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From the outside, Tara Yoga Centre looks like a normal, welcoming yoga studio. A pleasant building in an expensive east London postcode, with another popular branch on an Oxford high street. There are positive, even gushing, Google reviews. The website is professional, with photos of smiling people stretching on matching purple yoga mats. It promises “rapid and integral transformation”, as well as “an invitation to awaken now”.
When Miranda, from Oxford – who has asked to go only by her first name – was in her late 20s, she visited India to practise yoga. It was 2015 and yoga was already a booming industry in the UK. She was working as an English teacher at a London school and gravitated to yoga for the same reason that it’s recommended by health bodies from the World Health Organization to local GPs: healing, exercise and mental wellbeing.
Miranda found that practising daily offered a sense of calm: “It could move a stressful day into something more manageable and the philosophical perspectives helped me to consider that things happen for a reason, to process difficult life events with more ease than before.” So she booked another course, in Thailand, focused on Tantric yoga, which encouraged her to love her body and embrace her femininity. On returning to the UK, she Googled “Tantric yoga”. Tara Yoga Centre appeared.
Tara Yoga’s classes are marketed as “esoteric Tantra” – more about inner work than improving your sex life, with a focus on realising your own potential. Miranda started to attend weekly sessions. The people were friendly, intelligent, open-minded – as is Miranda when we talk on the phone; someone curious about spirituality, while also being matter-of-fact. When she was informed about a three-day Tara Yoga retreat in the spring of 2018, it instantly appealed and she packed her bags for Somerset.
Miranda remembers the experience. She meditated a lot, entering what she describes as “an altered state or euphoria – like coming up on a drug, but because it’s natural, it feels controlled”. She attended lectures. She saw other students undress as they gave performances and simulated Tantric massage. “That shocked me: the level of casual nudity in the dances and performances, seeing my teachers performing on stage naked.” She decided not to engage in nudity herself, at times feeling objectified by the men on the retreat. But the experience was also exhilarating. “There’s an intensity, it’s like going to a festival,” Miranda recalls. “There was a small group of us, but we were all there for the same reason and with the same intention… That can be addictive.”
After the retreat, Miranda began dating one of the teachers and was drawn into the Tara Yoga “inner circle”. The teachers spoke about their guru, Gregorian Bivolaru, and his organisation, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (Misa). Intrigued, she went on more retreats, including one in Costinești, Romania, organised by Misa, where students of Tara Yoga and other international yoga schools came together – it was huge, with group meditation and dancing at night. At times, she thought, “This seems a bit weird”, especially the regular playing of soft porn films, but there were 6,000 other people there, so she kept the faith. (In a statement, Misa claims there is a “clear and huge difference between porn and erotic movies” that “depict elevated, pure, artistic aspects”.)
“I thought, ‘Maybe these people know something I don’t or something I can’t explain’,” says Miranda. After all, it was this desire for a connection to something bigger than herself that had attracted her in the first place. And so, she threw herself in.
What she did not know then was that Bivolaru was wanted by Interpol. Tara Yoga teachers had advised Miranda not to look him up online; his questionable reputation had been briefly explained to her as persecution on behalf of the Romanian government, where he was born and began teaching yoga in the 1970s before founding Misa in 1990. A few years later, she would learn that, after charges of tax evasion, sexual exploitation and human trafficking in his home country in 2016, he fled first to Sweden, then into hiding in France. And that later, after extradition and imprisonment for sex with a minor, he returned to France, still wanted by the Finnish government as the leader of an international trafficking organisation.
Bivolaru – or “Grieg” as many of his followers call him – is not the only self-styled yoga guru to have faced abuse allegations. Sri K Pattabhi Jois, an Indian guru who popularised Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, died in 2009. After his death, he was accused by dozens of students of sexual misconduct. The charismatic Indian-American guru Bikram Choudhury created a trademarked brand of hot yoga, with 650 studios worldwide at its 2010s peak. Allegations of rape and sexual assault at Choudhury’s yoga training camps led to the downfall of his empire, as detailed in the 2019 documentary Yogi, Guru, Predator. A 2021 report by the BBC, meanwhile, uncovered multiple reports of abuse at Canadian sites for the Sivananda Yoga School led by Swami Vishnudevananda. Often in these cases, sexual abuse was shrouded as the correcting of posture, an aligning of chakras or explained away in the name of Tantra.
