From the Magazine
Holiday 2020 Issue

“Everywhere I Went, They Went With Me, Because They Were on My Phone”: Inside the Always Online, All-Consuming World of Twin Flames Universe

Before we all spent our days on Zoom, the spiritual community used the power of its Facebook group and webcams to spread a gospel of eternal love—and build its founders’ business along the way. Is it a cult that has manipulated some members’ understandings of their own genders, as ex-followers allege, or the outermost extremes of influencing?
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THE GURUS
Shaleia and Jeff Ayan run Twin Flames Universe—a sort of therapeutic-spiritual reality show—from their Michigan home with all the familiar trappings of the modern YouTube star.
Photographs by Paul Octavious.

Katie woke to the sound of waves. She was in the back of her car, parked by foggy cliffs that hid the highway. Staying here felt nice, like camping. She peed in a mason jar and ate yogurt from her cooler. Not even the hikers knew that a woman was sleeping in her car at the trailhead.

Katie drove to the hospital. In the waiting room, she read articles on her phone. How is arachnoiditis diagnosed? What is cerebrospinal fluid? Her back sparked with pain. She took a deep breath and opened up YouTube.

“Twin Flame Rejection,” the video title read. A woman with mini-pigtails and rosy cheeks sat shoulder to shoulder with her husband. They spoke about what it was like to be separated from your “twin flame,” the person created by God as your divine counterpart. “There is nothing outside of you that prevents you from being with your love,” the man said. “Only you.”

Twin flame gurus were easy to find on YouTube in the fall of 2017. They popped up amid videos on astrology, tarot, healing crystals. The gist was that every human had a complementary partner whose being was attracted to their own—a kind of über-soul mate. Jeff and Shaleia, the couple in the video, were relationship coaches in Michigan. They had all the trappings of YouTubers: the “hey everyone,” the “like and subscribe,” the faces perfectly illuminated by camera lights. Jeff, then in his late 20s, geeked out on video games. Shaleia, in her early 30s, was an amateur photographer.

Their videos attracted tens of thousands of views—occasionally more than 150,000. They also had a private Facebook group, which currently has more than 14,000 members, and classes on Google Hangouts four times a week. Students shared their relationship problems while Jeff and Shaleia extracted sublime truths about their hopes and traumas. Subscriptions to the full run of this therapeutic reality show, and its offshoots, currently cost $4,444. The appeal of Twin Flames Universe was that you could have what Jeff and Shaleia apparently had, what Shaleia called “a deeper level of oneness,” a Harmonious Twin Flame Union.

The following spring, Katie paid Jeff for a private coaching session. She wanted to know if any of the love she experienced was real. If it was, why was she still alone? Jeff didn’t answer that question, at least directly. “How do you feel?” Jeff asked over Google Hangouts. He sounded far away, and there was occasionally a lag and crackle, but he scrutinized her through the screen. Katie paused to articulate herself. She felt afraid to receive Jeff’s guidance, she explained, because most of her past experiences of love were followed by pain. Jeff told her that only she could fix herself. He suggested that she was not alone because she was not made alone and asked her to surrender herself to God.

At one point, Katie told him, “My twin flame won’t talk to me and thinks I’m crazy, and has told all my family members…”

“He doesn’t love me!” Jeff echoed in a mocking, high-pitched voice.

As the session continued, Katie cried and lashed out and giggled and stared blankly. None of it seemed to satisfy Jeff. Exhausted, she grew quiet. She’d made progress, Jeff said, noting that when Katie watched the video later, “you’re going to see 49 minutes of you getting better and better.”

Jeff and Shaleia confirmed what she already suspected: Her ex was indeed her twin flame. Perhaps Katie was holding herself back, they suggested. Her pain was rooted in the reality she chose to create. And health issues could stem from one’s current thinking or past-life behavior. “Your body is an extension of your mind. Meaning your mind is primary and your mind creates the body,” Jeff told Katie in one class. “Not food or exercise,” added Shaleia. “Or medical care,” said Jeff.

THE SEEKER
When Katie first joined Twin Flames Universe, she wanted to know if any of the love she had experienced was real.
Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen.

Part of her sensed it might be a scam. But she was willing to try anything. A statuesque blonde with a throaty laugh, Katie had moved to the Bay Area after earning two undergraduate science degrees. For years, she spent her days in a university DNA lab and her evenings listening to techno records. On the weekends she did yoga and went to clubs, festivals, or raves. Katie met her ex at Burning Man. (Katie is not her real name—she asked me to call her that because it’s safe and “generic.”) He was the rare man taller than her. Their outfits matched, and they later found out they shared many of the same references, interests, and beliefs. They went on to spend nearly two years together.

