The Up Vibe: JKUltra on Mirrors, Evolution & Reclaiming Your Power

What happens when you stop climbing Hollywood's ladder, lose everything during lockdown, and start posting conspiracy theories on TikTok? For Jen Carmody—known online as JKUltra—it became the doorway to doing exactly what she's meant to do.

In the latest episode of The Up Vibe, host Aurora Luna Star sits down with the consciousness researcher, author, and hypnosis practitioner for a conversation that refuses to stay on the surface. From deconstructing spiritual hierarchies to reclaiming the power of negative emotions, Jen brings her signature blend of wit, wisdom, and unflinching honesty.

What Does It Mean to Find Your Edges?

Jen describes herself as "a tour guide on this human experience rather than a spiritual teacher," and that grounded energy permeates the entire conversation. Her journey hasn't been linear. After moving to LA for film school, she worked everywhere from Beverly Hills hair salons to weed shops across the city. "Every weird job that you can imagine, I have had," she laughs.

But it was during the 2020 lockdowns that everything shifted. Working at a high-end restaurant in Beverly Hills, making good money but deeply unhappy, Jen began exploring timelines. "I already know what happens on the timeline that I stay here," she realized. So she left—invested everything in herself—and watched her life fall apart. Relationships ended, writing projects dissolved, and she found herself broke and about to be evicted.

Then two friends suggested she try TikTok. Her first video about Ghislaine Maxwell's secret Reddit account went viral. "I was like, oh, you like that? I've got more where that came from."

Thirty days later, everything had changed. Not financially—she's transparent about still working on that—but in alignment. "I am definitely doing what I'm meant to be doing. I love what I'm doing. And I kind of accept that the universe provides in the way that I need exactly as I need it."

Aurora notes how Jen's content has evolved dramatically. "There's so much less conspiracy and so much more love in the work that you're doing... You're really trying to help people become empowered and stop listening to the guru energy."

Are the Conspiracies Even True Anymore?

Jen's relationship with conspiracy theories has itself become... conspiratorial. "My biggest conspiracy now is that in a way, none of the conspiracies are fully true either," she reveals. "First it was like, oh, all the conspiracies are true. And then you go further and you're like, well, actually, none of them are fully true."

She uses MKUltra—the proven CIA mind control program her online name references—as an example. "It was a horrible diabolical thing that happened. But if you zoom out, it's actually what kind of started the age of Aquarius in a way." The same LSD experiments meant to manipulate people led to a mass awakening and the hippie movement. "Even the darkest thing that we can prove that truly did happen, still when you zoom out, triggers a mass beautiful awakening."

Aurora agrees completely: "The darkness is always serving the light... When you're in the darkest night of the soul, that's when your greatest breakthroughs come through."

But Jen has also moved away from the ascension narrative she once embraced. "Who am I to say that I know better than creation, that I know better than the universe or God?" she asks. "That is actually my ego trying to control the entirety of creation... My ego wants to eliminate suffering because suffering sucks. How do I know better than creation itself?"

What's the Real Truth About Mirrors in Relationships?

One of the most powerful segments explores the spiritual concept that relationships mirror us—a teaching that can feel like victim-blaming when you've been hurt. Jen gets vulnerable about her own pattern of romantic partners cheating, and how she finally understood what was being mirrored.

"I would never cheat on someone. So what is this mirror?" she wondered for years. The answer wasn't in the actions, but in the wound. "I was emotionally unavailable. So I was attracting people who could only go to a certain depth of emotion."

She breaks down the empath-narcissist dynamic many spiritual seekers find themselves in: "These are two people that did not have their needs met, found two different ways to get their needs met. The empath finds its needs met by people pleasing, bending over backwards, self-sacrificing. The other side finds the way to get their needs met by taking what they need at any cost."

The mirror isn't the other person's behavior—it's the original wound you share. And even mirrors themselves, Jen points out, don't show us truth. "When we look in the mirror, that's not our true selves. It's an inverted version of ourselves that is skewed." She references viral videos of people seeing themselves in a "true mirror" for the first time and breaking down crying because they've never actually seen themselves as others do.

Aurora adds her perspective as someone who worked through people-pleasing patterns: "Eventually I was getting really angry because I wasn't being authentic to who I was. I was trying to fit into someone else's box all the time. That's exhausting."

The two discuss how even mundane activities mirror our inner work. Jen shares a recent example of her husband laying bricks at ground level while she climbed a ladder to clean gutters—him working on foundation and structure, her clearing things from a higher perspective. "We're literally always doing these things in our outer reality."

Before they wrap, Aurora discovers Jen's birthday is coming up (August 16th), and Jen leaves the audience with practical advice: start practicing the mirror perspective with mundane things before tackling your deepest wounds. She recommends her friend Cara Elizabeth's Animal Apothecary oracle deck as a way to see how nature speaks in symbols—like how dragonflies live underwater for years before emerging to fly, reminding us that "there's a whole other world, a whole other atmosphere that exists that I have no perspective or awareness of at this time."

"You have to find all the edges before you can know what the middle is," Jen says. "How could you know the middle if you haven't gone all the way to one end and all the way to another end?"

Watch the full episode to experience this honest, funny, and deeply human conversation. And if you want more of Jen's work, she offers monthly group hypnosis and coaching calls through her Substack, plus live streams every Tuesday night on YouTube.

As Aurora says, it's the Up Vibe—but it's also the real vibe. And sometimes, that's exactly what we need.

Catch the complete episode here.

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