World Of Secrets - The Bad Guru: 2. The Technique

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Miranda joins thousands of the guru Gregorian Bivolaru’s followers from around the world at a yoga festival in a Romanian seaside resort. It’s a two week-long holiday and her food and accommodation is free. But is she being drawn into something darker? This episode contains explicit sexual content. Host: Cat McShane Producers: Emma Weatherill and Cat McShane Sound design: Melvin Rickarby Production Coordinator: Juliette Harvey Unit Manager: Lucy Bannister Executive Producer: Innes Bowen Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. You're about to listen to the latest series of World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. Episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds. This episode contains explicit sexual content. They said, you know, we're going to keep everyone's passport and when you leave, you get it back. Miranda's an English teacher from Oxfordshire.

She's standing at a reception desk at a holiday complex in a Romanian seaside town. She hands her passport over and then the receptionist tells her... You're also not allowed to use your phone inside. You could only take your phone when you left. Miranda says the woman behind the reception desk pulls out a Bible and it's as if they're in a courtroom rather than a holiday resort. Placing my hand on the Bible and reading out the words that were given to me on a piece of paper at the time,

vowing that I wouldn't tell anyone about what happened inside this villa. And that if I did, then I would face the spiritual and health consequences of my demonic action. What is going to happen at this villa to warrant such a vow? This is World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. Season 6, a BBC Radio 4 investigation. I'm Kat McShane.

Episode 2, The Technique. It's summer 2018 when Miranda arrives at the Black Sea Holiday Resort of Kostinest in southeast Romania. She's here for a two-week stay at a yoga festival. And the reason she doesn't immediately turn back when asked to give up her phone and swear on the Bible is the event has been recommended by one of the yoga teachers at a place she's been attending for the last few months, Tara Yoga Centre in London. Miranda's had a few misgivings about Tara. Some of the teachers have pushed her to interact with other members

in a sexual way that doesn't always feel comfortable. But she tells herself... Whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me at the time and inappropriate and hyper-sexualised, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. And on the whole, attending classes has been a really positive experience. It felt amazing.

In a city where it's easy to feel lost, Miranda thought that in this very cool central London yoga centre, she'd found her tribe. It was a friendly and community-minded place. All of these nice, smiley, shiny, happy, good-looking people. And there was this sense that these people cared and that they had this love and affection for you. Miranda's mum, Penny, has her misgivings about the yoga movement, but she keeps her thoughts to herself.

She doesn't ask questions when her daughter, then in her early 30s, gives her only vague details about her trip to Romania. As a parent, you ask your grown-up offspring what they're doing, but you don't expect them to give you chapter and verse, and you sort of leave a space in the conversation for them to tell you if they want to tell you more and if they don't that's fine you move on to the next thing. And besides in Romania Miranda won't be on her own she'll be among her new community. I knew that my teachers were all going and they had told me that a lot of wonderful spiritual

things happened there that it was at the seaside. It came highly recommended. The camp is run by MISA. It is the Romanian affiliate of a UK-registered organisation called Atman, the International Federation of Yoga and Meditation. Tara Yoga Centre in London is also an Atman affiliate. Its belief system is eclectic. Indian spiritual teachings, astrology, Christianity,

like the swearing of a vow on the Bible. And like other schools in the Atman Federation, it practices what's called tantric yoga, a form of yoga that promotes the use of sexual energy in spiritual practices. Now that Miranda is finally inside the Romanian holiday complex, she takes in her surroundings. Bunk beds, a hall for yoga.

She's staying in a female-only villa for the festival. The men are staying elsewhere. The atmosphere in the women's half of the compound is great. We've used sound effects to help you picture the scene. There was this sense of it being kind of a girl's holiday. There were a lot of people around, probably at least 150 women there, if not more. It made me feel part of something international and really pretty huge.

