‘So many yoga gurus attempt to have intercourse with feminine followers – I’m amazed ladies nonetheless fall for it’
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Based on the Katha Upanishad, a Vedic textual content believed so far from between 800BC and 300BC, yoga is a “full stillness during which one enters the unitive state, by no means to grow to be separate once more”.
Over the centuries, in its migration to the West, what originated in India as a non secular observe has, for many, reworked into one thing somewhat totally different – a mix of wholesome train and self-punishment.
However the mixture of the pursuit of the physique stunning, and the – typically bogus – aura of spirituality across the observe has opened the door to one thing rather more sinister.
This week Gregorian Bivolaru, a Romanian described as a “tantric yoga guru”, and the founding father of an organisation referred to as the Motion for Religious Integration into the Absolute (MISA), was arrested in France, on charges of rape, kidnapping and people trafficking, accused of working a global intercourse slave ring, and utilizing “psychological manipulation” to sexually abuse his feminine followers over quite a lot of years.
A former pupil of Bivolaru, Agnes Arabela Marques, who claimed to have misplaced her virginity to him in 2016 when she was simply 15, mentioned that Bivolaru was obsessive about “the Indian fantasy that mentioned you may get to a excessive non secular degree in the event you had intercourse with 1,000 virgin women”.
One other feminine member of MISA was on report as saying “it was an honour to have intercourse with guru Gregorian, as a result of it meant constructive karma and non secular progress”.
Up to now, Bivolaru has denied accusations of legal exercise, along with his organisation describing a number of the previous allegations as “fabricated info”.
It’s a great distance from the “full stillness during which one enters the unitive state, by no means to grow to be separate once more”.
Yoga means “union”, a strategy of integrating the physique, thoughts and spirit. If the traditional picture of the observe was as soon as of the solitary contemplative devotee seated within the lotus place in his Himalayan redoubt, it’s now of lithe, sunkissed our bodies enacting the downward canine at expensive retreats in the Greek islands or on the polished wooden floors of the yoga studio with its aroma of incense, its New Age music and its air of cultivated narcissism.
But initially yoga was a bodily observe solely insofar because it served a non secular goal, as a method of self-transcendence.
The Buddha, realising enlightenment whereas meditating below the Bodhi tree, is essentially the most potent image of this. The founding father of one of many world’s nice religions can be puzzled to replicate that yoga is now a £14 billion trade. And appalled that the non secular teachings of Buddhism and yoga are deployed as the quilt for sexual abuse.
The checklist of transgressors is limitless. There may be Swami Muktananda, the founding father of Siddha Yoga, who arrived within the West in 1970, establishing ashrams and meditation centres in quite a few nations.
Muktananda was often called “the shaktipat guru”, able to transmitting non secular power and awakening his college students merely by the ability of his presence. It was solely following his loss of life in 1982 that allegations surfaced of him molesting under-age women and interesting in sexual relations with younger devotees.
Then there was Harbhajan Singh Puri, a Punjabi customs inspector who arrived in America along with his spouse and three youngsters in 1968. Calling himself Yogi Bhajan, and telling folks he was a famend holy man in India, he started educating Kundalini yoga.
Bhajan, who died in 2004, constructed up a thriving enterprise, advertising Kundalini Yoga, and his personal model of Yogi Tea, ostensibly “rooted in ayurveda”, and which lived on after his loss of life, reportedly exceeding gross sales of $59 million (£46 million) in 2022. In addition to constructing an enormous and adoring following he additionally cultivated political connections, and was photographed glad-handing with politicians together with George Bush and Invoice Clinton.
It was not till 25 years after his loss of life that it emerged that Bhajan, opposite to his claims of strict celibacy, had truly raped three ladies and had sexual relationships with quite a lot of different devotees, in addition to being concerned with a number of legal operations together with smuggling 20 tons of marijuana and weapons from Thailand and defrauding folks with pretend funding scams.
He defined to 1 devotee that in having intercourse together with her he was “simply fulfilling an obligation to you due to previous karma. I’ve no want of any sexual relationship. I’m past all of that.” He additionally informed her that the one solution to “clear” her karma was by “doing his laundry and washing his flooring”.
Maybe essentially the most notorious trainer of all is the Speedo-wearing, waxed-chested Bikram Choudhury, the inventor of so-called “sizzling yoga”.
Consisting of a sequence of 26 postures practised in an atmosphere heated to 104 levels which prompted practitioners to vomit or move out, and which attracted a celeb following together with Shirley MacLaine, Girl Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow, “sizzling yoga” made Choudhury a multi-millionaire.
He fell to earth in 2012, amidst a slew of lawsuits accusing him of rape, sexual harassment and discriminatory behaviour towards homosexual folks, ladies and racial minorities.