Then she got into a car accident, followed by medical leave, disability, surgeries, and pain. They broke up. After her third spine operation, she was struggling to walk normally. She briefly left the Bay Area. Then a flare-up of pain from her spinal cord sent her back. She lived out of her storage unit and car. A new apartment proved evasive, as did old friends. The energy healer Katie saw couldn’t tell her what was wrong. Neither could any of a dozen doctors or therapists.

According to testimonials in the Facebook group, Twin Flames Universe yielded perks beyond romance. Students shared stories of miraculous transformations. Some made money, found new careers, healed their depression. They did it without visiting Jeff and Shaleia in person. These were miracles that could be accessed from the comfort of your computer chair, or in Katie’s case, a coffee shop. To see results, Katie needed to commit. Some followers went to great ends. They moved cities and countries to be near the twin flames that Jeff and Shaleia affirmed for them. Others spent years waiting to magnetically attract exes.

Still other followers found harder paths to their perfect partners. Some discovered that their twin flame was of a sex they didn’t usually date. Others who identified as male or female announced that that was not really the case. They changed their names and pronouns, bought new wardrobes, and came out to their families and colleagues. They were eager to explore the divine genders that Jeff and Shaleia had confirmed through God.

Long before COVID-19 turned global communications into a giant video chat, Twin Flames Universe was spreading its gospel and building its own world on Facebook, Google Hangouts, and Zoom. Today, followers order meal plans through Jeff and Shaleia’s start-up, Divine Dish; attend Sunday service at their Church of Union; and “resolve trauma” in Mind Alignment Process sessions. Its coaches help recruit new clients via Facebook ads and community outreach.

“Everywhere I went, they went with me, because they were on my phone,” one former member told me. Over time, Katie started spending more time online, in video calls all day. Her Twin Flames friends spanned the globe. They were doctors, business owners, stay-at-home parents, students. Most were single. They shared memes and past traumas in group chats. Twin Flames Universe would eventually include a sales team, a media team, vice presidents, HR. It had flexible hours and like-minded colleagues. And just as at any other ideologically impassioned start-up, Katie, who would eventually become a coach herself, hoped she would be saving the world while making a profit.

Katie now estimates that she spent “around $10,000” on classes, coaching, books, products, and more during her time with the group. “God has sent [this lead] to you for a very specific purpose,” began the spreadsheet where Katie and other coaches kept track of potential clients. “Your one and only job here is to communicate to them that they have finally found what it is they have always been searching for.”

A cornerstone of the community’s spiritual practice is the Mirror Exercise, a tool, as one YouTube page said, “to help you create whatever it is you desire in your reality.” Rather than blaming others, followers were taught to take responsibility. At times they shifted around the pronouns of sentences: One woman posted that she was “having a hard time clearing the upset around my twin filing a restraining order and making false statements in it.” She should look within. “You put a restraining order on yourself,” a community member wrote on Facebook. “You made false statements. Why [did] you do that???” Once followers addressed their deep-seated traumas and fears, they’d usually start to feel better. One student told me he was able to stop taking antidepressants and anxiety medicine. Another “healed” her fear of flying.

The Mirror Exercise was said to obtain especially dramatic results with a coach. Gabe Green, a Twin Flames coach living in California, was one of a select group of students who used it to realize he was transgender.

“Literally a week ago I would have sworn to you, and did to several of you, that I was 100% a woman,” Gabe wrote in a blog post called “Suddenly Always Being a Man” that appeared on his website in early 2020. After nearly two years as a member of Twin Flames Universe, Gabe had not yet found his harmonious union. Then two community members reached out to talk, saying they’d been speaking with Jeff and Shaleia. They had an important question for Gabe: In your sex life, do you like to give or receive? They asked only that Gabe consider the question, but he immediately knew that it was a pathway to explore.

In a subsequent session with his coaches, Gabe allowed himself to admit that he might have a block around his gender. His coaches took him through a meditation and prompted him to feel his way into each gender role, asking at each juncture, “How are you feeling?” The longer it went on, the more his answers seemed to change, until he couldn’t help but see it: He was a divine masculine. “I was guided perfectly through pointed, logical questions and meditation to the truth,” he wrote. “As soon as I chose to surrender and claim that energy, there was an immediate shift. I felt more peace and calm than I ever had in my entire life.”