It's 25 degrees outside as Miranda explores the rest of the site. Up to 6,000 people have descended on this Black Sea tourist resort for the yoga festival. In the centre of the complex, there's a huge marquee which is pumping out dance music. Miranda joins the long queue which snakes around the tent. As she enters, a security guard checks Miranda's ID. Checked Miranda's ID. The music is deafening, but the crowd inside is sitting on rows of wooden benches,

silently meditating. And the music involved certain sexual noises and moans, and they had this music set as a background to a compilation of soft porn. Miranda says that at the camp in Romania, women were shown pornographic videos as part of a programme they were expected to attend. The camp is an extension of the sexual boundary pushing that women had been exposed to back in the UK,

or whichever country they'd been attending a yoga centre inspired by guru Grigori Mbivalaru. People like Bec, an Australian, who'd come across Mbivalaru's teachings while living in India. And beautiful things happen. They had lots of stage productions and they're very beautiful and they're full of, like, semi-naked women in bikinis and that's very beautiful.

A thousand people meditating together is a really nice feeling you know it's beautiful. Bec attended this annual yoga festival on four separate occasions. Like many of the women I've spoken with Bec was at a crossroads in her life when she got involved with this yoga movement. She was recently divorced and left Australia behind to look for a new meaning in her life and this festival in Romania made her think that these people had the answers. Checking out with people who are high on God love is kind of great. It's a little weird, but it's like, yay to you, man. Woo. Maybe I want to feel like that. I don't know. This isn't what you'd expect at a normal yoga festival.

And I think if most of us encountered this, we'd get straight on the next plane home. According to Miranda, in the preceding months at the Tara Yoga Centre in London, she's been told she has to push her boundaries if she wants spiritual awakening. Experts I've spoken to say that there's a cultural assumption that yoga, and the wellness industry in general, is a healthy and safe activity. So you let your guard down a bit. It's only a bit of yoga. How bad can it be?

And because yoga encourages you to experience your body in a new way, you might be getting in touch with your sexuality in different ways. In short, if you're exercising more, getting fitter and healthier, you'll probably also feel sexier. And those are benefits that keep people hooked. And we're most susceptible, most likely to miss the red flags when we're seeking self-development. Because we want someone to tell us what to do

and push us in a new direction. It's all about breaking down boundaries. Evenings at the camp are given up to a Miss Shakti competition. Shakti is the Tantric word for femininity. This competition is, in Miranda's words, kind of hyper sexualized miss world but the judging criteria being a woman's state of shakti as they would say an embodiment of the divine feminine the goddess these shows went on for hours at the beginning there were probably at least 100 to 150 women in the competition, 30-plus performances of five minutes plus commentary. The first time she came to this festival, Miranda just watched the Miss Shakti competition.

But Beck from Australia actually took part as a contestant. Each stage, some women would be eliminated by the judges, and as the rounds went on, they got more and more sexual. It's super intense. Every day, just doing hours of rehearsal. The group rehearsal, and then your mini group rehearsal. Some of the stages are just, they're just a kind of bikini stage show, you know, stand there with a fan.

Apart from Becca Miranda, I've spoken to two other people who have attended stages of the Miss Shakti competition, and I've read accounts from four others. Accounts vary as to what happens at each stage, but it seems to get progressively more sexually explicit. Two people told me they'd seen women parading naked on stage, and two people told me that people simulated sex. At the end of the competition, out of more than a hundred entrants, one is crowned as Miss Shakti. The winner that year was given the opportunity to live with the guru of this huge international movement, Gregorian Bivalaru. The guru himself isn't at the camp in body,

but followers are told he is there in spirit. So they said that he is an omniscient being and that he can connect to different locations telepathically. So there was this sense of him being a non-physical presence in the house, a kind of supernatural support from this spiritual guide figure. I don't know how many followers Gregorian Bivilaru has, but if his network can attract 6,000 people to the festival Miranda's attending in 2018, he must be quite a big deal. So when Miranda is asked if she'd like to meet him at some point in the future, she says, of course. And at the women's villa, she's handed 30 testimonial videos of women who've already met him. The women speaking to the camera are naked.

That doesn't shock Miranda. I didn't mention this earlier, but to attempt her first weekend retreat with Tara Yoga in England, Miranda says she was asked to supply them with a photograph of herself semi-naked. To attend this holiday camp, she says she had to supply a photograph of herself semi-naked. To attend this holiday camp, she says she had to supply a photo of herself fully naked. The reason given is that the guru, Gregorian Bivalaru, needs it to read her aura. And since she's been here, she has been filmed naked.

