Letting go

Psychology

Print length: 368 pagesHay House, 2013

Description

David R. Hawkins presents surrender as a practical response to the emotions and inner resistance that sustain suffering. Drawing on decades of psychiatric practice, he teaches readers to notice unwanted feelings without suppressing, expressing, or endlessly analyzing them, allowing their emotional force to pass instead. The method is applied to common sources of difficulty, including work, money, health, creativity, sexuality, relationships, and spiritual development. Rather than treating happiness or success as goals reached solely through greater effort, Hawkins argues that people often change by releasing the fear, anger, grief, and limiting attachments obstructing action. The book combines a broad theory of emotional life with an everyday technique intended for repeated personal use.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Essayistic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Earnest · Hopeful · Intimate · Reflective

Structure

Argumentative

Focus

Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FreedomGriefLoveMental healthTransformationWork

About David R. Hawkins

David R. Hawkins brought the language and authority of psychiatry into a later career as a spiritual teacher, producing a body of work that joins clinical vocabulary, self-development, and teachings on consciousness. His books are organized less as separate inquiries than as extensions of a single system. Beginning with Power vs. Force, he arranged emotions, attitudes, and spiritual states on a numerical “Map of Consciousness,” then used that hierarchy to interpret the ego, suffering, religion, politics, war, and mystical experience. His characteristic method moves from the intimate to the sweeping: personal transformation becomes a model for understanding society and reality itself. The system depends on muscle testing as a means of calibrating truth and consciousness, a practice that is not a validated clinical instrument and is better understood as part of Hawkins’s spiritual framework. Letting Go offers the most practical version of his approach, presenting surrender to felt emotion as an everyday discipline. Across the work, his distinctive ambition is to turn an account of inner change into a comprehensive explanatory structure.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Hay House
Language: English
ISBN: 9781401945015

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.