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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?

By Alice Hines

Photography by Paul Octavious

December 3, 2020
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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.
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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.

CONTENT

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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.”

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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.

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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.”

SEEING THEM RESPOND TO MY QUESTIONS WAS LIKE HAVING THE CHARACTERS ON A TV SHOW
COME TO LIFE.

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.

“BEHOLD, WE ARE THE PROPHESIED SECOND COMING,” HE CONTINUED. SHALEIA WAS THE
“MOTHER CHRIST,” JEFF, THE “FATHER CHRIST.”

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.”)

THE MISSION
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.”Photograph 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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