were trained a little bit to always be in situations where we couldn't know in advance exactly what was going to happen.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
There is silence in the hall. Then a faint murmur passes through the crowd. And now Lara sees him.
Lara:
Casual, so authoritative and casual. A tall man, too.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara knows this man from movies, books, workshops, and lectures. His name is Mihai Stoian.
Lara:
So you know when people sit somewhere with a completely natural attitude, with: My place is here, on a pedestal? So, I'm sitting here and I don't even have to sit nicely for him to take me seriously, but I'm sitting there casually because I'm completely aware that I'm top notch here, so to speak, I I'm at the top of the chain, like that. A completely unquestionable authority.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Mihai Stoian is a celebrity in the ATMAN world, because he is almost as important as the founder of the yoga movement itself, like Gregorian Bivolaru or Grieg, as they call him.
Mihai Stoian was at the time one of the coordinators of the Danish yoga school NATHA and is considered a close confidant of Bivolaru. Some even say he is his right-hand man.
Lara:
I always called him the little king.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
And now it's here, at Lara's tantra retreat.
Lara:
The other teachers were already sitting slightly up, but for Stoian there was a sofa. A very old one, like a chaise longue or something like that, you would say, and he was sitting on it, like, very regal.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
His black hair is pulled back into a ponytail. He looks well-groomed. He smiles.
Lara finds him charismatic.
Lara:
Exactly, so red clothes, so clothes that are a bit... like you're describing the lover in the tasteless romantic books, who wears velvet and silk things with a lot of red.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Mihai Stoian talks to his students about tantra, about masculine and feminine energies, about a yogic state of mind. This is how Lara remembers it.
Lara:
So he has this whole range of a good speaker, someone who can convey things well, maybe with a joke sometimes and then again seriously, with intense looks, not so creepy, but like that, you say to yourself, ah yeah right, I I'm captivated too, I can't even tear myself away from here and somehow an absolute concentration.
And he did it very well. He completely mesmerized us all.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Stoian talks and talks and then the moment arrived.
Lara:
It was called, in a way, now it begins, exactly, and it was called an initiation. It was an initiation practice.
And then it was said that, so to speak, now there is an initiation practice, either you get out or you stay.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Unlock next level.
Lara:
Most of the people, I don't know if there were maybe two, three people who came out, maybe women who were on their periods or something like that. There was always some, like, reason in the story, which meant that most of the people stayed in the room.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Then someone closes the doors and Lara, she's standing inside.
Lara:
The doors were closed. I don't think they were locked, but it was clear that no one was allowed to leave, because that meant, so to speak, that the energy had to be kept in the room, that it couldn't be interrupted by coming in or going out. And you were either in or out.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
This is the Soul Hunter, Toxic Tantra show. A podcast produced by Christiane Hawranek Hawranek and me, Katja Paysen Petersen.
Episode nine, The Man in the Shadow.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
In this episode, we'll tell you exactly what Lara experienced with Mihai Stoian at the tantra retreat in Denmark. We meet her in Berlin, in November 2024, on a cold and windy day.
We go together to the ARD studio in the capital. There we can talk undisturbed.
You can hear her real voice in this podcast, but we should change her first name. So we'll call her Lara.
We brought cookies, but Lara didn't touch them for a while. We can tell she's tense.
She wants to give us some background on her time at yoga school. That's why she contacted us, because she thought, hey, there's something I really need to tell you. Something you haven't included in your podcast yet.
But we have to take it slow.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara takes out her mobile phone and shows us photos from back in 2006, when she was 20 years old and doing yoga and tantra at the German Traditional Yoga Academy in Berlin, together with a very close friend.
We see the friends from back then and Lara at a young age, eyes closed, smiling at the kitchen table in their shared apartment. Her blonde hair was shorter back then. She wore it loose and she didn't wear glasses, like she does today.
Lara:
We were just kids, that's all. We were very young and, yes, naive. I was definitely naive.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara listened to our podcast. She heard from us about the arrest of Gregorian Bivolaru near Paris, about the investigations against him for human trafficking, rape and kidnapping. She heard about women who say they were invited to Bivolaru by their yoga teachers for a secret meeting, for sex, which, in retrospect, they consider abuse. She was surprised by the statements of the German Academy of Traditional Yoga, DAtY for short, her former school, which told us in the podcast that Bivolaru was not the guru of the yoga school and that this school doesn't know that female students were taken to Paris to meet Bivolaru for an initiation. Lara wonders how the school could not know that so many women traveled to meet Bivolaru.
