Transcript of 2. The Technique

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.

And they said, you know, we're gonna 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 Cat MacShane. Episode 2, The Technique.

It's summer 20 18 when Miranda arrives at the Black Sea Holiday Resort of Kostanest in southeast Romania. She's here for a 2 week stay at a yoga festival. 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 1 of the yoga teachers at a place she's been attending for the last few months, Tara Yoga Center in London. Miranda has 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 hypersexualized, 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 center, 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 mom, 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 thirties, 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 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 organization called ATMAN, the International Federation of Yoga and Meditation. Tara Yoga Center 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. Bug 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 the sense of it being kind of a girl's holiday. There were a lot of people around, probably at least a 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 center 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.

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 program they were expected to attend. The camp is an extension of the sexual boundary pushing the women had been exposed to back in the UK, or whichever country they'd been attending a yoga center inspired by guru, Gregorian, Bivolau. People like Beck, an Australian, who'd come across Bivolau's teachings while living in India. And

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. And a 1,000 people meditating together is a really nice feeling. You know, it's beautiful.

Bec attended this annual yoga festival on 4 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 kinda great. It's sort of weird, but it's, like, yay for you, man. Whoo. Maybe I wanna 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 Center 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 shakti is a tantric word for femininity. This competition is, in Miranda's words,

kind of hypersexualized 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 a 100, to a 150 women in the competition, 30 plus performances of 5 minutes plus commentary.

The first time she came to this festival, Miranda just watched the Miss Shakti competition. But Bec 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, you're 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 Bec and Miranda, I've spoken to 2 other people who have attended stages of the Miss Shakti competition, and I've read accounts from 4 others. Accounts vary as to what happens at each stage, but it seems to get progressively more sexually explicit. 2 people told me they'd seen women parading naked on stage, and 2 people told me that people simulated sex. At the end of the competition, out of more than a 100 entrants, 1 is crowned as miss Shakti. The winner that year was given the opportunity to live with the guru of this huge international movement, Gregorian Vivilaru.

The guru himself isn't at the camp in Bodhi, 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 being a nonphysical 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 attend her 1st 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 photo of herself fully naked. The reason given is that the guru, Gregorian Bivolau, needs it to read her aura. And since she's been here, she has been filmed naked. In 1 of the first testimonies that she watches are women who visited Gregorian Bivolauro, or GB.

She recognizes a woman she knows from the Tara Yoga Center 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. 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 Vivilaru. 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 develare? This is Gregorian Vivilaru speaking at a conference in 1999. Vivilaru was born in Romania in 1952.

He has shoulder length, still gray hair, and wears aviator glasses and a buttoned up peach shirt. It's 10 years after the collapse of communism in Romania. And in the post Soviet era, the yoga organization he has founded, called MISA, is a big hit.

It filled a void in in people's hearts or lives.

Michael grew up in Romania. He's a former member of Tara Yoga, who in episode 1 told us about his experience at the polarity retreat. Michael was just a boy when communism fell, but can see why Gregorian Vivilari's yoga movement became popular.

The the promise was quite beautiful, like spiritual path and 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 Vivilaro was a young man, he was interested in telepathy, parapsychology, and yoga. The communist dictator, Nicolai 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 for 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, Bivolari was able to run his yoga organization openly, and his popularity spread beyond Romania. In the UK, a group of his followers set up Tara Yoga Center in London in 2,001. Today, there are Gregorian Vivilaru following organizations in 29 different countries, all operating under the umbrella of the Atman Federation. And followers from these organizations come together at festivals like the 1 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 organized 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 wanna be ostracized 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, tarp all in, essentially. And then there were mattresses on top of that. 3 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 the ritual.

The ritual is a highly choreographed form of 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 it 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, fantasizing 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 1 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 bliss.

We wrote to MISA, the organization that ran the camp. They told us, we never ask for nude photos. This is a lie. They denied that the camp created a sexualized atmosphere and told us they promote, quote, refined, elevated, uplifting, spiritualizing eroticism, which is the exact opposite of raw, instinctual, even degrading sexuality. They told us that although many of the people attending considered Gregorian de Villaro 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 believed that, like many famous painters and sculptors, that the nudity of a harmonious female body is something marvelous, 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 Vivilaro 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.

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 parlor. 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 Center 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 Center 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. Okay.

Harriet's young, just 26, and has a kind of London look, hoop earrings, sleek hair, fashionable clothes. She was only 22 when she joined Tara Yoga, a 3rd 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. Like, 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 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 1 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 forties, some even older. They look 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 client's paid between £150300. 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 6 minute walk away from the Tara Yoga Center. To operate legally, massage parlors are required to have a license.

The local authority told me the flat where the Ecstatic Joy Temple was based didn't have 1. Harriet told me that 2 teachers from Tara Yoga Center 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 like looks like a little, like, brothel almost. This fancy place, red 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 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 Center 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 Center. Both organizations declined to answer our questions about their relationship. The Ecstatic Joy Temple also didn't respond to our questions about its lack of a license. 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 we were told was good for you and was spiritual once you then did it. I often experienced a feeling of of euphoria as 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, Gugoyan Bivilaru, is ready to meet her. And there will also be something called an initiation. Did you consider rejecting the invitation?

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, etcetera.

This was when we became really concerned.

We should put on 1 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 Innes Berwyn. 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.

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