One of Gabe’s coaches revealed that they had channeled his twin flame: a fellow community member and friend, Briana Manalo. “I also felt this to be true,” Gabe wrote, adding that it was confirmed by Jeff and Shaleia—who are straight and cisgender. When Gabe called Briana to deliver the news, she fought it at first. She was straight, and “sooo attached to my dreams” of the man she had long believed to be her twin flame. But the next day, she realized those reservations were mere blocks to the divine. Three days after Gabe’s call, Briana flew to California on a one-way ticket to see him. Within a few months, Gabe had changed his name and pronouns, cut his hair, and come out to his mother as trans. On Facebook, members congratulated the new couple and thanked their gurus.

Jeff and Shaleia Ayan met through a mutual friend, who introduced them on Facebook in 2012. Later, Jeff posted a crass meme on Shaleia’s wall. A romance was born. Jeff, a Michigan native, was running “a vegetarian Airbnb” in Hawaii. Shaleia, who is Canadian, was working in a hair salon and studying with a spiritual teacher in Sedona, Arizona. She had read about twin flames on the internet and sensed Jeff could be hers. Shaleia introduced Jeff to the concept. They tried a few different niches before settling into the current incarnation of Twin Flames Universe.

Shaleia is the more spiritual twin. She’s into numerology, pendulum divination, and crystals. Jeff is more business-oriented. Before meeting Shaleia, he went by the name Ender Ayanethos on his LinkedIn, which described him as a “lifestyle design entrepreneur.” Shaleia was once Megan Plante. Both Shaleia and Jeff are from Catholic families with whom they have fallen out.

I first interviewed the couple over Zoom. They sat side by side in Aeron chairs. I’d watched almost 50 hours of their content and pored over their private Facebook forum. In addition to their own YouTube videos and free spin-off videos from their coaches, there are at least 600 hours of class videos for purchase. (To reach the highest rung on the Twin Flames Universe coaching ladder, one must watch and pay for all.)

Seeing them respond to my questions was like having the characters on a TV show come to life. Their webcams were at perfect eye level, and they had dressed up: red lipstick for Shaleia, a blazer for Jeff. “Armani,” he pointed out. Gabe told me that he was starstruck meeting them in person for the first time: “I couldn’t form sentences, to be honest.”

While the idea of a soul counterpart is old, the first historical mention of the phrase “twin flame” I could find was in 1886. “There is no soul on this earth that is complete, alone,” said a character in British author Marie Corelli’s best-selling novel A Romance of Two Worlds, which helped stoke interest in reincarnation in Victorian England. 

As the notion of a soul mate gained mainstream currency in the 20th century, twin flames continued to percolate on the fringes. Guy and Edna Ballard, the founders of the “I AM” Activity begun in the 1930s, called themselves by the related term “twin rays.” The couple traveled around the country hosting gatherings as so-called “messengers” of the ascended masters. Decades later, one of the Ballards’ followers, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, wrote a series of books that explored the nature of twin flames—although she was most famous for encouraging her followers to stockpile weapons for the nuclear Armageddon.

The Ballards taught that you can create a more positive reality by focusing on the positive within. In recent years, an industry has grown up around the law of attraction and the power of manifestation, which have been promoted by everyone from inspirational speakers like Tony Robbins to the NXIVM sex cult to corporations like Amway. Borrowing from Christianity, the occult, Eastern philosophy, and up-by-your-bootstraps capitalism, Twin Flames Universe is a business as much as a belief system.

The idea of twin flames seems ready-made for our current digital existence. Finding love is supposedly easier than ever, but young people are reportedly having less sex, and marriage rates are declining in the U.S. and other Western countries. Dating is an algorithmic pursuit. Articles on Goop and Allure and Elite Daily have framed the idea of twin flames as an antidote. It’s the preferred term if you’re the type of person who checks your friends’ horoscopes on the way to kundalini class. Princess Märtha Louise of Norway has called the shaman Durek Verrett her “twin flame.” Megan Fox has said the same about rapper Machine Gun Kelly. Ryan Gosling filed a restraining order against a stalker who claimed to be his.

“Once you realize that you can have sex at the push of a button, you want something better than that,” Jeff told me. He says at least 80 percent of the people watching his and Shaleia’s YouTube videos are women.

In a 2019 video posted to Facebook, Jeff and Shaleia marveled at how quickly their business had become profitable. “Twin Flames Universe is valued at more than a million dollars…closer to two million dollars,” Jeff said, recalling his broke days just a few years before. This spring, they moved to a five-bedroom, $850,000 house outside of Traverse City, Michigan. Their living room fireplace is flanked by $11,000 worth of amethyst, which Shaleia regularly communes with. (“I get feelings and thoughts communicated back to me from the crystal. And this is how I found out that this [crystal] is a female, and that’s a male,” she said.) Icons decorate the mantel and a nearby wall: Krishna, Jesus, Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya.

