I want to tell you about a client, Laila.
She found me through the measurement angle. She’d done the Joe Dispenza retreat. She’d read the David Hawkins book. She’d done therapy, ancestral healing, energy work – the full inventory of the serious seeker. And she’d moved. She’d genuinely moved. But she knew she hadn’t moved enough, and she was sophisticated enough to know the difference.
What hooked her in wasn’t my methodology. It was that I was tracking it.
She was 40. Senior executive, earning well into six figures. She’d left India at 18 with nothing and built everything herself. The kind of person who tracks her net worth the way other people track their steps. She knew she had over a million in assets. She wanted more. Not from lack, but from a very clear sense of what was possible and a frustration that she wasn’t there yet.
Her husband had recently been diagnosed with ALS.
She came to me wanting to raise her level of consciousness. Not through a presenting problem. Through an intention. That was unusual.
She came in at 226.
What 226 means
The numbers I use come from Dr David R. Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness – decades of research that produced a measurable scale of consciousness.
On this scale, 200 is a critical threshold. Below it, you’re operating primarily from contracted states: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, anger. The world looks threatening. Resources feel scarce.
Above 200, something opens. Courage, neutrality, willingness. Above 300: acceptance, reason. Above 400: love, joy. Above 500, you’re in what I call Glitter Ball territory – where most of the heavy work is done and you’re operating from a fundamentally different quality of life.
What Hawkins calls the calibration – that single number – is what I call the baseline. The weighted average of how someone is operating day to day. But I’ve added two measurements of my own on top of his.
- The floor is the lowest point someone drops to when things fall apart. When triggered. When the pressure is highest. This is where you really see where someone lives – not on their best days, but in their worst moments.
- The ceiling is the highest they can access. Their peak state. Their most resourced moments.
Laila’s baseline was 226. Her floor was 183. Her ceiling was 284. 183 is in the fear zone. That’s where she was dropping when things got hard. And things were getting hard.
She came in wanting the private jet lifestyle. Wanting to circulate with high-net-worth individuals. Wanting to build a business generating – and I remember this number clearly – four million a month.
Inside my head when she said that: well, good luck with that.
I didn’t say it. That was my head trash, not hers.
A quick word on the Ladder of Growth
Before I go further, I need to give you a small piece of context – because the language I’m about to use won’t mean much without it.
The Ladder of Growth is a measurement framework I co-developed to make inner growth visible. It describes five stages of human development – from Reactive & Defensive at the bottom, through Aware & Unsettled, Emerging & Erratic, Integrated & Focused, to Aligned & Coherent at the top. In my work, I use a different naming system for these stages – the five balls – but the developmental arc is the same.
Think of your internal world like the sea. Walk into the ocean and you’ll notice it’s not all the same temperature – warm patches near the surface, cold pockets deeper down, unexpected cold currents running through the warm.
That’s what’s happening inside us too. We carry all of these energies simultaneously. What changes through healing is the proportional mix – how much of each energy is present, and which ones are setting the tone.
For a deeper explanation of how this works, [read more here].
The Gold in the Boot
When I took Laila’s initial scan – mapping her internal architecture before we began –something came up that I’d never worked with quite so precisely before.
She had grown up in a family of untouchables.
If you’re not familiar with caste: untouchable isn’t just poverty or disadvantage. It’s a wound encoded into identity across generations – the belief, absorbed from infancy, that you are of a fundamentally different order than other people. Less. Undeserving of what others take for granted.
She’d left India at 18 and built an extraordinary life by every external measure. But you don’t leave a wound like that behind when you cross an ocean. It travels with you. It shows up in how you price yourself. In who you think you’re allowed to want. In whether you believe, in your bones, that the life you can clearly see is actually available to you.
In the Ladder of Growth framework, we have a concept we call the gold in the boot.
Imagine driving your car and something sounds wrong. You can hear what sounds like the exhaust dragging along the road. Scraping. Heavy. What the hell is going on? You take it to the garage and they have a look under the car, then under the boot – and there it is. Someone has loaded the the spare tyre compartment in the boot with gold. Not metaphorically. Actual heavy metal. Nobody told you it was there – you thought your spare tyre was in there. It’s been dragging you down this whole time – making the car work harder, scraping along the ground, costing you in ways you couldn’t see from the driver’s seat.
