Here’s an intriguing article published at the journal Bitter Winter, that regularly addresses issues of religious freedom vs. suppression. This one looks at Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute group.
It begins:
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.
read the whole article:
https://bitterwinter.org/shetoo-the-experience-of-misa-women-1-the-scholar-and-the-yoginis/.
