Twin Flames Gone Wild
When marriage & gender essentialism become a tool for spiritual ascension, love has not won
In the opening scene of Netflix’s Escaping Twin Flames documentary, Jeff Ayan, co-founder of Twin Flames Universe, shows off his new car. He emphasizes that he hasn’t made his wealth “selling people videos how to make wealth” (bad) but rather by making videos with his wife that teach others how to have “beautiful, healthy, loving romantic relationships” (good!). He looks like a little boy who just got his first ride-on car.
For someone whose career has included trying to sell a cure for cancer, and who, indeed, looks like a little boy having a tantrum in a lot of the footage captured in the Netflix doc, Jeff Ayan has, however, done well for himself. Some of what he says is even true: while TFU implicitly promised fame and fortune to their online followers, this promise was mostly rooted in Jeff and his wife Shaleia’s public demonstrations of their own wealth, which they acquired through selling “true love” via a curriculum meant to help students find their “ultimate lover.”
TFU has since been accused of forced labor, abuse, and exploition. As Sarah Berman reported for VICE, members say they were “discouraged from seeking professional mental healthcare, and cut off from their families.” Some call it a cult.
Let’s back up: the term Twin Flame likely evolved from the term “twin rays,” coined in the 1930s by a group that also touted, as TFU eventually would, the finding of one’s soulmate as a path to spiritual ascension. A twin flame, in other words, is basically a new agey soulmate, but the term brings with it a certain claim to individual growth. In the 2010’s, the term “twin flame” had a heyday on the internet and the Ayans, then courting each other, eventually used it to describe their own quick romance, which they then turned into a million-dollar business/scam/cult.
The apparent novelty of the term “twin flame” (even if the concept isn’t that novel), combined with the Ayans’ branded approach to marriage, gave them a generational allure, which they positioned as THE alternative to digital dating and a lonely world. The group began as a Facebook page and YouTube series, but evolved into their “ascension school.” The Ayans now run a church called Church of Union, which leans into their founding mission— that a “harmonious union,” in the form of one eternal monogamous heterosexual partnership, is required to elevate individual consciousness. (Turn it into a church, Jeff Ayan remarks in the doc, so he doesn’t have to pay people. He says getting people to work for him for no or low pay has sex appeal.)
TFU isn’t actually in the business of selling love. Rather, like NXIVM, like many MLMs and most institutionalized religions, TFU sells self-improvement—the premise of spiritual awakening, in this case the kind that can only be found through lifelong heterosexual monogomy.
In a maddening twist of logic, the Ayans approach relies heavily on a disturbing tactic called the “mirror exercise,” which poses as a self-love practice. The idea behind the “mirror exercise” is that one must love themselves in order to find love—like the old cliche that you can’t love someone until you love yourself. Seems harmless enough. Except that the exercise requires one internalize any unrequited love as personal failure or flaw.
Ex-lover rejecting you? The mirror exercise would have you “change all of the nouns and pronouns to point to yourself.” You are actually upset at yourself for rejecting yourself. Step 3 of the exercise: ask yourself, “Is this true?” The video outlining the exercise claims, “The answer is always yes.”
TFU’s success says a lot about the age of the internet guru and the contemporary wellness industry’s understanding of what “self love” even is— in this case, it hinges on the erasure of unrequited love, and more broadly, wellness culture sells the idea that all distress can be erased if we fix ourselves. While the premise of the mirror exercise is that it will heal inner wounds and dissolve supposed “blocks” to loving the other, it’s actually an exercise in blaming one’s self for any pain caused by the behavior of other people. By asking followers to shame themselves for unrequited love, it also primes them for other abuses.
Journalist Sarah Berman notes in an interview in the Netflix doc that this exercise is similar to those used in other high control groups. The practice teaches adherents that things external to ourselves (including people and their behavior) only hurt us if we want them to. Many TFU members describe being encouraged to stalk and pursue supposed “twin flames,” sometimes even by violating restraining orders so as “not be twin flames pussies,” as Jeff Ayan puts it, but rather “honey badgers,” who go after what they want.
American ambition meet American monogamy.
One of the more troubling aspects of TFU’s approach to marriage is how the Ayans use gender to structure their programming. They have been accused, for example, of coercing women in the group into identifying as masculine. Allegedly, there were so many women in TFU that some were pressured by the Ayans to identify as masculine so the Ayans could continue to ordain masc/femme twin flame couples within the group, while preserving the appearance of a binary gender order. It’s also possible that some trans men entered the group as straight cis women, later realizing they were trans. We don’t know enough about their stories.
But there is plenty of video evidence of the Ayans disciplining followers into binary gender roles, and as Dr. Cassius Adair remarks in the doc: “I don't hear in the testimony of the people in Twin Flames Universe something like, ‘I want to get closer to who I am.’ What I'm hearing them say is, ‘I want to get closer to who I'm supposed to be.’ That raises a red flag for me.” The Ayans even ran a manifestation course on what they call the divine masculine and feminine energies that make up a “harmonious union,” suggesting the group relies on a regressive binary gender hierarchy to encourage abuse of women in the group.
Jeff Ayan (who once went by the name Ender Ayanethos) is a former business student, self-described “lifestyle design entrepreneur,” and one-time “babe-hunter.” Here he is describing masculine energy:
The Netflix doc also shows that women in TFU were instructed to do the mirror exercise on themselves when they didn’t want to have sex with their male twin flames.
What’s of interest to me here is not so much this one couple’s abusive and controlling behavior (Jeff’s relationship with his wife is under-explored in the doc, but unsettling to say the least, including some disturbing clips of him verbally disciplining her on camera). What’s most striking is how easily gender essentialism and marriage are refashioned in the group as a source of individual power for both men and women.