“Yoga teachings are traditionally transmitted from guru to student. So setting oneself up as a guru figure, you have a lot of authority,” explains Peter Tyldesley, CEO of the charity British Wheel of Yoga. “There is a need to follow a teacher’s instructions and safety depends on that person being of good character.” This is not always the case, he points out, and it doesn’t help that yoga is also an unregulated industry, meaning no qualifications are legally required for teachers. “It’s very easy to set up as a yoga teacher and that leads to all sorts of risks, like abuse or sexual exploitation, but also of injuring people if a teacher is not well trained in anatomy and physiology.” When wellness links sex to spiritual growth, this potential vulnerability to coercive control can be heightened, he adds. Consent can be blurry, abuse more prevalent.
Tantra is not necessarily sexual by nature, Tyldesley explains, “Classical Tantric yoga has its roots going back as far as 1,500 years to the Indian subcontinent and was quite revolutionary.” If, as a spiritual practice, yoga was essentially a monastic pursuit, Tantric yoga was a branch of the practice that could fit into a person’s day-to-day life. “The idea was that everything you do can be part of your physical spiritual journey, preparing food or caring for children, or even sexuality.” Yet the common association between Tantra and sex was strengthened through its more recent exportation to the west. Here, “neotantra” emphasises presence in sexual encounters; harnessing and directing one’s sexual energy.
At Tara, this style of yoga was positioned to Miranda as a route to feeling more love, connection and positivity, as well as a way to reach what was labelled “pure eros” – coming into your sensual power without shame. Speaking about negative things or criticising yourself and others was frowned upon. “It was a good-vibes-only kind of mentality,” Miranda explains. “Some of that comes from yogic philosophy, but it’s been exaggerated. You see it everywhere on social media – reels, memes and soundbites about positivity bordering on toxic. Tara Yoga took it to the extreme.” In hindsight, she says, “These thought patterns cause you to overlook your own boundaries, especially when it comes to trusting ourselves.” Yet the idea of letting go of your existing beliefs to become happier and more enlightened was appealing: the idea that you can manifest your way to a better life.
In late 2019, still attending Tara for yoga classes, Miranda was told about its sister centre, a Tantric massage “temple” near the London yoga studio. Other teachers and senior members of the Tara Yoga community were working there, or had previously, and spoke about how good it was for their spiritual journey, encouraging Miranda to follow suit. “The temple was part of the indoctrination,” Miranda now believes, “whereby sex work is seen as spiritual; a service for the uplifting of the clients and your own spiritual growth.” Sometimes it felt “a bit seedy”, but Miranda was told, repeatedly, that the topless sacred massages she was instructed to give were healing and part of the selfless service without reward that is emphasised within Karma yoga, a justification that led her to stay for three months, working ad hoc, for below minimum wage.
After her stint at the “temple”, Miranda quit her part-time teaching job and embarked on another retreat in Hungary that she had been told about at a Tara Yoga seminar, where the focus was creativity. ArtExtasia, as its website (still live) explains: “is a daring project with the goal to give art back its divine rights”. Miranda stayed for a number of months, falling out of touch with family and friends. She practised yoga and meditation daily, consumed by the teachings of Bivolaru. That is, until two Tara Yoga students informed Miranda that she had the opportunity to meet Bivolaru and undergo what was called by her peers “the initiation”. She sensed this would be sexual, but explains: “I’d been told by my teachers that this would be a spiritual turning point for me, a transformative experience.”
Talking about this time is difficult for Miranda. Her voice, clear and level until now, wobbles. She was driven to Paris to meet Bivolaru in 2019, then asked to hand in her phone, credit cards and passport at a holding house, where she shared a room with dozens of other women, from various countries, who came and went. She asked herself, “What would I do if I wanted to leave?” but did not feel able to take this step. She was convinced that backing out of meeting Bivolaru would see her ostracised from the community that was now her world.
