You are invited to an exclusive yoga retreat at “the villa”. When you arrive, it’s a grim building in Romania in which women cavort in micro-bikinis and drink each other’s urine after a mass orgy. You are summoned to meet a spiritual guru in Paris. When you arrive, a woman wraps your sim card in tin foil and drives you to the suburbs. Later you are taken to a dingy flat where you are expected to have hours-long sex with an elderly man whom you must “transfigure” into a less undesirable entity.
If this were a dream, you’d probably wake up disturbed by the weirdness of your subconscious. But for a number of women, this surreally terrifying chain of events was no nightmare. While the finer details of Twisted Yoga’s tale may be intriguingly wild, the broader picture is infuriating and sad.
The first person we meet is Ashleigh, a smiley Australian with a penchant for the alternative (ghosts, astrology, numerology). She moves to London in her 20s and reconnects with a friend who recommends a yoga studio. It specialises in a specific kind: tantra. Yes, the very same practice that for a certain generation will unfortunately always bring to mind Sting’s 1990s bedroom-based revelations. But tantra isn’t merely about pleasure, it also involves the communion of spiritual knowledge, an “extreme expansion of the field of consciousness” so mysterious it cannot be articulated by any of the once devoted followers here.
The pursuit of this knowledge takes Ashleigh to the aforementioned villa and later into the orbit of Gregorian Bivolaru, a Romanian man referred to as “the guru” by her yoga community. After an invitation to meet him comes through the studio’s receptionist, she travels abroad, agreeing to keep her whereabouts secret from friends and family. Once there, she refuses to have sex with the septuagenarian. In response, she is told she’s being “manipulated by demons” who don’t want her to “receive divine power”. This is when Ashleigh discovers tantra was never an exercise in self-improvement but an opportunity for people to exploit her.
Yet multiple women interviewed here – some of whom attended different, loosely affiliated yoga studios – did take part in the so-called “sexual initiation” with Bivolaru. One describes being subsequently transported to Prague to do shifts – for no pay – on a camgirl site. She is told she is saving her clients’ souls by helping them connect to a higher sexual energy.
By now you may find yourself screaming in incredulity: the lies these women were fed were ridiculously transparent. But beneath the barrage of red flags and alarm bells is a more complex psychological landscape that director Rowan Deacon (Netflix’s Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story) maps out over this three-part series. The women who are attracted to tantra are looking for guidance and community, but they are also trying to be better people, making reference to evolution and “next steps” in their development. It is deeply ironic that for all the talk of “love” and “auras”, they ended up with the same cold, calculating capitalism that has long 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 astute. But they have fallen into a clever trap, and yoga’s longstanding association with virtuosity is key to how it works. The suggestions that tantra will fundamentally change you may sound welcome, but really it means never trusting your instincts for self-preservation. Giving weight to your doubts means you stand to lose your “salvation”, as Miranda from Oxford puts it. Another reason not to question your new overlord.
Bivolaru, we eventually discover, is a household name in Romania. He is notorious for failing to turn up to court to answer to charges including “sexual corruption, trafficking of minors, engaging in sexual relations with minors and attempted illegal border crossings” in the 2000s. He was later discovered in Sweden, where he was granted asylum after claiming he was being persecuted for his beliefs (yoga was genuinely banned for a period in Romania), but in 2013 was convicted in absentia of sex with a minor. Then, in 2023 Bivolaru was arrested on new charges including rape, kidnapping and human trafficking in France – which has unusually stringent anti-cult laws – where he remains in custody. He denies all charges against him.
In the meantime, these studios are still up and running and deny any association with the crimes mentioned in this programme; when I Google “tantric yoga”, one of the first results is the London yoga studio Ashleigh attended. That alone is chilling. We can only hope this fascinating documentary will give Bivolaru a reassuring degree of infamy outside his homeland.