#SheToo: The Experience of MISA Women. 1. The Scholar and the Yoginis

A scholar traveled to Romania to let the women of the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute tell their stories in their own words.

Article 1 of 6.

MISA women during a workshop. From womenofspirituality.com.

In November 2023 the French police launched multiple militarized raids on eight yoga meditation retreats in Paris and Nice. Around forty yoga students from the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) were taken to police stations for questioning. A flurry of media reports ensued that focused on MISA’s female students, the yoginis.

Le Monde claimed MISA’s Tantra Yoga courses were “conditioning victims to accept sexual relations via mental manipulation techniques which sought to eliminate any notion of consent,” and that “several women, of different nationalities, said they had been victims of the MISA organization and its leader……. Women were encouraged to accept sexual relations with the group’s leader and to participate in fee-paying pornographic practices in France and abroad.”

BBC News reported: “Police found 26 women being held……. against their will.” Le Monde added they were “kept in deplorable conditions, both in terms of space and hygiene.”

Since the 2023 raid, MISA’s founder, Gregorian Bivolaru, has been awaiting trial in a Paris prison, charged with rape, kidnapping, human trafficking, and abuse of weakness. His alleged female victims are portrayed in the European mass media as brainwashed cult followers, trafficked as prostitutes in a vast European operation run by a “bande organisée” (criminal gang) that operates under the cover of a yoga school.

But who are these women? What is their role in MISA? And what is their relationship with Bivolaru, their spiritual master? And how do they apply his teachings on Tantra in their everyday relationships and lives?

To find the answers to these questions, I traveled to Romania. Between July 3 to 16, 2024, I conducted interviews with thirty-nine women at the MISA yoga school in Bucharest.

Women’s roles in new religious movements had been the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation. After reading the academic studies of MISA by Gabriel Andreescu, Massimo Introvigne, Zdeněk Vojtíšek, and Liselotte Frisk, I realized this NRM would make a fascinating study for researchers interested in the intersection between religion, gender, and sexuality.

I approached MISA’s administrative leaders who accepted my proposal. They arranged my schedule and found an interpreter for those few women who did not speak English or French. They also set up a video recorder, presumably to ensure that no one could distort the information that was being communicated.

One criticism of this research project might be that it did not follow the random sampling process. All my informants expressed a highly favorable view of MISA and of its spiritual mentor, “Grieg” (Gregorian Bivolaru). I visited yoga classes and the yoga hall and the students who accepted to be interviewed answered my questions.

In defense of this method, it might be noted that the mass media and French procureur (prosecuting judge) involved in the case against Bivolaru have focused narrowly on the testimonies of seven women who reported negative experiences and have chosen to ignore the majority of Bivolaru’s female yoga students, who number around 60% of the estimated 20,000 students in MISA and the international federation ATMAN of which it is part.

Women of MISA/ATMAN. From womenofspirituality.com.

I found this research fascinating. The Romanian women I interviewed were beautiful, the majority pale-skinned with oval brown eyes and long black hair. As yoga practitioners, their bodies were fit and flexible. As MISA members I assumed they were vegetarians, non-smokers, abstaining from alcohol. They wore revealing, ultra-feminine clothing that was comfortable and flowing. Their manicured nails and toenails were enameled in pastel colors. The majority were professional women with a university education. Among them were four psychologists, four teachers, five managers, three masseuses, two translators, two economists, two journalists, and one medical doctor. Their ages ranged from 26 to 55.

Eighteen of the women were in their 40s, ten were in their 50s, four were in their 30s, and three in their 20s. Many had been practicing yoga since the early 1990s, when Bivolaru launched his yoga school. And each woman was an experienced practitioner in MISA’s sacred and ethical path of “amorous erotic continence” (AEC).

Before beginning the interviews, I entered into an oral consent agreement with each woman, captured on film, in which I promised to protect her anonymity and comply with the guidelines of Canada’s research ethics boards. In transcribing their interviews, I have tried to preserve the slightly clumsy, Romanian flavor of their English prose, which I found quite charming.

It is beyond the scope of this article to address the allegations against Gregorian Bivolaru and his core group, or to challenge the claims of abuse by former members. Rather, my purpose is simply to investigate and describe women’s roles and experiences in MISA, based on data collected during my research project, and to analyze MISA’s culture of sacred eroticism within the dual context of previous “gendered” studies of NRMs and studies of spiritual trends in the feminist movement.

MISA is both a yoga school and a religion. But it might also be described as a spiritual “subculture” with its own unique gender roles, based on Bivolaru’s sacred approach to sexuality. And after a week of back-to-back interviews, I began to detect in these women’s narratives the configurations of a kind of “feminist spirituality.”

But it should be noted that my informants certainly did not self-identity as “feminists.” They evinced very little interest in this important cultural movement. Several dismissed the feminist movement as “man-hating,” or “women trying to be men.” Nevertheless, many of them claimed they had found strength, meaning and self-determination as women—what feminist scholars call “empowerment”—through their affiliation with MISA, following the Tantric path of AEC. For this reason, it appears appropriate to analyze these narratives within the framework of feminist theories on women in religion.

Read Article 2

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About the author

Susan J. Palmer is an Affiliate Professor in the Religions and Cultures Department at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also directing the Children on Sectarian Religions and State Control project at McGill University, supported by the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is the author of twelve books, notably The New Heretics of France (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Source: bitterwinter.org

 

yogaesoteric
February 1, 2025

 

Also available in: Română

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