The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin Book Review (2003)
The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin is a paperback published in 2003 by Sedona Press, with a foreword by Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Its full title is The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being, and that subtitle is the book's own framing rather than a claim this review makes. It teaches one technique: a short question sequence, aimed at unwanted feelings, that Dwoskin calls releasing or letting go. Kevin Trudeau's recommended reading list carries it. Read it if you want letting go explained by the man who inherited the material. Skip it if you resent paying for 400 pages to learn five questions.
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Everything below describes what the book contains and what its author claims. Nothing here is health, medical or psychological guidance.
What The Sedona Method Actually Teaches
Most self help books in this category ask you to add something. An affirmation, a visualization, a morning routine. Dwoskin's premise runs the other way. His claim is that you already know how to let go of unwanted feelings, that you release them constantly without noticing, and that his five questions only make the move deliberate.
He opens by naming the two habits he says people default to instead. Suppression, which means pushing feelings down. Expression, which means acting them out. The first chapter is titled "Beyond the Suppression-Expression Cycle," and Dwoskin's argument is that both keep feelings in circulation. His third option is to let go, which he calls releasing.
The Five Steps Dwoskin Names
The technique is short enough to print in full, which is the strongest thing about the book and the source of its biggest problem. Sedona Training Associates, which calls it a simple, easy to learn technique, states the five steps this way.
- Step one. Focus on an issue you would like to feel better about, and allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling in this moment.
- Step two. Ask one of these: "Could I let this feeling go?" or "Could I allow this feeling to be here?" or "Could I welcome this feeling?"
- Step three. Ask "Would I?" In other words, am I willing to let go?
- Step four. Ask "When?"
- Step five. Repeat the preceding four steps as often as needed until you feel free of that particular feeling.
That is the entire method. Notice what the questions do not do. They never ask why the feelings are there, never ask you to analyze them, never ask whether they are justified. Dwoskin's position is that the story around your feelings is not the lever. Willingness is, and it all runs in the present moment.
Step four is the one people underrate. "When?" sounds like filler and does the real work, because it turns an abstract willingness to let go into a decision with a timestamp on it. Sedona Training Associates says hundreds of thousands of people have used the technique, which is its own figure and not one this review can check.
The Five Ways of Releasing
The book does not stop at one route. Dwoskin names five ways to release, and Sedona Training Associates lists them as choosing to let go of the unwanted feeling, welcoming the feeling and allowing the emotion to be, diving into the very core of the emotion, dissolving the opposing polarities we all carry, and seeing through the feeling to what he calls the Awareness right behind it. The fourth is the one he labels Holistic Releasing.
Read as a system, the five ways of releasing are an admission that the first one does not always produce results, which is more honesty than this genre offers. Read as a book structure, they are why the page count climbs.
The Four Basic Wants
One chapter is titled "Letting Go of the Four Basic Wants," and it holds the most interesting idea in the book. Dwoskin's claim is that uncomfortable feelings sit on one of four wants: wanting approval, wanting control, wanting security or survival, and wanting separation or oneness.
His instruction is to release the underlying want rather than the surface feeling. Feelings, in this framing, are downstream. The want is the root, and the word wanting is doing deliberate work, since he treats wanting itself as the experience of not having. Release the want, he argues, and the feelings attached to it have nothing left to stand on.
What the Book Says It Is For
The subtitle promises lasting happiness, success, peace and emotional well-being. Freedom is the other word that recurs, usually as emotional freedom. Chapter titles in the applications half include "The Secret of Letting Go of Fear and Anxiety," "Escaping the Tyranny of Guilt and Shame," "Breaking Those Nasty Habits," "Your Wealth Builder" and "Relationship Magic."
Those are the book's own words and its own claims. This review reports them and endorses none. If any of those areas is a live concern for you, take it to a qualified professional, not to a paperback.
The Sedona Method at a Glance
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Full title | The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being |
| Author | Hale Dwoskin, cofounder of Sedona Training Associates |
| Foreword | Jack Canfield, cocreator of Chicken Soup for the Soul |
| Published | 2003, Sedona Press, first edition |
| ISBN | 9780971933415 |
| Length | Past 400 pages. Catalog listings disagree on the exact figure, so treat any single number with caution |
| Structure | Two parts: The Sedona Method Course, then Real-Life Applications |
| The technique | Five steps, built on the questions Could I, Would I, and When |
| Named routes | Five ways of releasing, including Holistic Releasing |
| Named root causes | Four basic wants: approval, control, security, separation or oneness |
| Origin | Lester Levenson, 1909 to 1994, who worked the approach out in the 1950s |
| Author's screen credit | Featured in the films The Secret and Letting Go |
| Bestseller status | Sedona Training Associates describes Dwoskin as a New York Times best selling author |
| Our rating | 3.0 out of 5 |
How the Book Is Organized
Two parts. Part one, The Sedona Method Course, is the teaching half. Its chapters include "Beyond the Suppression-Expression Cycle," "Your Formula for Success," "Your Roadmap to Emotional Freedom," "Dissolving Your Resistance" and "Putting It All Together." Emotional freedom is Dwoskin's phrase for the destination. Part two, Real-Life Applications, aims the same techniques at specific areas of life.