TFU is tradwives without the cosplay. It’s less homemaking and sandwiches for your man (though there’s some very weird stuff about food), more have sex with him when he wants/ male sexual entitlement as feminine spiritual awakening.
Sex, in fact, Jeff Ayan says, is an ascension tool that can also “heal your blocks.” According to him, men need to have sex frequently and women have to satisfy their man! In one horrible clip in the Netflix doc, Jeff discusses violating Shaleia, and mocks her attempts to say no to his sexual demands.
“Discipline is a gateway to freedom and power,” he says.
And marriage, where all of this takes place, is a tool for personal wellness, financial growth, and spiritual ascension.
It all sounds completely crazy, right? And yet, not too different from most models of marriage and “family values,” especially those demonstrated in other recent docs like Let Us Prey, which explores the hidden abuse of girls and women in IFB Churches, and shows how male figures in the church view male and female sexuality similar to how the Ayans do.
Meanwhile, marriage is touted as a cure-all for every social and political ill we face.
The HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God tells the story of another unlikely a guru—a young mother, once a McDonald’s manager, who leaves her children in search of something (we never know quite what), only to find it in herself. Amy Carlson began selling herself as an online spiritual guru via YouTube before convincing her small community of followers that she was in fact Mother God, a personified mother nature. She received messages from Robin Williams. She had also been reincarnated many times previously—in the group’s own words, as “Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth of England, Marylin Monroe,” among others.
Amy’s fantasy of herself as a maternal God—like the Ayans’ delusions of grandeur— relies heavily on gender norms: Carlson picked up several “Father Gods” along the way, ultimately landing on her twin flame (Jeff and Shaleia Ayan have also referred to themselves Father Christ and Mother Christ). Even the seemingly matriarchal community of Love Has Won believed that Mother God needed an apparently abusive male counterpart.
Amy/Mother God also battled with anorexia, which is under-explored in the doc and in the reporting I’ve encountered on Love Has Won— she often insisted her followers starve themselves. There are some intimations in the HBO series that she enjoyed a certain kind of feminine objectification. It’s hard to parse out how all this lined up with her spiritual manipulation.
It’s also unclear whether Amy’s delusions and lies led to her fatal alcoholism, anorexia, and wellness-gone-wild abuse of colloidal silver, which ultimately turned her skin blue, or if it was the other way around. In the series, Amy/Mother God rarely has public moments of conflict, but is reported to have broken down at least once, acknowledging she was a fraud.
Amy’s youthful, YouTube-hosting, crowd-funding devotees nevertheless followed her around the country in her final hours, waiting for her to ascend to the “galactics” (i.e. die) leaving behind her human form (aka her body), which they believed was ailing (and turning blue!) because it had taken on all the suffering of humanity.
The term “cult” fails a bit here, as it does with the Ayans. The cult designation has become so commonplace as to nearly lose all meaning. It’s not that I don’t believe that Carlson, or the Ayans, used mechanisms of control that align with accepted definitions of high-control groups or cults (which I’ve learned are not really the same thing). But we’ve become so enamored with cultishness that we’ve lost the plot— and the ability to see how our own digital lives are built around the kind of influence these group leaders exploit.
Here’s your annual reminder, by the way, that I am not Amanda Montell, and she is not me, though I love her work! Montell writes in her book Cultish that cults are essentially linguistic enterprises that exert power through rhetoric, relying on devices like dichotomies and insider speak to world-build.
Other forms of power do this, too: the Right’s assault on abortion, for example, is primarily linguistic. We hit up against the limits of cultishness as a descriptor for our era, however, when we fail to dig further into the language of branding, community, self-love, wellness, gender, alienation, self-improvement, misogyny, liberation, marriage, and capital, each of which drive people looking for belonging in groupthink. This is where the current wave of cult docs tends to flatten rather than illuminate: look at this CRAZY CULT, they all seem to say. Or maybe we get a bit of, look at how easily ordinary people fall victim these CRAZY CULTS. But we’re left with not much else.
Many of these groups, however, rely on traditional patriarchal methods of control— discipline and punish, gender roles, belief in heterosexual coupledom as a societal and political panacea, make sexual entitlement, maternal idealization. It’s all there, beckoning us, too, as we point and stare, forgetting how we all fall victim, in different ways, to the era of the guru and the recycled ideologies such figures often wield, selling them as new.
The TFU doc was fucking NUTS. Thanks for writing about this truly bizarre cult. Also, that screen grab of one of Jeff’s cringiest lines is perfect. 🤘🏽
I recently watched TFU. I've yet to watch the Mother God one. There are so many! I watched the LulaRoe one, NXIVM, part of Wild Wild Country, Nicole Daedone/OM, Gwen Shamblin, Teal Swan, Bikram... I am sure I am forgetting a few. So it's intriguing to me to ponder the gap between true "cult" and high power group. The point about linguistics is a good reminder. And yes I wish more of these shows, or maybe there needs to be one show/doc that connects the dots/offers us more what modern day things like wellness language, the right's attack on abortion and trans people, mothers/marriage/care work etc. have in common with cultist language- I see how othering these shows are, like I get a rush watching it, thinking "Oh I'm so glad that's not me. It's so crazy that so and so lost 20 years of her life to Keith Raniere" while also being self reflective enough to know I've definitely bought into some extremely problematic rhetoric having lived in west coast hippie communities that are rife with New Age (just another iteration of monotheism if you ask me- sub universe for god). I have Montell's book- but haven't read it yet. I also really appreciate the work the guys at the Conspirtuality podcast are doing about the intersection of conspiracy thinking/new ageism/wellness and cult like tactics.