Lara tells us what it was like for her in Berlin in 2006.
Lara:
Grieg's photographs were ubiquitous at school back then. They were on every altar and hung on many walls.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Altars. Lara remembers them being in the yogis' rooms in the ashram, but also in the school's practice room. Small tables with figures on them. Angels, Buddha, Hindu gods and photos of Bivolaru in the center of the altar.
Lara:
There were these pictures of him as a middle-aged man, with long hair, with seventies-style glasses, which he always wore, and, yes, with a younger version of Grieg always hanging there.And when I debuted there, they were definitely in the practice room.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
No one called Bivolaru a Guru, but he was openly revered as the head of the school, Lara says. Although he was already under investigation in Romania at the time for having sexual relations with a minor.
Lara also remembers how she was invited to visit him herself, through a yoga teacher at school.
Lara:
He told me, I have good news for you, you are allowed to go to Grieg.
And then she briefly explained what it was like, that you would be traveling by car and not alone, but that other guests would be traveling with you. And the details about the actual trip would come later. And then it was like, yeah, I'm sure you want to, you're probably looking forward to it. And I was like, ah, yeah, okay, I can think about that for a moment.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara didn't go to him in 2006, but other women have been going for decades. Women from many countries around the world.
According to media reports, officers from a special police unit followed and investigated his apartment in 2023, and he is said to have sometimes received between five and ten women a week.
Now, as we sit down with Lara in the studio in the capital, in the fall of 2024, of course we have to talk about him first. And of course, we also want to tell you what has happened to him and the school since his arrest.
Gregorian Bivolaru remains in custody in a French prison. The investigation continues.
The presumption of innocence still applies to the charges against him, including human trafficking, kidnapping and rape.
I learned that Berlin is also investigating the issue of human trafficking. Several German yoga students have filed complaints. Now, at the end of 2024, it is still unclear when and if there will be a trial against the guru. I have made some efforts to contact the French investigators.
No way, they are quite discreet at the moment. We also tried again with Gregorian Bivolaru through his lawyer. No answer. But we have an acquaintance at the Liberation newspaper in Paris. We talk to him from time to time about the case.
He managed to obtain the transcripts of the hearings and published excerpts from them. Gregorian Bivolaru's hearings by French investigators. Bivolaru first told the officers who he was and, above all, what he could do.
The narrator reading Gregorian Bivolaru's statement:
I have a paranormal gift that can be used to act like a magnet. I can deflect the needles of a compass with just my hands.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
It looks familiar to me somehow.
But Bivolaru told the investigators even more about himself. That he has enemies, just as Jesus had enemies. That's what happens with an unusual being like him.
Narrator reading Gregorian Bivolaru's statement:
I am the channel of the divine energy of love.
People ask me to demonstrate their state of joy, happiness or other emotions. There are hundreds of divine attributes that I can amplify. It's like a radio.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
But he also says that the many women who visited him in Paris simply asked for his advice.
Narrator reading Gregorian Bivolaru's statement:
They came to talk about yoga and in some cases, love emerged, so we had sex.
Of course, only if the love was mutual.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
For many of the former followers I spoke to, the most important thing about Bivolaru at this point is that he can no longer receive women. He is in prison, at least until his trial. He could receive 30 years in prison.
So is this the end of the abuses at ATMAN? The end of this large international umbrella organization that includes yoga schools from 29 countries? Will the entire movement collapse with Bivolaru in prison?
These are the kinds of questions you asked us again and again after Toxic Tantra was published.
And that brings us to Lara. Lara, who contacted us because she says, folks, it's not just Gregorian Bivolaru in this ATMAN system.
There are other people. Those who kept the school running. People like Mihai Stoian.
Lara: He really had to be the center of attention. He must have been, well, today you would say he was some kind of "Manplainer" or something like that.