Jeff and Shaleia’s ambitions have grown with their followers. Last year, they founded the Church of Union, which Jeff said “seeks to unify all religion under one spiritual umbrella.”

“If the Second Coming were to happen today, where do you think it would happen?” Jeff began a lengthy Facebook post. “Be logical about its location. We have another place now called the internet where everyone in the world can come be at once.”

“Behold, we are the prophesied Second Coming,” he continued. Shaleia was the “Mother Christ,” Jeff, the “Father Christ.” Their yet-to-be-conceived daughter, Grace, meanwhile, was the “princess of all Creation.” Together, the trio was “The Master Christ, eternal ruler of all Creation by God’s loving hand.”

When I asked Jeff about this declaration, he was reflective. Everyone is a perfect divine being, he suggested; he was the Master Christ. “I’m the Second Coming! I’m what was prophesied. And I say that with humility, but there’s no other way to say it. Jesus got the same response when he was like, ‘Yo, I’m the son of God. I’m the Messiah—look!’… My purpose is to enlighten the world, not to be gentle with it.”

Not every couple who meets within the community lasts. In March, Victoria Bonilla, a former member living in Alabama, was told by her coach that a fellow female member was her twin flame, she told me. But Victoria “wasn’t a lesbian,” she told the coach, who replied that, actually, the female follower Victoria was paired with “is a man,” Victoria recalled. “I just started crying and felt sick to my stomach,” she said.

“There isn’t any part of me that feels good about this,” Victoria messaged her coach. Then she tried to switch coaches. Church of Union officials reached out by email: “To deny Jeff and Shaleia’s word, is to deny the word of God and to throw away your Harmonious Twin Flame Union.” Victoria left the group. Her supposed twin flame is still in it.

“We really don’t tell people, ‘Hey, this is your twin flame,’ ” Jeff told me. It was one of many occasions where he and Shaleia said one thing and seemed to do another. For instance, “Feel good in your physical body, no matter the circumstances,” Shaleia advised one woman in a Facebook comment thread. Just before, in the same thread, she’d told a female member that she was “a man inside,” and that her female body was a “choice” she had made “to hide from God because you felt ashamed.” The woman left the group soon after.

Twin Flames Universe teaches that love is between masculine and feminine counterparts. It also positions itself as a champion of LGBTQ+ acceptance. That’s because it claims to define “masculine” and “feminine” by energy rather than bodies. “We’re all created 100 percent masculine energy or 100 percent feminine energy,” said Shaleia.

The gurus insist that members who discover a new divine gender are never pressured to change their outward appearance. Still, many of them do; starting with their names, pronouns, dress, and hair. A small number medically transition: At least three followers, including Gabe, are currently taking hormones. Meanwhile, at least five women who resisted accepting their new gender ended up leaving the group. “I have been blocked by the group and everyone I knew in the group since I told them I did not accept being a divine masculine,” one ex-member told me.

Catrina and Anne Irwin joined Twin Flames Universe in summer 2017—the rare couple to sign on together. Two years before, they found Jeff and Shaleia online and admired that they offered spiritual guidance that seemed inclusive of their sexuality and supportive of their personal journey.

The pair became coaches, taking on more responsibility and earning around $120,000 combined in one year. Eventually, Jeff and Shaleia named them VPs of sales, a nonpaying, labor-intensive position. They managed a small army of coaches responding to leads. “How would you feel about owning your own private jet?” the couple recalled Jeff asking them.

One day in class, Jeff told Anne he wanted her to explore taking a male name and pronoun. Anne was open to the discussion. She admitted that she felt a masculine energy inside. For example, “There’s been contexts where I’ve been wanting to bro out with dudes playing baseball,” she said. Jeff asked Anne intimate questions about her sex life, her kids (weren’t they lying if they didn’t call her Dad?), and her pronouns. Jeff stressed to Anne the importance of picking a more male-sounding name. She seemed hesitant. He suggested Dan.

Jeff would never force Anne to do anything, he emphasized in that class: “You’ll notice we only ever use the pronoun for anyone that they prefer…because this is so sensitive, and that’s just not how we roll.”

