Laurie entered a world promising self-healing, mastery, and transformation. She left after stopping lifelong medication, becoming physically unwell, isolating herself from nearly everyone she knew, and realizing the teachings she believed were healing her had begun consuming her life.
This article documents Laurie’s firsthand experience with RJ Spina’s teachings and the direct consequences she says followed during the period she became deeply immersed in them. The focus of this piece is the impact she experienced on her health, medication decisions, family, relationships, grief, identity, and daily life. All personal events, conversations, and interpretations described here are Laurie’s own testimony. Where the article references Spina’s health claims, teachings, courses, or other statements, those references are drawn from his own publicly available material or clearly attributed to Laurie’s account. The article documents what Laurie says happened to her while following these teachings and the consequences she experienced in her own life.
This article continues The Survivors Record: Testimony From the Spiritual Manipulation Era, an ongoing Elumenate Media series documenting what is actually happening inside — and around — the modern spiritual manipulation era. The record includes New Age movements, coaching cultures, channeling collectives, energy-healing systems, high-control religious environments, and the expanding marketplace of teachers who sell healing, awakening, hidden knowledge, personal transformation, and access to supposedly higher states of human potential.
The stories documented here are sober, transparent, and unembellished. Nothing is dramatized for effect or heightened to manufacture a more compelling story. If testimony is disturbing, it is because the experience being described was disturbing. The Survivors Record exists to document consequences that can disappear behind the language of healing, ascension, awakening, manifestation, energy, consciousness, personal evolution, and spiritual authority.
This series is also deliberately broader than any single teacher, organization, or belief system. The names change. The terminology changes. The cosmologies become more elaborate. New programs, courses, certifications, communities, and personalities continually emerge. But recurring patterns remain visible across the modern New Age marketplace: extraordinary claims presented with certainty, spiritual authority concentrated around individual teachers, familiar concepts repackaged as exclusive knowledge, escalating financial investment, fear disguised as enlightenment, identity dismantling presented as growth, and serious life decisions increasingly filtered through belief systems that followers are taught to trust.
The consequences do not remain inside a meditation, course, retreat, livestream, or online community. They enter ordinary life. They can reach health decisions, finances, marriages, friendships, parenting, grief, work, identity, and a person’s relationship with everyone outside the belief system. Children can become part of choices they never made. Families can watch someone they know begin behaving like a different person. Friends can be classified as spiritually incompatible, energetically draining, unawakened, negative, or dangerous. Ordinary doubt can be recast as fear, ego, resistance, programming, or evidence that someone has not progressed far enough.
The Survivors Record documents what happens on the other side of those promises.
It is a place for people who entered these systems themselves and eventually began recognizing what had happened to them. It is also a place for partners, relatives, friends, and children who experienced the fallout from someone else’s immersion. Some survivors recognized the damage quickly. Others spent years inside these environments before they could see the pattern clearly. Their experiences will not be identical because the systems themselves are not identical. What connects the record is the need to document consequences that are too often minimized, spiritualized, rationalized, or simply left out of the public story.
Each testimony adds another piece to that record. No single survivor is expected to explain an entire movement, prove what happened to every participant, or speak for everyone who encountered a particular teacher. Their responsibility is to tell what happened to them. Elumenate Media’s responsibility is to preserve those accounts carefully, distinguish testimony from documented public claims, and examine the larger patterns those experiences expose.
Laurie’s story is the next entry in that record.
Her experience moves directly into some of the most consequential territory this series examines: what happens when New Age teachings stop being material someone watches or discusses and begin directing decisions about the body, medication, grief, children, relationships, money, identity, and daily life. It also raises serious questions about the expanding commercial market surrounding self-proclaimed spiritual authorities who attach extraordinary promises to expensive programs and present personal transformation stories as evidence that their systems work.
The purpose of documenting these stories is not to preserve the mythology surrounding this era. It is to preserve what happened to the people who lived through it. As more survivors speak, the record becomes harder to obscure behind polished “testimonials”, spiritual language, extraordinary promises, and carefully constructed public personas.
If you would like to contribute to The Survivors Record, email info@elumenatemedia.com. Every firsthand account adds to a growing record of what these systems are doing to people, families, and communities — and what becomes visible once someone finally steps outside them.
Some of the most dangerous consequences of New Age spirituality emerge when belief stops being something a person merely holds and becomes a system for making decisions about real life. Healing claims begin influencing medical choices. “Protecting your energy” begins determining who remains in your life. Fear is renamed intuition or awareness. Isolation becomes spiritual discernment. Identity erosion becomes deprogramming. Physical deterioration can even be interpreted as evidence that the body is healing. Once that framework takes hold, the very things that should signal that something is going wrong can be absorbed back into the belief system as proof that the process is working.
Laurie’s story belongs to this side of The Survivors Record. She was not standing outside the New Age world watching someone else disappear into it. She entered it herself. What began with videos, meditation, energy work, and the promise of healing gradually expanded into decisions involving her lifelong thyroid condition, prescribed medication, severe fasting, her children’s schooling, her relationships, her grief, her identity, and the way she interpreted the world around her.
