What if someone told you there was a way to stop self-sabotage, achieve your goals, and be happy no matter what circumstance or situation surrounds you at any moment? Believe it or not, you can open the door to emotional freedom, happiness and success by learning to release negative emotions, thoughts and memories with the Sedona Method. This simple, yet effective technique allows you to reconnect with the peace and wellbeing already inherent within you.
Hale Dwoskin, New York Times bestselling author of the book, “The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Wellbeing,” brought the method to the mainstream after studying under its founder Lester Levenson. He joined Elevated Existence Magazine founder, Tammy Mastroberte, as part of the Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Telesummit to demonstrate and teach about the releasing technique – a simple yet effective method to reconnect with the peace and wellbeing already inherent within all of us.
“In 1952, Lester Levenson was sent home to die by doctors after a second coronary,” Dwoskin explained on the call. “He was a type A personality, very successful and driven, and living on Central Park South in Manhattan. He had good relationships, but was a physical and emotional basket case.”
Levenson was 42 years old at the time, and it was then that he discovered a process of self-inquiry he called “correcting things with love,” now known as The Sedona Method.
“He discovered we all have this natural ability to let go of our stress, tension and anxiety, and also all our inner obstacles to creating success and wellbeing,” Dwoskin explained. “He realized if you tap this natural ability, nothing can stand in your way. He discovered you could resolve longstanding patterns and started to feel more alive. At the end of a three-month period, he went from a physical and emotional basket case into a state of profound peace, and he lived another 42 years after the doctors had given him that death sentence.”
Dwoskin met him when he was 22 years old, took his course, and realized he wanted to dedicate his life to teaching others how to release and let go.
“I was only 22, and to see these issues I had been carrying dissolve so easily, something shifted inside, and I had this inner knowingness that I was going to dedicate my life to these teachings. It’s almost 40 years that I’ve been doing this now, and there are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who do this process.”
Dwoskin also expanded on the technique and teaches five different ways of releasing, including the initial technique of welcoming the negative emotion, thought, attitude or belief, and a technique called Holistic Releasing, which is welcoming the polarities that run our life and watching them dissolve, he noted.
“There is also a technique for diving in, where if you go to the surface of any emotion, it feels like it is getting darker, but if you go a little deeper, there is nothing but light, peace and love. That is our basic nature,” Dwoskin said. “All the emotions we struggle with are just very a thin coating on the top. When you move through it, you will see underneath and the coating will dissolve.”
Dissolving the Barriers to Peace
Many of us reach a point in life where we start searching for more than just good health, good relationships or money in the bank, believing there has to be more happiness then only external circumstances can bring, according to Dwoskin. The Sedona Method helps us dissolve your barriers to discovering the truth of who we are, and to sticking with our positive practices or disciplines we know we should be doing but can’t get ourselves to do, he said.
“From a process orientation perspective, it shows you how to tap your natural ability to let go of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, judgment, memories, and all the tendencies or past judgments we stumble over, even when things are going well. Having a tool to do that is what the Sedona Method is all about,” he explained. “It enhances whatever it is you are already doing because if you know you have taken a course in making more money, but you can’t get yourself to do it, you can remove the obstacles and start doing it.”
While a positive mental attitude and state of mind is important, and there are many tools to help us accomplish this, Dwoskin doesn’t believe we need to suffer in the process. We shouldn’t have to re-experience trauma or rub our faces in it in order to deal with it.
“Rubbing your face in it just gets your face dirty and you suffer more,” he said. “What the Sedona Method does is show you how to dissolve all your inner barriers to success and to maintaining a positive attitude so it happens naturally and you don’t have to work at it.”
We can peel away the negatives, and underneath we will find the positive, which is our natural state and at the core of every one of us. The Sedona Method helps bring this out, and can even help those who are currently successful go to the next level.
“Even people who are succeeding or not letting the barrier stop them – the barriers are still there. They are moving around them or compensating for them, and that is what most people say success is – not letting the barrier stop you,” Dwoskin explained. “But what if you could just dissolve them and spend all that energy on creating what you want instead of holding off the things you don’t. That is what’s possible with the Sedona method and success.”
In the area of health and wellbeing, as people release, their body and mind get healthier and more at ease, and many people will see ailments improving – similar to Lester Levenson did years ago, he noted.
At a recent retreat, Dwoskin worked with a man in his 60’s who was raped by a priest when he was only eight years old. When he told his father, he did not believe him, and beat him for 15 years because he though he lied about the priest. After working on it in the seminar, the issue dissolved.
“He started sleeping and decades of insomnia went away, his relationship with son and wife healed, and he had a whole bunch of other addictions fall away. His whole life completely transformed,” he said. “When you do this process, things you never thought possible start to change, and the goals that seemed our of reach now seem possible.”
Five Questions
The Sedona Method is as easy as asking ourselves five questions as a process of self-inquiry. This helps get us in touch with our natural ability to let go.
“Most of us adults have forgotten how to do this naturally, but as you use the Sedona Method, the natural ability we had when we were very young is available to us again,” Dwoskin noted.
By starting the process on negative emotions, we will eventually discover attitudes and beliefs also getting in our way. We are always doing something with our emotions – usually denying, repressing or escaping them – but this method teaches us to let them go.
“Healthy expression is necessary, but most of us are stuck in unhealthy expression or we repress,” he said. “Also, many of us are so unable to express how we feel, so afraid of how we feel, or are so in denial, we have lost touch with out emotions and then when it comes up, we explode like a pressure cooker. The Sedona Method is a balancing point. It’s the escape value so you can start letting go of the pressure.”
The basic releasing technique starts with an emotion, and the first step is to focus on the feeling. Then we can ask ourselves the following questions:
1.What is my ‘now’ feeling?
2.Could I allow myself to welcome this feelng?
3. Could I let this feeling go? (Just for now.)
4. Would I let this feeling go?
5. When?
This process can be repeated s many times as needed in order to feel better and find relief.
“If you are mousy you, get a backbone and stop letting people walk all over you. If you are over assertive, you get a balance,” Dwoskin said. “People com to a balancing point, and they start behaving in ways that are for their highest and best good.”
If there is a situation in our life we want to change or improve, we can start by allowing ourselves to feel the emotions connected to it as best we can. And if we can’t start with the emotion, we can start with the thoughts because as we work with them, the emotions will come, he noted.
“The more you do it, you will realize you can eventually do it without asking the questions. You can just tap that natural ability to let go,” Dwoskin explained. “Even people who have struggles with things for a long time are surprised at how easy it is. But I always say, don’t discount how easy it is. Most people think it has to be a struggle to grow, but it doesn’t have to be. You can just let go.”