One warning about editions. Chapter order differs between printings, and later Sedona Press and distributor editions list the same chapters in a different sequence from the 2003 first edition. If you are working from a course or a study group, check that your copy matches theirs.
Where the Sedona Method Came From
This is the part most reviews get lazy about, and it changes how you read the book. Hale Dwoskin did not invent the Sedona Method. Lester Levenson did. Levenson, who lived from 1909 to 1994 and is described by both organizations that teach his work as a physicist, worked the releasing techniques out for himself in the 1950s and taught them in small retreats and talks for the rest of his life. Sedona Training Associates places the origin in 1952, when Levenson was 42 and going through a period of severe personal crisis. This review reports that account as the organization's own and makes no claim about it.
Hale Dwoskin's Route In
Dwoskin's own bio is specific, which makes it checkable. He met Levenson in 1976 at a seminar both were attending, and enrolled in three of Levenson's courses inside four months. He moved to Arizona in 1987 to work for Levenson's organization, received the copyrights in the early 1990s, and founded Sedona Training Associates with his wife Amy in 1996. The book followed seven years later.
So The Sedona Method is a student's systematization of a teacher's technique, published four decades after the teacher worked it out. That explains the book's strength and its bulk. Dwoskin is not transcribing Levenson. He is organizing him, and Sedona Training Associates describes him as a New York Times best selling author on the strength of the result.
Two Organizations, One Teacher
Here is the detail nobody mentions. Two separate organizations teach descendants of Levenson's work, and their histories do not match.
Sedona Training Associates, founded by Dwoskin in 1996, teaches the Sedona Method. The Release Technique, a separate organization, states that Levenson "passed the torch" to Larry Crane, a businessman who lived from 1935 to 2018 and learned releasing from Levenson in 1977, and that Crane taught more than 160,000 graduates. The Release Technique's history page does not mention Hale Dwoskin at all.
Neither account is verifiable from outside. The useful takeaway is narrower: letting go is not proprietary to Dwoskin, it predates him by decades, and at least two competing groups sell training in it.
Common Criticisms of The Sedona Method
An honest book review names these, and most are about the book rather than about releasing itself.
Four hundred pages for five questions
This is the complaint that recurs most in reader reviews on Goodreads and StoryGraph, and it is fair. The technique fits on an index card. The book runs past 400 pages, and a large share of that is the same instruction applied to a new life area with new anecdotes attached. Readers describe hitting the third chapter and recognizing material they had already read twice. The same reviews often call the method itself life changing, so the problem is the packaging rather than the practice.
The defense is that repetition is the point, since letting go is a habit rather than a fact. That works better for an audio course than for a book at full price.
The validation claim names no study
The publisher's description asserts that the method has been validated through independent studies over four decades. No study, researcher, journal or year is named there. Sedona Training Associates' own How It Works page describes the five steps and the five ways at length and cites no research either.
An unnamed study is not evidence, and a reader has no way to check a claim shaped like that. Treat releasing as a practice some people report liking, which is all the available material supports.
The book is the front of a paid ladder
The book is sold alongside courses, audio programs, retreats and facilitator trainings from the same organization, and readers regularly note that it points onward to them. Steve Salerno made the general version of this argument in SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless in 2005, which held that the industry depends on repeat customers rather than on readers who finish and leave. He was writing about the field, not about this book. The structure he describes is visible here.
It cannot fail on its own terms
Work the questions honestly and get no results, and the framework has one answer available: you were not actually willing to let go. That is unfalsifiable in exactly the way the rest of this shelf is unfalsifiable, and the book offers no separate diagnosis for the reader in that position.
The criticisms at a glance
| What the book claims | The objection | Source of the objection |
|---|---|---|
| The technique needs a full book to teach | The five steps fit on an index card; the rest repeats | Recurring reader reviews on Goodreads and StoryGraph |
| Validated by independent studies over four decades | No study, researcher, journal or year is named anywhere | The publisher's own description; Sedona Training Associates' How It Works page |
| The book is a complete standalone system | It sits at the front of a paid course, audio and retreat ladder | Steve Salerno, SHAM, 2005, on the industry pattern |
| Anyone can do this and get results | Failure is explained as unwillingness, so nothing counts against it | This review |
| The method is the Sedona Method | The technique originates with Lester Levenson and a rival organization claims his succession | Release Technique, which credits Larry Crane and omits Dwoskin |
| An established approach with a track record | No encyclopedia entry exists for the method, for Dwoskin or for Levenson | This review, checking Wikipedia |
Why Kevin Trudeau Points People Toward This Book
The connection here is sharper than for most books on this list, and it is not about happiness. It is about what blocks a goal.
