https://open.spotify.com/episode/3YPfQbWLd2OEEqWLRU4Q3K
[producer] (0:00 - 0:58)
This episode was produced in Otatahi by Plains Media with support from New Zealand On Air.
Welcome to Decult Talks, the podcast series where we raise awareness, reduce stigma and offer support for those affected by cultic harm. We are an independent, volunteer-run charity committed to breaking the silence around high control groups and coercive dynamics. From expert interviews to survivor stories, we're here to inform, empower and connect.
The following session is from our first conference held in Otatahi Christchurch, Aotearoa, New Zealand in October 2024. For more resources and to support our work, visit decult.net where you can already register your interest for DECULT 2026. And now over to our presenters and panellists.
[male presenter] (1:00 - 1:32)
Here to talk about toxic tantra, surviving and suing MISA's yoga guru, Bec Sonkkila, a life coach and therapist in Melbourne. She testified in the police investigations in France that led directly to the arrest of MISA guru Gregorian Bivolaru last year. Rebecca has also participated in a German podcast and upcoming BBC documentary dedicated to the exposure of MISA as a criminal organisation. So to hear a little bit about this incredible story, please welcome Bec Sonkkila.
[Bec Sonkkila] (1:32 - 29:36)
Thank you. I am so delighted to be here. Hey, so one of the issues of speaking here today is that I am a witness in a case against Gregorian Bivolaru and his organisation MISA. Now a lot of people haven't heard of MISA, but that is because it runs under a bunch of different names. One of their ways of promoting themselves and growing is that they call themselves something different in every country. And even in the same country, in the same city, it's called something like ”Ecstatic”, ”Women's Collective”, whatever. It's Natha in Denmark and Sweden. It's Maha Siddha in India, Australia and Thailand and it's MISA in Romania, which is its origin country.
So in 2011, I was off the back of a divorce and I was a bit sad. I was pretty sad actually. And I just wanted to grow a bit as a person. I felt like ”there must be something more to this life”. And so I went out there having a look and I went to India and I discovered this pretty sexy organisation. I thought ” wow, this is cool!” These people are pro-women and they're pro-sensuality and pro-body comfort and they support sexuality without being too graphic about it and too grotesque about it. And I thought ” this is great!” Plus they've got all this like traditional, beautiful, deep wisdoms and quotes. And I thought ” oh, this is awesome!” And it's kind of like edgy and new and funky. And this is exactly what the planet needs.
It needs something like this. And I thought ” this is exactly what I'm looking!”, for because I don't want something too stuffy and old and boring because I don't have the patience and I don't want something that is all from the voice of a man. And I thought ” this is for me, this is pretty cool!”
Cut and now it's 2024. Gregorian Bivolaru was arrested in November, the day before my birthday, 28th of November, after writing letters, I've been writing letters for 10 years since 2013, emails and being ignored and not replied to and shamed and told to stop. So this has been the journey.
So how did that happen? How did I go from ” This is the best thing ever!” and telling everyone ”So great, so great! Come, come! You've never felt anything like it. It's so good!” to ” These people are seriously dangerous!”
Well, I didn't know, actually. And for a lot of years, I had absolutely no idea of the effect on me. What I understood was in my body that I was in control. Actually, there's a bit of discomfort here, but that's how things are in life. Not everything's comfortable all the time. Things are a bit tough., you've got to struggle, you've got to try, you want to do something extraordinary, you want to wake up, you want to realise the true nature of existence, you want to be fully happy, you have to work. Everyone knows discipline equals results put in to get out. Everyone knows that. Sure, it was a little bit hard, but I mean, I was okay, I thought. But what I could see when I looked around was other people were not okay. You're not okay. You're not okay. Me, I'm like having intense moments. It's beautiful and blissful. I'm feeling divine love that I'm feeling like crushed in the workload.
And then I'm struggling to kind of keep my businesses in life active. And I'm like going from ”I'll do a little bit for you” to two telephones running for them and nonstop emails and some days 14 hours a day, plus my own life.
And I realised that I was getting less and less life, but it would pass soon. And I was managing it.
I'm a high functioning, super disciplined, output orientated person. I deliver with excellence and focus. And I was not going to fail on my promise to the individuals in the organisation who'd asked me to do just a couple of things, just do a couple of things, just run a couple of little workshops.