He fled to India, the place he opened yoga studios, unchastened, responding to the accusations by saying “Why would I harass ladies? Folks spend a million {dollars} for a drop of my sperm,” and calling his accusers “trash” and “psychopaths”.
Denying the accusations, Choudhury mentioned in 2014: “I by no means harm one other spirit. I’m essentially the most non secular man… you ever met in your life.”
Tibetan Buddhism too has had its personal share of scandals.
In 2017 Sogyal Rinpoche, the founding father of Rigpa, a outstanding Buddhist organisation within the West, and the writer of a best-selling ebook, The Tibetan Ebook of Dwelling and Dying, was pressured to resign in shame after allegations of sexual and bodily abuse that that had circulated for years – and have been reported extensively in The Telegraph in 1995 – got here to the floor after devotees revealed an open letter accusing him of utilizing his function as a trainer “to realize entry to younger ladies, and to coerce, intimidate and manipulate them into giving [him] sexual favours”.
Sogyal’s case would possibly stand as a parable of the risks that may come up when Westerners fall in thrall to esoteric non secular teachings they might not absolutely perceive, and when Japanese lecturers are uncovered to the glamour and temptations of movie star worship.
As is frequent in so many communities, senior members in Rigpa conspired for years to cowl up or flip a blind eye to the allegations, not least as a result of to denounce Sogyal would forged a deadly blow to their very own judgement.
The alleged abuse of his college students was defined away as being within the custom of historic Vajrayana teachings, during which tantric sexual relations with a consort could also be an intrinsic a part of the trail to enlightenment.
“That was definitely not the case with Sogyal,” says Mary Finnigan, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, and the writer, with Rob Hogendoorn, of Intercourse and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rinpoche.
“So as to have the ability to have interaction in sexual union, the practitioner has to have reached a really excessive degree of growth by many, a few years of yogic observe, and it’s restricted to extremely developed adepts. Sogyal was a complete charlatan who was utilizing that ploy with a view to pull women for his personal satisfaction, profiting from their credulity.
“He was a robust male who was working an enormous organisation and inside that organisation ladies have been thought-about to be very particular in the event that they have been invited into his harem. That is all to do with the abuse of energy.” Sogyal, who died in 2019, at all times denied the allegations, however an impartial inquiry upheld lots of the complaints.
On this respect, the attract of an unique educating, and the give up to the trainer, is much like the ability exercised by the boss over the powerless worker or the seductive attraction of the movie star to the fan. The important thing distinction is that the boss or the movie star is unlikely to be presenting themselves because the embodiment of spirituality or enlightenment, because the guru is.
“The trainer can seem to have some information that the scholar desires, which supplies him energy over them,” Finnigan says. “This energy could make them really feel omniscient, when in reality they’re world class narcissists. So many find yourself making an attempt to have intercourse with their feminine followers, and it’s so broadly identified that I’m truly amazed ladies nonetheless fall for it.”
Even by the wretched requirements of bogus gurus, Gregorian Bivolaru is in a category of his personal. In 1977 he was jailed in Romania for distributing pornographic supplies. In 1989 he was arrested once more and hospitalised, reportedly identified with schizoid persona dysfunction, and paranoia with “obsessive-phobic components”.
The next 12 months he based MISA, ostensibly “to extend the non secular degree of peoples by spreading the yoga information and practices”, however which if truth be told grew to become a suspected European-wide cult.
In a judgment by the European Courtroom of Human Rights in 2021, Bivolaru was proclaimed to be a legal on-the-run for forcing his followers to show over their life financial savings to him and have intercourse with him, and one another, at his command. Younger feminine members mentioned they have been pressured to work as strippers and seem in hardcore porn movies.
Bivolaru will not be the primary Romanian to have been accused of utilizing his place for sexual abuse. In 2018, Narcis Tarcau, the founder and chief of the Agama yoga centre on the island of Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand, was accused by not less than 14 yoga college students of sexual assault and rape, allegations he denied.
Tarcau styled himself as Swami Vivekananda Saraswati, a not unusual ploy to lend bogus credibility – “oriental gloss”, as Finnigan places it, to idiot the credulous.
The tragedy of all that is that it threatens to offer yoga a foul title. However relaxation assured, the pleasant yoga trainer in your health club or church corridor lessons is very unlikely to be sexually abusing college students, smuggling marijuana, or hoarding hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in valuable jewels and gems.
The worst prone to occur is that you simply sprain a wrist or an ankle.
In 2017, a survey within the Journal of Bodywork and Motion Therapies reported that yoga was the reason for extra accidents than all different sports activities mixed, with one in 10 practitioners creating musculoskeletal ache from their observe, and a 3rd of these experiencing ache so extreme they have been out of motion for 3 months. Practitioners of the sedentary place might afford themselves a smug smile.
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