The First Steps in Yoga
Gregorian Bivolaru was born on March 12, 1952 in Tărtășești, near Bucharest, in Romania. He was an introverted child, inclined to contemplation and with an immense desire for knowledge. He read avidly on any topic. Schoolmates remember him as an eminent student, who impressed his teachers with his vast knowledge, which far exceeded the standard of an ordinary schoolboy. From his childhood he had overwhelming spiritual experiences, states of Cosmic Consciousness, and he sensed that he was going have an exceptional spiritual destiny. God has revealed to him as a living, grandiose and eternal reality, and the awareness of His secret presence has aroused in him an unwavering aspiration for perfection and an intense desire to help others to discover God.
He attended high school in Bucharest, which allowed him to go to the large libraries of the capital city. He was studying there with great attention, many hours in a row, day after day, books on yoga, alchemy, parapsychology, sexology, esotericism. The discovery of the fundamental yoga tradition was a great revelation. He immediately understood that yoga offers very effective practical methods that lead to the discovery of the Ultimate Truth. Every night he was practicing yoga techniques tenaciously, up to 8-9 hours. He soon achieved remarkable results and profound inner transformations, which brought him into the position to share with others the mysteries of the ancient yogic tradition. But his spiritual interests quickly brought him to the attention of the communist authorities. The communist regime under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu did not accept any other philosophy except dialectical materialism. Anyone who showed an interest in spirituality was on the "black list" of the Secret Police (the infamous „Securitate”) and was then systematically supervised and monitored, because of the potential danger of generating currents of opinion contrary to communist ideology. This was the case with Gregorian Bivolaru.
On the Radar of the Secret Police
After starting to exchange letters with Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religions living back then in USA, considered by the Communists an "enemy of the people", Gregorian Bivolaru was subjected to the first round up of the Secret Police at his home, in 1971, before he turned 20 years old. Under the absurd pretext of looking for some missing weapons from a warehouse, three secret police agents were tasked with frisking the house. In fact, they wanted to intimidate him and they took away all his notebooks on spirituality, all the copy-books, the notes, as well as the letters exchanged with people from abroad. Thus began the 19 years of terror and harassment by the Secret Police - until December 1989, when Ceausescu's regime fell.
Despite the risks he was facing, Gregorian Bivolaru began teaching yoga, under the denomination of "psychosomatic gymnastics", in the early 1970s in different venues, houses of culture and student centres, and he did that until 1981, when the great scandal related to The Transcendental Movement in Romania took place. On that occasion, the Ceausescu regime arrested and imprisoned hundreds of practitioners of this movement on the accusation of "suspicious mysticism that may lead to the destabilisation of the state" and subsequently all Eastern spiritual practices, including yoga and martial arts, were banned. Gregorian Bivolaru continued secretively to practice and teach yoga to those interested, permanently pursued and harassed by the Secret Police. On April 17, 1984, Gregorian Bivolaru was arrested along with 17 other people, to whom he was teaching yoga in a private home. The others were investigated and intimidated, but Gregorian Bivolaru was imprisoned, beaten and tortured in the roundhouse of the Secret Police, without being allowed to communicate with family and friends, or to consult with a lawyer. In response to this abuse of the Secret Police, which could have even led to his annihilation, Gregorian Bivolaru escaped, using the paranormal endowments he had acquired through the practice of yoga. A few days after this famous escape he was arrested again, and the communist legal system condemned him for escaping from the Secret Police's arrest, without accusing him of any other crime - which in theory would have been the reason for the initial arrest. He was imprisoned for a year and a half under very difficult conditions of detention, with chains of 7-8 kilograms at his ankles, in cells without windows and heating, including in winter.
The Last Years under Communism
After his release in 1986, he was constantly put on the list of the most dangerous people for the Communist regime, being permanently in the spotlight of the Secret Police, but never stopped practicing and teaching yoga, thereby achieving a unique act of spiritual resistance in communist Romania. Gabriel Andreescu, researcher of the CNSAS archives, dissident and activist for human rights, states in his book "MISA - Radiography of a repression" that the group of yogis coordinated by Gregorian Bivolaru is "the only example of long lasting collective resistance under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu".
The repression culminated in 1989 with the arrest, political conviction and forced hospitalisation of Gregorian Bivolaru at the maximum security psychiatrical hospital of Poiana Mare - a so-called nervous disease clinic, in fact a desolate and terrible place where undesirable political prisoners that did not share the vision of the communist regime were sent for a gradual extermination. In the medical file of the detained Gregorian Bivolaru there were prescribed drugs that would have killed an ordinary man in just a few weeks. However, the doctor who was supposed to administer this treatment risked his career by not doing what the communist authorities required of him. Many years later, this doctor, Leonard Hriscu, stated in an interview: “Gregorian was not a man who needed any kind of psychiatric treatment; he knew a lot and was a man of great culture so that often I could not keep up with him in the discussions we had, having to step back. Under no circumstances could I have accepted the diagnosis that was imposed on him."
As a further confirmation, the Bucharest District Court established in July 2011 by a final court decision based on the law on political convictions of the communist period the political character of both the 1977 and 1984 convictions, as well as the admission to the Poiana Mare Psychiatric Hospital in 1989. In other words, Gregorian Bivolaru was not guilty of violating any norms of common law, all that he did was upholding different values and than those accepted by the totalitarian communist regime.