So someone who had this, this attitude of I'll teach you, I'll bring you closer to the doctrine, which he accomplished very well and for me he was also a didactic figure who was much more direct than what you might imagine now in the case of Grieg.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Mihai Stoian was one of the directors of ATMAN until the end of 2023. He was mainly active in Scandinavia, where he also trained entire cohorts of yoga teachers. In the winter of 2007, he held sessions at Lara's tantra retreat. Lara also received a special invitation.
Lara:
Yeah, wouldn't you like to go there? So, I think it's something for you. It's something really special, I'm sure it'll be really cool. I can totally picture you there.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
That's what her yoga teacher at DAtY in Berlin told her, Lara remembers.
She and her close friend, go to Copenhagen, to the school of our Danish friends, it will do you good. You will make spiritual progress there. The two young women realize that they must go there, together. The problem is that this retreat at NATHA, the name of the yoga movement in Denmark, is completely different from what Lara knows from the school in Berlin. It is not in the center of Copenhagen, no, it is somewhere in the countryside, in the middle of nowhere.
Lara still remembers how they both stood in front of the campus.
Lara:
I arrived in the darkness and at that moment I was so overwhelmed.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
There is a large meadow, Lara recognizes in the darkness, and a few classical buildings with courtyards. Lara also sees that everything here is very simple, bare, unkempt, not at all the banal cliché of a fancy pansy tantric retreat.
Lara suddenly feels different.
Lara:
Yeah, because I also... Like, I don't have a driver's license or anything. So I couldn't just steal a car and drive off or anything like that, but I'm in such a... I can't easily drive off on my own.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
But there is also her friend. She seems confident. The two shoulder their bags and enter a house where there is light.
Lara:
There was definitely a reception table, a counter, a kind of speakers' stand. Where we were greeted, people were being registered and their names were being checked, so to speak. I think there were a lot of people that we didn't even know. So it was just the two of us and a bunch of strangers.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Okay, take a deep breath.
Lara:
Yes, goodbye. Because I didn't know what to expect. I knew, well, what I knew was that there would be tantra practices, and I also realized that there was a sexual element to it. I had a brief moment where I wondered if it wasn't a stupid idea to come here as a young woman.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara remembers the conversation with her yoga teacher in Berlin, at DAtY.
It will be great, she said. Just the right thing for you. So it will be great now, for sure. The two of them are settling down.
Lara:
And it was like, yeah, okay, it's dark, the house, it's over here, the women's rooms are over there, let's spread out the air mattress somewhere like that, find a place to sleep, you can relieve yourself there, that's it .
Tomorrow morning we wake up and start.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
The air mattress Lara sleeps on that night is uncomfortable. She is cold and can't sleep because her mind is racing.
Lara:
Did I make a good decision now, yes or no? Actually, I can't really go back.
The fact that I'm scared here and maybe I want to leave could be a sign of my immaturity and I want to develop myself spiritually here, so to speak, to be mature and ready for this challenge that's being offered to me here and then of course there's this dilemma. So this is where the logic breaks down a little bit, because you're saying that this fear that you have is actually a sign of immaturity in this logic.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
The next day is a bit like DAtY in Berlin, with meditations and yoga exercises. But then comes this evening session and Mihai Stoian, Bivolaru's confidant, the man in the red velvet clothes, the director of ATMAN, is now sitting there on the lounge chair.
Lara:
Then, there was an initiation practice. Now, either you leave or you stay.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara stays inside. The doors are closed. What does Stoian plan to do now? What tantric secret is about to be revealed to you?
Lara:
Then I meditated. Then I just remember standing there, so to speak, and then there would be a special initiation, so to speak.
Yes, it was a lingam massage.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lingam massage?
Lara:
An erotic massage in which women massage men's penises, collectively in this huge room.
So I felt like I was alone in the room, surrounded by a bunch of people I didn't know who were like, yeah, okay, here we are doing a lingam massage and forming pairs somehow.
But there wasn't really much movement in the room, it was just us sitting there looking at each other, yeah, okay. And then randomly like that, you turn around and then you're in this position, you know, like in school back then. Something like, your practice partner is now..., like that.
So, not at all in the sense of consensus, in the sense of who I feel comfortable with, who I might also feel the need to practice this with or...
