Three years ago I got my first cease-and-desist.
It came from the estate of a man I’d been writing about – a doctor I’d discovered in 2021 who’d spent decades mapping levels of consciousness, and whose framework had become, for a while, the lens I was using to make sense of my own healing. I’d been blogging about him. I was building tools that referenced his calibrations. I had a chart on a blog post showing how my own consciousness had moved through pregnancy, mapped retrospectively against his scale.
The email said: you can’t include his calibration numbers, his category labels, or his Map chart image. He owns all of it. Trademark number this, copyright number that. Remove immediately.
So I did what you do when someone tells you you’re infringing on something. I replied and asked: which of these three things, specifically?
Because numbers and category labels can’t be trademarked in any meaningful sense – you can’t trademark “200” or “courage” any more than you can trademark “blue” – but the chart image absolutely can be. Which one is the actual concern?
No reply.
Months later, another email. Vaguer. Same trademark number, same copyright number, same please remove immediately. I replied again. Asked for a URL. A screenshot. Anything specific.
No reply.
This pattern has been running for three years.
This week’s email arrived. The vaguest yet. The new line was: you cannot use the Map of Consciousness.
Just that. Stop using it.
Here’s the thing.
I’ve spent three years trying to figure out what I’m not supposed to do. They’ve never told me.
The chart was about my own life – a graph of how my consciousness had shifted over 18 months.
In 2009 I miscarried. I’d been pregnant for the first time, terrified the entire pregnancy in a way nobody around me thought was normal. I was relieved when I miscarried. I figured out later there’s a name for what I had – tokophobia, the extreme fear of pregnancy and birth – but at the time I just thought I was broken in some unfixable way.
I cleared it. Home birth. First daughter. The whole arc.
Years later, in 2021, I came across Hawkins’ work and read it carefully. And I did what any obsessive measurement nerd would do – I went back in time and retrospectively calibrated my own pregnancy journey on his scale.
I was at 173 the day I miscarried, near the bottom. I was at 205 by the time i fell pregnant for the second time, and at 303 when my daughter was born – past the boundary between fear-based states and courage-based ones.
It was the first time I was able to fully understand, in a number, what had actually happened to me. And being a numbers nerd, this was a big deal.
Obviously, I made a chart of it. Put it on a blog post. Used his y-axis labels because I was talking about his scale. Wrote his name in the footnote – Using Dr David R Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness – because the whole reason the chart existed was to credit the framework I’d used to understand my own change.
That’s the chart they want me to take down.
The most recent email contains an accusation I want to pull out and look at, because it’s instructive.
It says I’m attributing material to him he did not create.
But that’s the opposite of what I was doing.
Putting his name on the chart wasn’t a false attribution. It was a credit. The whole reason his name was there – in the footnote, in the labels, in the body of the blog post – was to make it clear the framework was his. I was using his lens to understand my own experience and acknowledging the lens belonged to him.
These are opposite things.
Crediting says: this came from somewhere, and I want you to know where.
Attributing says: this person made the thing you’re looking at.
A yoga teacher saying “I teach Iyengar yoga” is crediting a lineage. She’s not claiming to be B.K.S. Iyengar. She’s not falsely attributing her class to him. She’s locating her practice within a tradition that has a name.
The entire legal accusation in the latest email rests on getting that distinction backwards. Either the person sending it actually doesn’t see the difference, or she does and is using vague legalese to chill practitioners into compliance regardless. I don’t know which. (I have a suspicion 🙄 but I’ll keep it to myself.)
What I do know is that the accusation, as written, doesn’t describe what I was doing.
Here’s what I did anyway.
Because they wouldn’t tell me which of the three things they actually wanted removed, I had to guess. After three years, my best guess was that the chart image was the real concern – since numbers and labels aren’t enforceable as trademark, but a specific chart visual could be. That had to be the actual exposure.
So I rebuilt it. Stripped the labels. Removed the calibration numbers. Took off the attribution footnote. Left only my own line moving through time, with annotations of what was happening to me at each point. A chart of my pregnancy. No framework on it.
Then I replied. Asked again for specifics on anything else they’d like reviewed.