At the center of Laurie’s experience was RJ Spina, founder of Ascend the Frequencies, whose public platform is built in significant part around his claim that he healed himself from permanent paralysis and multiple serious illnesses and can teach others the process he says produced that recovery. For Laurie, one claim carried particular weight: Spina says he resolved hypothyroidism. Laurie had lived with hypothyroidism since birth and had relied on medication for most of her life. According to Laurie, Spina also taught that pharmaceuticals had to leave the body before true healing could occur. Eventually, she stopped taking her thyroid medication.
What followed is the reason Laurie’s testimony matters.
While believing she was healing, Laurie became increasingly physically unwell. While believing she was protecting her energy, she cut people out of her life and changed her phone number. While being taught that fear was something to overcome, she says she was simultaneously exposed to an expanding world of conspiracy narratives and threats. While trying to strip away ego and identity, she began feeling that her own personality was disappearing. During the illness and death of her sister, the same belief system that appeared to offer relief from grief also contributed to a profound disconnection from the people and events unfolding around her.
None of this happened to Laurie because she believed she was destroying her life. It happened while she believed she was improving it. That is precisely what makes her story so important to document. The danger of a high-control spiritual framework is not always experienced as danger while someone is inside it. It can feel like healing. It can feel like clarity. It can feel like protection, growth, awakening, discipline, or finally understanding how reality works. The consequences can become visible only after enough of ordinary life has been reorganized around the belief system.
Laurie eventually reached the point where what she was being taught could no longer be reconciled with what was actually happening to her. She stepped away, returned to the medication she had stopped, returned her children to school, began reconnecting with ordinary life, and started confronting the grief, relationships, physical consequences, and pieces of herself that had been pushed aside during those months.
She is speaking now because she can see the experience from both sides: from inside the system, when she genuinely believed she was healing, and from outside it, where she can see what those beliefs were doing to her life.
Her story documents that distance — and what it took to cross it.
Who RJ Spina Presents Himself To Be
RJ Spina does not present himself merely as a spiritual teacher, meditation instructor, or motivational figure. At the center of his public identity is an extraordinary medical claim: that after becoming paralyzed from the chest down following a catastrophic spinal infection in 2016, he restored his ability to walk and resolved multiple diagnosed illnesses through the consciousness-based system he now teaches and sells to others.
On his Ascend the Frequencies website, Spina states that a rare staph infection compressed his spinal cord, required emergency surgery, and left him “permanently paralyzed from the chest down.” He says he was also diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease and autonomic dysreflexia and suffered life-threatening complications associated with the spinal injury. He describes his body as having been “destroyed and beyond repair.”
Spina further states that he spent roughly three months in a hospital and rehabilitation facility receiving antibiotics, medication, painkillers and physical therapy. According to his account, he was given “zero chance” of ever walking again and was told he would require medication for the rest of his life.
Then comes the claim upon which much of his subsequent authority rests.
Spina says that within the first 100 days following emergency surgery, he walked unassisted. He further claims that his diagnosed illnesses and diseases were “resolved,” including what he describes as a lethal infection that months of antibiotics had been unable to cure.
These are not small claims. They are extraordinary medical claims, and Spina uses them as the foundation for an entire commercial self-healing system.
Nor does Spina present his recovery merely as a remarkable personal experience whose cause remains uncertain. He explicitly attributes it to a process that he says other people can learn. His website tells prospective students that their “ill health” can undergo “complete transformation” through “the exact same process” he says he used to heal himself from permanent paralysis and chronic disease.
That distinction matters enormously. Spina is not simply telling the public, This happened to me. He has constructed a commercial healing system around the proposition that he understands how it happened and can teach that process to other people.
Spina is not a medical doctor. He does not present conventional medical or scientific expertise that would establish him as an authority on spinal cord injury, endocrinology, infectious disease, autoimmune disease, oncology, neurology, psychiatry or the numerous other serious medical conditions that appear throughout his healing material. Yet the claims attached to his programs move directly into those territories. There is an enormous difference between teaching meditation and presenting oneself as capable of teaching people how to overcome serious disease. Spina crosses directly into the latter.
His Supercharged Self-Healing 2.0 course is marketed as “The Healing Program of Your Lifetime.” Spina tells prospective students that through prerecorded videos he will “literally be supercharging your healing during each class.” He describes illness as something that can be affected through subconscious programming, vibration, consciousness and what he calls “Intelligent Energy.” The curriculum includes instructions to “Command Creator Consciousness,” “Channel Intelligent Energy into the Body” and “Turn Off the Program of Illness.”
The language does not stop at general wellness, relaxation or using meditation as a complementary practice. It makes direct claims about illness and healing.
On the same sales page, Spina publishes an extensive list under the heading, “Can I Really Do This?” He states that the conditions listed are among diagnoses his students have “overcome” by dedicating themselves to the teachings in Supercharged Self-Healing. The list includes incurable and inoperable cancer, heart failure, stroke, paralysis, autoimmune disease, diabetes, kidney failure, spinal injuries, thyroiditis, infertility, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, medication withdrawal and numerous other serious physical and psychiatric conditions.
Those are extraordinary assertions. Testimonials may describe what individual customers believe happened to them, but testimonials are not controlled clinical evidence, and the existence of a testimonial does not independently establish that a particular intervention cured a disease or caused a medical outcome. Yet testimonials occupy a prominent place in the marketing of Spina’s healing programs, including alleged accounts from people describing stopping medications, recovering from serious illness and experiencing improvements they attribute to his teachings. Listing conditions as serious as incurable cancer, heart failure, kidney failure and paralysis as diagnoses students have supposedly “overcome” through a paid spiritual healing program demands far more than promotional testimonials.