For $2,222, I purchased and watched Anne’s sessions. These would be “juicy” classes, Jeff announced to students tuning in live. But over several classes, Anne grew resistant. “You guys look dumb as fuck hiding behind the lie still,” Jeff texted Catrina when Anne still hadn’t adopted a male name. In another text, he added, “Take a guy’s name and a guy’s pronoun or I will need to put someone else in charge of sales who does respect my work.”

When I asked Jeff about these text messages directly, he said, “There’s the difference between what is said and what is communicated.” He also said I was missing important context about his relationship with Anne and Catrina. They were planning “a hostile takeover” of their business and to steal their clients, Shaleia said. “They were megalomaniacs,” Jeff added. “They wanted power.” (“We made no plans and no attempts to undermine their business in any capacity, ever,” said Catrina.)

THE FOLLOWERS
Anne and Catrina were the rare couple to join Twin Flames Universe together. They liked that it initially seemed inclusive of their sexuality and supportive of their personal journey. Location: State Botanical Garden of Georgia at the University of Georgia.
Photograph by Wulf Bradley.

Eventually Anne had had enough. In front of everyone, she said that she had thought Jeff had only been conducting a brief “experiment” and reminded him that she had written a post expressing how uncomfortable she was, and would like it to end. Jeff said he hadn’t read it, only skimmed. Anne’s anger was further proof that he was right about her masculinity. As the class came to a close, there was a long pause: Anne gazed at the space in front of her computer’s camera, while Catrina seemed to hold her breath. Anne acquiesced. Catrina broke out in a big smile and buried her face in her hands. Jeff applauded dramatically.

The next afternoon, Anne and Catrina were hit with a flurry of notifications. Twin Flames Universe had blocked them on its social media platforms. Jeff and Shaleia posted a 46-minute video online explaining why they had “released” the couple. Anne and Catrina were “a leech on the system.” Their negativity was dampening the enthusiasm of other coaches.

About a year later, I spoke to Anne and Catrina in a series of phone calls. They had found new jobs and had moved on from their time in the online world they now consider a cult. Twin Flames Universe seemed so progressive at first, Catrina told me: “Saying, ‘Okay, what happens if Anne goes on a journey and redefines as masculine?’ seemed fun and open-minded. It aligned with our views on gender, which is that it doesn’t really matter and is very fluid.”

But in the end, the community’s LGBTQ+ acceptance was superficial, they suggested. They believe Jeff picks on people who threaten him as a way to test his power. Jeff and Shaleia dispute both these claims and reject the idea that they coerce people to change their gender. Jeff admits, however, that the videos with Anne make him look bad: “I’m sure if that’s all I saw, I might even agree with you and say, ‘Wow, what a jerk. What a controlling psychopath.’ But that’s not the reality.” In fact, perhaps, “This is what [Anne] needed me to say to her in order for her to be set free,” he texted me later that night. “She needed me to become so vulnerable that she could ruin my life and reputation forever and hold the keys in her hand to that slaughter. Why did I allow it? Because I am a humble servant of God.” 

The theory espoused by 10 of the ex-members I spoke to—that Twin Flames Universe is coercing vulnerable people who have never experienced gender dysphoria to transition—sounds like a conservative fantasy, proof that an understanding of gender as a social construct can only lead to scary places. Over the past year, 24 bills were filed in 19 states that sought to make it a crime for doctors or parents to support transgender youth by providing medication or aiding other aspects of social transition. Some social conservatives posit that to be trans is itself to be indoctrinated. Conservative commentator Naomi Schaefer Riley recently compared the “transgender movement” to Nxivm.

At the same time, conversion therapy—which typically tries to convince gay people they are straight or trans people that they are cis—is alive and well. In a recent survey of more than 27,000 transgender adults in the U.S., 14 percent of respondents said they had been exposed to gender identity conversion efforts; the practice is associated with psychological distress and suicide attempts.

Twin Flames Universe feels like bait for the anti-trans lobby. It’s what might happen “if excessive liberal progressives got drunk and had a baby with conservative Christians,” says Arcelia Francis, a former member of the group who already identified as trans when she joined.

She left the community, she says, when her calls for “less pressure and more freedom among our group” were shut down by other members. “If those people in there are happy, I hope so,” she told me. “But I just think it’s all too likely that indoctrination made them believe that they were trans when they were fucking fine before.”

And yet she told me she does not see the group’s existence as proof that a broader cultural acceptance of gender fluidity will lead to widespread social confusion and harm. “The only reason transgender people have suddenly appeared is because there’s actually hope that we can be who we really are now,” said Francis, who described Twin Flames Universe as heteronormative. (Asked about this assessment, Jeff said, in part, “TFU’s foundational principles are based in an exploration of fundamental spiritual law, or base reality.… TFU stands with Truth, and if the world ultimately discovers new information which points to a different reality, TFU will explore that.”)

