When she discovered the hashtag #MeTooTantra these days on social networks, Isabelle immediately wanted to testify. Today, the young woman is training in critical thinking and is a correspondent for an association fighting against sectarian excesses. “But before that, I fell very low,” she regrets. In 2019, this thirty-year-old, then a wellness masseuse, decided to expand her offer and learn the protocols of tantric massage. “At the time, I was very into New Age, I believed in energies, and I wanted to take sexual energies into account in my practice,” she says.
She contacted a tantric masseur on the Internet: “I simply wanted to train, but this man had real charisma. He captivated me and the intercourse arrived very quickly. At the time I thought I was consenting, but I ended up by realizing that I was totally under his influence.” Because the one who proves to be a true guru also organizes collective training in which Isabelle participates. “He told us that our ‘guides’ spoke to him, that he knew what was good for us. He also made very conspiratorial speeches and isolated us from our loved ones.” The young woman will eventually manage to get away from it. She does not think she will be able to file a complaint, but is currently preparing a file to submit a report to Miviludes (mission to combat sectarian abuses).
It is to bring out this type of testimony that the Sectarian Phenomenon Study Group (Géps) and Elisabeth Feytit, documentary filmmaker and creator of the podcast Shock meta, launched the hashtag #MeTooTantra this week. The Géps and its president Hugues Gascan contributed greatly to the fall of the Misa network, named after this school of Tantric Yoga which claimed to awaken spirituality through sexuality, and stimulate the libido through meditation and yoga. It was in reality an international sect founded by a guru of Romanian origin based in France, whose dismantling gave rise to a vast raid on November 28. The victims, young women of foreign origin, were put under control and forced to have sexual relations with the guru, before being sent back to their country.
Filing a complaint turns out to be complicated
“We want to take advantage of this news to raise awareness more widely about the abuses linked to certain forms of yoga, in particular tantrism, but also kundalini yoga or Kashmir Shaivism,” explains Hugues Gascan, immunologist and former research director at Inserm, involved for several years in the fight against sectarian abuses. Because he is convinced: the potential victims are probably very numerous given the proliferation of groups dedicated to these practices over the last three to four years. “However, when women are adults, filing a complaint turns out to be complicated. They are generally considered to be consenting, and it is very difficult to demonstrate that they have been put under the influence,” underlines Hugues Gascan.
Hence the interest in warning widely, to inform and free speech. “These practices are attracting more and more people. Everything can obviously go well, but we must not deny that it is also a blessing for manipulators, guided by the lure of gain, the desire for power, or the possibility of creating a sort of ‘harem'”, notes Elisabeth Feytit. And in fact, while the hashtag had only been circulating for a few hours, other testimonies began to arrive.
Like that of Renelle, herself a yoga teacher, who wanted to expand her practice. “I already knew the philosophy linked to tantra, which initially has nothing sexual, and I trained in tantric therapeutic massage,” she explains. However, during the training, a participant “slips”. “I had already been the victim of abuse in my childhood, and all of a sudden, I became again the little 8-year-old girl unable to defend herself,” remembers this forty-year-old from Lille, who today wishes “make his voice heard”. Because this memory remains all the more painful as the organizers of the training hardly helped her afterwards: “They were guarantors of my safety and took care of me, but they did not exclude this participant from their course .”
For the victims, the trauma is often compounded by significant financial losses, because these massages, courses and other training are of course priced at high prices. “It became urgent to break the taboo around these practices,” insists Elisabeth Feytit, who hopes to help victims overcome their shame and guilt to prevent others from falling into the same traps.
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