Once you find it and process it – once you do the work – something interesting happens. The gold stops being dead weight and becomes something else. A gift. A source of power you didn’t know you had. You don’t just lose the drag. You gain something in its place.
That’s exactly what happened with Laila’s wound.
The untouchable history – once we cleared the ancestral roots of it, layer by layer – didn’t just stop weighing her down. It became the most distinctive thing about her. The thing that, as you’ll see, positioned her for the most extraordinary professional opportunity of her life.
The Data
Here’s what Laila’s journey looked like.
+386 points on the baseline. Floor from 183 to 453. Ceiling from 267 to 667.
Hawkins’ research says the average person moves 5 points in a lifetime.
She moved 386 in 12 months.
The floor shift is the number I want you to sit with. She came in dropping to 183 when things went wrong. She left with a floor of 453. In practical terms: the worst days became categorically less extreme. The fear zone became structurally unavailable – not suppressed, not managed, but simply out of reach. She no longer had enough of the lower energies in her makeup to drop there.
Why the other tools had taken her as far as they could
Laila had done serious work before she came to me. Joe Dispenza, Hawkins, therapy, energy work. And she’d moved – genuinely moved. So why was she still at 226?
Here’s something nobody in the personal development industry talks about: the methods that exist calibrate at different levels. And a method can only take you as far as its own level.
Think of it like travelling from London to Moscow. You could take a series of different transport legs – cross the Channel by boat, pick up a train to Paris, change again to get to Berlin, change again, slowly making your way across Europe. Each leg gets you further. None of them gets you to Moscow.
Or you could get on a plane in London and fly direct.
Therapy was the boat across the Channel. It was the right tool – it got her somewhere she couldn’t have reached without it. Joe Dispenza was perhaps the Paris train. Each intervention did what it was capable of doing.
Head Trash Clearance operates at a different altitude. It can take someone from 100 to 650+ in a single journey – not because the other methods failed, but because it’s the plane. It was always going to go further.
Month two
At the start of each month in the first 3-month programme, we did an intention-setting session where she wrote out what she wanted to create. In month two this is what her intention was;
I attract financial blessings in unexpected ways.
Money comes to me for no reason.
Everything I desire is here.
A month later – near the end of her first programme with me – she lost her job. Company cuts. Out.
Her husband’s ALS had progressed. Private carers, significant healthcare costs. Not the moment to be without a six-figure income.
When she told me on the call, I had my own internal wobble. For about thirty seconds I thought: of all the timing. What the hell.
Two days later she emailed me.
She’d bumped into an old friend. The friend knew someone – a CEO who’d been running his businesses for twenty years. He was looking for someone to run operations across all of them. She had a conversation. No real interview process. She was the only candidate.
He hired her in four days. At £300k.
One of the first things she had to do in the new role was manage the purchase of his private jet.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a manifestation story. I’m allergic to that framing.
This is a precision healing story.
The CEO who hired her was Indian. And of a different caste.
One of the things most precisely cleared by that point was the untouchable wound – the ancient, ancestral belief that someone from her background couldn’t stand alongside someone from a different class as an equal. That she was less. That she didn’t belong in the room.
Without that clearing, the conversation with the old friend would have happened differently. The meeting would have gone differently. She would have priced herself differently, carried herself differently, made herself smaller.
She didn’t. She showed up – data in hand if you want to think of it that way – and she got the job.
The private jet wasn’t a coincidence. It was the logical consequence of the internal work, made visible.
Today
She’s still in the role. Running finances for the whole operation. Her boss thinks she’s brilliant.
We stopped working together about a year ago. We’ve stayed in touch. Her husband’s illness deteriorated after the programme ended. He died recently.
She handled that whole journey – and I choose that word deliberately, because handling isn’t surviving, it’s operating with full presence and clarity through something devastating – with the equanimity that only comes from being a Glitter Ball. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a measurement.
- Floor at 453.
There is no possible version of this story where she navigates what her life has contained in the last year from the position she was in when we started. The grief. The career upheaval. The extraordinary professional opportunity. The death of her husband.
At 226 with a floor of 183? Any one of those things would have taken her down.
At 612 with a floor of 453? She held all of it.
The Takeaway
You don’t have to feel broken to want to do this level of work. Perhaps you want to create an incredible life for yourself – and you understand that the only limits are the internal ones.
If you’re ready to expand your capacity and create the life of your dreams, it starts on the inside.