But what I did see was the people around me were not good. And that is how it happened. I heard the women talk about what appeared to me to be sexual assault from my layman's ears. And what appeared to me to be coercion and what appeared to me to be unpaid labour that looked like slavery. And although I couldn't see any of that in my own realm, that took a lot of years and a lot of reading books and a lot of watching YouTube and a lot of talking to other people just to go ”Hey, maybe some of this happened to me! Oh, wow! No wonder I've been having nightmares! Oh, whoa! No wonder I've been having panic attacks! Oh, wow! No wonder I'm shaking and I'm crying for no reason, no reason that I could see!” So, yeah, the stories from the others.
And what I noticed was as these women slowly peeled away and turned a big 180 from total devotion to the organisation or some teacher, person in authority or to running away. Was what I heard in those stories was, was this kind of growing larger than normal, larger than average percentage of sexual assault to my ears. And although I wasn't an expert and although I travel with all the same social conditioning as everyone else, and in fact, that's been one of the hardest things to actually to get over my own social conditioning. I heard these women talk about their suffering and pain and I thought ” Oh, you're a bit dramatic, aren't you? Too much, isn't it? Come on!” Like, you know, we're all a bit, when we break up with someone. So I also put it aside, but how many people can you put aside? Like one? ”No, she's a bit of a nutter, a bit unstable!” Two? ”Well, she was a bit unstable too!”, but you know, three, four, five, I don't know. Where does the line drop?
And eventually the numbers grew and I was like ” Well, nothing's happening to me, kinda! It's pretty fine here relatively! So what they should say something, why should I say something?”
But what I realised was they can't say something. Not only do they not have the capacity to be stable in their psycho-emotional state, enough to speak from a position of power, by the time you're running from someone who's assaulted you or attacked you, you have no words left. It's years and years to get to the point where you can say something.
But I could say something. And so I did! And that's how it all began. It started out as some kind of conversation about a couple of women that had distressing situations that no longer turned up to classes. And it expanded from there to talking to other women in the organisation and hearing a larger than population average of women who worked in sex industry. And I thought: ”Wow, cool! Great! Love this edgy organisation! Aren't they pro-sex work? Isn't that great? Power to your sister! Pro-choice! Great! Sex work is real work. Go strip, go dance, go fiddle yourself on a video! I don't mind. No judgement. Great! Make the money, pay for your family!”
I mean, you know, some of these women that did places like Serbia, Croatia, you know, Belarus, Romania, where wages were not high. I spoke to a bunch of people in the organisation about it. I was like ” Oh, what about this sex work thing? Are the women happy? Is it like, you know, what's the story?” And I heard back, you know, from the official spokesperson of MISA, you know, that these women are choosing to do this. They choose this to do to support the organisation. And I was like ”What? What do you mean? They don't get the money?” And I thought ” Oh, that's revolutionary! But hey, who am I to judge? Let's not be judgmental. Hey, let's not make a stand when we don't have any data. So let's go check”.
What he said, what he said was ”Well, a lot of these women wouldn't have anything else to do in their life anyway. You know, they're probably going to be sex workers anyway. At least they're doing something for the benefit of mankind, you know, supporting Gregorian Bivolaru, who, he helped you, didn't he?”
No, no, he didn't help me either! But, um, so I went and checked and I asked the girls:
”Are you happy with what you're doing? Do you like it? Is it, is it working for you? How many, how long have you been doing that? And what did you do before?”
And what I found out is a lot of these women had university educations. They had professional jobs, accountant, legal secretary, doctor, nurse, all kinds of professions, real professions that they had stopped doing because someone recommended they work in the sex industry to increase their sensuality. And I mean, I agree working in the sex industry should increase your sensuality. You've got to learn some moves, eh? But, but why are you doing it for this guy? Like, what's the benefit of that?
And what I discovered was not much. What they told me was they were exhausted. They were pressured to do hours that they didn't want to do. They didn't feel like they could go home to their family when they wanted, and they were not allowed to tell anyone where they were. And I thought: ”Hang on a minute, sex work is a job where you get paid!” And I would think the whole benefit of sex work is the fact that you get to choose when you go to work. Didn't we see that in the nineties in that film, you know, Pretty Woman? ”I say who, I say when, I say where I say how much!” I mean, these women weren't saying any of those things and they certainly didn't know how to run a business.
So then I started to meet women who'd been doing it for over 20 years and their sole experience of life was basically living in this organization and working in the sex industry for them. And if they were paid, it was a pittance. Some were paid, some were not. Some got to take more or less money. It was different for everyone.
