Hale Dwoskin - The Sedona Method - Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being

For the first time in our lives, my brother and I became friends. I was able to release the old baggage that I had been carrying around about our earlier relationship, and we became a terrific business team. We were having a recurring problem, however, of starting many more deals than we were actually closing. Then, one day out of the blue, Lester called me up to see how I was doing. I explained what was happening. He said one sentence that totally turned around our closing ratio and the rest of my business career. He simply said, “Bank in the bank, not in your head.” Without me saying anything about it, he had picked up on a tendency that I and most other people in the sales profession have, which is “head banking.” I was so busy imagining how great it was going to be when I closed each deal that I was neglecting actually closing them. As soon as I started releasing instead of fantasizing, we started to close a lot more deals.

Another important lesson about letting go was learned when I received a listing for nine shopping centers from what was affectionately known in the industry then as a Xerox broker. A Xerox broker is someone who gets written listings on properties from other brokers, then copies and sends them to other brokers and principals without ever bothering to check the facts or get in contact with the actual owner or listing agent.

I sent a copy of the listing to one of my better customers, and he shot me back an immediate, almost full-priced offer. Of course I was excited, so I picked up the phone to call the man I thought was the principal, only to discover that the listing had come from a Xerox broker with no way of contacting the true owner.

Distraught, I realized that there was nothing I could do but let go. So I did. I cleared my mind and released all my feelings about the situation until I reached the point where it was okay whether or not I ever made the deal. The very next phone call in our office was from the actual principal of the shopping centers, responding to an ad looking for properties that we just happened to have running in the Wall Street Journal. When he offered us the listing on the very same property, I nearly fell over.

This is only one of many events that have led me to understand that a statement I’d heard repeatedly from Lester is absolutely true: “Even the impossible becomes completely possible when you are fully released on it.”

I also got to practice using the Method right while closing deals, sometimes when people were renegotiating multimillion dollar contracts and trying to cheat me or each other by making up a whole new story of what we’d agreed on, instead of simply signing the papers and exchanging checks. These were tense occasions, as a lot of money was at stake. Nonetheless, because I was releasing, I knew when to be quiet—which is very difficult for a broker. I also knew when to stand up for what was correct. The financial rewards were beyond my expectations.

By early 1987, I’d saved enough money to move to Arizona to rejoin Lester and support him in sharing his wonderful technique with the world. Much to the consternation of my brother and father, I relocated to Phoenix and became a full-time volunteer for his non-profit organization, the Sedona Institute, doing whatever was needed to get the word out. I spent most of the remaining years of Lester’s life working closely with him on his mission, almost entirely without monetary compensation. The reason I didn’t mind working for free was that I could see how much good I was doing, and how much I was personally changing for the better.

In 1989, Lester asked me to move to Sedona to help him sell some of the organization’s real estate holdings to graduates in order to raise money. It was there that I met my wife Amy. I saw her in a karate class and immediately recognized who she was to me, so the next day I asked her out. She was dating another man at the time, however, and asked for my card in case her situation changed. A few months later, I got a call from her and we went out on a date. That was a Wednesday. By that Saturday she was taking the Sedona Method Course.

Today, Amy and I have a beautiful, loving relationship, but it wasn’t always that way. It was tough in the beginning. Honestly, Amy was interested in other men at the time we met, so I had to do a lot of releasing for her finally to pick me. Once we married, we still had our disagreements—which of course still happens, that’s only natural. But because we both use the Sedona Method, when something happens that causes an upset, we let it go. From my perspective, our relationship is very unusual in that it just keeps getting better and more loving.

By the early ‘90’s, my relationship with Lester had grown to a place of such mutual trust and respect that he decided to turn over the copyrights of his teachings to me and asked me to continue his work. I maintained the organization that he’d established towards this end until two years after his death. Then, in 1996, I decided it would be much more effective for Amy and me to start a new company, Sedona Training Associates, to convey the Method to the world in an even bigger way.

One of the things that impresses me most about the process of releasing is that it has resulted in a sense of unshakable peace, happiness, joy, and calmness that is always with me, no matter what’s going on around me. Not that there still aren’t ups and downs, but, as Lester used to say, this is really the “bottoms-up method.” I know from my own direct experience that what I used to think was a peak experience, or something really terrific, is now normal, and my peaks just keeping getting higher and higher. I have no idea how far “up” is, and I’m looking forward to finding out.

The good news is that the good I have experienced using the Method isn’t unique. People around the world have been able to produce the same kind of phenomenal results in their lives. Years ago, a study of the effectiveness of the Sedona Method was done with an insurance company called Mutual of New York. A group of field underwriters were trained in the Method, and their sales results were compared with as close a control group as possible over six months. Over the study period, the group that learned the Method outperformed the control group by 33 percent. The study was also broken down into two three-month segments, and the results in the second three months were better than the first three months. The Method’s efficacy increased over time.

In this book, you’ll be learning the Sedona Method, a technique that you can use every day for the rest of your life. As you begin letting go of all the emotional baggage that has been getting in the way of you doing what you already know you should be doing, and want to be doing, you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly successful at everything you do. This book will not give you a whole new list of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” or new behaviors you “must” try to implement in your life. We are already “shoulding” on ourselves enough. Instead, you’ll be learning how to change yourself from the inside out. When you change yourself from the inside out, the changes are permanent.

In addition, as you experiment with this simple system in your life, you’ll keep discovering more ways that you can apply it. Whatever initial insights you gain from reading this book and working with the Method are only the tip of the iceberg. This single technique can affect every part of your life, because it is built on the fact that we are already unlimited beings. If you think back over your life, you’ve probably had glimpses of this unlimited state, which is natural to us all. You’ve probably also had glimpses or periods where you felt like you were in a state of flow, moments in which everything seemed to “click” and work effortlessly. Through using the Sedona Method, it is possible for you to experience the flow as part of your everyday life from now on.