The Bad Guru: 1. The Retreat
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed. And in this new series, we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this. Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation...

You just get sucked in so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise.

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You're about to listen to the latest series of World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. Episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds. This series contains explicit sexual content, some strong language and allegations of sexual exploitation. This episode includes explicit sexual content.

Inside a yoga studio in London, neat rows of women and men are sitting on their mats with perfect postures. The teachers here usually talk a lot about love, but not today. Today, the teacher won't be guiding them through sun salutations. Instead, he's gathered the group to denounce a former student, Miranda, a 30-something university tutor from Oxfordshire University.

A man relays a message from the yoga school's guru. This is a secret recording from the meeting. It's hard in places to make out what he's saying, so I'll explain it. He says the former student has taken advantage of their naivety.

The message is that Miranda is a liar who has spread... Obviously false, tendentious pieces of information. Obviously false, tendentious pieces of information. The sensation of cunning slander is insidiously whispered in our ear. And sensational, cunning slander.

Miranda has made some serious allegations against what he calls this esoteric spiritual school. It's a worldwide yoga movement. And this place in London, Tara Yoga Centre, is part of it.

This is a potential crisis, not just for this yoga centre in London, but the entire international movement, because the accusations this former student has made about the guru and his movement are jaw-dropping. My phone and my passport were taken from me and wrapped in foil. Here being on Interpol's wanted list. Dark glasses which had masking tape on the inside.

We couldn't see where we were going. To hide behind yoga is particularly reprehensible. I have nothing. I have a bag with some knickers in it and a toothbrush. I knew that the whole movement had started in Romania. It's already a cult. Can I ask you, while I've got you on the phone, why you encourage students from the yoga school to work in a cash-in-hand, unlicensed, topless... I'm sorry, I'm taking you to be nice. PHONE RINGS

This is World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru, a BBC Radio 4 investigation. I'm Kat McShane. This is Episode 1, The Retreat. This story starts for me in January 2021, on that first rainy day of the third pandemic lockdown in England. And I'm wishing I wasn't stuck inside these four walls. Perhaps it's boredom that makes me agree to do a call with a yoga teacher in Oxford called Laura Hancock.

They can't believe this is happening in the yoga industry because this is supposed to be a place of healing, of care, of support, of all of that stuff. Laura is a friend of a friend and she's been put in touch with me because she's looking for a journalist to help her expose what she says is a scandal. It can feel really overwhelming and unbelievable and sometimes I wake up and I think, you know, am I making this up? It

It's the start of a series of conversations we have over the coming months about the role of one yoga network with a base in London and also her hometown of Oxford. In terms of like chatter in Oxford, I mean, it is like everyone knows about it. She's read an article online about the man she says is their spiritual guide who lives in hiding abroad.

As the months go by, Laura and I both investigate the guru. We hear a series of increasingly outrageous-sounding allegations about him and the international network he's inspired. Laura suspects some of the women who started by attending classes in Oxford...

might have ended up being trafficked as victims of modern slavery. Could an innocent-looking yoga school in Oxford be linked to this stuff? The place Laura is talking about is the branch of a registered charity called Tara Yoga Centre. It has run classes throughout the British Isles. London, Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Leicester, Plymouth, Burton-on-Trent, Woking and Dublin, as well as Oxford.

And most people who've attended their classes won't have a clue about the sort of accusations Laura and I are investigating. It's clear we're going to need to speak to many more alleged victims, and we need someone who says they've lived through this and is willing to speak on the record. That isn't easy. And we both have a sense that people who have been deeply involved feel duty-bound to remain loyal. So, when three years later, I sit down with a whistleblower in a studio, it's quite a moment.

A large group of people will be very unhappy about the fact that this is happening. Meet Miranda from Oxfordshire. She's the woman who was being talked about at that yoga meeting in London at the beginning of this episode. She's decided to sue Tara Yoga Centre and to go public. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to...

put my reputation and everything else on the line. But I want truth and justice and for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. Miranda's now in her late 30s and has long, curly, unswept hair. She wears bright, bold prints that give you the impression she's just stopping by to see you before going to her next music festival. I sit opposite her in the recording studio. So are you happy to...

I'm here to start. And she tells me her story over four days. Miranda is a well-educated, intelligent woman from a privileged background. In fact, all the women I've spoken to while investigating this story have been bright, impressive types who do that oh-so-middle-class thing, trying to find themselves through yoga. Miranda wants to tell her story, but she doesn't want to be forever known for it. So I'm just going to use her first name.