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Everyone else in the room seems to have no problem with this selection process. Soon, everyone has a practical partner, except for Lara, who is still single.
Lara:
They probably saw that I was completely shocked, disoriented, and I thought, ah, but I don't know, nor do I want to.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
No one blames her for that.
Lara:
No, it's okay, just stay there, you can stay here, like this, stay next to Stoian. He - like this: stay in energy and meditate like this all the time. But I wasn't allowed to leave the room.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
If someone leaves now, they say, then the energies can also leave the room.
So Lara does what she was advised to do.
She sits down next to Stoian. He nods briefly and then speaks. Lara remembers giving instructions to the participants.
Lara:
The men lie down and undress and then the women were told, so the women now have the function here, so to speak, yes, to practice this lingam massage.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
In the dim light, Lara sees about forty men undressing in the room, women bending over them. She hears Stoian continuing to speak.
Lara:
What state are you in? Why do you say "thinking" and try to raise your energy level?
And then it begins. Then I stood there and looked at this sea of people giving each other a penis massage like this.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Mihai Stoian, looking just like Lara at the sea of women and men.
Lara:
It was incredible. A whole room of people at once, not just you and me, but a whole room...
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Stoian seems satisfied.
Lara:
And then I remember I got a headache... I have migraines.
Not that bad, but sometimes when I'm in situations that are so stressful or beforehand, my whole body tenses up and then I start to... I remember sitting there and I got a migraine.
I didn't really want to be there. I was shocked and I didn't really want to be there and I just didn't want to, it was like an overload in the system. I was hoping it would end at some point.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
After a good half hour, which seems much longer to Lara, the massage ends. There is a short meditation for everyone to channel their energies, then the doors are opened.
Lara:
I just remember walking out of the room at one point, so everything seemed so normal, like nothing had happened or you were just doing a normal standard meditation, and then I just remember it was like a movie, like the brain was really overwhelmed.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara still remembers what bothered her when she was twenty.
Lara:
That's right, I wasn't quite ready to do that. It was a little embarrassing for me, wasn't it? Not to have really performed in that sense.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
She follows the logic of the yoga school. She uses for herself the argument that always appears when she has doubts about certain methods, certain practices in the school.
You're not ready yet, you'll understand.
And now she realizes that it's all her fault that she couldn't massage someone else's penis, it's all her fault.
It's obvious that some of the yogis at the retreat can empathize with her, because right after the massage they come up to her, smile sympathetically, and say, "Don't worry, it's okay."
You will discover this within yourself, like this.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
That night, Lara lies sleepless again on her air mattress.
Lara:
Would it be the right time to leave or drive, and then I wondered more how I should do this, I don't know, I have no idea, and then I said to myself: "Yeah, come on, you'll manage somehow the next day too."
Katja Paysen Petersen:
For the next evening session with Mihai Stoian, he is making plans.
Lara:
This time do it.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
She wants to prove to herself that she is spiritually prepared and:
Lara:
Because I wanted to be a part of it. So, I think it's as simple as that, I would say, yes, I wanted to participate, to be a part of it, not to fail.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
So, the next evening. Lara is back in the main hall. She's dressed up, heavily made up, and wearing a blouse with a low neckline.
Lara:
The announcement before was that we, women, should dress beautifully, femininely.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Another warm-up session with meditation. Stoian enters again.
Lara:
Again the couch. Again the Super Special initiation ritual in the gym, so outside or inside.
Stay in the room, diffused light, a little candlelight.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara stays inside. The doors are closed. Now the women must form a star-shaped circle, shoulder to shoulder.
Lara:
And there were men around us.
And by chance, so to speak, who was next to you.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
So women are now practically surrounded by men.
Lara:
And the idea was that we women would generate a special energy through meditation, and the men would provide us with a protective space with their masculine power. And then we would lie down, and the men, we were all dressed, would lie down on our laps. So I lay down, and my man lay down face up, so to speak, here, like he was lying between my legs, like this.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara tells us that the goal is for men to receive sacred energy from women. Shakti energy, a kind of blessing.
Lara:
The men then followed one another. That means I did several rounds with different men. You know what I mean?