All of Jeff and Shaleia’s current trans followers I spoke to maintain that no one has pressured them to transform anything about their bodies or lives, just accepted them for who they are. “It wasn’t forced on me in any way,” says Gabe. In retrospect, he said there were signs that he was divine masculine that he had been trying to ignore before the question arose.

A few months after joining, Katie found an apartment and stopped living in her car. She started offering free “Twin Flames Yoga” and meditation and coaching classes as a way of building her own online business. Katie felt happier than she had in months. Her spine hurt less. In the spring of 2018, she tried multiple sessions of an emerging program, now called the Mind Alignment Process. A Twin Flames member named Christine Emerick, Ph.D., a lieutenant colonel in the Army whom Jeff had supposedly healed of PTSD through this process, runs the program.

“Each person gets everything they require to fully heal their PTSD in the [one-hour] session,” a white paper Jeff shared with me said. (A legal disclaimer on their site now backs off from claiming to treat the disorder.) Whereas the Mirror Exercise focuses on generalized introspection, MAP targets someone’s most upsetting memories, according to the website: “Your MAP practitioner will expertly access your trauma like a world class computer programmer rooting out a bug in the system.”

One of Katie’s “spiritual blocks” was associating love with pain. As a child, Katie claimed, she was force-fed psychiatric medication. When she processed the memory, she said, she started to feel better about it. After a few sessions, the pain of the memory started to lighten, and she felt less triggered. She felt “soothed, placated.” By this time, Katie had already stopped taking her antianxiety medication.

Another trauma was Katie’s breakup with her ex in the spring of 2017, while she was recovering from her third spinal surgery. The ex initiated it; Katie still wanted to be together. This account of their breakup comes from court documents. Katie remembers it, but what happened later with her ex—after Katie had joined Twin Flames Universe—is cloudier for her, she says. For instance, Katie claims she doesn’t fully remember the moment when she found out her ex had filed a restraining order against her. She doesn’t remember the details of being served, either, she says.

“After a year of trying to block her on every form of communication, I have finally decided that a restraining order is necessary,” Katie’s ex wrote in an email to her family. “She has been served, but refused to read it and has not acknowledged its efficacy, nor that it is a consequence of her actions.” Katie was “delusional,” the ex said, and “living in her own version of reality.” He speculated that Katie had joined a cult.

When her family called, Katie shut down and withdrew. In her mind Jeff and Shaleia weren’t cult leaders. They were YouTubers who happened to have access to awesome spiritual knowledge that they were cool enough to share. Katie knew they were making money off of people like her. But what was wrong with that? Shaleia warned Katie about this type of criticism. A suspicion about cults indicated someone had a personal “upset” about them, Shaleia said in a Facebook comment. “I AM NOT GIVING UP ON MY TWIN FLAME WORK,” Katie wrote her family in an email in June 2018.

Katie was not the only person in the community to pursue a reluctant twin flame. “He posted on FB his stalker has gone too far and he will go to the police,” wrote one woman in the Facebook forum in November 2017, soon after Katie joined classes, of her supposed twin flame. Two weeks later, the woman was on a bus to another country and planning to relocate to be near him. “Sounds like you’re being guided to be closer and connected to your Twin Flame!” Shaleia chirped in her Facebook comments. “God supports you on your next big step.” Victoria Bonilla said she eventually had to block her channeled twin flame on Facebook.

Jeff and Shaleia disputed accusations that they promote harassment. And in Katie’s case, they said they were “explicitly” telling her the opposite. They said they told Katie not to pursue her twin and that she disobeyed them. “Don’t go out and run out and chase,” said Jeff. “Accept the reality of the boundary and work on healing herself in that place, because that boundary was there for a reason,” said Shaleia.

In May 2018, Katie showed up at the ex’s place and sat outside. “You are mine…just as I am yours,” she wrote him in an email the next month. He forwarded it to her family. Around this time, Katie got kicked out of her new apartment. Her plan was to drive, first to a festival in Angels Camp, California, to “introduce the party people to Twin Flames.” Katie barely even needed GPS, she told her Facebook friends: “God tells me where to get gas.” That summer, Katie cut off contact with her family. “She asked for several thousand dollars from us,” recalled one relative. They couldn’t afford it, and she rejected an offer to come home.