I had a very happy childhood. Miranda grew up with her dad, two brothers and her mum Penny. Well, we started out in London in a house in Clapham and then when Miranda was eight we moved to Oxfordshire, about six miles outside of Oxford, a sort of overgrown cottage I always describe it as.

We were middle of the road parents, really, in the sense that we wanted to be more liberal than our own parents had been.

But we didn't set out to be our children's best friends. There was money for exotic foreign holidays. We had a lot of fun together, a lot of laughs. And Miranda seemed to thrive. She has always had a terrific sense of humour and has always been great fun. She had, you know, a mischievous side.

Just normal mischief, really. So this is a privileged family, growing up in an idyllic setting. But life wasn't always easy. There are some deeply private matters that I can't go into, but suffice it to say that this family also had more than its fair share of bad luck. Yeah, you know, challenges arose over the past 15 or so years in our family, so that hasn't always been easy. But I think it's been another motivating factor for all of us to...

seek therapy and different ways of living with in the most kind of positive and life-enhancing way. A family dealing with life's challenges while looking for something more profound. Where do you think Miranda's search for more spiritual meaning came from? Well, I think I would put my hands up and say that there's a certain...

inheritance aspect here because I've always been a seeker. I've always wanted to find out more about what lies behind human existence. When Miranda graduates, she moves to London and gets a job as an English teacher. It's stressful, so she decides to take a year off travelling. She ends up in India at an ashram and yoga just seems to work for her somehow. I

overcame things, a lot of things in a shorter period of time than I had done with other types of development. After India, Miranda comes back to London and she searches online for classes and the first yoga group she comes across seems perfect. It felt a really safe and welcoming space.

I noticed from the beginning that the people on reception were always very, very smiley, friendly, welcoming. It's the London branch of Tara Yoga Centre, an affiliate of Atman, the International Federation of Yoga and Meditation. There are endless different types of yoga, popular across the globe.

an industry worth nearly a billion pounds in the UK alone. There are nearly 5,000 British yoga studios where each week half a million of us bend our bodies into downward dogs, breathe deeply, meditate and try and find a way to clearer minds and stronger bodies. In common with other affiliates of the Atman Federation, Tara offers two types of yoga. One, the sort you might be familiar with. It's called Hatha yoga. A lot of poses, stretches. All seemed quite normal.

But Tara and Atman affiliates also offer a more niche version of yoga too, tantric. When I first heard of tantric, I thought of Sting and his fabled seven-hour marathon sex sessions with his wife, Trudy. But as Maria Pawsveld, one of the leaders of the Tara Yoga Centre, explains in this talk, entitled Open Couple Relationships, on Tara's YouTube channel, it's about spirituality too.

One of the areas of our life that we aim to integrate in a tantric practice, which is a practice that encompasses and integrates all areas of our life in our spiritual practice, would be that of love and relationships. Maria became one of the directors of Tara Yoga in 2016, a year before Miranda discovered it.

Maria is a reassuring looking presence on the Tara Yoga website. She smiles sweetly. She talks softly in her Danish accent as she lectures about such topics as the importance of pleasure in happiness, the meaning of life and that talk on what she calls open couple relationships. In reality, the only relationship that really works is an open one.

I was interested in there being a different way to interact sexually and for relationships and sexuality to be used for spiritual experiences and receiving teachings, which I could then take into my personal life and use with a partner. For weeks, Miranda attends a one-hour tantric class...

Miranda starts going to another class at Tara too called the Shakti group. It's just for women. Men have their own class.

Miranda feels the classes are helping her to be more confident and sexy in the name of embracing her divine feminine power. Tara Yoga also has open days. Miranda's mum Penny goes to one, but she isn't impressed. Let me come straight out with it. It was a bit icky. I guess what struck me was there was a lot of, shall I say, hugging and embracing. And did you share any of that with Miranda? Oh no, I wouldn't have dreamt of it because that would have been...

ungracious and churlish. You know, she'd invited us to something that she was involved in. And, you know, to all intents and purposes, it was a lovely, heartfelt event. And Miranda is getting a lot out of this group. I felt really good after the yoga classes. I felt amazing. In the spring of 2018, Miranda wheels her suitcase up the long gravel drive of a beautiful country house in Somerset, south-west England.

She's looking forward to a break from her new life in London, teaching university students how to write academic English. She's here for a retreat weekend organised by the Tara Yoga Centre.

There was a romance to the house and the furnishings. There was an indoor pool with a sauna and a steam room, four poster beds. The weekend court she's here for is called the Polarity Retreat. I thought it would be a good way to develop my friendships with the women in the group.