We sit like women... like in the game of "Musical Chairs."
Christiane Hawranek:
It's just that they were in your lap....
Lara:
Yes, I was relieved because I thought I could do this. It's really weird and I was a little excited, but I have to really focus. You have work to do.
You were just put to the test and you did it all the time, like in sports, no, I wasn't afraid I was going to fail, but it was really more like, thank God it's not a lingam massage, like that, but for now, we can stay dressed, everything is fine. Relaxation.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Many of you told us after the launch of our podcast that you found it so disgusting that so many women went to Bivolaru and had sex with him. So cruel that they agreed. And you told us that you couldn't understand why.
What Lara told us was based on the same principle. Lara pushed her personal boundaries. She did what she would never have done otherwise, she held strangers in her lap. And in the end she was even relieved because she realized that she would have gone all the way with a lingam massage. Because she had been manipulated into it.
Because he wanted to be part of the group.
Lara:
The question is: how benevolent is it all when so much of your being, your spiritual practice, your identity, what is reflected in your environment, is ultimately built on this?
Katja Paysen Petersen:
That's it. That's how the system works. That's why so many women have overstepped their bounds.
In the winter of 2007, Lara doesn't realize that Mihai Stoian has a stage name: Paul Diamond. The yoga movement star is also a porn actor.
Christiane Hawranek and I were sent videos of him. And when Lara told us about this farm in Copenhagen, where her yoga retreat was located, when she described it to us, it clicked with us.
Lara:
I'm letting it go to this point, because if tomorrow...
Christiane Hawranek:
Then let's take a quick look together.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
We're going to show Lara clips from one of the porn movies, Eve's Awakening.
Lara:
This is the room. This is the big hall. This is it.
Yes.
Okay, wow. But that was cool.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
In the film, Lara recognizes the barn from back then, the one with the lingam massage. And she sees how NATHA or MISA followers do a kind of sacred tantric sex with each other there. In the place where Lara crossed her limits in 2007.
Lara:
Oh my God. No.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Have the women who star in these films, women from school, also overstepped their bounds?
Officials at the MISA yoga school call porn films educational erotic films, even in an interview with us.
In an interview with us in early 2024, the spokesperson stated that these were made with the aim of teaching others how to make love and what spiritual relationships between men and women are like.
In the Making of a film that NATHA temporarily distributed, The Magic Passage, Mihai Stoian says:
The narrator, reading Mihai Stoian's statement:
We never felt like sex dolls on set. When you've done a movie like that, you feel elevated and you want to do another one. You feel richer.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
An actress who Stoian has sex with in the film also comments in the Making of and talks about how special it was to work with him.
The narrator, reading the actress' statement:
You provoked me.
My life has completely changed.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
A powerful message.
Lara also realized that Mihai Stoian was perceived as the "lover" in the yoga school. That many women slept with him and that many wanted to sleep with him because of who he was.
Lara:
What I see in Stoian, what annoys me so much about the system there, is that it was like a kind of shadow, underground economy.
On the one hand, you have this whole scenario around Grieg and the fact that he was being supplied with women in secret. And at the same time, you had this system in Denmark where it wasn't supposed to happen in secret. That's because there was a story at school... a story that it's just the best and the greatest and the most honourable thing for women to be allowed to sleep with someone like Stoian. That's the framework.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
A few months after the tantra retreat, Lara travels to Denmark again.
She wants to visit her friend there. She has moved to an ashram in Copenhagen.
Lara sees that several women live in the same apartment, women from northern Europe, from Denmark, Sweden and Finland, she remembers.
And then he sees another ashram, one only for Romanian women, and it's obvious that they don't have the money to live decently.
Lara:
We are in this apartment and Romanian women live in a really quite small apartment, a lot of women in a really small apartment, it is unhygienic, but not because they make it unhygienic, but because you have no chance of keeping it even remotely hygienic , because you have everywhere... I felt like I was in a three-room apartment, I don't know how big the apartment was, but I had the feeling that there were fifteen women.
I'm probably exaggerating, but... There's laundry everywhere, of course, and you have the bathroom full of cosmetics and stuff, and they were... they were all super nice, they really made an effort, but are these living conditions?