And that was very clever of him because then nobody could say ”oh, none of them get paid!”, because somebody gets paid, just somebody doesn't because they didn't want it or they didn't choose it. A very clever system! So this started to look more and more like sex slavery and not like sex work. And then all of the volunteer work started to look like slavery to me, to my layman's ears.
And so I started to send more letters and make more issues. And eventually I was expelled, one could say, in 2016. And thankfully so. I mean, I was expelled for no reason. There was no reason given, but the reason was obviously I would not be quiet about the sexual misconduct of a particular teacher who I ran into in Rishikesh, who I wrote letters about. And that letter, beautifully, was read out in a household of women by G.B. Gregorian Bivolaru, the head of the cult, this super powerful reincarnation of God or some such thing, to a bunch of women. And my letter was disassembled. And those girls spoke to other girls, spoke to other people in the organization. And I went from being this incredible, beneficial person who brought this amazing energy and potential to the organization to being someone who carried demons. And I got text messages that said ” You carry demons!”
A bunch of people stopped speaking to me. By that stage, I'd been in the organization a few years, and these people were quite close friends. And I was really deeply, deeply hurt by that. But it kind of gave me pause. I realized that I will never be quiet about the women who've been sexually assaulted, in my opinion, until the authorities take a look at the case and decide for themselves. Is this or is this not?
So that's a bit about what happened. But how did I make something happen? Or how did something happen?
Well, well, that was a crazy, crazy journey. I mean, I just started talking to people inside this organization, and I thought they were just pip walk. You know, you just talk to people like you would at any workplace and say ” Hey, man, have you seen this thing going on? Is that okay with you?” And thought the people would honestly speak back and we'd have some kind of resolution conversation and it would go somewhere. But it didn't.
I was told to speak to the higher chain of authority that they'd sort it out: ”Everything will be fine. Everything will be good!” I was told to ”Just mind your own business! You're way too focused on other people's issues. You should focus on your own!” I was told to... I was threatened in directly and indirect ways. It was pretty intense actually. So nothing kind of happened inside the organization.
Then I started to try and talk to the other like survivors, those who I met inside and those who were now out. And what I found was ” Wow, that was like a crazy waste of time!” It takes so many years and so much time for survivors to speak directly and cleanly about what's happening without being triggered by anything you say and everything that you do, that it was almost pointless talking to other survivors and also difficult because they would confuse the issue of what I'd seen happen with their sense of shame and blame. And in fact, direct the blame at me. Oh, well, just spout the same dogma from inside the organization. So it was pretty, pretty crazy times. I didn't really know where to go. And when I wrote to authorities, they didn't either reply or said things like ” Oh, well, it didn't happen here. So you need to speak to your local country” or ”didn't happen or whatever school you were involved with, organization base you're involved with, speak to them”. But they said:
”Well, the assault didn't happen here. It happened there. We don't know where that person is!”
And that was frustrating. I mean, the Finnish organization was one of my favourites. So I sent them an email around 2015 or 16, and then another one a couple of years later. And then a couple of years after that, I sent them a flaming email with my previous two emails attached saying ” Why have you not got that to me? Your actual organization is an anti-cult, anti-sectarian organization and I am talking to you about something that's happening directly in the centre of Helsinki, that your country has an Interpol arrest warrant out for the head off and you don't reply to my email! What is wrong with you?” They replied ” Oh, sorry about that! It must've got lost!” Yeah, lost! A lot of my emails got lost!
So, so let's recap. This is about suing MISA. And one of the reasons I don't have a PowerPoint here today is that as I put one together, I realized that I don't know what I'm allowed to put up on screen without clearing it with my lawyers. So because photos involve other people, and then by putting a photo up there, I'm directly saying directly about that individual person and because I'm actually like, I haven't just given testimony. I'm a witness in the case, I can talk about my direct experience, but I can't talk about the case. And, and happily so, because it's, it's just begun. And anything I say very specifically about the organization and my experiences in it might affect the testimony of other witnesses before they come forward. So it does feel kind of protective behind this thing, but also it's quite separatist, isn't it? Something, something a little wrong with that. So, so where to now?
There's a few years have gone by. I've been in this organization a while. Yeah. So I have this friend and I was speaking to them recently and they were in the organization when I was, and then they left the organization subsequently in the last few years. And one of my pet peeves is people who were in the organization, who were there, who saw my very public like breakdown and breakthrough, what I was fighting about, what I was, what I was expressing, who I was talking about specifically. They knew them and they knew what I was saying was true.
