The Sedona Method is a self-help technique built around a simple idea: you can dissolve unwanted emotions by consciously choosing to let them go. Developed by physicist Lester Levenson in the 1970s, it uses a series of questions to guide you through a process called “releasing,” which is meant to loosen the grip that feelings like anxiety, anger, and grief have on your thinking and behavior. The method is now taught through courses, retreats, and digital programs run by Sedona Training Associates, with Hale Dwoskin serving as the primary instructor.
How Releasing Works
The core of the Sedona Method is a structured internal dialogue. When you notice an uncomfortable emotion, you pause and ask yourself one of three questions:
- Could I let this feeling go?
- Could I allow this feeling to be here?
- Could I welcome this feeling?
The answer doesn’t have to be “yes.” The point isn’t to force yourself into letting go. It’s to create a moment of space between you and the emotion, so you stop being fused with it. By simply asking the question, you shift from being inside the feeling to observing it. That shift, practitioners say, is often enough for the intensity to drop on its own. You repeat the process as many times as needed, sometimes asking follow-up questions like “Would I let it go?” and “When?” to move the releasing along.
The technique is designed to be fast and portable. You can use it in the middle of a stressful conversation, while stuck in traffic, or lying in bed replaying something that happened earlier. There’s no meditation posture, no breathing exercise, no equipment. It’s entirely internal.
The Problem It Claims to Solve
The Sedona Method frames emotional life as a spectrum between two default habits: suppression and expression. When you suppress, you push feelings down, deny them, and pretend they don’t exist. Those emotions don’t disappear. They get stored and build pressure over time, like a pot with the lid on. When you express, you let the steam out (yelling when angry, crying when sad), but expression doesn’t put out the fire underneath. It can also escalate conflicts and create new problems.
Releasing is presented as a third option. Instead of bottling up an emotion or acting it out, you simply notice the feeling, acknowledge it, and let it pass through. The method’s framework suggests that most people oscillate between suppression and expression without realizing there’s another choice available. The goal of releasing is to give you that choice consistently, so you’re not at the mercy of emotional reactions.
The Nine Emotional States
The method organizes human emotions into a hierarchy of nine fundamental states, ordered from lowest energy to highest: apathy, grief, fear, lust, anger, pride, courageousness, acceptance, and peace. This isn’t meant as a personality label. It’s a map. The idea is that at any given moment, you’re operating from one of these emotional states, and that state colors your decisions, relationships, and physical tension.
Lower states like apathy and grief feel heavy and paralyzing. Middle states like anger and pride carry more energy but still distort your thinking. The upper states, courageousness through peace, are where the method aims to move you. Releasing is the mechanism for climbing the scale. Each time you let go of a feeling, you naturally shift toward a higher state without needing to manufacture positive thinking or talk yourself into feeling better.
Advanced Techniques
Beyond the basic releasing questions, the method includes more advanced practices for experienced users. One is called the Fifth Way, which adds a layer of self-inquiry to the process. Instead of just asking whether you can let a feeling go, you ask questions like “Am I that feeling, or am I that which is aware of it?” The purpose is to dissolve your identification with the emotion entirely, recognizing that you are not the anxiety or frustration but rather the awareness observing it. The Fifth Way is designed to address deeper patterns of identity and separation, not just surface-level emotional reactions.
Triple Welcoming builds on this by adding a final question: “Could you welcome the sense that it is personal?” This targets the tendency to make emotions feel like proof of who you are. By welcoming even the sense that a feeling belongs to “you” specifically, the technique aims to loosen the emotional charge at its root.
What the Research Shows
The most cited study on the Sedona Method compared three groups of 20 people each. One group learned the Sedona Method, one learned progressive relaxation (a standard stress-reduction technique involving tensing and relaxing muscles), and one control group received no training. All participants watched a film of graphic industrial accidents at three points: before training, two weeks after, and three and a half months later. Researchers measured heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension during and after the film.
The results favored the Sedona Method on cardiovascular measures. The releasing group showed a 360% improvement in heart rate response compared to the control group, while the progressive relaxation group showed a 100% improvement. For diastolic blood pressure, the Sedona group had a 10% reduction between first and final measurements, compared to 3% for progressive relaxation and a 2% increase for controls. Muscle tension results were closer: the Sedona group showed a 26% reduction, progressive relaxation showed 28%, and controls showed 14%.
These numbers suggest the method has a measurable effect on the body’s stress response, particularly heart rate and blood pressure. However, the study was small (60 total participants), and it’s worth noting that the muscle tension results didn’t separate the Sedona Method from standard relaxation training. Corporate survey data from users has shown self-reported anxiety reduction of 76%, though self-reported outcomes from people who chose to learn a technique carry obvious bias. Independent, large-scale clinical trials remain limited.
How Levenson Developed the Method
Lester Levenson was a physicist who came to the method through personal crisis rather than academic research. During a serious health episode, he turned inward and began exploring his own emotional patterns, looking for a way to achieve physical and mental recovery by releasing inner pain. What he found was that consciously letting go of stored emotions had a direct effect on his physical condition. His health improved, and he spent the following decades refining the process into a teachable system. Hale Dwoskin, who studied with Levenson, later formalized the training and now leads retreats and courses through Sedona Training Associates, including digital recordings available through their online library.
What Practicing Looks Like Day to Day
In practice, most people start using the Sedona Method on small, everyday frustrations: irritation at a coworker, nervousness before a meeting, the low-grade anxiety of a cluttered to-do list. You notice the feeling in your body, identify it if you can (though naming it precisely isn’t required), and run through the releasing questions. The whole process can take 30 seconds or several minutes, depending on how deeply the emotion is entrenched.
Over time, practitioners report that releasing becomes more automatic. Emotions that used to hijack your attention for hours start passing through in minutes. The method encourages you to release on anything, not just negative emotions. You can release on excitement, attachment to outcomes, or even the desire to do the method “correctly.” This open-ended application is part of what distinguishes it from techniques designed only for acute stress or anxiety. It’s meant to be a continuous practice woven into ordinary life, not a tool you pull out only during emergencies.