And I was excited to learn more, really. Polarity is one of Tara Yoga's tantric theories. There's this very binary concept that they adhere to, that men and women have very different needs, qualities, energies, and that by separating them as much as possible...

you increase the magnetism between them. Miranda unpacks her bag, changes into her yoga clothes and goes downstairs and joins the women's group. And in one of these beautiful rooms at the country house with floor-to-ceiling sash windows, women do yoga exercises that are similar to the ones she's been doing in London. You would keep your eyes closed and they would say, you now feel...

And this would be followed by a series of statements. You now feel a sense of love without an object, a sense of connection to the universe, a sense of selfless devotion. They claim to know a lot about these things. This is what they say I should be feeling. Okay.

I can start to feel that. After yoga, they learn about makeup, clothes, how to look sexy, even practicing dance routines. We were encouraged to dance very sexually to a song, to kind of interact with each other in a sexual way while dancing.

While in a separate part of the building, the men are also at work. We were told, don't ask the men what they were doing. They're not going to ask you. Part of polarity is that you keep these activities completely separate. The men were learning how to be what Tara calls a tantric man. But at various points over the retreat, the men and the women were encouraged to snap out of their seclusion, to rejoin the opposite sex, perform a ritual together and let the magnetism take over.

So you weren't told what was going to happen in the evening. They'd say, come downstairs and we're going to separate into separate genders and wear your nice clothes. Elise is a hairstylist who started going to Tara Yoga around 2010 after a flyer came through her door.

She was looking for something to remedy the stress of running her own salon. She attended various Tara Yoga retreats, including Polarity, some years before Miranda. At Polarity, she had a bit of a surprise one night. I remember taking part in a ritual. There must have been about 60 people in the ritual. And we were like divided into separate genders.

In one room, the women are told to disguise their identities from the men by wearing black veils over their faces and bodies. All the women kind of laid in this formation and we all had our legs open. And then men were coming into the room and they had feathers and various other bits and pieces that they were allowed to use to touch us. But it definitely felt like that event was quite out of control. Like the...

There was definitely a lot of sexual acts happening. There was never a real, like, you don't have to do this. They do kind of say you don't, but if you decide you don't want to, there's a lot of persuasion. This will be good for your spiritual development. This is your block. This is your thing to overcome. The purpose of the ritual is to evoke a particular kind of goddess, but Elise... I cried the whole way through, um...

And afterwards, I just kind of went and hid myself away. And what were your feelings while it was going on? I found it really difficult, actually. I knew the whole idea of those camps is to kind of ramp up the energy between the men and the women, I think. And so I did know that I was going to be letting myself into something like that. Every retreat is different. Miranda's group didn't have the feathers ritual at her retreat.

World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed. And in this new series, we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this. Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. You just get sucked in.

So gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. The women were told to surprise all the men with a sexy dance they'd practised earlier that day. We were told that we were going to offer them this selflessly and a nice kind of gift for them. And we were encouraged to dress up.

And some of the women, especially the teachers, went in underwear or took their underwear off while they were in there. I wore a skirt, a short skirt and a top.

And I remember that there was one woman who didn't feel comfortable, didn't want to participate. And she was made to feel pretty bad that this was her limitation she needed to overcome. And this was her ego. And she ended up just kind of sitting on her own.

in the room while everyone else went in and did the dance. So the men were meditating in the hall, we went in, they put on some music, we started dancing. And I remember dancing quite close to my first Tantra teacher and him looking directly at my crotch.

And I was very shocked and surprised in the moment, largely because this action, this behavior was so much in conflict with everything we'd been taught and told about Tantra and spiritual sexuality before. There was, you know, this idea that we'd been told that Tantric men, especially Tantra teachers, were...

this elevated type of masculinity that understood women, that adored women, that worshipped them, that didn't sexualise them and that they would treat you impeccably. Were you surprised by how sexual this camp was? Yes. Had you had any preparation that this sort of thing was going to happen? No, I had no idea that these things would happen. The overall atmosphere in the school was kind of

great and was kind of friendly, aspirational, even loving. There was a good sense of community. Michael went to the polarity camp multiple times, including the same year Miranda went. The retreats followed a similar structure, including a ritual to honour Shakti, the female energy. Michael took part in the same type of veil and feathers exercise that Elise did. They had a ball with rose petals.

which they could throw in the man's direction, which was a sign that they would be open to allow the man to touch them in different forms, including oral pleasure. The person I was with chose to go and have all stages. So from my end, it felt that she was in consent and she seemed to actually really enjoy consent.

the ritual and expressed joy and pleasure. But after the ritual, this woman came up to Michael. And she was really, really distressed. And she cried for a whole evening and the night and she could not sleep. She was not upset with me because she realized that she actually ran into the room and made her choice of a man. But she felt very coerced into doing so. The way Michael

the preliminary workshops in the women's quarters took place caused some sort of psychological pressure for her at least. If she wouldn't proceed with the ritual, then she would not be accepted. So she really pushed herself way beyond her boundaries. It was really distressing for me and I felt really sad and guilty.