After two weeks, Miranda was blindfolded and driven to another location, Bivolaru’s small, grimy Parisian apartment. Here, he opened the door in a dressing gown, older and more dishevelled than she’d imagined. For three days in a blacked-out room, she was made to wait. “There were between four and six of us. We did our yoga practice as best we could, watched DVDs and read books. We slept on a mattress on the floor that we moved during the day and on bunk beds.” Bivolaru was shouting at people, Miranda remembers, for instance, for using the wrong towel. There was, she describes, “a feeling of a low-level threat”.
Over about 72 hours, other women were summoned by Bivolaru to a second bedroom. Then it was Miranda’s turn. The “initiation” involved a long sexual encounter with Bivolaru, in seven positions that were supposed to reflect the seven chakras (Tantra teaches that the chakra is seven energy points in the body). Miranda remembers feeling that she was not attracted to Bivolaru and did not want to go through with it, but told herself not to be shallow. Internally, she recited mantras to try to endure the experience. “I would say I was also pretty detached from the physical, at this point: ‘I’m here now, I have to get through this.’ There was a fair amount of dissociation going on.”
Afterwards, Miranda was taken to a house in Prague. This was described as another period of “spiritual practice”. In fact, this meant being pressured to work in webcamming. As had been the case up until now, channelling “Shakti” the female goddess, through sexuality, was positioned as empowering. “Ultimately this was used to encourage us to make them a profit through sex work.”
The women there, including Miranda, were told they were in debt for their food and accommodation, as well as for their travel so far to various retreats and needed to work to pay for it, a common tactic used by traffickers to exploit their victims. Only after six months was she permitted to leave. First, she returned to Hungary and then to London in February 2020. Finally, Miranda was home, her path to “enlightenment” on pause.
The term “cult of wellness” has been used to describe the false promises of the wellness industry: Take this pill and you’ll feel better, buy this class to be your best self, meditate your way to happiness. It also speaks to how wellness practices can quickly evolve from a physical or health pursuit to inflecting or even warping one’s outlook on the world.
Think of the well-trodden wellness-to-anti-vaxxer pipeline, where fitness influencers were some of the most prominent voices to share Covid conspiracies online. In her book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein investigates this link between fitness, yoga and wellness “gurus”, and misinformation. “So many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely offering encouraging words to motivate our workouts and green juicing,” she writes, “and started whispering to us alarmingly about dark forces coming to poison us and eventually to gag, jab and dominate us.”
Now, Miranda has come to see the Tara Yoga and Misa communities as not just part of the cult of wellness, but as a literal cult. This realisation only occurred with time and space away from Bivolaru’s followers back in London: the opportunity to be around people who questioned her experiences and hours spent watching YouTube videos on how cults work. At first, she was resistant to the idea, then began to unpick how it had happened, gradually – the familiar mechanisms of indoctrination, including thought reform and isolation. Those who questioned things in classes, says Miranda, were shamed. Misa strenuously denies this was the case. “People who actively participated and pushed boundaries were applauded,” she remembers. Most of all, each step was positioned as the next step to liberation. “The efficient way to get someone to do what you want is to make them believe they are there out of their own choice or for some higher purpose, whether that’s money for their family or their own spiritual good.”
As the founder and co-chair of the British Yoga Teacher’s Union, Laura Hancock has heard several stories like Miranda’s from former Tara Yoga students. (Several also share their stories on the new BBC Sounds podcast The Bad Guru presented by journalist Cat McShane). As a yoga teacher herself, Hancock used to rent a teaching space at Tara Yoga and remembers seeing a photograph of Bivolaru on the studio wall. She initially became involved in setting up the union because of a lack of workers’ rights and fair pay in the industry. Soon, she found many students and teachers across the industry were approaching her to report physical and emotional abuse, exploitation, sexual harassment and grooming. “It became what most people were coming to us with,” she says.
