Imperturbability still feels too far away for me. Lester talked a lot about how great ultimate freedom is, but it's not something I can really relate to from my own experience yet.

I honestly can't say I want imperturbability more than I want the world.

But I do want to feel better.

When I feel apathetic, I want to feel happier.
When I feel angry, I want to feel happier.
When I feel proud, I want to feel even happier.
When I'm already happy, I want to feel joy and love.
When I'm feeling loving, I want to feel perfection.

I still don't really want "imperturbability." But I do want to keep feeling better, at least all the way to perfection.

And for me, that's enough. It makes Step 1 practical instead of like some distant spiritual goal.

Hope this helps or inspires someone else too.

In the golden Six Steps of the Sedona Method (Lester’s original framework), Step 5 is extremely important: when you’re stuck, release the wanting to change the stuckness. This step is critical and cannot be skipped. It completely determines whether your releasing is like walking or like flying. Releasing stuckness is harder than ordinary releasing — it basically requires a double layer of awareness. There are three parts to it:

Allow yourself to feel the stuck feeling. Allow yourself to notice the desire “I want to change this stuckness.” Allow yourself to notice that desire with ease (in a relaxed, effortless way).

Once you do that, the stuck feeling naturally starts to leave, and you’ll find your releasing becomes much more effective. Lester’s claim that you can awaken in three months isn’t empty talk. The problem is that most people simply aren’t doing what he said. If you want complete freedom badly enough, you will continuously let the wants arise and leave, day after day, without interruption. I’ve come to see that a lot of people in this sub are still very stuck and releasing inefficiently. Many are still mainly releasing emotions. Releasing emotions is only practice — what you actually need to release are the three basic wants (wanting approval, wanting control, and wanting security/survival). In Chinese online communities, many people have achieved major goals and even real awakenings through this method. A large number know the Method and actually practice it. I think this is because the pressure in China is truly immense — possibly among the highest in the world. Many people feel a kind of desperation similar to Lester when he had cancer and was close to death. Some of them found the Sedona Method and used it to break free from the world’s limitations.

By that I mean actually keeping all 6 Steps intact. If you read them carefully, there really isn’t any stopping point in the process, “continuous” in Step 4 literally means continuous. It’s almost like a perfect loop.

And when I say keeping them intact, I also mean not adding personal interpretations or variations to the method. The way I see it, someone who isn’t enlightened is basically walking through the world with a blindfold on. So making even small changes to the method, for whatever reason, could potentially lead you off course. To me, that would almost be like assuming we can see or understand something better than the person who created the method without that blindfold, in this case, Lester, who was enlightened.

I’m not trying to start an argument or debate about this. I’m genuinely just curious whether there are people here who are fully committed to practicing it this way, and what you’ve actually observed through your own experience along the way.

I wanted to share this because I spent roughly 4–5 hours a day for almost two years practicing the Sedona Method. I’ve experienced a number of positive changes during that time, although I honestly can't say how much of it was because of the method and how much was simply because I left a toxic job and spent two years away from that environment.

But recently I realized something that completely changed the way I understand releasing.

I wasn't actually feeling my emotions. I was repressing them.

And I think this is particularly important for anyone who has a lot of trauma or is disconnected/dissociated from their feelings.

For a long time, I couldn't really feel much emotionally. I was very disconnected from what I would call the “feeling self.” But because I wanted the Sedona Method to work so badly, I would sometimes create an emotion in my imagination and then try to release it.

And when I did feel something genuine, I would often immediately apply the three questions instead of giving myself enough time to actually experience what was there.

Looking back, I think I was doing something like this:

>“Here is an emotion. I am observing it from a distance. Now let me ask the questions so that it will go away.”

I thought this was releasing. And boy, was i wrong.

Over time, my social anxiety became extremely severe. I could experience sharp pain in my chest simply because someone looked at me. That's when I started questioning what I was actually doing and realized how much I had been disconnected from my own emotional experience.

One thing that especially bothers me in retrospect is Hale's statement in the course:

>“It's okay if you don't feel anything shifting, just keep going, you can't get this wrong.”

I personally found this extremely misleading.

I think you actually can get it wrong.

At least, I did.

Maybe the statement is useful for someone who is already properly feeling their emotions, but for someone who is dissociated and isn't actually feeling the emotion, blindly continuing with the technique can potentially reinforce the very disconnection they're trying to resolve.

So what am I doing now? Am i still using the Sedona Method?

Yes and no.

Yes, because I still believe there is something very valuable about allowing and releasing emotions.

No, because I don't use the three questions anymore.

Instead, I simply sit with whatever I'm actually feeling.

