If you’ve read my The Garage of Consciousness post, you’ll know I love a car metaphor. It explains things in a way that feels tangible rather than abstract, and when we’re talking about something as slippery as consciousness or energy, we need something solid to hold on to.
This piece sits in the same family, but it goes a level deeper. Because it’s one thing to talk about what car you’re driving. It’s another thing entirely to look at what’s actually inside it.
In this post:
Your baseline level of consciousness isn’t the whole picture
You can take a reading of someone’s baseline level of consciousness. I use the same 0-1,000 scale that shows up in different models – Dr David R. Hawkins uses it in the Map of Consciousness, Frederick Dodson uses it in Levels of Energy, and it’s become quite a common framework.
So let’s say you take a reading and you calibrate at 300. That tells you something useful. It gives you a sense of where you sit overall. But unless you understand what is actually going on inside you energetically, that number only takes you so far.
It’s a bit like standing outside a car and judging it purely by how low it sits. Yes, you can see the ride height. Yes, you can observe that it struggles over speed bumps. But you don’t yet know why. And without knowing why, you’re limited in what you can do about it.
The gold bullion in the boot
Let’s go back to the car. Imagine you’ve got a vehicle that feels sluggish. It’s riding really low. Every time you go over a bump, you wince because you can hear the exhaust scraping along the tarmac. It’s uncomfortable to drive, so you find yourself going slowly, avoiding uneven roads, maybe even parking up altogether because it just feels like too much effort.
You might assume the car is rubbish. Old suspension. Poor design. Bad luck.
But what if, tucked away beneath the floorboards or hidden in the compartment where the spare tyre should be, someone has stashed twenty gold bars?
Gold is valuable. But it is also incredibly heavy. And that’s the point.
In this metaphor, the gold represents your deep wounds and traumas. Some of them you are aware of. Some you’ve completely forgotten. Some may have formed before you had language. Some may have come down the ancestral line. Some may not feel dramatic enough to qualify as “trauma” in your mind, but energetically they are dense. And density lowers the car – which lowers your baseline level of consciousness.
When you’re carrying that kind of hidden weight, every small bump in the road feels amplified. Minor life challenges feel disproportionate. You don’t necessarily collapse, but you feel the drag. There’s a heaviness that you can’t quite explain. And often you don’t even know the gold is there.
Why gold and not bricks?
Because bricks are just heavy. Gold is heavy until you refine it.
Once you unpack these wounds – heal them, process them, release them – what comes out the other side is richness. Richness in insight. Richness in self-awareness. Richness in boundaries. Richness in relationships. Richness in self-worth.
Many of us are walking around weighed down by unrefined treasure. The wounds are dense and costly right now. But once they’re transmuted through clearance work, they become the very things that give your life depth, discernment, and resilience that’s grounded rather than forced.
Space is not the same as weight
Here’s another layer of the metaphor. You might open the car door and see that it’s completely full. Someone asks you for a lift and you say, “Sorry, there’s no room.” But what’s actually filling the space?
Is it six other people? That’s heavy. A boot full of suitcases? Also heavy. Or is it one enormous inflatable castle that looks dramatic and takes up loads of space but weighs almost nothing?
Energetically, this distinction matters. Not everything that feels big is heavy. Not everything that looks dramatic is dense. And not everything that’s hidden is light.
You might have a loud, surface-level frustration that takes up a lot of mental space but doesn’t actually weigh you down much. Equally, you might have one quiet, unexamined wound that sits in the background and exerts enormous gravitational pull on your decisions, your reactions, and your capacity.
And that heaviness doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it just looks like a plateau. A subtle block. A reluctance to accelerate. A tendency to park up rather than push forward.
That’s weight, not lack of strategy. This is why simply knowing your baseline level of consciousness number doesn’t tell the full story. You need to understand what kind of energetic cargo you’re carrying.
Not sure what’s weighing you down?
The free Head Trash Quiz maps where your emotional weight is concentrated – so you can see what’s actually in the boot before you try to fix the suspension.
Take the free Head Trash Quiz →
You are not one energetic state
Another important piece: you are not a single, fixed energetic type. In my work with the Ladder of Growth, I use metaphorical labels – Conker, Washing Ball, Snooker Ball, Bouncy Ball, Glitter Ball – to describe different energetic clusters and how they behave. These aren’t personality types. They are patterns of density and responsiveness.
And they don’t show up uniformly across your life. You might be a Conker in relationships – easily triggered, guarded, reactive. But in business you might be a Snooker Ball – steady, capable, measured. Around health, perhaps you’re more like a Bouncy Ball – enthusiastic but inconsistent.
Your wounds express themselves differently in different lenses. Which means your internal garage is not evenly weighted. Certain compartments are heavier than others. Certain parts of your life carry more gold bullion than the rest. If you only look at your overall baseline, you miss that nuance.
Why you feel fine but not thriving
This is where people get confused. They’ll say, “I’m okay. I’m functioning. I’m not in crisis.” And that’s true. On paper, their baseline level of consciousness might suggest things are stable.
But there’s a subtle heaviness. A plateau. A sense that something isn’t flowing. They want to grow their business, but something stalls. They want to deepen a relationship, but something blocks. They want to take better care of themselves, but something resists.
When that happens, most people assume the issue is tactical. They think they need a better strategy, a sharper plan, stronger boundaries, more discipline, a new morning routine – something on the surface that can be adjusted.
But often, it’s not tactical at all. It’s gold in the boot. A wound around visibility affecting business. A wound around trust affecting relationships. A wound around worthiness affecting income. These aren’t obvious. You don’t see them unless you deliberately look through that lens.
You won’t uncover that by tweaking the website or rewriting the to-do list. You uncover it by being willing to look beneath the bonnet and ask a different kind of question.
Raising the baseline means lightening the load
This isn’t about pretending to be positive. It’s not about chanting your way into a higher frequency. It’s about removing density.
When you clear wounds, when you resolve conflicts, when you release the energetic weight that no longer serves you, the car naturally rises. The suspension adjusts. The ride smooths out. The bumps in the road don’t disappear – life will always contain bumps – but they don’t reverberate through you in the same way.
You don’t brace for them. You don’t dread them. You don’t interpret them as proof that something is wrong with you. They become part of the terrain rather than confirmation of failure.
That’s what a genuine baseline shift feels like. Not a temporary lift from a good weekend. A permanent raising of the waterline because the weight has been removed.
Where to go deeper
- The Ladder of Growth – the measurement framework. See where you sit across multiple life lenses, not just an overall number.
- The Clearance Club (£49/mo) – ongoing clearance work. The daily practice that gradually lightens the load and raises the baseline.
- The Ascent (£5,777) – three months of deep clearing with measurement at every stage. For people ready to shift the baseline deliberately, not gradually.
By Alexia Leachman · Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions
About the author: Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method and founder of Ladder of Growth – the consciousness measurement framework that maps where you are on the path of becoming. She’s worked with clients to raise their consciousness 200+ points on the Hawkins scale, and built The Ascent, a three-month deep clearing programme for people moving from 3D to 4D with measurement at every stage. More about Alexia
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