In one of the first testimonies that she watches of women who visited Gregorian Bivalaru, or GB, she recognises a woman she knows from the Tara Yoga Centre in London. She was saying that, you know, she'd had this amazing experience and that GB had helped her to overcome these traumas from her past. from her past and it had been difficult but she felt this deep sense of a level of healing in her soul. But there was also something that struck Miranda as odd about this woman's testimony. She looked very sad, very distressed. What she was saying was completely in conflict with what she was clearly experiencing and feeling in the moment.

The video testimonies all end the same way. The women read out a statement. I will show that I'm a stupid, superficial, fluctuating woman if I ever forget all of these spiritual states. Miranda still wants to meet the guru Gregorian Bivalaru. It seems surprising that rather than be concerned that something horrible might have happened to these women, she thinks they've all been through a wonderful spiritual experience.

So who is Gregorian Bivilaru? For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamour. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles.

It's about a battle for the political soul of America, and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts. This is Gregorian Bivolaru speaking at a conference in 1999. Bivolaru was born in Romania in 1952. He has shoulder-length, steel-grey hair and wears aviator glasses and a buttoned-up peach shirt. It's ten years after the collapse of communism in Romania

and in the post-Soviet era, the yoga organisation he has founded, called MISA, is a big hit. It filled a void in people's hearts or lives. Michael grew up in Romania. He's a former member of Tara Yoga, who in episode one told us about his experience at the Polarity retreat. Michael was just a boy when communism fell, but can see why Gregorian Bivalari's yoga

movement became popular. The promise was quite beautiful, like spiritual path and opening the heart and creating community, giving back, like really good values and attracted lots of people that were either spiritual seekers and they felt, oh, this is great and could be wonderful, or people who were psychologically wounded or had past trauma and they found something here that felt safe and promising. When Bivlaro was a young man, he was interested in telepathy, parapsychology and yoga. The communist dictator Nikolai Ceausescu wanted to suppress alternative belief systems and in 1982 he banned yoga in Romania.

Bivilaru defied the ban by teaching classes in secret but he was caught and sent to a psychiatric prison. He tried to escape but failed and was in jail for almost a year. Former associates say he was treated with extreme brutality and his ill treatment made them revere him all the more. But after the collapse of communism, Bivallaro was able to run his yoga organisation openly and his popularity spread beyond Romania. In the UK, a group of his followers set up Tara Yoga Centre in London in 2001. Today there are Gregorian Bivalari following organisations in 29 different countries, all operating under the umbrella of the Atman

Federation. And followers from these organisations come together at festivals like the one Miranda's attending. As the yoga festival in Romania draws to a close, according to Miranda there is a final ceremony for the guests staying at the women's villa, an organised lovemaking ritual. We were told that it was optional, but if you didn't want to participate, you had to leave and you had to stay out for the whole day. Miranda doesn't want to be ostracised for not taking part, and she reminds herself that a core part of the teachings at the Tara school

are that to achieve spiritual growth, she must push her boundaries. So she's in. The windows were closed, all of the curtains were drawn. They'd put down a lot of kind of black tarp, tarpaulin essentially. And then there were mattresses on top of that. Three women stood there naked, they were painted gold, and they were playing this kind of very evocative trance-like meditation music. And then we began the ritual.

The ritual is a highly choreographed form of group sex between the women. After 45 minutes of timer sounds, it's announced. Now is the group sex between the women. After 45 minutes, a timer sounds. It's announced. Now is the first time doing the technique. This is something Miranda was taught about in her women's group in London just before coming to Romania. They spoke about the technique and these amazing spiritual states that they'd had

from partaking in the technique with their partner. And they would speak about physical transformations, people whose breasts are grown by doing the technique, that through doing this technique, you can also assimilate the qualities of different zodiac signs and speaking also about the health benefits. Sounds amazing, right? But you might be less keen when you hear what the technique involves. There's no easy way of saying this and I hope it doesn't gross you out too much. It's drinking other people's urine. Followers are told it's a practice

which has its origins in ancient yogic practices. This was the dubious sounding explanation Miranda was given of how it works. Liquid has a memory. And that after a certain amount of time of making love in a tantric way, the liquid in your body gets transformed and holds the memory of not just the spiritual states that you've had, but also holds the imprint of you as a human being and of your personal qualities, your zodiac sign, your physical qualities. And that by drinking your partner's urine or elixir, as they called it, at this stage of lovemaking, you can absorb and assimilate physically into your body, into your cells and somehow use this to become a cosmic man or woman.

