Twisted Yoga Review – A Wild Reveal of Tantric Sex Cult | television

YYou are invited to an exclusive yoga retreat in the ‘Villa’. When you arrive, you’ll find a gloomy building in Romania, where women walk around in tiny bikinis and drink each other’s urine after a group orgy. You have been summoned to meet a spiritual teacher in Paris. When you arrive, a woman wraps your SIM card in foil and takes you to the suburbs. Later you are taken to a dingy apartment where you are expected to have hours-long sex with an elderly man whom you must “transform” into a less desirable entity.

If this is a dream, you will likely wake up disturbed by the strangeness of your subconscious mind. But for a number of women, this terrifying series of events was nothing short of a nightmare. While the finer details of Twisted Yoga’s tale may be interesting, the broader picture is infuriating and sad.

The first person we meet is Ashley, a smiling Australian with a penchant for the alternative (ghosts, astrology, numerology). She moves to London in her twenties and reconnects with a friend who recommends a yoga studio. It specializes in a specific genre: tantra. Yes, the same practice that will unfortunately always bring to mind for a certain generation Sting’s bedroom discoveries of the 1990s. But Tantra is not just about pleasure, it also involves sharing spiritual knowledge, the “extreme expansion of the field of consciousness” that is so mysterious that none of the dedicated followers here can express it.

The pursuit of this knowledge takes Ashley to the aforementioned villa and later into the orbit of Gregorian Bivolaru, a Romanian referred to as “The Guru” by her yoga community. After receiving an invitation to meet him through the studio’s receptionist, she travels abroad, agreeing to keep her whereabouts a secret from friends and family. Once there, she refuses to have sex with the septuagenarian man. In response, she is told that she is “being manipulated by demons” who do not want her to “receive divine power.” That’s when Ashley discovers that tantra was never an exercise in self-improvement but an opportunity for people to exploit.

However, many of the women interviewed here—some of whom attended different, loosely connected yoga studios—engaged in so-called “sexual initiation” with Bivolaro. One describes how he was then transferred to Prague to do shifts – without pay – on the site Video Girls. She has been told that she saves her clients’ souls by helping them connect with higher sexual energy.

Now you may find yourself screaming in disbelief: The lies these women were fed were ridiculously transparent. But beneath the barrage of red flags and alarm bells lies a more complex psychological landscape that director Rowan Deacon (Netflix’s Jimmy Savile: British Horror Story) paints in this three-part series. Women drawn to tantra are looking for guidance and community, but they are also trying to become better people, pointing to growth and “next steps” in their development. Ironically, all the talk about “love” and “circles” ends up with the same cold, calculating capitalism that has always played on women’s desires to improve themselves physically and morally.

Deacon never makes her subjects look stupid; on the contrary, they all seem articulate and intelligent. But they’ve fallen into a clever trap, and yoga’s long association with dexterity is the key to how it works. Suggestions that tantra will radically change you may seem welcome, but in reality it means never trusting your instincts for self-preservation. Giving weight to your doubts means you will lose your “salvation,” as Oxford’s Miranda put it. Another reason not to question your new master.

We eventually found out that Bivolaru is a household name in Romania. He is known for failing to appear in court to answer charges including “sexual corruption, trafficking of minors, engaging in sexual relations with minors, and attempting to cross the border illegally” in the 2000s. He was later discovered in Sweden, where he was granted asylum after claiming he was persecuted for his beliefs (yoga was actually banned for a while in Romania), but in 2013 he was convicted in absentia of having sex with a minor. Then, in 2023, Bivolaro was arrested on new charges including rape, kidnapping and human trafficking in France – which has unusually strict anti-cult laws – where he remains in detention. He denies all charges against him.

Meanwhile, these studios are still up and running and deny any connection to the crimes mentioned in this program; When I Googled “tantric yoga,” one of the first results was a yoga studio in London that Ashley attended. This alone is chilling. We can only hope that this fascinating documentary will give Bivolaro a reassuring degree of infamy outside his home country.