Twisted Yoga: How the Search for Enlightenment Turned into a Dangerous Cult | documentary

pPracticing yoga has its benefits: meditative calm, stability, and balance. Devotees pursue transformative spiritual journeys, through poses, chants and breathwork. Some followers of Tantra Yoga take things further, using sensuality to channel their energy and reach beyond themselves, seeking bodily liberation and enlightenment.

But it is this very endeavor that has left hundreds vulnerable to alleged rape and trafficking.

These crimes are chronicled and explored in Apple’s new Twisted Yoga series. Former followers of the Movement for Spiritual Integration in the Absolute (MISA) appear in a compelling (and yes, enlightening) three-part documentary series, describing their slow indoctrination into what appears to be a cult.

Followers, including a woman named Miranda who shared her story with The Guardian last year, describe going from enrolling in one of the many yoga schools in cities like London or Paris to being taken to secret locations, and having their cards and IDs confiscated. They were allegedly manipulated into sex cam work and orgies, and were groomed by an international network of yoga camps organized by Gregorian Bivolaru, a self-proclaimed guru who was already wanted by Interpol on sexual exploitation charges in Romania dating back to 2016. Bivolaru was detained in France in 2023 and charged with organized kidnapping, organized exploitation of vulnerability by cult members, human trafficking and rape. He is currently awaiting trial.

“The question we grappled with was: Why didn’t this come to the fore sooner? How did people not speak out sooner? Why is this happening now, when this guy has been in Paris for 20 years?” says Rowan Deacon, director of Twisted Yoga.

As Miranda says in Twisted Yoga, she didn’t see herself as a victim, echoing the experience of many who suffer abuse. The words rape and human trafficking were not part of the lexicon she applied to the situation, as she found herself in a community and wholeheartedly embraced their teachings on tantric yoga. This remained the case even when, like many women, she was inevitably lured into tantric sex with Bivolaro, as part of a transfiguration ritual to access the divine.

“They come into this situation as a kind of spiritual exercise and think about it linguistically in these terms,” says Susan Lavery, executive producer of Twisted Yoga. “But if you take that term out, and then look at it from a legal perspective, or as a therapist, or in the cold light of day…it challenges the belief system that they’ve built up during their time in school, and then you realize that the appropriate different language would have been much more disturbing.”

Speaking to Miranda’s appreciation, Deacon adds: “I found it so fascinating that indoctrination would actually change the perspective of what happened to her… It takes a long time to unpack narratives that you’ve told yourself or that have been told to you. In many of the women’s cases, it took other women talking to them about their experiences, which opened something up for them.”

Deacon begins our conversation by speaking with her reluctance to broach the topic. She expressed concern that the explosive case against Bivolaru, a figure who used the remnants of Romania’s communist regime to portray himself as an unfairly prosecuted political refugee, could create the sensationalism of a real crime. Twisted Yoga has its fair share of investigative reporters and French investigators exposing the sordid international web of collusion, deception, and abuse that has yet to be tested in court. But Deacon and Lavery steer the film toward a psychological tale that explores consent and power, where neither financial power (as in the case of office abuse) nor age (when children are victimized in Catholic churches) factor into the factors that make those victims vulnerable.

“I wanted this to be a sympathetic article that explained these women’s stories to people from their point of view, not from the point of view of a police or a detective… It allowed us to explore the way in which psychological power and ideologies and dogma can really get under the skin and really begin to change the way these women see themselves, and see their own limits. What was interesting for me in exploring this story is that the power of faith is no less effective than other forms of structural power.”

Ashley Freckleton is one of Twisted Yoga’s top subjects. Before becoming a contestant on The Bachelor Australia, Freckleton lived in London, England. She joined Tara Yoga Center there in 2018 seeking self-improvement. In the series, Freckleton describes the calm and healing she felt through exercises that channeled telluric energy, and Deacon uses projection mapping to visualize seductive yoga scenes, where light from the earth flows through the body.

Freckleton recounts that she became so immersed in the school that she was also taken through cloak-and-dagger practices to a secret house in Paris, where she was prepared for a transfiguration ritual with Bivolaro, and it was only in that moment of face-to-face that she was liberated.

Deacon points out that unlike some other survivors, who may have come from broken families or experienced similar trauma, factors that forced them to search for healing and community, Freckleton describes a happy childhood, and largely sought out yoga to find some direction after a romantic breakup.

“It was important to make sure everyone didn’t fall into the ‘Oh, that’s why…’ category,” Deacon says. She adds that victims in this case could appear to the lay public as a friend or colleague who attends these classes just as they do in Pilates, just anyone who would have been “there but for the grace of God.”

“What we never wanted was for people to say, ‘Well, that’ll never happen to me,'” Lavery says. “I will never join an organization like this.”

“The process they went through, as they became deeper in their spiritual journeys within the different schools they were attending, broke down barriers, taking them step by step until they found themselves in a place they never really expected to be.”

Deacon adds that part of the appeal and false sense of security comes from the real ancient yoga practices the schools in question fit into. There are real liberating benefits to yoga, which she is careful not to denigrate, but in this case, it has been abused or distorted, as the title of the show succinctly states.

“At the heart of the teachings was the feeling that you must surrender, especially surrender your ego. Too often our modern preoccupation with wellness and self-improvement is about surrendering to this process.

“What is included in this positive and empowering (practice) is also something that is very frustrating at the same time.”