Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping the Twin Flames Universe – Amazon Prime
Hey, you, person reading this article! Have you met your Twin Flame yet? Your Twin Flame is the other half of your soul, split from your soul essence and then separated to gather individual experiences across various lifetimes. When you find your Twin Flame, you’ll experience a union that transcends typical relationships and accelerates your spiritual evolution. Sounds pretty neat, huh? Obviously, it’s a whole load of mystical gobbledygook, but you can see why the idea of meeting one’s super-charged chosen-by-god soulmate would be pretty appealing.
Most proponents of Twin Flames mysticism are probably harmless new-age hippies, but to Jeff and Shaleia Ayan, sharing the Twin Flames ideology was a route to money, power, emotional manipulation, and generally behaving like terrible, terrible people.
Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping the Twin Flames Universe, directed by Marina Zenovich, follows journalist Alice Hines as she attempts to get to the bottom of The Twin Flames Universe, the brand name of Jeff and Shaleia’s online guruism. The documentary follows up a Vanity Fair article in 2020 in which Hines exposed the Twin Flames Universe as a manipulative cult. Hines is a prominent talking head in this documentary, along with former members, their families and some people who knew Jeff and Shaleia Ayan before they became whatever the hell it is they are now.
Hines says that she is drawn to stories that reflect interesting new ways of dating, the “Weird fringes”, and how love is evolving with the new ways people relate to one another other today. Well, so am I, I guess. But the weird thing about this programme is that it seems to be less about love and sex and more like a step-by-step guide on how to start your own cult.
Jeff and Shaleia are, they say, Twin Flames, and they guarantee to help you find your Twin Flame. Do they really believe in the concept of twin flames or are they just in it for the money? The more of this 4-part series you watch, the more it seems like the latter.
They certainly put the work in with social media, racking up eighty million YouTube views and running their Twin Flames Ascension School. The classes they hosted were an awful lot like group therapy sessions run by two people completely unqualified to do that sort of thing.
They recorded all these sessions and sold them online to other Twin Flames Universes members. This was a handy passive income stream for them. It also means all these weird, hippyish, sometimes supportive and often downright abusive sessions are available for all of us to see in this documentary.
There is some really controlling, aggressive shit here. Mostly from Jeff. (Shaleia is more the passive-aggressive type). It’s extraordinary that Jeff has the balls to deny his behaviour when it’s right there, recorded and available on the internet. (Although, I assume it’s been removed now.)
Jeff was originally one of those entrepreneur types who wanted to make a billion without having to necessarily put the work in. He’s a salesman with no real product. His first “career” was setting himself up as a Life and Career Coach at 25. (With no actual experience of life or careers.) When he met Shaleia he got into the whole Twin Flames thing.
Then that became their whole business model, which led to them making millions. They were shameless, showing off flash motor cars and their swimming pool while simultaneously demanding that their acolytes work for free for the Twin Flames Universe.
There are a whole bunch of former members sharing their stories on the documentary. And even though they explain their reasons for getting involved, it’s still hard to understand why they all stuck with it for so long.
Because, and here’s the thing, nothing that Jeff and Shaleia were teaching actually worked. They had one couple – Catrina and Anne – who got together after joining up with Twin Flames and in their case, they absolutely would have got together anyway. Mostly because they already felt the same way about one another.
Most of the other ex-members were in the throes of limerence when they joined. They were obsessed with their exes, someone they had a fling with or some guy who came into the gas station where they worked.
These members wanted reassurance that the object of their unrequited love was their one true soul mate. And they got that. But what they didn’t get was any kind of relationship with that person. Because you can’t make someone fall in love with you, despite what some Twin Flames guy tells you.
Jeff and Shaleia dished out the worst advice possible to their members. They told them to be stalkers, send multiple texts, go to their houses and absolutely not take ‘no’ for an answer. Unsurprisingly after following Jeff and Shaleia’s advice, several people were handed restraining orders.
At the start of the documentary, I had assumed that Twin Flames Universe was like a matchmaking service and they would find you your one true match in all the universe. (Or rather, someone they told you was your one true match.) This would make slightly more sense than encouraging people to pursue the person they dated in high school five years ago.
Later on, Jeff and Shaleia do get into the whole matchmaking game, and they do it in the creepiest way possible. They seemingly randomly smooshed together members into Twin Flames partnerships and told them that God had told them they were destined to be together. So far, so predictable. But, because the majority of their members were heterosexual women, they would pair two women up together and then pressure one of them to change gender. Because, as far as the Twin Flames Universe is concerned, one of them had to be the man. It’s all about divine masculine and feminine energy or some shit. This is an organisation whose one ‘success story’ was a lesbian couple, remember?
In fact, Catrina and Anne were similarly pressured. The video recording of Jeff badgering Anne to change her name to Dan and insisting that she’s really a man is absolutely horrifying.
The documentary includes Jules Gill-Peterson, a Canadian historian specializing in transgender history, to make it clear that while someone recognising their gender is not the gender they were assigned at birth is cool, this – whatever the fuck Jeff and Shaleia were doing – this was not cool. The Twin Flames power couple were so determined to have only heterosexual couples on their books that they were prepared to bully people into changing sex in order to do it.
This was the part where Catrina and Anne decided they were Done With This Shit. And they were really invested in the whole Twin Flames organisation at this point. Their entire incomes came from working as counsellors within the Twin Flames Ascension Academy.
Jeff’s fury at being challenged has to be seen to be believed. And luckily, we can see it for ourselves. That is the extraordinary thing about Twin Flames Universe – every single web chat was recorded and put on the internet for all to see. Jeff and Shaleia were so assured of their infallibility that they broadcast everything. They almost never met their students in person – it was done on online video calls. Everything was recorded, and everything was documented. Most cults like to keep things behind closed doors. They don’t have the hours of footage that Twin Flames Universe racked up.
The most extraordinary thing about the conclusion of this documentary is discovering that Jeff and Shaleia are still at it. Because we’re only hearing the stories of the people who escaped, you start to get the impression that the Twin Flames Universe came crashing down as people recognised how mad and dangerous the whole thing was and got out.
But no. It’s all still happening. People are signing up and handing their money over to a pair of charlatans with no discernible skills and a fuckton of what one might charitably call ‘character defects’.
Like I say, you might not learn much about love and relationships, but if you’re looking to start a cult, you could pick up some handy hints from Jeff and Shaleia Ayan’s career trajectory.
I don’t think you’d even need to do the forced gender reassignment and illegal-stalking-encouragement stuff. The coercion, manipulation, and exploitation are probably a non-negotiable part of running a cult, though. And if you have a shred of conscience, then you’ll probably have a bit of a problem with that.
But if, like Twin Flames Universe leaders, you were born without a conscience and with an inescapable belief that you’re the only one who matters in the world and that it’s OK to completely fuck up other people’s lives just so you can buy a fancy sports car, well then, this might just be the ideal career for you. Good luck!