Twisted Yoga review – a wild exposé of a tantric sex cult | Television
ANDYou are invited to an unique yoga retreat at “the villa”. When you arrive, it is a grim constructing in Romania during which girls cavort in micro-bikinis and drink one another’s urine after a mass orgy. You are summoned to fulfill a non secular 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 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 individual 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 buddy who recommends a yoga studio. It focuses on a particular form: tantra. Yes, the exact same observe that for a sure era will sadly all the time recall to mind Sting’s Nineties bedroom-based revelations. But tantra is not merely about pleasure, it additionally includes the communion of non secular data, an “extreme expansion of the field of consciousness” so mysterious it can’t be articulated by any of the eleven 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 neighborhood. After an invite to fulfill him comes by means of 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 instructed she’s being “manipulated by demons” who don’t desire 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 take advantage of her.
Yet a number of girls interviewed right here – some of whom attended completely 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 website. She is instructed she is saving her shoppers’ souls by serving to them connect with a larger sexual power.
By now chances are you’ll end up screaming in disbelief: the lies these girls had been fed had been ridiculously clear. But beneath the barrage of pink flags and alarm bells is a extra complicated 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 on the lookout for steerage and neighborhood, 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 his 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 ideas that tantra will basically change chances are you’ll 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 courtroom to reply fees 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 strictly banned for a interval in Romania), however in 2013 he was convicted in absentia of sex with a minor. Then, in 2023 Bivolaru was arrested on new fees 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 fees in opposition to him.
In the meantime, these studios are nonetheless up and operating and deny any affiliation with the crimes talked about on this program; once 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 outdoors his homeland.