As yoga teachers and volunteers, the Yoga Teacher’s Union had to upskill to deal with this outpouring, referring issues to law enforcement where possible. Yet with no official yoga regulatory body, it was unclear where to turn. They also found the police often showed little appetite in investigating, with complaints about Tara Yoga, for instance, being passed from one force to another, before going nowhere. “The responsibility or duty of care should be aligned to psychotherapy; there’s a power dynamic at play between yoga teachers and students and that’s not acknowledged,” says Hancock. “People have felt very disempowered by not having avenues to report these things. The media has done a good job of presenting the stories of survivors well. But the question is: ‘What’s next?’”
The union began to urge studios to put up sexual harassment policies. The British Wheel of Yoga is in the pilot stages of a database of registered practitioners (currently, you can find yoga teachers trained to stage four through their school on its website). But what’s needed, argues Hancock, is wider reform. “People go into yoga with a heightened level of trust, assuming that a yoga class is going to be good and positive, and that there’s integrity. That’s not always the case. There’s a lot of diminishing and cognitive dissonance, because people don’t know what constitutes harassment in these spaces or don’t want to admit what’s at play.” Hancock lives just minutes away from the Tara Yoga Centre, and is angry to see that it’s still operating. “Ultimately that school should not be open.”
For now, the onus remains mostly on consumers to be discerning in choosing a yoga school or teacher, a challenge in the wild west of wellness. There are signs to look out for. At a class, hands-on adjustments without prior consent should no longer be the norm, Hancock says. Be cautious of retreats or camps that deprive you of personal possessions, says Tyldesley. “If they say, ‘We ask people not to use mobile phones in the ashram to cultivate an environment of quiet, but you can use them off grounds or keep them on silent in case of family emergency’, that’s reasonable. Taking them away from you, less so.” Residential retreats should also detail their activities and policies ahead of time, “because you’re the consumer – we wouldn’t buy anything if we didn’t know what we were buying. A yoga retreat should not be at all mysterious.”
In November 2023, French police raided the apartment where Miranda had met Bivolaru in the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, arresting him on suspicion of kidnap, human trafficking, rape and “abuse of weakness”. Bivolaru is currently remanded in custody in France awaiting trial. He and his lawyers declined to comment when approached regarding these allegations. During these raids, 41 other people were arrested on a variety of charges at affiliated locations and 58 women were found to be living in cramped conditions with no privacy, according to French authorities.
Several other women have joined Miranda in giving their testimonies to be used as evidence in the case against Bivolaru and Misa in France, with pre-trial investigations still ongoing. In the UK, Miranda is currently pursuing a civil claim against Tara Yoga for alleged involvement in assault, trafficking and causing personal injury. Tara Yoga declined to comment on these allegations, but a spokesperson stated that the organisation will “vigorously defend itself” in any legal proceedings and that it “unequivocally condemns all forms of abuse”.
“Although tiring and re-traumatising, speaking about it to people who are experts and understand has given me another perspective,” Miranda says. “People in wellness were initially generally quite dismissive, so seeing people shocked was refreshing.” Given that women were largely the victims in her experience also feels relevant: “To continue, they [Tara Yoga and Misa] are relying on women like me to forgive, to retain our reputation, not to challenge things. I feel as if I’m overcoming that through speaking out against this abuse of power.”
Misa maintains that many of the “tens of thousands” of people who have attended their classes and retreats over the past 35 years still “appreciate and respect” Bivolaru, and continue to participate in their events. All allegations, they claim, are part of a “witch-hunt” and are “based on the declarations of a handful of people who are probably motivated by personal vendettas or a need to get attention.”
Miranda has not returned to a yoga class since 2020. “For a while, even doing yoga at home was triggering. That’s one of the things that makes me angriest. It’s a relationship they co-opted.” In spiritual or wellness circles, there’s a focus on forgiveness, she says, but that can be overplayed. Just as the spiritual side of yoga was co-opted, the promise of healing became a means of coercion. “What I find more healing now is the idea that justice could be done.”
The Bad Guru podcast is available on BBC Sounds.
