Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Releasing the Wants
Trace a stubborn feeling to the underlying want driving it — approval, control, or security/survival — and release the wanting itself, collapsing the root rather than the symptom.
Welcome the feeling, then ask which want is beneath it — approval, control, or security/survival. Release the wanting (the felt lack), not the thing itself. Want freedom more than you want the want. Cycle the wants; repeat in layers.
What it is
This is Levenson’s deeper layer of releasing — the diagnostic move that distinguishes his method from simply dropping a surface feeling. Levenson taught that nearly every painful emotion is sustained by one of a small set of basic wants, and that releasing the wanting dissolves the whole branch of feelings hanging off it.
In his own framing the wants reduce to three: the want of approval, the want to control, and the want of security/survival. (“See that all your feelings culminate in three wants — the want of approval, the want to control, and the want of security.”) This is an inquiry practice, not just an emotional one: instead of working the symptom, you look beneath it for its motive and let go there.
It operationalizes releasing the grip to receive (The Inner Creates the Outer), the insight that identity precedes circumstance — the felt lack is a self-state, not a fact (The Inner Creates the Outer) — and the turn toward the deeper Self beneath the wanting ego (All Is One).
This documents Levenson’s source form (three wants). Dwoskin’s later four-want map (which adds the separation/oneness pair) is the descendant version, cross-linked below and not duplicated here.
The Method
Faithfully distilled from Levenson’s teaching and Keys to the Ultimate Freedom (described, not reproduced):
- Bring up the feeling and welcome it (as in basic releasing — let it fully show up first).
- Ask which want is beneath it. Levenson’s three: wanting approval (to be liked, loved, accepted), wanting control (over people, events, outcomes), and wanting security / survival (safety, to go on existing). Most stuck feelings trace to one or more of these.
- Release the want, as a want. Apply the same allowing-and-letting-go you’d use on any feeling, now to the wanting itself: could I let go of wanting approval / control / security? would I?
- Release the lack, not the thing. You are not renouncing love, agency, or safety — you are letting go of the felt sense of lacking them, the inner constriction of grasping. That constriction is what generates the emotion.
- Cycle the wants and repeat in layers. A single issue often stacks two or three wants; release each that’s present, again and again, as deeper layers surface. Levenson set freedom above the wants themselves: “You must want freedom more than you want approval, control, and security” — the willingness that powers the whole practice. (Sourcing note: “all your feelings culminate in three wants — approval, control, and security” and “want freedom more than.” reflect Levenson’s published teaching, attributed; faithfully described, not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
Lester Levenson (1909–1994) framed suffering as rooted in a few basic wants and made releasing those wants the engine of his method, set out in books including Keys to the Ultimate Freedom.
His student Hale Dwoskin later codified an expanded four-want map (approval, control, security, and the subtler pair of separation/oneness) in The Sedona Method (2003).
The deepest want in Levenson’s own teaching points beyond psychology toward a nondual recognition of an unbounded Self.
Common refinements
Releasing the object instead of the lack. You’re not giving up safety or love — you’re releasing the feeling of lacking them.
- Forcing a want to fit. If none of the three obviously applies, just release the feeling directly; don’t intellectualize.
- Using it to deny real needs. Releasing “wanting security” is an inner move, never a license to ignore an actually unsafe situation or a need that should be met.
- One-and-done. Stubborn patterns stack wants; work them in layers.