If you’re asking whether this work is grounded in actual research or whether it leans entirely on spiritual language, that question deserves a straight answer — because you’ve already sat through enough programs that blurred the line between “the science says” and “the universe is calling you” without ever showing their working. You’ve done the reading. You know the difference between a peer-reviewed study and a vision board. And if you’ve landed here, you’re probably tired of having to choose between rigour and depth, as if a serious adult can only have one.

So let’s be honest about what this is, and what it isn’t.

The short answer: both, and the seams show on purpose

The work inside the community draws from two distinct streams, and neither one is hidden behind the other.

The first stream is evidence-based. The ACE framework itself comes from the original Adverse Childhood Experiences study run by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente in the late 1990s, which followed more than 17,000 adults and tracked how childhood adversity correlates with adult health, behaviour, and economic outcomes. That research has been replicated across dozens of countries and is now standard reading in trauma-informed clinical training. The nervous-system language — regulation, window of tolerance, fight/flight/freeze/fawn — comes from polyvagal theory and the broader body of somatic research associated with Stephen Porges, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, and Pat Ogden. Attachment patterns trace back to Bowlby and Ainsworth and the decades of developmental research that followed.

The second stream is what you might call contemplative, or experiential, or yes — spiritual. It includes practices that come from older wisdom traditions: meditation, breathwork, inquiry, somatic awareness, prayer in the broad sense of the word. These practices predate the research by thousands of years, and many of them are now being studied empirically with increasingly interesting results.

The work doesn’t pretend the second stream is the first. It also doesn’t pretend the first stream is the whole story.

Why the split exists in the first place

Most programs that touch this territory pick a side. The clinical side says: stay in the data, anything else is woo. The spiritual side says: the data is reductive, you have to feel your way through. Both positions are defensible. Both are also incomplete for the population this community actually serves.

The reason is straightforward. If you’re a conscious entrepreneur with a history of childhood adversity, the patterns showing up in your business — under-charging, hiding, perfectionism at the threshold of visibility, fawn-response client dynamics — are partly nervous-system patterns that respond to evidence-based interventions, and partly meaning-making patterns that respond to contemplative ones. Trying to solve a 3D problem with 1D solutions is exactly what’s kept you cycling through programs that almost worked.

Frameworks like the six-layer model and the three pillars exist precisely because the inner work, the business work, and the alignment between them have to be addressed together, not separately. The clinical research tells us what’s happening in the body. The contemplative practices give the body somewhere to put what it’s holding. The business frameworks make sure the integration actually shows up in your income and your impact, not just in your journal.

What’s clearly evidence-based

To be specific about which parts have research behind them:

  • The ACE framework and its links to adult patterns around money, visibility, work, and relationships.
  • Nervous-system regulation practices drawn from polyvagal-informed somatic work.
  • Attachment-informed understanding of how early relational patterns shape adult business dynamics, especially with clients, partners, and money.
  • Cognitive and behavioural approaches to identity, belief, and habit — the territory where coaching and clinical psychology overlap.
  • The business and economic models themselves, which you’ll see laid out in pieces like the economic machine.

What’s contemplative, and named as such

Other elements draw from wisdom traditions and personal practice rather than peer-reviewed research. Meditation, inquiry, somatic listening, and the broader language of flow, alignment, and intuition belong to this stream. Some of these practices have a growing evidence base; others are taught because generations of practitioners have found them useful, not because a randomised trial has confirmed it.

The community doesn’t dress these up in clinical language to make them sound more credible. They’re presented as what they are: experiential practices that many people find helpful for the parts of being human that data alone doesn’t quite reach. If that framing doesn’t sit well with you, that’s worth knowing before you join — and it’s a fair reason to look elsewhere.

For a related question on the religious framing specifically, you might find this answer on religious affiliation useful.

The test that matters more than the label

Here’s the thing about evidence-based versus spiritual as a binary: it’s mostly an argument about packaging. The real question is whether the work changes anything in your life — measurably, in the parts of your life you can point to.

Can you charge what you’re worth without your throat closing? Can you be visible without losing a week of sleep afterwards? Can you receive a sale without the old pattern kicking in? Those are testable. You don’t need a journal article to tell you whether they’ve shifted. Your bank account, your calendar, and your nervous system will tell you.

If you’ve been around long enough to wonder whether this is yet another program that won’t add anything after therapy, coaching, and retreats, the honest test is the same one you’d apply to any of those: does the work move things you couldn’t move before, in a timeframe you can actually evaluate?

One last thing on rigour

Being trauma-informed is itself an evidence-based commitment. It means pacing the work, naming when something is a practice versus a proven intervention, acknowledging the limits of any group program, and being clear that some readers will benefit from working with a licensed clinician in parallel. That isn’t a disclaimer hidden in the footer. It’s part of how the community operates.

If you’d like to look at the space, read the descriptions, and decide for yourself whether the mix of research and practice fits how you actually think, you can explore the community here and see what’s on offer before you commit to anything.

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