The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being. Hale Dwoskin

safely beginning to empty the contents of your inner pressure cooker. Because every feeling that has been suppressed is trying to vent itself, releasing is merely a momentary stopping of the inner action of holding these feelings in so you can allow them to leave, which you will find they do easily under their own steam. As you use the Sedona Method, you will discover that you will be able to be free to both suppress and express when it is appropriate, and you will find that you will more often opt for the point of balance, the third choice of letting go. This is something you already know how to do.

      Though you have probably become an expert at suppression and/or expression, even so, you are still letting go. True laughter, for instance, is one of the ways that you let go spontaneously, and the benefits of laughter in the area of health and stress elimination are well documented. Think of the last time you had a really good belly laugh. You may have been watching a funny program on TV or having a conversation with a friend and, all of a sudden, something struck you as funny. You felt a tickle inside, heard a guffaw come up from deep in your middle, and your whole body started to bounce up and down. As you laughed, you probably felt lighter and lighter inside and progressively happier and more relaxed, almost warm and euphoric. This is also a good description of what you may experience at times as you use the process described in this book. Although most of the time you won’t laugh out loud as you let go, you will often smile and feel the same sense of inner relief that comes from true laughter.

      Have you ever lost you keys or your glasses and turned the whole house upside down only to find them in your pocket? Think back to the last time that happened. You probably felt more and more tense as you turned over the contents of your house, maybe even emptying garbage cans if you were desperate enough. You kept going over and over in your mind where you could possibly have put the keys. And then, almost as an afterthought, you reached into your pocket and let out a sigh of relief—Aahhh—as your tension and anxiety melted away when you discovered you already had the keys, or the glasses, all along. After calling yourself a couple of names, your mind probably got quiet, your shoulders relaxed, and you may have felt a wave of relief pass through your body. This is another example of how you release right now.

      As you perfect your use of the Method, you will find yourself able to go right to this point of realization and relaxation, even on longstanding issues that you were tearing your life apart trying to resolve. You will discover that the answers have been right inside you all along.

      “At work, I am more energetic, proactive, and positive. I am in sales, and rejection does not have the same effect on me. In fact, I am now finding I get much less rejection.”

      —David Fordham, London, England

      Sometimes a spontaneous release takes place in the middle of an argument. Picture a time that you were in a heated discussion with someone that you care about when the following happened: You were really into it, absolutely sure you were right and justified in your position, when all of a sudden you caught the other person’s eyes and, without trying looked deeply into their being, you connected with them at the level that makes them as special to you as they are. In that instant, something relaxed inside and your position no longer felt as justified. You may even have glimpsed the conflict from their point of view. Perhaps you paused for a moment and reconsidered the situation, and then found an easy, mutually beneficial solution.

      As you master the ideas in this book, you will learn how to see more than just your own point of view, which will free you from all sorts of conflicts, some that you may even have forgotten you have.

      The Continuum of Letting Go

      If you review your life, you will probably recall many instances that you have let go. We generally let go either by accident or when our backs are against the wall, and we have no other choice. As you focus on reawakening and strengthening this natural ability within yourself by practicing the Sedona Method, you will be able to bring releasing under your conscious control and to make it a viable option throughout your everyday life—even when you have days like the one described earlier.

      The chart below will give you a better understanding of the process of releasing, whether it’s the spontaneous releasing you already do or the conscious releasing you will be doing as you explore this book. It will also help you to better distinguish between letting go, suppressing, and expressing. Each category represents a continuum that everyone is moving through in all moments.

      

      As you practice releasing, you’ll see that you tend to move from the left-hand side to the right-hand side of this chart. Sometimes you may find a difference in only a single category as you let go, and other times you will see a difference in many.

      You can, and probably already do, force yourself at times to move to the right-hand side. For instance, you may force yourself to make a decision in order to stop thinking about a particular problem. But that’s not real releasing. If you do force a decision, you may grow uncomfortable inside and increase your tension. When you are forcing yourself to change a behavior without changing how you feel, you will find some categories moving to the right while others move to the left. When you have consciously released, the whole continuum moves to the right.

      But what do we mean by consciously releasing, letting go? How can we put releasing into practice?

      Practical Releasing

      There are three ways to approach the process of releasing, and they all lead to the same result: liberating your natural ability to let go of any unwanted emotion on the spot and allowing some of the suppressed energy in your subconscious to dissipate. The first way is by choosing to let go of the unwanted feeling. The second way is to welcome the feeling, to allow the emotion just to be. The third way is to dive into the very core of the emotion.

      Let me explain by asking you to participate in a simple exercise. Pick up a pen, a pencil, or some small object that you would be willing to drop without giving it a second thought. Now, hold it in front of you and really grip it tightly. Pretend this is one of your limiting feelings and that your hand represents your gut or your consciousness. If you held the object long enough, this would start to feel uncomfortable yet familiar.

      Now, open your hand and roll the object around in it. Notice that you are the one holding on to it; it is not attached to your hand. The same is true with your feelings, too. Your feelings are as attached to you as this object is attached to your hand.

      We hold on to our feelings and forget that we are holding on to them. As I stated in the Introduction, it’s even in our language. When we feel angry or sad, we don’t usually say, “I feel angry,” or, “I feel sad.” We say, “I am angry,” or, “I am sad.” Without realizing it, we are misidentifying that we are the feeling. Often, we believe a feeling is holding on to us. This is not true … we are always in control and just don’t know it.

      Now, let the object go.

      What happened? You let go of the object, and it dropped to the floor. Was that hard? Of course not. That’s what we mean when we say “let go.”

      You can do the same thing with any emotion—choose to let it go.

      Sticking with this same analogy: If you walked around with your hand open, wouldn’t it be very difficult to hold on to the pen or other object you’re holding? Likewise, when you allow or welcome a feeling, you are opening your consciousness, and this enables the feeling to drop away all by itself—like the clouds passing in the sky or smoke passing up a chimney with the flue open. It is as though you are removing the lid from a pressure cooker.

      Now, if you took the same object—a pencil, pen, or pebble—and magnified it large enough, it would appear more and more like empty space. You would be looking into the gaps between the molecules and atoms. When you dive into the very core of a feeling, you will observe a comparable phenomenon: Nothing is really there.

      As you master the process of releasing, you will discover that even your