And this is where I discovered something that I wish someone had explained to me years ago:

Actually feeling an emotion is very different from observing an emotion.

I didn't understand this until I watched some of Joe Hudson's coaching videos. Watching someone genuinely experience an emotion suddenly made something click for me. It resonated so deeply that I ended up crying — really crying — for the first time in what felt like decades.

I realized that what I had previously called “feeling an emotion” wasn't really feeling it.

When I actually feel an emotion, there is no psychological distance from it.

It's much more like being the emotion.

For me, it often manifests physically as a tremendous amount of heat coming into the chest. Mostly there are tears and sometimes even a kind of pain.

And after the emotion has been fully experienced, there is often an incredible sense of clarity and lightness. “Pure” is the closest word I can find for it.

So if you're reading this and you're someone who is very disconnected from your emotions, I would suggest first learning what genuine emotional experiencing actually looks and feels like.

For me, watching other people genuinely experience emotions helped enormously. Joe Hudson's coaching videos were particularly useful for this.

Then try noticing the difference between:

“I am observing fear in my body and trying to make it disappear.”

and

“I am completely inside this fear. I am allowing myself to actually experience it.”

The second one is radically different.

There is no need to imagine a door, imagine energy leaving, or force anything to happen.

There isn't even much room for asking questions.

You simply go into the experience itself.

Become intimate with it.

Let yourself fully experience what is already there.

And, for me, something surprising happens: the emotion releases by itself.

Sometimes it happens incredibly quickly.

Another thing I discovered is that emotions themselves can actually be quite beautiful — even emotions like fear.

When I was observing fear from a distance and resisting it, fear felt horrible.

When I actually allowed myself to be with the fear completely, it became a surprisingly rich and even enjoyable experience.

I'm not saying that this is the only correct way to practice the Sedona Method, and I'm certainly not claiming that my interpretation is universally applicable.

I'm sharing this because I spent thousands of hours practicing, and I wish someone had told me earlier that there is a huge difference between:

observing an emotion → trying to release it

and

actually feeling the emotion → allowing it to complete itself.

If you're doing hours of releasing every day but becoming increasingly disconnected from your emotions, I would seriously question whether you're actually feeling what you're trying to release.

Maybe the problem isn't that you aren't releasing enough.

Maybe you aren't feeling enough.

P.S.

I also think the examples in the 1992 course gave me the wrong idea of what “feeling an emotion” actually looks like.

This is something I only noticed in hindsight.

When I watch the people demonstrating releasing in the 1992 Sedona Method course now, I don't see what I would consider genuine emotional experiencing. To me, it often looks more like they are observing the emotion from a distance, wanting it to go away, and sometimes even holding back their physical expression.

I don't mean this as a criticism of the people in the course. I'm talking about how I interpreted what I was seeing and how that interpretation affected my own practice.

I had unconsciously learned that “feeling an emotion” meant sitting still, observing something in the body, and trying to let it go.

But I now think genuine emotional experiencing can look completely different.

Compare that with watching people in Joe Hudson's coaching videos. What struck me was how little they seemed to be trying to do anything with the emotion. They become vulnerable. Their faces change. They cry, shake, express themselves, and sometimes their whole body responds to what they're experiencing.

There seems to be a quality of not holding themselves back.

Obviously, strong outward expression isn't proof by itself that someone is genuinely feeling an emotion. People can act, perform, or exaggerate too. But in my experience, when someone is genuinely allowing an emotion to be experienced, strong spontaneous expression — especially in the face — can be a very useful indication that something real is being felt rather than merely observed intellectually.

That was a huge realization for me.

if so, what is it?

Here's one of my favourite ways of explaining letting go. And it covers something that tripped me up in the past. I turned letting go into an activity to make things go away. I notice sometimes when people facilitate me, it seems they expect the feeling to go away when they ask me "Could you let it go.". But for me, letting go has nothing to do with making things go away.

Letting Go Without Pushing Away:
In the Sedona Method, we often ask a simple but powerful question:
"Could you let it go?"
At first glance, it seems direct, and it is. But there’s a subtle depth to it that’s often missed. Sometimes, when we hear this question, the mind translates it into something more like:
“Get rid of this now.”
And when that happens, the feeling doesn’t actually get released it gets repressed.

Letting go, in its truest sense, isn’t about forcing something out of our experience. It’s more like a soft unclenching. Imagine holding a pen in your hand. You’re gripping it tightly. Letting go doesn’t mean throwing the pen across the room. It simply means relaxing your hand. Now the pen rests gently on your palm free to stay, free to roll around, and also free to fall away when it's ready. You’re not controlling it anymore. You’re just not holding on.