The year after she joined Twin Flames Universe, Katie turned 30. She decided to go dancing by herself at one of her favorite bars. She says she went to leave and spotted her ex outside, and they exchanged words. She went back inside and then the cops showed up.

The ex gave his version in court 12 days later: “We happened to run into each other at a nightclub, and I left because I was very uncomfortable with the idea of her being there. And she followed me out of the nightclub and tried to initiate contact there, which is why I called the police. I didn’t want to have to do that.”

Katie was charged with stalking and violating a restraining order. She didn’t have bail money. She spent 18 days in jail, where she observed her cellmates had trauma just like hers and tried to coach them. After her family bailed her out, paying $25,000 out of their retirement savings, she says someone at Twin Flames suggested she’d been sent on a mission from God. In a class two months later, Jeff congratulated Katie for having faith in the process, and God, and herself. “It gives me enormous trust in you, when before I had none,” he said.

“Are you tired?” Jeff asked me. I was listening semi-intently to Shaleia talk about the introduction of yoga to the West when a fleeting thought of grabbing a Red Bull occurred to me. I had not believed my face betrayed it. We were sitting in the living room of their sprawling home. It was a Saturday in June. An American flag flew over the lawn outside, and screened windows opened to a breeze from the bay. “Alexa, play French bistro music everywhere,” said Jeff, as we sat down for a ham, roast beef, and brie sandwich with a side of grilled pineapple—a Divine Dish meal.

As I set out to report this story, Vice Canada’s Sarah Berman published two unflattering articles about the community. (After beginning work on this story for Vanity Fair, I started working as a correspondent for Vice News in February of this year.) They described the existence of messages in which a member said that a student of Twin Flames Universe had turned down “mind alignment” therapy sessions before killing herself. Meanwhile, a community of ex-members whom Jeff called “the haters” were regularly posting on Reddit and YouTube. Jeff and Shaleia were eager to address the various controversies.

The couple answered the door barefoot. Shaleia suggested I pull a card from one of their “oracle” decks. Giving birth to Heaven on Earth is nothing more than outlasting evil’s weak and meaningless grip over your reality, it read, quoting a post from Jeff’s Twitter feed. Jeff had a plan, he informed me. Over our time together, he would prove to me that neither that card, nor anything else in the universe, was a coincidence. His eyes were bluer than they’d looked onscreen. I recalled with momentary comfort that I was sharing my real-time location with my editor via WhatsApp. I was there to interview them, but he wanted to learn about me…my hopes, my fears, my triggers.

Shaleia observed while Jeff probed, occasionally offering insights. That I was with my twin flame, for instance. I was told by the couple that I had storied past lives: Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe. Jeff pulled up a photo of Woolf on his phone. “Look into the eyes.… Feel that there’s a person there,” he said. “I’m not doing this to flatter you. I’m not doing this to make you feel good about yourself. Not everyone’s a fucking legend.”

The home’s extra bedrooms housed four “boot camp” students of Twin Flames Universe, who cooked, cleaned, and ran errands in exchange for the chance to do intensive spiritual work in the household of their gurus. COVID-19 was barely mentioned. I was the only one who wore a mask.

Celebrity twin flames were a favorite topic in the house. In 2019, Jeff and Shaleia posted a video of those they’ve “channeled” to Facebook, such as Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish, or Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, for instance. Cults were another recurring theme. The word is a “nonword,” Jeff theorized. It doesn’t mean anything of value. As he’d put it in a recent YouTube video, “It’s kinda hard to get into a cult on the internet, isn’t it? How are you going to drink the poison if it’s on the internet? Don’t you have to, like, be part of a community, like, that all lives on a farm or something?”

While I was with him, Jeff looked up the synonyms for “cult” in an online thesaurus, which compared it to a type of religious sect or group, something people were obsessed with, or something for which there was a craze or fad. Jeff liked what he read and explained that he and the TFU boot campers had decided to face the issue head-on, wondering, “What if we just said we’re a cult?” Earlier that month, Jeff had dropped a flurry of videos. In one, he declared himself a cult leader and laughed like a Marvel villain. (Perhaps intentionally, his own content is now a top Google result for “twin flame cult.”)

Jeff and ShaleiaPhotograph by Paul Octavious.

It was hard to tell whether moments like this indicated self-awareness and fear that the critics might be right, or total insulation from everything they were saying. It’s a feeling familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the corners of the internet where ironic posturing and genuine feeling blur. In his video “admitting” to running a cult, Jeff “conceded” all their points: He’s a greedy fraud who doesn’t actually care about his followers. But there’s one he wouldn’t admit: that twin flames aren’t “real.” There’s no way that could be true, he mused. The foundational concept of his organization was love, and he knew that love was real.