This distinction becomes especially important in Laurie’s story. Laurie was not merely listening to vague statements about positivity or meditation. She encountered a teacher publicly claiming that he had eliminated hypothyroidism — the same condition she had lived with since birth — and selling a system that he explicitly presents as capable of teaching others how to heal themselves. For Laurie, these were not abstract claims. They spoke directly to a serious medical condition she had managed for her entire life.
And health is only one branch of what Spina sells.
Once the full catalog of Ascend the Frequencies is examined, Spina’s work becomes an almost encyclopedic collection of modern New Age concepts. Energy healing sits beside chakras. Manifestation sits beside money. Higher consciousness sits beside subconscious deprogramming. Astral projection, ascended masters, mystical teachings, frequency language, identity deconstruction, fasting, healing meditations and claims about hidden knowledge all appear within the larger system. Laurie says his classes also moved heavily into conspiracy narratives, political and societal collapse, reincarnational identities, demons, Lucifer, the Elohim, extraterrestrial material, soulmates, twin flames and elaborate cosmologies.
There is even a course called Master the Mystic Arts. Another is Unleash the Dragon. His healing curriculum includes “Open Your Third Eye.” Other programs promise access to what are presented as higher states of consciousness and hidden mechanisms governing reality.
The breadth is striking because very little in the contemporary New Age marketplace appears to remain outside the system. Rather than presenting a genuinely distinct body of knowledge, Spina’s catalog reads as a massive consolidation of familiar New Age material — healing, manifestation, chakras, frequencies, ascended masters, mystical identities, subconscious programming, sacred geometry and conspiracy culture — repackaged together under his own system and terminology.
Spina has published multiple books and built an extensive collection of courses around these subjects. His books include Supercharged Self-Healing, Change Your Mind, Access Super Consciousness, The Law of Attention and You Are the Sun. His paid programs extend from health and healing into money, manifestation, relationships, identity and spiritual development.
One particularly revealing example is Vibrational Engineering: The Metaphysics of Money Manifestation. The prerecorded program is advertised at $12,497. Its marketing promises students a “personalized, actionable plan to exponentially grow your income,” steps for money manifestation, the ability to “create without limitation,” and tools to “completely recreate your financial health.”
The package includes more than conventional lectures and worksheets. Among the additional materials advertised are hours of “deprogramming,” a ten-hour “Attract Money While You Sleep” video loop intended to dismantle limiting beliefs and money blocks, and a three-hour, thirty-three-minute and thirty-three-second “Sacred Geometry Video” described as being attuned to 888 Hz and containing subliminal messaging.
The sales page then surrounds these promises with extraordinary testimonials. One testimonial claims the participant “manifested $250,000” within the first two weeks of the course. Another says the participant “literally manifested the $10,000,000 home of my dreams.” Another describes the information in the course as worth $100,000 and tells prospective students, “THE CHASE IS OVER. You found it.”
These testimonials are presented by Spina’s own business as promotional material for a program costing thousands of dollars. They are alleged customer claims, not independent evidence that Spina’s methods caused the financial outcomes described. Yet they function as advertising for a course that explicitly promises students tools to exponentially increase income and transform their financial lives.
The pattern is difficult to miss. A personal story becomes proof of a method. The method becomes a course. The course becomes a larger system. The system expands from health into money, relationships, identity, consciousness and increasingly elaborate spiritual explanations of reality. Alleged testimonials then provide additional stories of extraordinary transformation around the system.
It is also precisely the pattern Elumenate Media has documented repeatedly across the modern New Age marketplace: familiar concepts are collected from multiple spiritual, religious, occult, self-help and conspiracy traditions, renamed or reorganized, and then presented as a proprietary or uniquely authoritative system. The packaging changes. The terminology changes. The teacher at the center changes. Much of the underlying material does not.
Spina’s material is an unusually concentrated example.
Chakras are there. Energy healing is there. Manifestation is there. Frequencies are there. Higher-self teachings are there. Subconscious reprogramming is there. Fasting is incorporated into healing. Sacred geometry appears in the money material. Ascended masters appear in the cosmology. Astral projection appears in the teachings. Biblical figures and demons appear alongside chakras. Conspiracy narratives appear alongside instructions not to live in fear. Money manifestation is sold alongside self-healing. Identity deconstruction is presented alongside claims about illness. Ancient and mystical imagery is folded into modern course packages, online communities, prerecorded videos, worksheets and high-priced programs. It is difficult to identify a major strand of contemporary New Age culture that has not been absorbed somewhere into the larger product ecosystem.
Even Spina’s claims about his own identity extend far beyond that of teacher.
According to Laurie, he has suggested or claimed connections to an extraordinary collection of historical, religious and esoteric identities, including Joseph from the story of Jesus, Moses, Plato, Merlin, Shakespeare, Saint Germain and an archangel. She recalls him telling students, “If you don’t know all my incarnations by now, you’re well behind.”
These claims deserve scrutiny. Spina is making sweeping assertions about reincarnation, ascended masters, manifestation, chakras, energy healing, sacred geometry, and his own supposed identities across history. Taken together, they reveal just how expansive the authority he assigns to himself has become.