And then in Denmark, in Copenhagen, for example, it was no secret that there was a tantric massage studio in Copenhagen. And that women, especially Romanian women, would go there to have tantric massage to develop their Shakti energy.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
Lara had never been to this tantra temple herself. She didn't want to go there.
But we know that it is still active, that it was founded by teachers from the NATHA school.
We tried to talk to someone who was there. And we found her, a woman. She doesn't want her voice to appear on this podcast, but she told us that she was a student at NATHA. During this time she participated in women's groups, Shakti groups.
These were also led by Mihai's wife. In these groups they learned how to be perfect Shakti and that they were allowed to pass this on.
So they offered tantra massages to paying customers at the Tantra Temple in Copenhagen.
For a massage, she says, she only received a small portion of the money, even though clients paid much more. She suspects that most of the revenue went to people at NATHA.
The NATHA Yoga School did not respond to our question regarding this assumption. Other former ATMAN Yoga students who worked as camgirls or strippers gave us similar accounts regarding the principle of karma yoga. Of course, we also asked the Tantra Temple about the truth behind karma yoga.
Christiane Hawranek has the response email in front of her.
Christiane Hawranek:
Let me translate it for you.
Dear Christiane Hawranek, due to the ongoing investigation, I have received legal advice not to answer questions.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
The investigations against Gregorian Bivolaru in France have wide repercussions, even in Denmark.
Here, we learn from the Danish police, house searches are taking place in two NATHA headquarters, in October 2024. French police are also on site.
And the investigations are also expanding to Georgia. Here, on the border with Turkey, police arrested a couple at the end of summer 2024 who, according to the press, were on vacation in this country. It was the Stoian couple, Mihai and his wife Adina. They are accused of kidnapping, rape and human trafficking. The presumption of innocence applies.
We have a few questions for them. We're contacting their lawyer. Nothing.
But we receive correspondence from Denmark, from NATHA. Of course, we also asked them for answers about the ongoing investigations and the role of Mihai Stoian, whom they are defending.
They say the arrest was unfair.
So I'm not answering any questions, but I'm talking about heated gossip and slander, and NATHA is not involved in illegal activities.
I quote: "It is also important to note that NATHA is neither responsible nor accountable for the private lives of its staff, students, volunteers and teachers." NATHA also reserves the right to take legal action against me and Bayerischer Rundfunk for any statements that violate German and/or international defamation law. Is NATHA trying to intimidate us here?
We speak to Lara again. She is pleased that Stoian is now also in custody. For her, it is important that those who ensured the functioning of the system are also held accountable.
Lara:
In the shadow of Grieg, who is a bit dubious and so on... In my opinion, they took advantage of that.
So yes, Stoian would have definitely recognized Grieg as the head teacher and so on, but I think it was also practical for him to have someone who was even more dubious than you, because that always gave you the opportunity within the system to give this appearance of: everything is great and good here.
Katja Paysen Petersen:
So here we are now, in December 2024, a year after the arrest of Gregorian Bivolaru and a few months after the arrest of Mihai Stoian.
Yoga schools in 29 countries are currently part of the international yoga umbrella organization ATMAN. In Germany, the German Academy for Traditional Yoga currently has branches in 8 cities. Courses are still ongoing.
NATHA is currently planning a New Year's retreat for couples in Denmark, under the motto of rekindling the flame of love.
Many yoga teachers from ATMAN, trained by trainers like Mihai Stoian, continue to follow him and Gregorian Bivolaru's teachings.
In fact, shortly after Lara received the offer to meet Bivolaru, she terminated her membership in the school. Her friend from that time is still active in the yoga school. The two are no longer in contact.
This was the Shadow Man. A bonus episode of Seelenfänger, Toxic Tantra. You can find all episodes in the ARD Audiothek. If you like this podcast, click subscribe, write a comment and give us a few stars or recommend it to your friends. If you want to leave a cult yourself or help others do so, we have a list of counseling centers and help offers for you.
I've put the link in the show notes. You can also find more information about this episode there.
Seelenfänger Toxic Tantra is a podcast by me, Katja Paysen Petersen and Christiane Hawranek. Thanks to Sabrina Gerstmeier. Graphic design, Anna Hunger.