This is the nub of it. From Michael's point of view, the women appear to be consenting, but some feel they've been coerced into consenting. Like nobody actually put handcuffs on someone and forced them into something. But with hindsight, Michael thought... I was fooling myself into believing, OK, there is consent. And once Michael realised this, he wanted nothing to do with Tara.

We asked the Tara Yoga Center to respond to the concerns you've just heard about consent at the Polarity Retreats. They didn't respond to the specific issues raised, but they told us they unequivocally condemn all forms of abuse. I've seen photographs of Miranda at the Polarity Retreat, smiling broadly. She looks like she's glowing with happiness. It's smiling for the camera, of course, but not just that. She says she enjoyed most of the retreat.

Both Miranda and Elise felt that, on balance, they were getting something good out of Tara, and that it outweighed the shock and discomfort they felt about some of the activities. So Miranda and Elise stayed in the school. I felt like I was less afraid of certain things. I got raised levels of confidence because I got used to getting outside of my comfort zone. And you just have so many people around you who just are so lovely.

Elise was also feeling something that, for me, explains a lot about why people find it so difficult to leave this organisation, even after they've started to have misgivings. You always feel like the next thing you're going to get is going to be the thing that's going to completely change your life. And they'll be like, oh, this technique that you're going to get in this next year is going to be amazing. And, you know, and then...

then the next it then it's on to the next one so it's always like a thing that's just around the corner that you really need to know about if you just stick with the program a spiritual breakthrough awaits it's something that maria the leading teacher at tara alludes to in a video entitled the transforming power of pleasure published on the tara yoga center's youtube channel ecstasy is not so difficult with a little bit of of training

coming with many more benefits than you can anticipate. Miranda has reason to think there might be something in that. I could see that the techniques they were teaching me were working. I felt very good after the classes, after practising some of their yoga and breathing techniques. I wanted to believe that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed...

gross to me at the time and inappropriate and hypersexualized was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Now, not everyone listening to this will relate to wanting a spiritual awakening, but we're all searching for something. A life partner, an amazing career, a healthy body, a cure for depression, and especially a better sex life.

When someone tells you that they can help us get the thing we crave, we often ignore the red flags, the toxic workplace culture, the overpriced health supplement. We ignore the warning signs because we want the thing that we think they can give us. After the polarity retreat, Miranda starts dating one of the teachers at Tara Yoga.

Miranda feels like she is now kind of part of the inner circle. She's been promoted to the Advanced Women's Group. The woman who leads it invites Miranda to another retreat, this time in a Romanian coastal resort. It will be a chance to meet people from around the world, members of other schools affiliated to the Atman Federation. All of your food will be included, that allot, allot.

of wonderful spiritual things happened there, that I would get to meet people from all the schools all around the world. It was at the seaside. And having a two-week holiday by the sea where I only paid for the flights, it sounded appealing. And she might even get the chance to find out more about the spiritual guide of the Tara Yoga School and the wider Atman Federation, a mysterious yoga mystic called Gregorian Bivalaru. This person was being more and more...

set up as a kind of god on earth figure with literally supernatural powers. Miranda will be sworn to secrecy about what happens at the Romanian holiday retreat. Vowing that I wouldn't tell anyone about what happened inside this villa. But six years on, she's ready to tell us the whole story.

We asked the Tara Yoga Centre to explain why Miranda was attacked as a liar at the meeting you heard a secret recording of at the start of this episode. The centre declined to comment. The teacher who you heard delivering the accusations, Bogdan Radhasanu, did not respond to our letters and emails. Hi, is that Bogdan? So I telephoned him. Do you regret the way in which you led the denunciation of your former student, Miranda?

Next time on World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. They said, you know, we're going to keep everyone's passport and when you leave, you get it back. World of Secrets, The Bad Guru is a BBC Studios audio production. It's presented by me, Kat McShane, and produced by myself and Emma Wetherill. The executive producer is Inez Bowen.

Subscribe to World of Secrets. Episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds.

These were police agents.

I'd have to find other agents. Just how was one man allowed to lead a double life for so long? It's not like James Bond. It's not a black and white situation. When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm with the IRA. Stake Knife. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed. And in this new series, we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this. Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. You just get sucked in spiritually.

so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. World of Secrets The Bad Guru Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.