The Guided Meditation
LePera’s first experience of celebrity occurred in the summer of 2019, when she decided to conduct an “inner child meditation,” oceanside, in Los Angeles. The turnout astonished her.
Weakland, a frequent poster on the Holistic Psychologist’s Instagram account, was among those on the beach in Venice that August morning. At 32, she was a recent transplant to Los Angeles from Colorado, where she had worked as a nurse’s aide in a pediatric oncology unit. Although she arrived too late for the session, Weakland met LePera and gave her a deck of oracle cards.
Soon they began messaging each other — or at least that is what Weakland assumed. Later, she came to believe that she had been communicating with Galvin, she told me. (LePera and Galvin declined interview requests sent to them through their lawyers, as well as LePera’s literary agent and book publicists. When asked by phone about specific allegations, one of those lawyers said she had no comment and hung up.)
The Holistic Psychologist took shape as a website, with LePera as the face of a start-up devoted to mental fitness. With Galvin, she expanded the franchise to include the Self-Healer’s Circle. At $20 a month, the cost (now $26) was roughly equal to what four or five minutes of individual therapy would set you back in TriBeCa or West Hollywood. Beyond monthly Q. and A.’s with LePera, the Circle offered members a range of online events, lectures and somatic practices.
When the site went live, so many people tried to enroll that the external server crashed. Weakland sent a message offering to help and was immediately hired. Telegenic and open in her affect, Weakland started appearing on camera, heading some of the Circle’s “Content Teachings,” in which she shared her own story as a child of parents immersed in poverty and addiction. With LePera, she co-hosted SelfHealers Soundboard, a podcast that ran for two years.
Not long after starting her job, Weakland received an invitation from LePera and Galvin to spend part of the holiday season with them. Landing in Philadelphia after Christmas, Weakland made her way to the Four Seasons. In a single room with two beds, the couple laid out gifts for her, Weakland said. Later, they decamped to an Airbnb in the Poconos where, on New Year’s Eve, Weakland recalled, they drank, smoked weed and kissed.