Lisa Turner can’t help but feel like she was born for this moment—an era she sees as a great convergence of science, personal and spiritual awakening, and technology. Trained as an engineer, with a Ph.D. in aeroacoustics and mathematical modeling, she is the rare scientist who has turned her attention to both traditional and New Age therapies with a scientist’s rigor, becoming an in-demand personal coach, coach educator, author and founder of an approach called conscious emotional transformation (CET).
Turner, who lives in Cornwall, England, sparkles with a sense of wonder and curiosity and approaches questions with an engineer’s mind, always developing impromptu experiments, tinkering and observing. She says that, from a young age, she’s always been asking the question, “I wonder what will happen if I do this?” and then collecting data around what does happen. She adds that she simply has a “willingness to experiment and a willingness to maybe get into a bit of trouble,” citing humorous examples of locking the systemwide computer server at her university, short-circuiting an entire tramline and flooding a science lab during an experiment. She credits the mishaps as simply casualties in the pursuit of wonder, learning, data gathering and testing hypotheses.
The Journey Back to Self
It was in this same way that Turner set out, in her early 20s, to heal from a set of unthinkable traumas that consumed her teenage years. When she was just 12 years old and growing up in Australia, she was groomed by a music teacher who eventually took her from her family and kept her captive in his home in England for five years, beginning when Turner was 15. Finally, when she was 20, she spent months planning her escape and succeeded. It’s a harrowing experience she details in her memoir, I Loved a Paedophile.
In the years after her escape, Turner began to confront the resulting complex post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety the experience left her with. In her efforts to heal, she sought many traditional mental health therapies, some of which helped—but only temporarily.
Then, an accident on her bicycle changed everything. Following a collision with a car, the bones on the right side of her body were shattered, and she had a near-death experience as the paramedics resuscitated her. “It was so blissful; it was so peaceful; it was so full of joy,” she recalls. “And the questions were, ‘What the heck was that? And how on earth can I get back there but without dying?'”
This kicked her into evidence-gathering mode and sent her on a mission to explore as many spiritual practices as she could, researching everything from shamanic healing, Western esotericism and Vedic astrology to kabbalah, Tantra, Eastern esotericism, chakra work and Reiki.
She began tracking the results of her experimentations into these practices. “Every time I had a spiritual experience, every time I got a result..., I reverse-engineered it, and I came up with about 40-odd different processes that would enable anyone [to replicate the results].” Her next step was to combine the successful techniques with other coaching modalities, such as neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis and somatic therapies to build her conscious emotional transformation model. Ultimately, CET brings together emotional, mental and spiritual models to unblock the flow of energy and, Turner says, reach one’s highest potential.
“What CET does is it enables people to go back to where they love themselves,” Turner says. “They don’t just know it intellectually. They are love. They become the embodiment of more love, and so they can step into doing what’s theirs to do.”
The Transcendent Leader
In her book Our Conscious Tipping Point, Turner describes how societal patterns over the past century or so have reflected a progression through our collective experiences that mirrors the seven chakras. She believes that, as a society, we have now reached the highest chakra (or, in her parlance, “PowerCentres”): the crown. She points to the common consensus that the noise and chaos of our current world can only be met with change and awakening.
“We’re starting to see the birth... the emergence of what I call the transcendent leader,” she says. “I work with a lot of high-net-worth individuals and a lot of people who get to this point where they are all about the consciousness. They want to make a difference in the world.”
A small population of such leaders, invested in change and progress, can push us into a new era of unity and wisdom, she believes. “What’s really interesting is, in order to create a movement of fundamental shift and change..., you actually don’t need the entire world,” she says, referencing a Harvard Kennedy School finding that it takes only about 3.5% of a population to ignite lasting change. “That’s who I work with—the 3.5% who want to be part of that shift of the conscious tipping point.”
For those who feel a drive to improve the world, it’s a moment of great opportunity and agency. She gives the example of a client, a successful leader who happens to be Muslim has set out to build interracial and interreligious spaces where people can connect and communicate about different religions. Another is addressing environmental change by inventing a new hyperlocal floral supply chain that eliminates the need for air transport. Some projects she’s seeing emerge are small while others are sweeping.
“If everyone does what’s theirs to do, they are a transcendent leader, and that’s what pushes us through the conscious tipping point,” Turner says. Her “to do,” in turn, is “to assist people to let go of their inner limitations so that they can embody the fullest expression of who they are.”
AI and Collective Awakening
Turner, ever the tinkerer and inventor, has in the past few years discovered what she believes is a game-changing tool in helping people get to the root of their limiting beliefs and accessing their fullest expression: artificial intelligence. She has created and trained dozens of AI models and is ecstatic about the results. She calls her method of training AI the “Turner Cohesion Method”—an approach that uses complex linguistics in its prompting techniques to produce a series of questions that drill down to the user’s “root” truth.
The results have been astounding, she contends. Turner recently had a client who used one of her AI tools for just 25 minutes and reported finding a “root-cause limitation that 10 years of therapy three times a week couldn’t find.” She marvels, “Imagine if more of the world were doing that.”
Turner herself uses AI to improve her work and relationships constantly. She wears a recording pendant that, at the end of the day, analyzes her conversations for action items and communication improvements. For leaders, this can be a life-changing tool when accompanied by an AI model that has studied your communication style, values and personality traits. No surprise: Turner has developed just such a model and uses it for herself and her clients.
Next up, she is developing an app that turns her AI models into a personal “mentor”—accessible to anyone through one simple download—designed for those intrigued by the intersection of conscious leadership, holistic spiritually, self-improvement and technology.
“For the first time,” she writes, “technology can amplify and accelerate the deepest spiritual work, making awakening accessible at scale.”
Featured image ©Karen Roswell/Courtesy of Lisa Turner
This article was first published in the March/April 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
