#SheToo: The Experience of MISA Women. 5. The Paradox of Polyamory

MISA women talk about experiments with multiple-partner relationships and what they have to do with spirituality.

Article 5 of 6. Read article 1, article 2, article 3 and article 4

While MISA students are not obliged or pressured (and certainly not “forced”) to form polyamorous relationships, Bivolaru defends and endorses polyamory in his writings. Most of the participants in my study had experienced “threesome” relationships that included another woman brought into the conjugal relationship; a situation, in most cases, initiated by their husbands or male lovers.

Several women had been involved with two lovers during the same time period, and one young woman was in a polyamorous relationship for years with her five male lovers who agreed amicably with this situation. Many of the women who experimented with polyamory spoke of struggling with jealousy; of how they learned to control negative feelings, and claimed they were rewarded by reaching even higher spiritual states of ecstasy than is possible with one lover. Some said they felt a deep love for the woman they had initially regarded as a rival.

N. spoke of her battle to conquer jealousy: “You need to have a spiritual nature to conquer jealousy, and to overcome this kind of resentment and anger. I think this is a very… sneaky problem, because it depends very much on your self-trust, your maturity. Sometimes, you could feel very good and master your energy and your emotions, but other times you could be taken by surprise and actually find that, whoops! You are jealous. So, you have to be very aware of what is inside your soul so you can conquer this feeling of jealousy. It’s not so easy.”

A. explained how polyamory was “not her style”:

“We had a relationship for three years and he decided to break up with me. He had started, already, another relationship. And he decided to stay in that one. So, for a very short while we had an open relationship. Actually. I can say it like this: It’s not my style.”

M. described an ominous experience with a lover who did not follow the protocols of polyamory:

“My lover at that time was [very insistent] about having other lovers and I couldn’t integrate such a perspective. He just took the decision by himself that he wants to open up towards another woman, and then I was told that he had already started another relationship. Later, I learned that this should not be done in this way, I mean he should have discussed it with me beforehand.”

The same woman turned to Grieg for paranormal help in dealing with her emotional trauma after this experience:

“I noticed afterwards that I started having a blockage in my affectivity, so I went to speak with my spiritual guide, Grieg. He was asking me if I thought that a person could love more beings, not only one. I said that as a concept, yes, I can understand this, but in my heart, I felt unhappy about doing it. But then I received paranormal help. While speaking with Grieg I felt the energies in my being becoming fluid. They started lifting upwards, and afterwards I could open up in love and affection towards another man without having any trauma remaining from my previous love relationship.”

Another woman (T.) tried polyamory only once, but she claimed it propelled her into a higher spiritual state.

“My third relationship was with a man who was 15 years older than me, and he was a yoga teacher. At the beginning of the relationship, when we were just discovering each other, he told me that he also had another lover, and they had been together for a while. I was in love with him, and he introduced me to his lover. They were living together at the time, but he was very mature.

He knew how to treat the relationship with such harmony and equilibrium that I did not feel any discomfort. I was not open towards women, so it was just one time, a very well-integrated spiritual moment in our lives. He asked me if I wanted to be together with them, and I didn’t have anything against the idea, so just did it once. I was used to having a man during a lovemaking [but now] it was also [with] a woman, and this enriched the amorous interaction. I felt during that amorous game that I was in a spiritually integrated context. I was not considering him or her as individuals, but I felt an expansion of the consciousness. My approach was from a universal angle, beyond the personal limit.”

One woman analysed an eight-year, long-distant polyamorous relationship with her lover: “He has a lover there. And it’s normal for me to have a lover here. He cannot be jealous and ask me to not have anyone. It’s normal. It’s common sense.”

S. spoke of guidelines needed to maintain a harmonious “threesome” loving relationship:

“In threesome amorous games, it’s very good for the women to know each other beforehand, to become friends. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. And when we start a threesome, it’s very important to be in harmony and to practice yoga and sublimation a lot, because the energies are very high. If the energy falls, it can give like possessiveness, jealousy, fights. Yes, that’s why I pay attention to practice yoga and sublimate my energies before and after this kind of lovemaking, because it involves a huge quantity of energy.”

M. spoke of her inner spiritual struggle in coming to terms with polyamory:

“I can tell you how I got away from jealousy, because I felt jealous, very jealous. I did long meditations, I made a retreat, and suddenly I realised that my heart has a space—the space of the heart of M.—and in my heart space there are all the people that I love in my life: my mom, my cat, my daughter, my lover, my sisters… And I was thinking that, if I am jealous, what if I make a space in my heart, just by my will? I will make it 100 meters. What if that person I am jealous of comes into my heart space, what does it mean? It means that I begin to love them, right?

[Our threesome relationship] lasted three years. He broke up with her last year, and I suffered a lot when she left because I really liked her. She was bringing a lot of joy and happiness in my life, and it was hard for me when she left, because I got used to her, and it was much easier… I’ll just say, when you are in a relationship with a man, but at the same time you have a very complex life, you cannot offer him all that he wants. But if you do give him what he wants, you don’t give yourself time for your independent life, your personal life. So, when another person comes along and is giving him exactly what you cannot give, that can be very helpful… You feel you have more time for yourself.

At first I was jealous, but when I met her I thought she was very sweet, and I liked her because she was very sincere. She was natural, open and very pure. I didn’t feel she had thoughts to steal him from me. I can tell you it was a wonderful experience, and it expanded my consciousness, and I felt… even more beautiful, more feminine, more erotic—because when another person is coming into your couple, you just feel like you want to give the best of yourself.”

All 39 women I interviewed claimed that the amorous erotic continence (AEC) techniques, learned in MISA classes, helped maintain erotic attraction or “polarity” between them and their lovers. Most were living in (or had lived in) marriages and/or intimate relationships that lasted between ten to twenty years.

As for motherhood, most women said they had decided early on not to have children; and that this reflected a general trend among the youth of Romania’s post-Communist period. Gregorian Bivolaru himself has no children and was never married, but he does not condemn marriage (unlike Osho Rajneesh who dubs it “the coffin of love”). Although Bivolaru is a staunch proponent of semen retention, he does not ban procreation, unlike the Reverend Chris Korda of the Church of Euthanasia whose oft-repeated motto is: “Thank you for not breeding.” In fact, I was told that Bivolaru has accepted several requests by MISA couples to be their baby’s godfather, and that he graced several christening ceremonies held in the Orthodox Church.

Read Article 6

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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 20, 2025

 

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