But the stakes become considerably more serious when those extraordinary claims extend into serious disease, permanent paralysis, and the assertion that he can teach other people to heal themselves.
There is a profound difference between selling a meditation designed to make someone feel calmer and telling the public that the process being sold is the same process that allegedly reversed permanent paralysis and chronic disease. There is a difference between discussing personal “beliefs” and advertising a program alongside claims that students have overcome cancer, heart failure, kidney failure, paralysis, diabetes and other serious conditions.
And there is a difference between saying this is what I believe happened to me and building commercial authority from the assertion that one knows the mechanism well enough to reproduce it in others.
Spina has made that leap himself. And he charges people thousands of dollars for access to the system built around it.
His own marketing does not ask the public merely to admire his recovery story. It explicitly connects that story to what customers can purchase from him. The healing system is presented as teachable. The techniques are presented as repeatable. The results are described in sweeping terms. His personal recovery functions as the foundational proof behind the product.
What is far less visible in the promotional material presented here is independent evidence capable of establishing the much larger proposition being sold: that Spina’s consciousness techniques caused his reported recovery from paralysis and multiple diseases, or that those techniques can cure the extensive range of serious conditions invoked in the marketing of his programs. The promotional claims are enormous. The independently established evidence presented alongside them is not.
That absence matters.
Recovery after a catastrophic medical event does not, by itself, establish what caused that recovery. A personal account cannot establish that a particular “spiritual practice” reversed paralysis. A testimonial cannot establish that a course cured cancer. A customer allegedly saying that something happened after taking a program does not establish that the program medically caused it.
Yet Spina’s authority depends heavily upon collapsing those distinctions. Correlation becomes causation. Personal testimony becomes validation. An extraordinary recovery story becomes the credential for teaching others how to heal serious disease.
Spina’s alleged personal recovery story is not simply part of his biography. It is the foundation upon which he markets an entire self-healing system, using his own extraordinary and unverified claims as the basis for selling others the promise that they can achieve the same. That is not a peripheral feature of the business. It is central to the pitch.
That is the context in which Laurie entered RJ Spina’s world — not simply a collection of eccentric New Age beliefs, but a sprawling commercial system built around some extraordinarily consequential promises about what human beings can heal, change, manifest and control through the teachings of one man who presents his own recovery as evidence that the system works.
How Laurie Found Him
Laurie came across RJ Spina’s work in May 2025, within weeks of her sister’s death. Her sister had been seriously ill before she passed away, and Laurie found Spina’s videos during this same period. Laurie began watching his videos online. She had only been involved in the broader New Age space for about two years prior, including some exposure to Reiki, so the language and themes he used already felt somewhat familiar.
The entry point was fast. His content presented itself as confident, structured, and solution-oriented, especially around healing and control over one’s circumstances. Given what she was going through personally, the message that suffering could be understood, managed, or even resolved through internal work was immediately compelling. His delivery style — direct, persuasive, and highly certain — created a sense that he knew exactly what he was talking about.
From the beginning, there was a strong pull. The calls and classes she joined carried a noticeable energy of excitement and anticipation, with participants expressing eagerness to go deeper into his programs. The environment felt charged, focused, and purposeful. For Laurie, it initially felt like she had found something that could help her navigate what she was facing — something that offered clarity, direction, and a sense of control during a time when her life felt uncertain.
Within a short period, she moved from watching his content into actively participating in his courses, beginning what would become roughly six months of immersion in his work.
The Promise Of Healing And Control
What initially drew Laurie into RJ Spina’s work was not abstract spirituality, but the specific promise of physical healing. His central claim — that he had reversed paralysis, autoimmune disease, diabetes, and hypothyroidism through consciousness alone — stood out immediately. For Laurie, that claim was not theoretical. She had lived with hypothyroidism her whole life since birth and had been on medication long-term to manage it. Hearing someone state that the condition could be fully reversed, without medication, directly spoke to something personal and unresolved.
His messaging was clear and consistent: the body could heal itself completely once the identity was deconstructed and the “higher mind” was mastered. Illness, in his framework, was not something to manage but something to eliminate. Pharmaceuticals were positioned as obstacles — substances that remained in the tissues and prevented true healing from occurring. The implication was that as long as medication was present, the body could not fully repair itself.
This was presented with certainty, not as possibility but as fact, reinforced by his own story as evidence. That certainty is critical: these were not presented to Laurie merely as speculative spiritual ideas. They were presented as principles of healing. For Laurie, that level of confidence, combined with her own history with a chronic condition, made the message highly compelling. It offered not just improvement, but resolution — the idea that something she had managed for years could be completely undone.
At the time, it felt logical within the framework he presented. If the body could be rebuilt through consciousness, then removing anything external — including medication — became part of the process. The teachings did not position this as a risk, but as a necessary step toward healing. That framing made the decision to follow his guidance feel aligned rather than extreme, especially as she became more immersed in his work.
Entering the Work: Classes, Techniques, and Early Effects
Once Laurie moved beyond watching RJ Spina’s videos, she began taking his courses. One of the first was Master the Mystic Arts, a program she paid $999 for that consisted of seven approximately hour-long classes. She also participated in chakra-focused work in which, according to Laurie, Spina connected each chakra to one of the seven deadly sins and to demons from the Bible.