Got the same template back. Same trademark number, same copyright number, same please remove immediately. No URL. No screenshot. No engagement with anything I’d written.
That’s when the pattern clicked for me properly.
This isn’t enforcement designed to resolve anything. If they wanted resolution, the first email would have included a URL and a clear description of which element was infringing. Three replies asking for specifics would have produced a single specific answer. Three years of intermittent emails and zero engagement isn’t enforcement. It’s a chill operation. The point isn’t to fix the alleged infringement. The point is to keep the practitioner anxious enough about being sued that they retreat from the framework altogether.
It mostly works. Most practitioners would have stopped using the framework after the first email. Many would have stopped writing about him entirely.
I didn’t stop, because I knew enough about IP law to know what they could and couldn’t actually claim. But I did keep getting the emails. Which I suppose is the point of the model – it doesn’t matter if you comply, only that you live with the threat.
This is what’s been sitting with me since the latest email arrived.
The man whose work is being protected this aggressively wrote about transcendence. About love as a calibrated state above fear. About the small ego that hoards being something to release. He spent decades teaching that the world above 500 on his scale looks different from the world below 200.
I’m not going to draw the obvious conclusion about the operating altitude of the people sending these emails. (Though I have measured their consciousness 😬.)
What I will say is this: there’s a choice every methodologist makes about what happens to their body of work. Some make it a gift – publish the methodology, teach it freely, let other practitioners run with it. Some make it a fortress – trademark every term, send templated cease-and-desists, treat each new practitioner as a potential thief.
Both are choices. The fortress earns more, usually. The gift produces more practitioners. Both have a cost.
The fortress cost is harder to see at first. It looks like protection. What it actually does is reduce the number of people who’ll use the framework to help anyone – because the only practitioners willing to absorb three years of vague enforcement letters are the ones with deep pockets, dedicated legal counsel, or sufficient brand confidence to ignore the threats.
The rest just stop. Quietly. Find something else to base their work on.
That’s the chilling effect. That’s what these letters are actually for.
For now, the chart is redrawn. The work continues unchanged. I’ll still use Hawkins’ framework in 1:1 client work. I’ll still credit him. I’ll still write about him. I’ll keep ranking for “Map of Consciousness” in search, because writing about a public framework is exactly the use case nominative fair use was designed to protect.
But here’s the bit nobody knows.
That first email three years ago – the one that started all this – also did something else.
I sat with it for a few days, and I realised: I can’t build a body of work on someone else’s framework. Not if the people protecting that framework are going to send me a vague threat every few months for the rest of my life. I need my own model.
That decision is the reason the Ladder of Growth exists.
What started as “I need a measurement framework that’s actually mine” has become a full methodology, a new company co-founded with JJ Stenhouse in November 2025. Five developmental stages. Documented assessment process. Trainable. Trackable.
Designed from the beginning to be measurable AND publishable AND useable by any practitioner who wants it.
The fortress that was meant to chill me into compliance pushed me, instead, into building parallel infrastructure. They didn’t stop me using Hawkins. They forced me to build something that didn’t need to.
Today I’m in gratitude of that first email and the gift that it was.
The question driving everything I build is still the same one it’s been for fifteen years: is it actually working?
It’s still the through-line. It’s still the question I’d answer at 3am if you woke me up to ask. But sitting under it now, more visible than it was before this week’s exchange, is another one:
What’s a method actually for?
If it’s for the methodologist’s estate, you build a fortress. If it’s for the world the methodologist claimed to be writing for, you build a gift.
The Ladder of Growth chose the gift path. The methodology is published. The assessments are documented. Other practitioners are training on it. That’s the work I want to do – building tools the field can use, not tools the field can be sued for using.
Most of us building work in this field will face that choice eventually. Worth knowing what you’ll choose before someone else makes the decision for you.
Alexia Leachman is a Growth Architect – she builds healing methodologies, then measures whether they actually work. Developer of Head Trash Clearance. Co-founder of the Ladder of Growth measurement framework. Four books. Two daughters. One excellent border collie called Milo.
Her podcast Is It Bloody Working? tackles the question that’s driven every method she’s built for fifteen years.