And yet they did nothing and they stepped away from me. And, and that was so painful. They wouldn't even engage in a conversation that was more than ”well, yeah, you know, people are people and they're kind of like that”. And I'm like ”I'm talking about rape!” Like ”how many women need to be raped for you to stand up and say something, do something, feel that this is an important natural issue here!”, rather than ”people will be people.”
So I was speaking to this friend recently and they were in the organization when I was and they left. And I've been speaking to them since my very beginning of the really intense distress and my breakdown. And I was like, how did it, and only recently has this person decided that the organization is toxic and has been sending me links and all sorts of things and people email and people to connect to. And I'm like ”How did it take you 10 years to kind of like you saw the whole thing? How did it take you 10 years to really feel my position and see what was happening?” And they said ”Well, I had to wait until my bucket was full of shit. I had to like work it out for myself. I had to really like test everything!” And they said: ”Thanks for filling my bucket with shit!” And I was like ”okay, great!” Well, at least they stayed in conversation, which is more than most people did. Most people just wouldn't stay in conversation. They turned away.
They said ”oh, it's too much!” They said they didn't want to talk about it. They said, uh, they said that I shouldn't talk about it, they said that I should back away.
And herein lies one of the, like one of my main takeaways of this whole thing, like shame and social conformity is such an enormous control mechanism that, when I would come to people with this upset, if I came with too much emotion, it was overwhelming. People would cling to themselves and say, like ”I don't have enough for you!”, like ”I have a thing going on too!”, which reminds me of a fantastic story. When GB was arrested, I just arrived in Portugal. I was going to see some friends in Lisbon and I found out on landing in Portugal. And I just, I just had tears flowing. I was shaking. I mean, this is, this is a person who's sexually assaulted, allegedly.
Thousands of women. There are thousands of women who live in sex slavery, in my opinion, unable to get out with their passports held and their driver's license held earning fines for not having their, I don't know, makeup done right or turning up two minutes late to a shift, who knows. You know, living in houses in bunk bed condition with someone who drove there with a blindfold and they don't even know where they are, I mean, thousands of women all over Europe, educated, intelligent women, and they don't even know they're in sex slavery or sex slavery, in my opinion, at least. Let's take care of our legals here.
Yeah. So a lot of people turn away from it. They can't talk about it because they don't have the words. So I was in Lisbon. I find out about this. I'm going to see my friend and it took me three hours to hire a car at the airport because I couldn't decide which car and how much and for how long and with what card. And I was just a total, like, I was just shaking and I was calling people and texting them and saying, can you believe it? Isn't this miraculous? I mean, just a few weeks before I'd been asked ”When do you think proceedings might happen?” And I'm like ” Look, this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. This is, I've been in this for the long haul. This is a occasional walk in a very ugly park. And I'm just going to keep going for that walk, but it's not my entire life!”
And then he's arrested. It was completely mind blowing, but I was pretty shaken up for reasons I can't really explain. Like the nervous system's kind of extraordinary. And then I said to a friend something and she, and I was quite distressed and she kind of recoiled and I said ”Oh, look, I'm really sorry, I'm pretty distressed right now because, you know, my abuser has just been arrested and I'm kind of in shock and maybe I'm not communicating very well!” And they said ” You know, I've got the same thing happening!” I said ” I'm sorry, excuse me!”
So you have someone that you have been trying to bring to justice for over 10 years has just been arrested. Did that happen to you today? So people's ability to empathize is extraordinarily minimal when it comes to this, like not just the experience of what it is and what happened there and how it happened, but just to empathize with the situation. And in general, a lot of survivors find it very difficult because like the behaviours are so generic that any normal behaviour can trigger a cascade of feeling the oppression come on.
But anyway, I would like to talk a little bit about the case. How did I organize myself? I just kept talking. I just kept writing letters. And now those letters that seemed worthless and useless and like nothing, they are all evidence and it's 10 years of diary entries. It's 10 years of letters to police in multiple countries.