Apart from that, fantasising about unusual uses of human urine is also a well-known sexual kink. Miranda notices that the senior women appear to be in a very intense spiritual state of orgasm after drinking urine. And I remember at the end of the ritual, it was a, you know, it was a really intense atmosphere. And one of the senior women just kind of smiling and saying to me, you know, this is heaven. I think that we're in heaven here. This is paradise. this is heaven. I think that we're in heaven here. This is paradise, this is bliss.

We wrote to MISA, the organisation that ran the camp. They told us we never asked for nude photos, this is a lie. They denied that the camp created a sexualised atmosphere and told us they promote, quote, refined, elevated, uplifting, spiritualising eroticism, which is the exact opposite of raw, instinctual, even degrading sexuality. They told us that although many of the people attending considered Gregorian Bivilaro to be their spiritual guide,

he was not the spiritual guide of the camp. As for nakedness and simulated sex on stage, they said they believe that, like many famous painters and sculptors, that the nudity of a harmonious female body is something marvellous, something to be admired, an expression of beauty that is present in the whole creation. Most people who go to a Tara yoga class in London don't end up at events like this camp.

They just go along to their weekly yoga class and have no idea what else is happening elsewhere in the movement. Some don't even know that Gregorian Bivilaro is the school's spiritual guide, even though there's a whole page dedicated to him on the school's website. It's entitled A Remarkable Modern Yogi. Things have moved incredibly quickly for Miranda. She says in less than a year, she has gone from a high street yoga studio in London to an orgy and drinking urine in a holiday resort in Romania, and there's still more boundary pushing to come. On her return to London, Miranda continues to go to her classes at Tara Yoga.

Instead of rejecting the group, she decides to become more deeply involved. Believing in doing things that other people don't makes her feel special. Part of a community of believers who understand things most ordinary people don't. I was seeing my friends less and less frequently. I'd effectively stopped going dancing. I wasn't seeing friends in other parts of the country or my family as frequently. I wasn't seeing friends in other parts of the country or my family as frequently. Miranda also decides to start a job she believes will help her spiritual growth. It's at a place where some of the teachers at Tara work.

It's called the Ecstatic Joy Temple. Ecstatic Joy Temple, a world of intimacy, beauty and bliss. When you receive a massage from us, you will immediately notice there is something unique, beautiful and even mysterious about our therapists and the massage they offer. The Ecstatic Joy Temple is a topless massage parlour. It's just a 10-minute walk away from the City of London. Tantric massage performed in this way naturally heals the sexual function of both men and women. It's just around the corner from Tara Yoga. The Ecstatic Joy Temple website states they don't offer sexual services, but...

The female therapists are all very sweet and feminine. They will make every effort to relax you, pleasure you, and to stimulate your sensuality. In September 2018, Miranda begins working there, getting paid to give massages. I didn't like using body parts, especially breasts, to massage the guests. On the Ecstatic Joy Temple's website, the faces of the naked and semi-naked men and women are familiar to me. Not because I've ever been there, but because they are the faces of some of the teachers on the Tara Yoga website. Miranda isn't the only former member of Tara Yoga Centre I've spoken to

who worked at the Ecstatic Joy Temple. You'd go topless and there wouldn't be any negotiating on that. Harriet worked at the Ecstatic Joy Temple until she left Tara Yoga Centre in 2021. The Ecstatic Joy Temple doesn't give an address on its website, but Harriet agrees to show me where it was. It's down here. OK.

Harriet's young, just 26, and has a kind of London look. Hoop earring, sleek hair, fashionable clothes. She was only 22 when she joined Tara Yoga, a third-year university student. In a story that now sounds quite familiar, Harriet had taken a gap year in India, and on her return she wanted to continue yoga. So she googled around and found Tara. And it just sounded cool. It sounded really right up my alley.