After the Fall of the Communist Regime
In December 1989, when the communist regime officially fell in Romania, a medical commission held an emergency meeting and decided to release Gregorian Bivolaru from the Poiana Mare prison-hospital. On January 12, 1990, Gregorian Bivolaru was already holding the first lecture and opened the yoga course, thus resuming his spiritual activities, in an apparently free country. Also in January 1990, he founded what would later become the largest yoga school in Europe and a real pole of promoting spirituality and yoga discipline in Romania: The Movement of Spiritual Integration into the Absolute - MISA.
Unfortunately, the situation in Romania changed only on the surface, because the communists managed to seize power in the power vacuum generated by the revolution, and the Romanian Secret Services (SRI) became the heir of the dreaded Securitate. Many prosecutors of the old regime remained in office, continuing to apply communist practices and persecuting those who had previously defied them. The harassment of Gregorian Bivolaru continued more or less openly, now accompanied by a true media lynching triggered by the newspapers under the umbrella of SRI. Their purpose was to destroy his credibility and public image and also to destroy the yoga school he created. Despite all the obstacles, Gregorian Bivolaru continued both his spiritual activity, guiding as a mentor the development of the yoga school, as well as the writing one, publishing 150 books and booklets and hundreds of articles up to now. The yoga course structured by him has spread almost throughout entire Romania, and sister schools have opened their doors in over 30 countries on all continents.
An Inconvenient Person for the Power Structures
Strongly believing that a spiritual person cannot remain indifferent to what is going on around him, Gregorian Bivolaru has written numerous articles and held several lectures in which he boldly disclosed the shady actions of the various interest groups that got to influence and even control the political and economic structures, in particular the occult, diabolical world freemasonry. As a result, he received threatening letters asking him to "stop the disclosures", and in February 1995 a devastating explosion destroyed his apartment in Bucharest. A „criminal hand" cut the metal grillage of the window from the bathroom and tampered with the gas installation, but fortunately the explosion took place before Gregorian Bivolaru got home. Two independent commissions demonstrated that it was a deliberate criminal act, however, strangely, the authorities did not make any further investigation.
"Operation Christ"
Despite the derogatory campaign in the media and even police intimidation, the MISA Yoga School has continued to develop, inspiring and instilling in thousands and tens of thousands of people spiritual ideas and values. Because such a large group of people was troubling to the power structures, and Gregorian Bivolaru was already an inconvenient person from several points of view, in March 2004 MISA became the victim of what the media trumpeted as "the biggest operation against organised crime in Romania after the Revolution of 1989”. Over 300 gendarmes, prosecutors, policemen and special force members entered forcefully in 16 private homes of some yoga students, who were abused and terrorised, claiming that they were dealing with a network of prostitution, drugs and arms trafficking. The fact is they did not find any evidence that would in any way incriminate MISA members and supporters and justify the huge deployment of forces. The almost incredible abuses committed by the authorities on that occasion have been the subject of actions at the European Court of Human Rights. Twelve years later, in 2016, the yoga practitioners who sued the Romanian state won this trial, with damages summing up almost 300,000 euros, while in Romania the investigations regarding the discovery of those guilty of these abuses had long been covered up.
The main target of this abusive action was obviously the spiritual mentor of the school, Gregorian Bivolaru. It was also a desperate attempt to create a diversion, which would divert the public's attention from other political issues and scandals of the moment, in particular from the 50 million euro robbery committed by a prominent member of the PSD, Gabriel Bivolaru. Later, in an interview with Antena 1, Adrian Năstase acknowledged that the forceful repression against MISA and Gregorian Bivolaru, called (strangely, but significantly) "Operation Christ", was a big mistake, indirectly confirming his involvement. Forced by these dramatic circumstances and convinced that he will not have a fair trial in Romania, Gregorian Bivolaru left the country and requested political asylum in Sweden. The Supreme Court of Stockholm demurely investigated the case and refused the extradition requests issued by the Romanian state, granting Gregorian Bivolaru political protection and asylum in January 2006. So far, this is one of the very few cases where a European state protects a citizen against another state within the European Union.
Meanwhile, the Romanian authorities have fabricated two criminal cases against Gregorian Bivolaru, on the basis of testimonies seized by force or blackmail, in the absence of any evidence. After two successive acquittals, on the merits and on appeal, the High Court of Cassation and Justice overturned the previous decisions and wrongfully sentenced him to 6 years in prison for a so-called sexual act with a minor, despite the fact that the "victim", Mădălina Dumitru, denied this throughout the trial, claiming instead the abuses she was subjected to by prosecutors. It is significant to mention that as of late several former employees of the judicial system have revealed how criminal files are fabricated at the command of SRI and how the obedient judges give the decisions that are ordered to give, either for personal benefits or as a result of blackmail. Ionuț Matei who decided the sentence of Gregorian Bivolaru was in such a situation being blackmailed with a very known criminal file "Cămătaru clan".
Instead of conclusion
At present, there are hundreds of yoga teachers around the world who teach yoga based on the materials and methodology structured by Gregorian Bivolaru at the MISA Esoteric Yoga School. The fact that tens of thousands of people benefit today, directly or indirectly, from his life's work is a confirmation of the value of his teachings. A striking personality, yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru made some people uncomfortable through his revelations and actions, inspired others, and he did not cease to guide on the path to perfection those thirsty for spirituality, who carefully and perseveringly applied his teachings and advice, with great modesty and a permanent state of godly relay.