It's 10 years of letters to women's sexual assault organizations in multiple countries. It's 10 years of letters to people inside the organization, so they can't say they did not know. And how about the organizing of the other survivors? Oh my golly, herding cats is not even, it's not even a description! There is paranoia, suspicion, aggression, distress, tears, blame, accusation, trauma cascades. Everybody's neurodiversity is like at the front and center. You know, people are just out of hand and it's not great, but everyone is trying. And the greater goal is to that somebody shows up. And one of the main things here is most of the people who are giving testimony and witnesses in the case are the people that the worst things didn't happen to. And that's been key for me. Like one of my fears of doing this at all was like, well, the worst stuff didn't happen to me. Well, it turns out once I realized what had happened, actually some pretty bad stuff did happen, but the worst stuff did not happen to me.
Like I didn't spend 24 years as a sex worker for the organization, for example, but because I was able to be articulate and cognizant most of the way through, even though I have trauma breakdowns and cascades and distress, I am able to verbalize in a way that other people are not. And that has been a major benefit. When I sat 17 hours with the court psychiatrist running through every worst event of my life and talking about in the first person, how that affected me and how I handled it. And then speaking first person about every major sexual event and breakup, and then the sexual assaults inside the cult and the worst experiences inside the cult from the first person, it helped me to be able to be articulate because I was not my most articulate in that situation.
It's extremely difficult and extremely challenging. Like when I sat seven hours with a magistrate in a top floor office in a fancy building with a translator, or when I checked myself out of hospital because I was the only one, the only one who would speak about MISA against that organization. I checked myself out of hospital, I flew to Paris, barely able to stand and I walked upstairs booked by some guy, when I told him I could barely even walk.
And I crawled my way up there on all fours and I shuffled my way down on my butt. And I got in a car and I sat for nine hours with a translator to the French police talking about who this organization was, what the damage they were doing is, and what risk they were to the government. And somehow that's what it takes. It takes showing up when you feel like you can't stand up.
And so he was arrested. Yay. And more people are arrested, which is great. And hopefully there's evidence so many years later about what happened. I mean, the only recommendation I have is write everything down because it was hard. I couldn't write everything down because it was so upsetting and it sounded so crazy. But even if it sounds crazy, write it all down. I did a BBC podcast, which is six part podcast. I decided not to do the, there's also a documentary video coming out. I decided not to be a part of that. But some other survivors are and I felt like the story is told. It's okay.
[Bec Sonkkila] (28:15) Do we have questions?
[question]: Outside of your own personal experience, was there literature or things that you looked into to help articulate yourself when advocating and trying to see change?
[Bec Sonkkila]: I read everything I could get my hands on. It was everything. I read, I pumped it in my head as fast as my head could take it, which isn't that fast when you're pretty traumatized. And the more you realize what's had, the more I realized what had happened to me and how distressed I was and why I was having nightmares and what these things were where I just get overwhelmed and shake or why I didn't want to get out of bed anymore or why I was hypervigilant as they call it or panic attacks, as they call it, or why I had this distress, cognitive dissonance or why I was dissociative and all these things that I didn't even have words for because I had a generally healthy life before, I ate well, exercised, normal things happened. I don't know. You know, when abnormal things happen, the nervous system responds and you need to understand that. But that's a whole education. I mean, I didn't, I didn't have a degree in trauma.
Yeah. Some years later I read a lot and it all helped, but definitely do not tell the authorities how to handle something. Don't do that. Just keep talking and keep talking and really isolate what the problem is. Like why do they want to listen?
[question] (29:36 - 29:49)
I was just wondering, what do you think might have contributed to the way that you didn't seem to be pulled into the lies or the narratives that the organisation was telling?
[Bec Sonkkila] (29:49 - 30:59)
Well, actually, I would say that's a misnomer of cults in general. Mostly people say something about a cult like, for example: ”Oh, you know, I saw it was happening, but I didn't really... you know, I mean, it didn't happen to me and, you know, it only happened to them.
And I don't know, you know, I saw it was happening, but I really liked the practices. I saw it was happening, but I really liked the parties. I just went to the parties. I saw it was happening, but you know, I just did my own thing and I didn't get involved in it!”
So mostly, including myself, I saw what was happening. I could see ”oh, you're just love bombing that person. Now that we know that word, you're just giving that person a giant ego boost because they like to think they're powerful. And you're telling them how powerful they are and how much power they have. So they do that for you”. So even though I saw that, I still continue to go to classes. I still continue to invest in the organization.
What I realized was that hypnosis works, whether you know, you're being hypnotized or not. That's how social control works. We know that we're being socially controlled, but we're still doing what we should do. And so I was still doing what I should do because I'm a decent member of society. That's what decent members societies do.
[producer] (31:02 - 31:40)
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