Tara Yoga Centre

Miranda’s search for inner peace through yoga leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation. “You just get sucked in so gradually… that you don’t realise,” says her mother Penny. The Bad Guru is season six of World of Secrets, the global investigations podcast from the BBC. Uncovering stories around the world and telling them, episode by episode, with gripping storytelling.

Atman Yoga Federation as an organization was registered in UK 2004. The then address of Tara Yoga Centre, the UK branch, was used until March 2021 as the address of the federation: 25-31 Ironmonger Row, Lower Ground Floor, London.

To see all the branches in the Atman Yoga Federation, please see the map.

Among the active directors in the organization is Bogdan Radasnu, a yoga and tantra teacher in UK. Other UK teachers, Maria Porsfelt served as previous director in the organization, and Cathrine Dunworth, as previous secretary.

Gregorian Bivolaru, the founder of the organization, also known as MISA, is currently wanted for human trafficking in Finland. His connection to Tara Yoga Centre was still mentioned on its website until 2015, before it was removed. He is currently in hiding and is still very active in controlling the organization.

Libel and defamation laws are strong in the UK. The Atman Yoga Federation has a history of suing people who speak out against the school. Tara Yoga Centre issued an open letter in late 2021 where they stated that they are “intent on pursuing legal proceedings against individuals making these damaging allegations to hold them accountable for their actions”.

Human Trafficking

Women are sent from different branches all over Europe to have sex with the guru. They are required to not tell anyone where they are going. Their phones, passport and credit cards are confiscated while they live under prison-like conditions; able to leave once a week in a group, and allowed only to call close relatives on a ‘community cellphone’ in the presence of witnesses.

Ashleigh joined the school while in London year 2018. In an MamaMia article, she describes the following:

“They promised the whole world at your feet, if you go through with the initiation. And they say that if a woman gets the opportunity and she says no, then she is stubborn, stupid, superficial. She’s completely lacking any aspiration for spiritual evolution, and she’s destined for a life of suffering and negative karma”

Listen to her story here:

Yoni Shakti – The book

The author, who wrote the first edition of her book in 2012, stated that she wanted to warn others about Atman Yoga Federation in the revised version of her book.

I needed to set the record straight, and to ensure that readers of Yoni Shakti could not in future be misled into believing that any of the schools of the Atman International Federation of Yoga were safe places to study yoga tantra. After receiving the testimonies of the ex-Atman Yoga retreat students describing many of the terrible experiences that they had endured, I felt that the best outcome from their brave sharing would be to help other young women void becoming caught up in such abusive organisations. The women who had testified worked together with me to create a set of practical warning signals to share with others, things that they wished they had known before they had entered the harmful environment of the Atman International Federation of Yoga.”

After the publication in July 2020, copies of the book were sold until the author was placed under a legal threat by Atman Yoga Federation and Tara Yoga over a year after the first date of publication. The initial legal claim against the author was made in May 2021 and Yoni Shakti has not been reprinted since then. The book is currently available in the digital version. In that, she mentions Tara Yoga Centre in UK.

The young woman who managed to escape from the ‘secret initiation’, aka rape, at the Atman Federation yoga retreat wrote to me some weeks after I first received the first testimony. Meanwhile, I also heard the experience of another young woman in the same yoga school. Soon afterwards I received further testimonies of a very similar encounter from a woman who had attended Tara Yoga – the UK branch of the Atman International Federation of Yoga. As each woman heard that I believed what had happened to them, and was willing to learn more, they found the courage to share. They wrote to tell me what had happened to them during the time they were students, and their sharing empowered others to speak also. I promised not to reveal their identities because they were terrified of retribution and violent reprisals from people who support Bivolaru, the leader of the cult. It is rare for women to escape from the powerful control networks of Bivolaru’s enablers.

The author founded a campaign in March 2020, called Yoni Shakti: The movement, aiming to educate, raise awareness and end the abuse of women in Yoga and Tantra.

Imagine a world where all women and girls are free from shame, oppression and abuse, able to live in resonance with the power of their natural rhythmic cycles and in connection with their inner wisdom.

We want a world where everybody’s sisters and daughters are safe to pursue their spiritual journeys of reconnection, free from abuse.  With your help and the help of a global web of yoginis and yogis, we have been ensuring women are aware of how to uphold their safety and sovereignty within the often oppressive and disempowering orthodoxy of yoga environments, and to give women the courage to speak out.  The campaign, and the ongoing offerings from the Yoga Nidra Network, intends to dismantle harmful structures and beliefs that create conditions for the abuse of power in yoga teacher-student dynamics.

This is the central message of Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Yoga and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra

The open letter

In the open letter from Tara Yoga Centre dated October 2021, the school denies the allegations with the following:

These accusations range from us being a cult whose purpose is to groom women as sex slaves for senior male teachers, to our yoga practices being forms of torture that slowly break down our members, who are then subsequently brainwashed by an environment that is friendly and loving – to mention a few. Considering that we seek to empower women and support them to discover their own innate power in a friendly and warm environment, and we teach different, traditional techniques that can be found practiced also in other traditions and schools of yoga, these allegations seem completely outrageous

Ashleigh, who currently runs the CultivateAwareness page on Instagram, unpacked the language used behind the letter. See the video here.

“So what they’ve actually done is warped the allegations into something that is for the most part and on a technicality not true. So they haven’t actually addressed any of the allegations made against them, they’ve just changed them and then denied those false claims that they’ve made.”