“There are two parts of me,” Jeff told me. “There’s regular old Jeff…. Very normal human earth Jeff. And there’s also the guy who can see your past lives, who can bring your twin flame to you, who manifests all this crazy, incredible stuff, and says he’s Christ.”

Shaleia has a more consistent persona. A month after I’d left, she sent me a detailed email criticizing Love Island, the romantic Survivor-style dating show that I’d mentioned while at her home. “[Jeff] said people would need probably a lifetime of traditional therapy to help them recover from the abuse they suffered in the show,” she wrote.

I wanted to see them shoot a video for their YouTube channel; they agreed and asked that I be in it. We sat in front of a sheet bearing the words “Love Never Fails.” They let me know I could review it after if I liked. (I didn’t.) Jeff spoke the exact same on camera as he had off: loudly and clearly, with the occasional slight flick of the hair that doubled as a neck crack. He asked me whether twin flames were real. I responded without sharing my personal opinions. He asked me again. I never answered.

This June, Jeff and Shaleia filed two lawsuits that named seven former Twin Flames Universe members and one family member as defendants, variously accusing them of defamation, false promotion, unfair competition, and additional charges. Among other things, the complaints allege that their negative accounts of Twin Flames Universe online or in the Vice story are false, cooked up to make the spiritual community look bad and to steal their clients, drive people away, and promote the ex-members’ businesses.

A few months after we met, I called up the leaders again. This time they were unequivocal about the cult claims. “I’m not evil,” Jeff said. Well over 30 harmonious unions have been formed thanks to their teachings, Shaleia said. Jeff continued: “People find healing. People experience real breakthroughs in resolving traumas and pains. People improve their lives in a sustainable and balanced way.” Jeff told me that followers who leave are failing to take responsibility for themselves. Katie, in particular, “wants to be rescued by someone. She wants someone else from outside of her to make it better for her. And maybe that’s why she came to us in the first place, because she thought that that’s what we were going to do, but that’s never what we communicate to anyone.”

Katie left the group in 2019—of her own accord, she said. Jeff said she left after she was passed up for a promotion, and he and Shaleia realized her continued pursuit of her twin flame was a red flag and potentially illegal. After she left, Katie said, Jeff threatened to ruin her reputation. Jeff denied this. Jeff claimed Katie hacked into his social media accounts and spread lies about him, including that he is a cult leader. Katie denied that she hacked into the accounts.

As of this writing, Katie’s criminal case is still pending. One of her charges, stalking someone in violation of a restraining order, is punishable by two to four years in state prison in California. She denied intentional wrongdoing and denied stalking her ex “on the basis that I wasn’t actually cognitively awake.” She is worried her lawyer doesn’t have the bandwidth to explore her case fully. Meanwhile, she’s been looking to pursue litigation against what she believes Twin Flames Universe did to her.

I spoke to a lawyer, Neil Glazer, who is representing clients in the Nxivm civil case and has been contacted by ex-members of Twin Flames Universe. He cited the cost of litigation as prohibitive. Even if it weren’t, cases involving alleged cults are difficult to prosecute. In the U.S., the First Amendment protects religious freedom. And psychological coercion and consent can prove subjective. “Although most people would agree that groups exist which rob people of their agency in ways that are profoundly harmful and wrong, translating that into laws that can be universally applied is a really difficult task,” said Glazer.

In Jeff and Shaleia’s case, the Mirror Exercise may make consent even murkier. It asks you to take responsibility for your whole experience of the world, even to the point of assuming another’s actions or behavior as your own. What you do to me, I do to myself. Choices, like pronouns, are malleable. Today, Katie is living in a new city. Few new friends know any details of her past. Katie wants to keep it that way. This fall, Katie went camping with some friends. They rented a generator and brought DJ gear up to the top of a mountain without cell reception. They cranked music all night. When Katie moves to music, her heart feels better. She doesn’t think about Twin Flames Universe. Another night, she DJ’d a fundraiser until she couldn’t stand up anymore. “Spent sunday recovering at my burning man fams house then back to the grind at the shit job that’s barely paying my rent through covid,” she texted me recently.

If and when her case gets resolved, Katie wants to travel abroad and write a book. In the meantime, she’s looking at buying a Sprinter van. She’ll build out the inside so she can go off grid. At night, she’ll take pictures of the stars. It will be camping, the deliberate kind.

A version of this story appears in the Holiday 2020 issue.

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