When getting paid:

• translate
• procrastinate
• translate
• procrastinate
• finish first draft
• procrastinate
• edit for the first and last time
• procrastinate
• edit again, for good measure
• procrastinate
• throw a really final glance over the text, because you never know
• turn in (nearly precisely) on time

Translating for friends:

**Roxana's notes:** I was asked to translate this shocking, heartbreaking letter from Romanian into English. Many of the things in it (like hunger, theft, or stupefying rules) speak for themselves. Others, alas, don't. So I find myself offering a short introduction to who these people are and what context they live in.MISA -- the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute -- started out in 1990, in Romania, as a 'yoga school'. In the over 20 years since then, it grew to have thousands or tens of thousands of yogis attending their weekly courses and it spread to many other countries, like the US, the UK, Spain, Argentina, France, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Australia and others. In some places it thrives, in others it merely gets by.

The yogis who wrote this letter are from Romanian ashrams, but MISA also has ashrams in other countries.While supposedly the organization itself has 20-odd members, the rest being volunteer instructors and yogis merely attending classes, the real structure of the school has Gregorian Bivolaru on top as the spiritual master and a number of VIPs, mostly yoga instructors, deciding things on a lower scale.

Bivolaru was involved in a number of trials in Romania, with some of the charges against him being human trafficking and sexual acts with underage girls and he currently has an international arrest warrant on his name for the latter charge. He ran way from Romania after his legal issues started in 2004 and obtained political asylum in Sweden in 2005. However, after that date many female yoga practitioners were invited to visit him for sexual purposes and discovered him to be located in Paris.Female students who were to his liking would receive free vacations in Costinești (a Romanian seaside resort where the international MISA yoga camp is held on a yearly basis), lasting from two weeks to a month, all expenses paid. They would also receive gifts of books, CDs, perfumes or other such. Those who were invited to Paris might also have their trip there paid and would stay for free, receiving gifts of money, perfumes, chocolate and so on.MISA has also been involved in media scandals for getting women involved in sex biz (pole dancing in foreign countries, erotic chat, erotic massage parlors, 'erotic' films).

My note: The following article was published on the Yogaesoteric.net website on the 8th of March 2013. It’s a response to a conference in which I talked about MISA, a Romanian yoga group which is spreading in various other countries, and its leader, Gregorian Bivolaru. The conference was held at the meeting of the anti-cult organization FECRIS in Perpignan, France, in October 2012. You can find the written conference on this very blog.

As a side note, I spoke freely during the conference, which means that any recorded audio/video version is going to differ slightly from the written one. However, the basics are the same.

Unfortunately, the author writing this article for the MISA official website, Yogaesoteric.net, only read my impressions of the trip to Perpignan and not my actual conference, which means he missed the opportunity to offer a reply to the issues that I really raised. The author still pretends he read it, though, which I find to be delightfully ironic in some corners.