Tara wasn't just a yoga school. It was a community. And that was a big attraction. It mattered so much for me to feel connection with people outside of what I knew as my family. That was part of what I was looking for. According to Harriet, within a couple of weeks, she starts dating one of the male teachers, someone who is over twice her age. And then only a couple of weeks after that, he encourages Harriet to work at the ecstatic Joy Temple, giving topless massages.

Harriet says he told her it would be good for her spiritual evolution. Can you describe to me, who were the clients that you had to see here? Just businessmen, sort of 40s, some even older. They looked like they worked around here. And what did you have to wear when you were giving these massages? Just some pants that they give you, like sort of luxurious sort of style. Silky, somewhat like provocative. Some would even say like if you can just go absolutely, like, no pants at all as well,

so just naked when you're giving the massage, it's even better, which I didn't do. Harriet got paid around £30 a massage, but the clients paid between £150 and £300. To Harriet, that sounds as if the temple is making a hefty profit. Despite the romantic sounding name, the Ecstatic Joy Temple operates out of a rather mundane looking converted office block. It's just a six minute walk away from the Tara Yoga Centre. To operate legally, massage parlours are required to have a licence. The local authority told me the flat where the Ecstatic Joy Temple was based didn't have one. Harriet told me that two teachers from Tara Yoga Centre were involved in running it.

Clients paid them in cash, and that's how she got paid too. I think back to it now, and it was literally like, it looks like a little brothel almost. This fancy place, red walls, low lighting, candles. So do you consider what you were doing here sex work now? Yes, yeah, absolutely. Why? Just the way I was sort of controlled to perform a certain way and it was very much to do with my looks and how I presented and my desirability

and the fact that it was a lot of these men who were obviously quite well off. And the fact that you didn't have any control really over who you were massaging? Yes, yeah, absolutely. The Tara Yoga Centre is a separate business from the Ecstatic Joy Temple, but it was a recruiting ground for staff. Both Harriet and Miranda knew about it through teachers at Tara Yoga Centre.

Both organisations declined to answer our questions about their relationship. The Ecstatic Joy Temple also didn't respond to our questions about its lack of a licence. Miranda worked at the Ecstatic Joy Temple for a few months. Even though she didn't enjoy giving the massages, she thought it was another boundary she should break in order to become a more spiritual person. There was a kind of ecstatic sense of overcoming something,

something that you were nervous about, that you were told was good for you and was spiritual. Once you then did it, I often experienced a feeling of euphoria. It was more than a feeling of achievement, sometimes dissociation, but often quite euphoric once you've gone through the thing that you were nervous about. And then, in June 2019, Miranda gets word that her guru, Gregorian Bivalaru, is ready to meet her. And there will also be something called an initiation. Did you consider rejecting the invitation?

It didn't feel like an option to reject the invitation. I'd heard people talking about women who had failed the initiation. I knew that it was very bad and that they were considered to have fallen spiritually. If I said no, I would become an outsider and I would stand to lose the community that I was now so heavily invested in, that I had now devoted my whole life to. Next time on World of Secrets, the bad guru. We would need to send our kind of final text messages to family, etc. This was when we became really concerned. We should put on one of these pairs of dark glasses

which had masking tape on the inside. World of Secrets, The Bad Guru, is a BBC Studios audio production. It's presented by me, Kat McShane, and produced by myself and Emma Wetherill. The executive producer is Inez Bowen. Subscribe to World of Secrets. Episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds. In 1984, an IRA bomb planted under a bath in Brighton's Grand Hotel came close to killing Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

It was the biggest direct assault on a British government since the gunpowder plot. From BBC Radio 4, I'm Glenn Patterson, and in The Brighton Bomb, I tell the story of the deadly attack, unravelling the threads that brought all involved, often by heartbreaking chance, to that place and time, 2.54am on the morning of 12 October. And I reveal how the police only just averted a follow-up bombing campaign aimed at England's beaches. To hear the Brighton bomb and many other great history documentaries, search for the History Podcast on BBC Sounds.

What do Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift all have in common? Well, their lives and fortunes are all being discussed on Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, motives and the money of some of the world's wealthiest individuals. I'm Zing Zing, and each week my co-presenter Simon Jack and I take a closer look at the world's mega rich, and we try to decide whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. From celebs and CEOs to spot stars and tech titans. Find out how billionaires made their money and how they use it. Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

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