The work incorporated energy healing and guided meditations. Laurie recalls being taught to send energy to individual chakras and participating in exercises such as a “psychic shield” meditation. Another exercise she remembers was what she calls the “spaceship meditation.” Participants were instructed to imagine entering a spaceship with their higher self, looking at a computer image of themselves with the body appearing perfectly healed, and then returning in the spaceship. Other material incorporated familiar New Age concepts and practices, including Merkaba techniques and astral projection.
There were also exercises aimed at examining thoughts and behavior. In what Spina called the “notebook challenge,” Laurie says participants were instructed to write down every action they intended to take and then analyze why they were going to do it, separating what was supposedly coming from the ego from what was not. This was one exercise Laurie could not bring herself to follow. “Some part of me would not allow me to do that,” she recalled. “Why would anyone do that? I couldn’t get into it.”
Another exercise involved assessing people and circumstances according to whether they were supposedly giving or draining energy. That concept would eventually have a profound effect on the way Laurie related to the people around her.
At first, however, parts of the work felt helpful. The meditations and chakra exercises provided relief, and Laurie became deeply engaged after completing Master the Mystic Arts. She remembers the environment around Spina’s programs as intensely enthusiastic. During calls, participants expressed excitement about his courses and about spending significant amounts of money to continue studying with him. Looking back, Laurie sees those early experiences very differently. But while she was inside them, the relief she experienced was real enough to keep her engaged.
Following His Health Teachings in Real Life
The health component of Spina’s teachings became much more consequential when Laurie began applying it to her own body. Laurie was born with hypothyroidism and had taken a high dose of thyroid medication for most of her life. This was not a minor or recent medical issue for her; medication had been part of managing the condition for years.
According to Laurie, Spina taught that pharmaceuticals had to be removed from the body and its tissues before the body could heal. She remembers his position as unequivocal: a person could not heal while pharmaceuticals remained in the body. She also remembers the reassurance accompanying that message: “Just trust that you’ll be OK.”
Spina is not a doctor. Yet according to Laurie, his teachings had now moved directly into how she understood prescribed medication and whether remaining on it was compatible with healing.
Following her sister’s death and service in May 2025, Laurie made a significant change to her own health care: she stopped taking the thyroid medication she had relied on for most of her life.
For a period, she instead took a homeopathic replacement. Laurie now describes that product as unregulated and says she felt “absolutely horrendous” while taking it. Yet by this point she had become immersed enough in Spina’s teachings that worsening physical symptoms did not immediately lead her to reconsider what she was doing. The belief that she was engaged in a healing process had become stronger than the warning signs coming from her own body.
Physical Deterioration While Believing It Was Healing
Over approximately four months without her prescribed thyroid medication, Laurie’s physical condition deteriorated significantly. Her thyroid area became so swollen that she could not tolerate clothing touching her neck.
Her appearance also began changing. She developed severe acne. Her hair started turning gray and snapping off. She became profoundly exhausted. Her menstrual cycle became disrupted, and she experienced heart palpitations. Looking back, Laurie connects the breadth of what she experienced to the disruption occurring throughout her body while her thyroid condition was no longer being treated with the medication she had relied on for most of her life.
At the same time, Laurie was also following Spina’s teachings around fasting. She says he promoted fasting as a way of ridding the body of serious illnesses and conditions, using the idea of cells going into atrophy and renewal as part of the explanation. Laurie followed those teachings while she was already physically unwell from being off her thyroid medication. She says she was barely eating and estimates that her body fat dropped to approximately 15 percent, something she now believes could also have been contributing to the problems she was experiencing.
But at the time, she interpreted these changes through the teachings she had absorbed. The fasting, the absence of medication, and the physical changes occurring in her body were all being understood through the idea that her body was undergoing a healing process or reset.
“I just said to myself this is part of the healing,” Laurie recalled. “This is all part of it. It’s normal. It’s OK. I just refused to believe otherwise. I just thought I was healing.”
That belief is one of the most consequential parts of Laurie’s story. Symptoms that ordinarily would have told her something was seriously wrong became evidence, in her mind, that the process was working. Physical deterioration and healing were no longer opposites. The framework she had adopted allowed deterioration itself to be interpreted as part of recovery. That inversion is precisely what made the situation so dangerous: becoming increasingly unwell did not initially break the belief in healing. It was absorbed into it.
Spina’s teachings about appearance also affected how Laurie responded to the visible changes. She remembers being taught not to care about appearance or image. Before this period, Laurie says she had always cared about looking nice and enjoyed wearing makeup. During her immersion, she stopped wearing it and stopped taking the same care with her appearance. Her daughter noticed the change and told her she had completely let herself go. Laurie became defensive. At the time, her response was essentially that appearance did not matter; only who someone was mattered.
At the same time, Laurie had begun increasingly isolating herself from other people as she followed Spina’s teachings around protecting and monitoring her energy. That isolation also meant that the physical changes were unfolding largely out of view. Laurie was seeing so few people that there was little opportunity for anyone outside her immediate environment to recognize the extent of what was happening. The swelling in her thyroid, changes to her skin and hair, exhaustion, and other symptoms developed while she continued interpreting them as part of the healing process. Without the regular presence of other people in her life, those changes were occurring inside the same increasingly isolated environment that had helped her normalize them.
