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My invitee is Cecilia Tiz and she will tell us more about the period she spent in MISA, led by Gregorian Bivolaru.
Welcome, Cecilia!
Thank you.
I will ask you to use the microphone and start at the beginning.
When did you and your then husband sign up for the MISA classes?
It must have been around 1990-1991.
But we didn't join officially, so to say
because, as I was saying in the recordings you've shown, I came across MISA through a friend
who first sent us the written texts given at MISA.
In other words, asanas, yoga theory, the positions they do. And that is how we came to practice yoga in MISA.
In those images you saw at the first, during the early '90s,
did naked women appear as they did afterward?
Towards the year 2000.
In those MISA texts which teach yoga theory there's none of that.
The only thing...
The photos, the images that showed the asanas were drawn at first, if I remember correctly.
After that they started using photos with...
Yes, a woman who was pretty much too under-dressed for my taste, to be in the positions she was in.
Right, when did you meet Grieg, because that's how they call him in MISA?
Yes, they do.
About a year after I started finding out about what was being done in MISA, this yoga bit.
I came to Romania on Christmas with my then husband and met him somewhere in a big gym, I think it was around Politehnica.
That is where a friend introduced us to him.
- But you had already heard about Gregorian Bivolaru. - Yes, yes, yes.
Did you know of his background prior to '89?
Not at that time. We emigrated in '89 and around the time we hadn't heard about him.
We'd heard about yoga, I have a very good friend whose godfather taught yoga during the time it was illegal.
But we didn't know about Bivolaru then.
Right. I will tell our audience that Gregorian Bivolaru was arrested three times before '89.
Once in '77, condemned to one year of prison for multiplying and spreading ***, for occultism and black magic.
The second condemnation followed in 1984.
One year and a half of prison for escaping from the arrest of the Securitate where he had been imprisoned because he had taught yoga without authorization.
And again in 1989 when he was arrested once more for spreading materials with obscene content,
pictures of himself having sex with his girlfriend at the time.
Right. What did you think of Grieg when you were introduced?
The first time I saw him Grieg didn't correspond to my idea not only of a spiritual master, but of a normal human being.
- Never mind a guru! - Exactly.
He was unkempt... so the first thing I noticed were his very long nails...
I have my obsessions, I can't stand men with long, dirty nails, greasy hair.
He was also balding at the time and he combed his hair over his bald spot.
- So he didn't really fit in with... - He was repugnant?
Pretty much. I mean, I wouldn't have approached him willingly.
Right, but I don't know, was there an aura around him?
For the others, not for me.
I tend to criticize a lot, not only others, but also myself, I mean I'm aware of my saddlebags and things like that...
...so I was, how should I say, skeptical from the start about the whole thing.
And the fact that I was quite young and didn't trust what I felt made me ask myself at first why I saw him differently than everybody else did.
- 'Everybody else' meant quite a lot of people. -Yes.
Yes. They surrounded him and looked at him as if he were God.
Was it fascination? What sort of power did he have over them?
It's hard to tell because I didn't feel it. So I really can't enter their souls and feel what they did.
I assume that you talked amongst yourselves and you felt them somehow.
Yes, so very many of them... at one point I asked a student of mine from Germany who is a Romanian and who came to us from Hamburg to Essen
Sorry... He traveled halfway across Germany to practice yoga after Bivolaru's method.
And he told me at one point that when he looked in Bivolaru's eyes, so just for a moment, he felt God.
- Right, that depends on the person... -It's what he told me.
Yes. What was his method, how does Gregorian Bivolaru's yoga method differ from another guru's yoga method, for example?
Well, Gregorian Bivolaru doesn't have his own method.
Gregorian Bivolaru had around him a few young people with a great spiritual aspiration who studied with him different books brought from the West
Books which at the time when yoga was forbidden in Romania you couldn't find anywhere except maybe on the black market.
And they wrote these texts which are given every week in the yoga class, some leaflets you learn yoga from.
So they practically translated from foreign books, copied from there and unfortunately modified very many things, which isn't alright.
Also, the authors of those books aren't mentioned.
- Most of the things taught there are presented as revelations of Gregorian Bivolaru and MISA. - And they're actually plagiarized.
And they're just, exactly, plagiarized.
When they created the association in Germany which is the German MISA branch the problem was that, well, the courses had to be translated,
but what is to be done because the asanas, the yoga positions, which are described in the MISA courses
are literal translations from the book of Van Lysebeth, a Belgian yogi?
Cecilia, if the only problem was plagiarism, people could probably forgive it.
But you said graver things about Gregorian Bivolaru in that material and I will ask you to expand on them this afternoon.
Please tell me about that meeting with him, in a way he told you that he wanted to...
- To open up before him and lose your inhibitions. - Give me a tantric initiation.
No, it wasn't quite like that.
So, I went to see him along with my husband and the friend I was telling you about introduced us. After that we talked.
And at some point, because the discussions always go back to sexuality and related topics,
he told me that I had to open up sexually, explore my femininity and things like that.
He didn't say I had to open up for him.
As a... what should I call it... a bonus, I was also told that he could do an identification with me.
An identification, I thought I knew at the time, was a meditation in which the two who identify with each other hold hands and meditate. But later...
- That wouldn't have been a problem. - Yes, no problem... Unless I didn't want to do it with him. - Right.
I later found out, however, that this was a thing... a sort of code, an indirect invitation to have sex with him.
- But years passed before I got that.
- An invitation he made when you were with your husband. - Exactly, yes.
- Did your husband notice... - No. Not as far as I know.
And I have to set straight something said in the beginning. I didn't distance myself from MISA because of that.
This happened when I was 24 or 25, now I'm nearly 45 years old.
I left MISA at the beginning of 2005 after a student of mine was sent, as I've said, behind my back to an initiation with Bivolaru.
And that is how I had the first clear evidence that things happen in MISA which, in my opinion, aren't alright, in which I don't want to be involved.
Please tell me what an initiation is.