Trudeau's counterintentions are, in his telling, programs in the subconscious mind running against the outcome you consciously want. Dwoskin describes the same problem in different vocabulary: held feelings, sitting on one of the four basic wants, that keep producing the result you say you do not want. Two teachers, one diagnosis. The obstacle is internal and it is not information.
What Dwoskin offers is a procedure you can run in ninety seconds. Trudeau's material tends to work on the reactive part of the mind through repetition and through the THETA state, which takes setup. Letting go takes none. That difference is the practical case for keeping this book near your desk even if you follow Trudeau's system.
Apply the Teachability Index to yourself here. Trudeau defines it as willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change, and Dwoskin's third question is literally "Would I?" Both men built their frameworks on the same variable, and both would say it is the one people quietly refuse.
Where It Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club built on his claim that the most useful knowledge about wealth and success was kept out of circulation. His material, including Your Wish Is Your Command, runs as a sequence.
The Sedona Method is not a sequence. It is a single tool that fits underneath almost any system, the move you make when you need to let go of something that will not cooperate. Dwoskin also appears as a featured teacher in The Secret, the 2006 film that made this whole category mainstream, and our review of the book version covers what it teaches.
Two neighbors on the same shelf are worth naming. Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz works on self image, which Dwoskin would treat as another held position to release. What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter goes at the same subconscious mind through language rather than through feelings. Both are self help books that assume the block is internal, which is the assumption letting go is built on.
Who Should Read The Sedona Method, and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you have a shelf of self help books and no repeatable move to make when you are stuck. Read it if you have met the idea of letting go secondhand and want the full version, including what Dwoskin calls emotional freedom, from the man who holds the material. Read it if the four basic wants idea lands, because that chapter is the one worth the price.
Skip it if you want evidence, since nothing in the book or on the publisher's site gives you a citation to check. Skip it if repetition annoys you, because you will meet the same instruction many times. And skip it if you want the steps only, since they are published free on the organization's own site and you can practice letting go tonight without buying anything.
Our rating: 3.0 out of 5. Letting go is genuinely portable and the four basic wants chapter is a real contribution. Deductions for length, for repetition, for a validation claim with nothing behind it, and for a book that keeps pointing at the next product.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin worth reading?
It is worth reading if you want the full version of the technique from the person who holds the material, and the chapter on the four basic wants is the strongest part. It is worth less if you only want the steps, since Sedona Training Associates publishes them free, or if repetition annoys you, because the book runs past 400 pages for a five-step technique.
What are the five steps of the Sedona Method?
Sedona Training Associates states them as follows. Focus on an issue and allow yourself to feel what you feel. Ask "Could I let this feeling go?" Ask "Would I?" Ask "When?" Then repeat the four steps as often as needed until you feel free of that feeling. Dwoskin's point is that willingness, not analysis, is the lever.
Who created the Sedona Method?
Lester Levenson, who lived from 1909 to 1994 and is described as a physicist, worked the releasing approach out for himself in the 1950s and taught it for the rest of his life. Hale Dwoskin met him in 1976, received the copyrights in the early 1990s, and founded Sedona Training Associates in 1996. The book came in 2003.
How long is The Sedona Method book?
Past 400 pages, in two parts. Catalog listings disagree on the exact figure, so treat any single number you see with caution. The technique itself takes about a page. The remaining length applies it to specific areas of life and covers the five ways of releasing.
What are the four basic wants in the Sedona Method?
Dwoskin's claim is that uncomfortable feelings sit on top of four underlying wants: wanting approval, wanting control, wanting security or survival, and wanting separation or oneness. His instruction is to release the underlying want rather than the surface feeling, on the grounds that wanting is the experience of not having.
Is the Sedona Method the same as the Release Technique?
They share an origin and are taught by different organizations. Sedona Training Associates, founded by Hale Dwoskin in 1996, teaches the Sedona Method. The Release Technique states that Lester Levenson passed the torch to Larry Crane, who learned releasing from him in 1977, and its history page does not mention Dwoskin. Neither account can be checked from outside.
What are the main criticisms of The Sedona Method?
Four recur. The book runs past 400 pages to teach five questions, and readers on Goodreads and StoryGraph regularly call it repetitive. The publisher's claim of validation by independent studies names no study or researcher. The book sits at the front of a paid course and retreat ladder. And failure is explained as unwillingness, so nothing counts as evidence against the method.
Was Hale Dwoskin in The Secret?
Yes. Sedona Training Associates states that Dwoskin is featured in the films The Secret and Letting Go, and Rhonda Byrne has interviewed him on the official site for The Secret. That connection is the main reason many readers arrive at the Sedona Method at all.
The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin Book Review: The Short Version
One technique, five questions, four hundred pages. Releasing is Lester Levenson's, worked out in the 1950s, organized and published by his student Hale Dwoskin in 2003 with a foreword from Jack Canfield. The best chapter is the one on the four basic wants. The worst thing about the book is its length, followed by a validation claim that names nobody. Take the questions, apply them to whatever feelings have you stuck, and buy the book only if you want the full treatment behind them.