Looking back, Laurie describes the reality much differently: “I was suffocating myself and also making myself very ill at the same time.”
Disconnection, Grief, and the Loss of Presence
The physical consequences were unfolding alongside a profound emotional change. As Laurie became more deeply absorbed in Spina’s teachings, she found herself increasingly removed from ordinary life and from the grief surrounding her sister’s death. Looking back at her state during that period, Laurie describes just how far removed she had become: “I was so disconnected from reality. It was like I was on another planet basically.”
In the days and weeks before her sister died, Laurie now feels she was not present for her in the way she wishes she had been. At the time, she was also interpreting what was happening through Spina’s teachings, including the idea that her sister had “chosen this path.”
That separation continued after her sister’s death. Approximately 100 people attended the service, but Laurie remained in her bedroom rather than joining them. By then, her concern about other people’s energy had become so consuming that it affected her participation in one of the most significant moments following her sister’s death. She now deeply regrets not attending.
The grief she barely felt during that period began returning after she moved away from Spina’s teachings. Memories and emotions that had seemed distant while she was immersed in the material began coming back. “Now it’s starting to hit me now that I’ve come away from it,” Laurie said. “I have a lot of grief and memories hitting me now.”
Looking back, Laurie no longer sees the temporary relief she experienced as evidence that the grief had been resolved. “Although in the moment it did make me feel better, it’s not permanent,” she said. “It cycles around.”
Isolation and Behavioral Changes
The isolation that had already affected Laurie during her sister’s illness and death continued to deepen as she became more immersed in Spina’s teachings. One of the practices she describes was an “energy diagnostic system” that encouraged people to evaluate other people and circumstances according to whether they were giving them energy or draining it. Laurie began applying that thinking to her own relationships, increasingly viewing contact with other people through the question of what it was doing to her energy.
Eventually, she began removing people from her life altogether. “I literally just cut off everybody,” Laurie recalled. “I changed my phone number. And I didn’t tell anybody.”
This was not simply a period in which Laurie became less social. Longstanding relationships were interrupted because she had begun to believe that protecting herself required separation. People she had known for years suddenly could not reach her. She withdrew further into the world created around the teachings while ordinary contact with friends and others outside it became increasingly limited.
The consequences did not disappear when Laurie stopped following Spina. The distance she created during those months remained, and reconnecting with people she had known before has been difficult. “Even to this day, I really struggle to reach out to people that I’ve known for a long time because I put such a block between myself and others,” she said.
Laurie believes some of the people around her were worried about what was happening but did not know how to approach her, particularly while she was grieving and already emotionally vulnerable. Now that she is out of that period, what she wants is almost the exact opposite of what she was doing then. She wants the human contact she had spent months shutting out.
“I’m at a point now I do want to connect with people and see people and be amongst people again,” she said.
The Impact on Her Children
Laurie’s immersion also changed life for her children. Spina was highly critical of conventional schooling, according to Laurie, and recommended homeschooling. During the period she was following his teachings, Laurie removed her children from school and kept them home with her.
The decision existed inside the same atmosphere of fear and protection that had increasingly shaped the rest of her life. Laurie says she had become frightened by the things Spina was saying were happening in the world and wanted to keep her children safe from them. Looking back, she does not believe the children necessarily wanted to leave school, although they went along with the decision.
She still worked hard to give them experiences. They took trips and holidays, and Laurie says she structured much of her life around them. But she now distinguishes that from actually being present. She remembers feeling calm with them, but now recognizes that what she experienced was often disconnection rather than calmness. She was physically with them while simultaneously detached from what was happening around her.
The household also lost routine. The children could go to bed whenever they wanted, and the ordinary structure that had previously organized family life fell away. Laurie now sees that differently as well. “Children need a routine or otherwise everyone’s unsettled,” she said.
Since returning her children to school, she says things have improved. Having part of the day to herself has given her room to breathe and has helped her begin rebuilding her own presence with them. She is still working through the effects of that period.
The Financial Pressure Around the Courses
Alongside the teachings themselves was a highly monetized course environment. Laurie describes Spina’s free calls as intensely sales-oriented. People would become excited during them, openly talking about spending thousands of dollars to move into his paid programs. She remembers the calls as persuasive and says Spina was particularly skilled with language.
The prices could escalate dramatically. Laurie paid $999 for Master the Mystic Arts. She says one later offering cost approximately $10,000 for ten classes spread across a year. She also recalls one-to-one work being offered at substantially higher prices. And as Spina’s own current course catalog demonstrates, five-figure pricing is not incidental to the business: at least one prerecorded manifestation program has been advertised for more than $12,000.
More concerning to Laurie was the way financial hesitation was addressed during sales conversations. She recalls participants saying they had rent due and Spina responding with questions such as whether the rent was due that very day. She interpreted the message as encouraging people to prioritize his programs even when they were worried about basic expenses.
She also remembers participants being encouraged to “take the leap,” with those willing to commit and pay being framed as people who would be rewarded for doing so. According to Laurie, the financial promise extended beyond the courses themselves: participants were told that money spent could return tenfold or even a hundredfold, and that the material could teach them how to become wealthy.
