‘There’s no going back’: A survivor’s story of a cult’s manipulation and exploitation
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This article contains distressing content.
Bec Sonkkila was in her late 20s and newly in love with yoga when she first heard of the Mahasiddha yoga school in the Indian city of Rishikesh and decided to visit for a month.
Mahasiddha is one of scores of yoga schools around the world associated with the Atman Yoga Federation, also known as the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA).
“A lot of it was very beautiful and amazing,” Sonkkila told Crikey. “The really messed-up stuff is hidden so well, you just don’t really see it until you’re around a while.”
Sonkkila soon returned to Australia to begin running workshops alongside other adherents, which is when she said she started to experience some of the “toxic stuff of the organisation”.
It took less than three years for her involvement with MISA to render Sonkkila — a once energetic, high-functioning and social person — incapable of walking a block from her house without having a panic attack.
“If I hadn’t lived this, I wouldn’t believe it,” she said.
In November last year, MISA’s leader and founder Gregorian Bivolaru was arrested in France, facing preliminary charges of human trafficking, organised kidnapping and rape. Fourteen others were handed a shorter list of preliminary charges and in total 40 members of the organisation were arrested as part of the same investigation.
Bivolaru founded MISA in Romania in 1990. As journalist Anke Richter detailed in her 2022 book Cult Trip, after years of legal issues in his home country, Bivolaru fled to Sweden in 2004, where he was granted asylum on the grounds that he had “been persecuted for his religious beliefs”.
In 2013, Bivolaru was sentenced in absentia by a Romanian court to six years’ imprisonment. He was arrested in Paris in 2016 and extradited to Romania. He fled Romania again in 2017 after he was conditionally released. A week later, Finland filed an international arrest warrant, seeking him for human trafficking and nine cases of sexual assault. By the time of his 2023 arrest in Paris last year, he had been on Interpol’s wanted list for years.
MISA has issued statements calling the charges “absurd”, a “witch hunt” and part of a long-running campaign to “discredit and slander” Bivolaru. A press release attributed to the MISA Yoga School (also posted on Atman’s website) insists the French school at the heart of the allegations, while part of the Atman network, is an “independent entity, with its own management and organisation”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/27/cult-misa-survivor-story/.
