Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Letting Go (Hawkins' Mechanism of Surrender)
To dissolve a feeling by allowing it to be fully present — without resisting, expressing, or suppressing it — until its accumulated energy runs out and it lifts.
Letting Go in 5 lines: When a feeling arises, turn toward it and drop the story — stay with the raw sensation in the body, not the thoughts. Don’t suppress it, vent it, or run from it. Simply be willing to feel it fully, with no resistance and no attempt to change it. Stay as the feeling’s energy runs out and it lifts on its own. Keep surrendering, layer by layer, in real time. (Use the surrender practice; treat Hawkins’ muscle-testing “calibrations” with skepticism.)
What it is
“Letting Go” is David R. Hawkins’ practice of surrender — a simple, in-the-moment mechanism for releasing emotional pressure.
The central instruction: when a feeling arises, instead of doing the three things we usually do with emotions — suppress them (push them down), express them (vent/act them out), or escape them (distract, numb) — you allow the feeling to be fully present, without resisting it and without doing anything about it.
You let it be there, stay with the raw bodily sensation of it, and let it run its course. Hawkins held that each feeling carries a finite store of accumulated “pressure”; if you stop resisting it and simply let it be felt, that energy discharges and runs out, and the feeling lifts on its own — often leaving a lighter state behind.
It is surrender not as defeat but as ceasing the inner fight with what you feel. It operationalizes non-resistance/allowing (The Inner Creates the Outer), surrender (The Inner Creates the Outer), the witnessing stance (Life Is a Dream), and the impermanence of feelings (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
From Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (2012). The faithful mechanism:
- Become aware of a feeling. Notice you’re carrying an emotion — anxiety, anger, fear, grief, craving, guilt. Turn toward it.
- Drop the story; stay with the feeling, not the thoughts. Hawkins stresses that the mind endlessly generates thoughts to justify and feed a feeling. Let the thoughts go and stay with the raw sensation/energy of the emotion itself, in the body. (One feeling can spawn thousands of thoughts; work the feeling, not the thought-stream.)
- Allow it to be there fully — stop resisting it. This is the heart of the method. Don’t suppress it, don’t express/vent it, don’t run from it. Simply let it be present and be willing to feel it, no matter how uncomfortable, without resistance and without trying to modify or get rid of it. Paradoxically, the willingness to let it stay forever is what lets it go.
- Let the energy run out. Stay with the feeling as a witness, allowing it to do whatever it does. Hawkins describes the “pressure behind” the feeling discharging — like steam escaping — until the feeling diminishes and finally lifts. You may feel it intensify briefly, then subside.
- Surrender the wanting to control it. Often what keeps a feeling stuck is the resistance itself — the wish to not have it. Letting go includes surrendering the desire to change the feeling. (Hawkins, like Levenson, links chronic feelings to underlying wants/programs.)
- Keep surrendering, layer by layer. Feelings come in layers; as one lifts, another may surface. Keep allowing. Over time, Hawkins taught, the accumulated reservoir of a given emotion (e.g., a lifetime of held fear) progressively empties, raising one’s baseline.
- Use it continuously. Like the Sedona Method, it’s meant to be applied in real time, all day — surrendering small irritations and large griefs alike as they arise. (Sourcing note: the suppress/express/escape framing and “willingness to let it be there” reflect Hawkins’ published teaching, attributed; faithfully described, not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
David R. Hawkins (1927–2012) was a psychiatrist and spiritual teacher who described his own experiences of profound surrender and non-dual realization.
Letting Go presents the surrender mechanism he taught for decades. The practice is essentially the same family as Lester Levenson’s releasing (the Sedona Method) — both teach allowing-and-releasing rather than analyzing — and both carry a non-dual/consciousness framing.
Hawkins is also known for his “Map of Consciousness” and applied-kinesiology “calibration” (muscle-testing to assign numeric “levels” to people, books, ideas) — these are separate, controversial claims and are addressed honestly below; the letting-go practice does not depend on them. → (Hawkins; cf. Levenson).
The Traditions' versions
Sedona Method (Levenson/Dwoskin) — the same allow-and-release mechanism with a question sequence.
- Surrender / “saying yes” (Michael Singer) — relaxing the inner contraction and letting experience pass through.
- Vipassana equanimity — observing sensation without reacting until it passes.
- ACT acceptance / “expansion” — making room for an emotion rather than struggling with it.
- Christian/Sufi surrender — fiat voluntas tua (“thy will be done”), tawakkul (trust/surrender to God).
Common refinements
Confusing letting go with suppression. Pushing a feeling down is the opposite of the method. Letting go is willingly feeling it fully, then ceasing to resist it.
- Feeding the story. Staying in the justifying thoughts (“here’s why I’m right to be angry”) keeps the emotion alive. Drop to the raw feeling in the body.
- Trying to force the feeling to leave. The willingness to let it stay is what lets it go; impatience to be rid of it is more resistance.
- Venting as “release.” Expressing/acting out is one of the three things the method says not to do — it discharges momentarily but reinforces the pattern.
- Swallowing the metaphysics wholesale. Adopt the practice; keep critical distance from the muscle-testing/calibration claims.