Fifteen years into a career in software engineering, with stints at the US Department of Energy and Sun Microsystems and two degrees in computer science and mathematics, Jeffrey Allen made the kind of pivot that is easier to describe in hindsight than to execute in the moment. He walked away from it entirely.
That decision, which Jeffrey traces to a teaching trip to Uganda in 2005, now shapes one of the more unusual trajectories in the personal development space. Today he is a Mindvalley author and the co-creator of Spirit Mind, an online training program built around a single animating idea: that most people have forgotten they have access to a second way of thinking, and that this forgetting is the source of much ordinary human struggle.
From Engineering to Energy Work
Jeffrey’s path from software to spirituality was not a sudden conversion. In his early 20s, he began noticing perceptions he describes as involving energy, other people’s mental states, and what practitioners call clairvoyance, none of which his scientific training gave him a framework to make sense of. He responded the way engineers tend to: he started researching. By 1996, he had found Psychic Horizons Center in Boulder, Colorado, a clairvoyant training school where, according to his Mindvalley biography, he completed the center’s training program and teacher’s certification and later served on the organization’s board of directors. He continued his engineering work in parallel for nearly another decade, until the Uganda trip made the split unworkable. Energy work won.
The Mindvalley chapter began in 2014, when Jeffrey, then running live workshops, met Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani at an Awesomeness Fest event in Thailand. He describes that meeting as the turning point that moved his reach from rooms of attendees to something considerably larger. His flagship Duality program, an introduction to what Jeffrey calls personal energy work, became one of Mindvalley’s catalog offerings, accessible through the platform’s membership. A second program, Unlocking Transcendence, is structured around a 60-day course in higher awareness practices. Collectively, it is reported that more than one million people around the world have engaged with Jeffrey’s Mindvalley programs.
The Spirit Mind Framework
The program now at the center of Jeffrey’s work is Spirit Mind, launched to English-language audiences in January 2023. It is a joint creation with his wife Hisami Allen, and the framework it introduces is straightforward to state if not necessarily easy to practice: the Allens distinguish between two modes of consciousness they call the Material Mind and the Spirit Mind.
The Material Mind, in their framing, is the analytical, judgment-making tied to the ego: the inner voice that compares, worries, and builds narratives about what situations mean. It is useful for practical life, they say, but tends to generate the kind of overthinking and comparison the Allens associate with ordinary stress. The Spirit Mind is the quieter counterpart: a mode of perceiving that precedes the analytical layer, less concerned with stories about experience and more attuned to the direct quality of the present moment. Jeffrey and Hisami frame this awareness not as something to be learned but as something to be remembered, a capacity already present in everyone that gets gradually eclipsed.
The program combines online training modules with live group calls and was developed over five years, according to the company. Spirit Mind is a registered trademark of Spirit Mind Living Inc.
East Meets West
The collaboration with Hisami Allen gives Spirit Mind a dimension absent from Jeffrey’s earlier solo work. Hisami, who grew up in Japan, founded Oneness Company there in 2000 and had been teaching her version of this framework to Japanese audiences for years before she and Jeffrey married in 2010. The English-language Spirit Mind program draws on her foundational teaching, while Jeffrey brings the engineering-inflected instinct for clear structure and practical application that has characterized his Mindvalley work. The couple describe Spirit Mind on their website as developed specifically to avoid the kind of analytical stimulation they believe undermines much of the existing content in the spirituality and personal growth space.
In July 2026, Jeffrey won the top rated program (Student’s Choice Award) for Duality at Mindvalley University in Tallinn, Estonia, while also leading a live workshops of roughly 1,500 participants from around the world. The goal, as Jeffrey and Hisami frame it, is the same one that drove the original departure from engineering: to make energy awareness available to anyone who wants to live a fulfilling life.
