You are invited to an unique yoga retreat at “the villa”. When you arrive, it’s a grim constructing in Romania wherein girls cavort in micro-bikinis and drink one another’s urine after a mass orgy. You are summoned to fulfill a religious guru in Paris. When you arrive, a girl wraps your sim card in tin foil and drives you to the suburbs. Later you might be taken to a dingy flat the place you might be anticipated to have hours-long sex with an aged man whom you will need to “transfigure” into a much less undesirable entity.
If this had been a dream, you’d in all probability get up disturbed by the weirdness of your unconscious. But for a quantity of girls, this surreally terrifying chain of occasions was no nightmare. While the finer particulars of Twisted Yoga’s story could also be intriguingly wild, the broader image is infuriating and unhappy.
The first particular person we meet is Ashleigh, a smiley Australian with a penchant for the choice (ghosts, astrology, numerology). She strikes to London in her 20s and reconnects with a pal who recommends a yoga studio. It specialises in a particular type: tantra. Yes, the exact same observe that for a sure technology will sadly all the time call to mind Sting’s Nineteen Nineties bedroom-based revelations. But tantra isn’t merely about pleasure, it additionally includes the communion of religious data, an “extreme expansion of the field of consciousness” so mysterious it can’t be articulated by any of the as soon as devoted followers right here.
The pursuit of this information takes Ashleigh to the aforementioned villa and later into the orbit of Gregorian Bivolaru, a Romanian man known as “the guru” by her yoga group. After an invite to fulfill him comes via the studio’s receptionist, she travels overseas, agreeing to maintain her whereabouts secret from family and friends. Once there, she refuses to have sex with the septuagenarian. In response, she is advised she’s being “manipulated by demons” who don’t need her to “receive divine power”. This is when Ashleigh discovers tantra was by no means an train in self-improvement however a chance for individuals to use her.
Yet a number of girls interviewed right here – some of whom attended totally different, loosely affiliated yoga studios – did participate within the so-called “sexual initiation” with Bivolaru. One describes being subsequently transported to Prague to do shifts – for no pay – on a camgirl web site. She is advised she is saving her purchasers’ souls by serving to them connect with a larger sexual power.
By now you could end up screaming in incredulity: the lies these girls had been fed had been ridiculously clear. But beneath the barrage of purple flags and alarm bells is a extra advanced psychological panorama that director Rowan Deacon (Netflix’s Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story) maps out over this three-part collection. The girls who’re drawn to tantra are in search of steerage and group, however they’re additionally making an attempt to be higher individuals, making reference to evolution and “next steps” of their improvement. It is deeply ironic that for all of the speak of “love” and “auras”, they ended up with the identical chilly, calculating capitalism that has lengthy performed on girls’s wishes to enhance themselves bodily and morally.
Deacon by no means makes her topics look silly – quite the opposite, all of them appear articulate and astute. But they’ve fallen into a intelligent lure, and yoga’s longstanding affiliation with virtuosity is essential to the way it works. The strategies that tantra will basically change you could sound welcome, however actually it means by no means trusting your instincts for self-preservation. Giving weight to your doubts means you stand to lose your “salvation”, as Miranda from Oxford places it. Another purpose to not query your new overlord.
Bivolaru, we finally uncover, is a family title in Romania. He is infamous for failing to show as much as court docket to reply to expenses together with “sexual corruption, trafficking of minors, engaging in sexual relations with minors and attempted illegal border crossings” within the 2000s. He was later found in Sweden, the place he was granted asylum after claiming he was being persecuted for his beliefs (yoga was genuinely banned for a interval in Romania), however in 2013 was convicted in absentia of sex with a minor. Then, in 2023 Bivolaru was arrested on new expenses together with rape, kidnapping and human trafficking in France – which has unusually stringent anti-cult legal guidelines – the place he stays in custody. He denies all expenses towards him.
In the meantime, these studios are nonetheless up and working and deny any affiliation with the crimes talked about on this programme; after I Google “tantric yoga”, one of the primary outcomes is the London yoga studio Ashleigh attended. That alone is chilling. We can solely hope this fascinating documentary will give Bivolaru a reassuring diploma of infamy exterior his homeland.