That’s the spirit of “letting go” in the Sedona Method. When we ask, “Could I let this go?”, we’re not demanding the feeling to disappear. We’re inviting ourselves to open the hand. To stop gripping. To allow whatever is present: sadness, fear, anger, or even joy, to be exactly as it is, without interference. Sometimes the feeling lingers. That’s okay. What matters is that we’re no longer tightening around it. And in that soft openness, something often shifts. Not because we made it shift, but because we stopped trying to control it.

If the question “Could I let this go?” ever feels like pressure, try this first:
“Could I welcome this feeling?”
“Could I allow it to be here, just for now?”
Even, “Could I welcome my resistance to it?”

From that place of gentle allowing, letting go becomes less like a task and more like a natural exhale.

So next time you feel something stir inside, try opening the hand. Let the feeling rest freely, without force. It stays if it wants. It lets go when it’s ready. Either way, you’re free.

Lester Levenson’s original Step 1 in the Six Steps to Freedom is generally stated as: "You must want freedom more than you want approval, control, and security."

After exploring mindfulness, non-dual pointers, and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I realized that "freedom" can sometimes feel like a distant, abstract goal. To make it more immediate, I rephrased the first step:

"Could you want to be here now more than you want control, approval, or security?"

Here is why this alternate interpretation is practically effective:

• It shifts the focus from a future state to an immediate action. You can choose to be "here now" in this exact second, whereas the ego often frames "freedom" as something to achieve later.
• The underlying wants are time-bound. The desire for control, approval, and security inherently relies on a past or a future. Eckhart Tolle points out that the ego requires psychological time to survive.
• Presence is the mechanism of release. If you fully consent to being here now, you automatically drop the resistance that fuels the need to manipulate an outcome (control), seek external validation (approval), or guarantee survival (security).

Combining the mechanics of the Sedona Method with pure present-moment awareness simplifies the letting-go process.

Has anyone else experimented with combining Levenson’s teachings with non-dual or present-moment pointers? I'd be interested to hear if this framing helps anyone else drop those underlying wants.

I have almost always failed to achieve goals using releasing. Or even healing small things like a cold.

Does the technique actually work? Larry goes as far as to claim " butt system" i.e. you sit on your butt and release and goals fall on your lap! I of course did not just sit and hope to get goals, rather did the things needed, but still no success.

Now i think the technique is just like self hypnosis or self talk, that works like placebo effect. You can find some temporary peace with it, but achieving permanent bliss or even mundane goals is just false claims.

Every time I sit down to release, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of tools available. The frustrating part is that none of them works consistently. One tool might deliver an amazing breakthrough in the morning, yet the very same technique can leave me completely stuck just a few hours later.

Lester Levenson famously advised keeping it simple. Ironically, in my experience, nothing feels quite as complex as the Sedona Method today. There are literally dozens—if not hundreds—of ways to approach a single problem, which often leads to decision fatigue. To illustrate my confusion, here is a snapshot of the options I’m juggling:

Methods from Hale Dwoskin:

1. Decide to drop it (e.g., dropping the pen).
2. Welcoming (open-arms gesture, settling with yourself).
3. Zoom into the feeling (noticing the space between atoms).
4. Notice both polarities at once (like/dislike).
5. Triple welcoming (noticing the feeling, any resistance to it, and the sense of "I").
6. Various questioning techniques from the Sedona Method book.

Methods from Larry Crane:

1. Open a door in your feeling center and let the energy pass through.
2. Let go of disapproving of yourself and give yourself approval.
3. Say "Yes" to the feeling instead of saying "No."
4. Tell the ego, "I am bigger than you. I don't need you anymore."
5. Recognize that all feelings want to leave; ask them and give them permission to go.
6. Let go of wanting to figure things out.

Other complementary modalities:

1. EFT tapping.
2. The Work (Byron Katie).
3. Ho'oponopono.
4. Breathing techniques.

Given this abundance, my core question is this: How can I simplify the process of choosing the right tool for the right problem? Is there a framework, a rule of thumb, or a specific criterion that can help me decide which method to apply in different life situations? 

has anyone actually reached the final stages of letting go?

im talking about the bliss and ecstasy stages and tye final permanent merging with the infinite that Lester talks about sometimes.

if so, how long did it take you? and how did you navigate those later stages?

Do you know where can I find the full original unedited writing, audios and videos of Lester Levenson? His direct “complete works”? What I mean by this is that I've found that Larry Crane versions, or Hale Dwoskin versions, or others on the Internet, are cut and pasted, mixed in different order, edited, commented, interpreted... and I'd love to have the complete original Lester's material. Thank you!