Laurie says she witnessed people discussing debt, mortgages, rent, and other financial obligations while considering increasingly expensive programs. Inside the group environment, however, spending heavily on the teachings was not necessarily treated as recklessness. It could instead be framed as evidence of commitment, courage, or willingness to trust the process. That framing matters in an environment where hesitation over spending can itself be recast as fear, limitation or failure to trust.
Losing Her Personality
By the time Laurie had been immersed in Spina’s material for several months, the changes were no longer confined to her health or social life. She felt that her personality itself had changed.
“I feel like it took the fun out of me,” she said. “It took my whole personality.”
Before this period, Laurie describes herself as more active and more concerned with ordinary parts of her identity and appearance. During the six months she spent deeply involved in the teachings, she became increasingly serious. She stopped having fun in the same way. She stopped caring about how she looked. She began trying to remove parts of herself that she now believes should never have been treated as problems in the first place.
“I can see it now,” she said. “I was trying to drop my whole identity. I was coming away from caring about what I look like. I was trying to become like a blank slate, by erasing myself completely.”
Spina frequently spoke about “peeling back the layers,” according to Laurie, and used a phrase she remembers as “Clark Kenting” to describe part of this process. At the time she accepted much of the language. Looking back, she sees the cumulative effect as a progressive removal of the person she had been before entering the material.
Something else began happening as well: she started recognizing Spina’s own mannerisms and certainty in herself.
“I became quite arrogant just like him,” Laurie recalled. “I remember literally saying to somebody, ‘I just know everything. I know how everything is.’”
She describes the experience now as almost being overwritten by the personality at the center of the teachings. “I started noticing I was acting like him,” she said.
Friends and relatives noticed the change too. According to Laurie, people close to her told her that during this period it appeared as though she were in a cult. What they could see from outside was a personality change that Laurie herself could not fully recognize while it was happening.
A Collision of New Age Teaching and Conspiracy Culture
As Laurie moved deeper into Spina’s material, she encountered far more than meditation and self-healing. She describes his teachings as an enormous mixture of familiar New Age ideas, conspiracy narratives, esoteric figures, religious mythology, extraterrestrial stories, ascended masters, manifestation, astral projection, hidden knowledge, and predictions about political and social collapse.
According to Laurie, Spina claimed involvement with an extraordinary list of identities and figures. She remembers him suggesting connections to Joseph from the story of Jesus, Moses, Plato, Merlin, Shakespeare, Saint Germain, and an archangel, sometimes through suggestive comments rather than straightforward declarations. She remembers one particularly revealing line: “If you don’t know all my incarnations by now, you’re well behind.”
Laurie also recalls teachings in which Spina described himself and two other ascended masters as responsible for the inception of a “free will project,” with Earth itself constituting that project. His cosmology included the Elohim, Lucifer, multiple gods and universes, preplanned human lives, and the idea that events push people back onto paths selected before incarnation. He also taught astral projection and incorporated familiar New Age ideas involving soulmates, twin flames, higher selves, and energetic practices.
The conspiracy material became equally expansive. Laurie recalls classes dealing with what Spina called “false awakenings” that were heavily populated with conspiracy narratives. She says he spoke about dark forces, impending instability, threats to the United States, alternative financial systems, and the need for people to establish what he called a “Plan B.”
Laurie found the contradiction increasingly striking after she stepped away. Fear, she says, was repeatedly identified as the thing holding people back. Yet the teachings themselves continually introduced new things to fear.
“He’s teaching that fear is the problem,” Laurie said, “but at the same time he’s instilling all this fear in you with the conspiracy theories.”
That combination is now one of the aspects she finds most disturbing. Participants could receive temporary relief through meditation and energy work while simultaneously being exposed to narratives about hidden threats and societal collapse. They could be told not to fear while being given new reasons to remain vigilant. They could be encouraged to analyze their thoughts, relationships, energy, behavior, finances, and surroundings while also being reassured that everything was fine. The contradiction is built directly into the structure Laurie describes: fear is condemned while fear-producing material continually replenishes it.
“To me, it’s so insidious,” Laurie said. “It’s one big loop and so many people are stuck in it.”
When Laurie Began to Pull Away
By November and December 2025, approximately six months after first finding Spina’s work, Laurie began pulling away. By then, the consequences were difficult to ignore.
She was physically unwell. Her neck was badly swollen. She was profoundly exhausted. Her hair had deteriorated. Her skin had changed. Her menstrual cycle had been disrupted. She had experienced heart palpitations. The version of herself who had entered the material believing she was engaged in healing was now confronting a body that had become increasingly difficult to dismiss.
“By that point, I was really unwell,” she said. “My neck was really swollen. I was so exhausted. My hair looked awful. I was a huge mess.”
Looking back, Laurie believes she had been struggling physically for much of the six months she was immersed in the teachings. But recognition did not arrive all at once. She had spent months interpreting symptoms through a system that allowed her to call deterioration healing, while simultaneously becoming isolated from many of the people who might otherwise have challenged that interpretation.
Coming away from the material therefore meant more than stopping classes. It required Laurie to begin reassessing decisions, beliefs, relationships, and bodily warning signs she had learned to interpret differently.
Returning to Her Medication and Her Life
In January 2026, Laurie resumed taking the thyroid medication she had previously stopped.
