The Sedona Method is all about letting go of negative or limiting thoughts and emotions, and was really my introduction to the entire arena of consciousness work, working on yourself, or whatever you want to call it.
Sedona Method is a deceptively simple process – one of those things you might say “that’s it?” when someone describes it to you. It involves welcoming, or fully accepting whatever you are experiencing, noticing the underlying desire behind it, and letting it go.. letting it pass through you.
It is definitely one of the simpler yet most effective tools I’ve come across, and I don’t mean this to sound like a Sedona Method commercial. It just happens to be a very important foundation for me, as it has to do with HOW I process everything I experience. It applies to, and enhances, just about anything – it is really more about a way of being than just a technique.
The story behind the Sedona Method is quite amazing and inspiring – this page is really about my own experiences and some background. However:
Almost any physical, psychological, or “spiritual” work brings up a lot of emotion and energy. You know what else does? About 10,000 things that happen every day. Whatever your default setting is for how you process this energy – whether you resist it, get agitated by it, get consumed by it, deny it, and so on determines your physical and mental state most of the time.
Now, most of what follows is just my experience with releasing / the Sedona Method. For me some of the “official” sources like their home page focus a bit much on “make more money” and self help hypey side of things – as opposed to the simplicity, power and practicality of what this really is, but maybe that’s just me.
My First Experience with The Sedona Method
My very first experience with Sedona Method was interesting to say the least, and I got to try it on something very practical – a physical pain. I was not so into “working on my core beliefs” or any of that (what I would call) BS at the time.
I play a physically demanding string instrument for a living, and one night after a gig, my hand was hurting. Really hurting.. like, “I’m not sure I can play tonight” hurting, which I’d never felt before. I was on my way to a late night session.. where of course at that time, my entire self-esteem would be derived from how good I sounded in front of the other guys. Also, not playing = not making money for me, so there were just a few things going on in my head.
I had just downloaded a free Sedona Method MP3 and put it into my ipod that night. It was led by Hale Dwoskin, the figurehead of the Sedona Method, explaining and going through the process. I had heard that it was good for releasing anxiety and being more confident talking to women. THAT I was willing to look at, at the time.
The first step walked through welcoming the experience. This had never been an option with pain before. My mind was saying “you can’t have this, this is bad, this can’t be happening. Pretend this isn’t there. You’ll be fine. It’s fine, right?” For the first time I stopped, and just welcomed it fully. Things started moving.. it was doing it’s thing. Then there was the process of identifying the “want” behind this.. they say that any thought or desire is coming from a few basic wants: security (safety, survival, etc) approval (wanting love/attention), control. I definitely wanted to control the pain. To get rid of it. That was what to “let go” of, that feeling of wanting. You can’t control everything that is happening, but this was showing me that you CAN make choices to control how you are reacting to them.
The analogy for letting go, which was walked through, was dropping a pen. You have to be holding on to a pen for it to stay in your hand. THAT actually requires effort, but if you do it long enough, it feels natural and automatic.
The Sedona Method Pen Demo by Hale
To let go is to just stop holding, it’s sort of a non-doing. By refusing to let the pain do what it needed to do and holding all the garbage in my head about it, I was creating extra tension there.
It felt a lot better.. real fast. I played that night. I was a believer. This was concrete.. this wasn’t me “feeling better about myself” with no practical applications. I also played better than everyone in the place, was offered a ton of gigs and got laid immediately after the set. (OK, that last sentence was making fun of the testimonials most people leave for these kinds of things.) My arm feeling better was good enough.
The thing about the Sedona Method though is that it really works it’s magic when applied to your usual habit of thought.. the emotions you are feeling on a day to day basis.
One thing I like about the Sedona Method is that the book lays it all out. It’s not expensive and it’s paper back. It’s not a teaser to get you to buy more Sedona Method stuff – I know how frustrating that is – you really get a complete picture from it and essentially a lifetimes worth of value out of it.
The reason for the recordings and so many different variations is that, for one, it can be a lot easier to sit and be guided through it then be reading, stopping, reading the process, etc. You can get a lot of meat out of going through the process looking at different issues (money, sex etc) from different perspectives. You’d be surprised how any one of those, you could dig into for over an hour and just scratch the surface, hence the amount of material out there. Sedona Method junkees often can’t get enough, because every new angle usually shows something new to explore and again, most importantly, almost always yields some type of RESULT (here’s the catch: just feeling more peaceful or realizing something wasn’t worth worrying about counts as a result).
For those that don’t feel like sitting down and reading a book on this, their movie, Letting Go, is a great introduction, and also will give you what you need to go ahead and start trying it out on your own. There has been a lot of evolution in applying releasing to different areas or getting deeper faster, and those processes are in the movie.
I actually won a 7 day retreat to Sedona to work with Hale. It was pretty amazing. I also met and worked with a lot of the people in the Letting Go Movie, and lots of other great folks.
You can get the book used / new for literally a few dollars (see below) so that if it sounds interesting to you, you might as well check it out. I’ll also attach a link to the movie here:
Or at the very least you can go to youtube and look up some of the free content. It’s a bit hard to fully describe what the Sedona Method process has done for me – if you try it, let me know how it goes for you.
If you are thinking about really diving into it, I have to recommend Just Allow It as a precursor to the course, because the first step of the method is “allowing” the emotions, but not really the training on how to do that part of it. I’m part of a forum where several folks have said that releasing really started working and making sense for them after really diving into the allowing part, specifically after visiting just allow it.
You can check out Just Allow It with FREE exercises HERE
(I recommend checking at least those free exercises out before the Sedona method)
Click here for the Sedona Method product page - They are now part of Learning Strategies Corporation. I’m not a fan of the sales page or how they describe it all in context to “the secret.” You can really start with the book above for a few dollars.
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