That decision marked a major reversal from the position she had occupied only months earlier. She had gone from believing pharmaceuticals needed to leave her body so that healing could occur to returning to the medication she had taken for most of her life. The promised self-healing had not eliminated the condition for which she had been medicated since childhood.
As she moved further away from Spina’s material, Laurie began seeing the previous six months differently. The life waiting for her outside the teachings had not transformed into something fundamentally different. “I see that life is the same as it was before all the teachings,” she said.
The contrast was particularly stark because she could now look back at what had happened while she believed she was improving: she had become physically sick, withdrawn from people she loved, disrupted her children’s routines, disconnected from her sister during the final period of her life, and gradually stopped recognizing parts of herself that had once been ordinary and familiar.
Leaving did not instantly reverse all of that. The process of returning has involved rebuilding ordinary life rather than replacing it with another system.
The Grief That Came Back
Leaving Spina’s teachings did not simply bring Laurie relief. It also brought back what had been pushed to the edges of her experience while she was immersed in them. The grief surrounding her sister’s death, which had felt strangely distant at the time, began reaching her in a way it had not before.
Memories returned with it. Laurie began looking back at the final period of her sister’s life differently, including how removed she had been during those last days and weeks and how differently she believes she would have behaved before becoming absorbed in the teachings. The regret surrounding her sister’s service remained especially painful. While approximately 100 people gathered to honor her sister, Laurie had stayed in her bedroom because of how consumed she had become with protecting and monitoring her energy.
Coming away from the teachings did not erase any of those moments. Instead, it left Laurie to experience emotions that had barely registered while they were actually happening. What had initially felt like relief from grief had not eliminated it. The grief was still there, and once the structure she had used to distance herself from it began falling away, she had to encounter it without the explanations that had previously surrounded it.
At the same time, Laurie began confronting the other consequences of those months. Relationships she had abruptly severed did not automatically repair themselves. Changing her phone number and cutting people off had created real separation, and reconnecting with people she had known for years remained difficult even after she wanted those relationships back.
Her life has gradually moved in the opposite direction from the isolation that defined that period. Her children returned to school. Routine returned to the household. Laurie began wanting to see people again rather than protect herself from them. She began trying to be present in her life rather than continually evaluating it through energy, fear, spiritual meaning, or what might be happening beyond ordinary reality.
The aftermath has therefore required Laurie to face something the teachings had temporarily allowed her to avoid: grief does not disappear because it has been given a spiritual explanation. Neither do relationships, regret, or the consequences of decisions made while disconnected from them. For Laurie, coming back to herself has also meant coming back to everything she had stopped allowing herself to fully feel.
Why Laurie Is Speaking Now
Laurie is speaking now because she can finally look back at the six months she spent immersed in RJ Spina’s teachings and recognize just how much changed while she was inside them. What she once believed was helping her ultimately affected her health, her grief, her relationships, her children, her connection to other people, and her own personality.
The health component is particularly serious for Laurie. Spina’s self-healing story is central to the authority he presents to his audience, including his claim that he healed himself of hypothyroidism. Laurie had lived with hypothyroidism since birth. According to her, Spina also taught that pharmaceuticals had to come out of the body’s tissues before healing could occur. He is not a medical doctor, yet those teachings reached directly into a real medical decision in Laurie’s life: she stopped taking medication she had relied on for most of her life and became extremely unwell while continuing to believe she was healing. This is where the consequences of extraordinary New Age health claims stop being theoretical. Laurie lived them in her own body.
But health is not the only reason Laurie is speaking. Looking back, she can see the scale of what happened around it. She became isolated enough to cut people out of her life and change her phone number. She became detached during the illness and death of her sister and later had to confront grief that returned after she left. Her children were removed from school. The household lost routine. She stopped caring about parts of herself that had previously mattered to her and describes trying to erase her identity until she was almost a “blank slate.” She even began recognizing Spina’s mannerisms and certainty in her own behavior.
She also remains deeply troubled by the larger environment she experienced: expensive courses, sales-heavy calls, extraordinary claims, conspiracy narratives, fear, and an endless layering of New Age teachings presented alongside Spina’s own claims about who he is and what he knows. From outside it now, Laurie can see how much of her life had gradually become organized around the material.
“I was different before I found his teachings,” she said.
Laurie is speaking because she knows the difference between how the experience felt while she was inside it and what she can see now that she is out. She remembers believing she was healing while her body was becoming increasingly unwell. She remembers believing she was protecting her energy while cutting herself off from people. She remembers believing she was changing herself for the better while friends and family were watching her personality change.
And now, looking back at the entirety of what happened, Laurie does not view it as harmless spiritual exploration. Neither does Elumenate Media. Her account demonstrates exactly why these systems warrant scrutiny when extraordinary spiritual claims begin directing decisions about health, medication, family, money, relationships and ordinary life.
“I feel like I was meant to go in there and out him because he’s quite dangerous,” she said.
Laurie cannot undo the months she spent believing that deterioration was healing, isolation was protection, and the gradual loss of herself was transformation. But she can put what happened on the record. By speaking now, she is making visible what extraordinary promises can look like once they leave the course page and enter someone’s actual life — where the consequences are not spiritual abstractions, but a body, a family, relationships, grief, and time that cannot simply be restored.
That is why Laurie is speaking. And that is why her story belongs in The Survivors Record.
