A Book Review of Letting Go

Letting Go: The Pathway Of Surrender is the work of author David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. 

This book is my first exposure to the work of this author, who has written seven other books including co-authoring the 1973 groundbreaking work, Orthomolecular Psychiatry, with Nobel Laureate, Linus Pauling. Letting Go, his most recent work,  was written just prior to his death in 2012. 

Letting Go is an extensive, thorough primer that walks you through how are mind works with respect to the emotions that we attach to everything and the thousands of subsequent thoughts that arise as a result of those emotional feelings.

The essence of what this author is teaching you is this:

A thought is a “thing”.  It has energy and form. Thoughts are caused by suppressed and repressed emotional feelings. When a feeling is let go, thousands or even millions of thoughts that were activated by that feeling disappear. We surrender a feeling by allowing it to be there without condemning, judging, or resisting it. We simply look at it, observe it,  and allow it to be felt without trying to modify it. With the willingness to relinquish a feeling, it will run out in due time. It is all about learning how to shed our emotional baggage.

The primary emotions to contend with are these:

1. Apathy and depression
2. Grief
3. Fear
4. Desire
5. Anger
6. Pride
7. Courage
8. Acceptance
9. Love
10. Peace

Each of these emotions generates a vibrational frequency level. Apathy and depression rank the lowest. The vibrational frequency level increases up through grief, fear, desire and so on until you come to courage, acceptance and love which have the much higher levels. Peace generates the highest vibrational frequency level.

Our minds have come to handle our emotions in one of four ways: expression, suppression or repression and escape.

The goal is to learn to be set free from emotional attachments. It is the underlying emotions, untapped, bottled up and not dissipated that serve to act like the carbonation in a soda can (my own visual image device). A built up pressure that eventually must be released.

Dr. Hawkins sets forth many principles in this book. Among them, here are a few of the ones that struck me as compelling:

A thought is a “thing.” It has energy and form, as previously mentioned.

The mind with its thoughts and feelings control the body; therefore, to heal the body, thoughts and feelings need to be changed. 

What is held in the mind tends to express itself through the body.

An illness tends to result from suppressed and repressed negative emotions plus a thought that gives it a specific form (i.e., consciously or unconsciously, one particular illness is chosen rather than another).

Feelings are not the real self. Whereas feelings are programs that come and go, the real inner Self always stays the same; therefore, it is necessary to stop identifying transient feelings with yourself.

Dr. Hawkins had this to say about the emotion of anger:

“With regard to the emotion anger, the price we pay for chronic anger and resentment is sickness and premature death. Anger is binding, not freeing. It connects us to another person and holds them in our life pattern.”

A final quote that I loved of his is this one:

“If we look back on our life, we will see that every mistake we ever made was based on an opinion.”

The book is very comprehensive and not one that you can knock off in one afternoon.

It is more like a detailed blueprint to lovingly take your time with and soak up each aspect as you delve into it.

I have already applied the principles set forth in the book in dealing with old repressed anger feelings about an encounter in my childhood with a bully. It works!

I love what this book is all about.  Finding a pathway through the thicket of old stored away emotions to ones higher, inner spiritual Self.

For more information about the author, David R. Hawkins, visit his website at www.veritaspub.com/

Jeff Dodson

July 3rd 2014

FTC Disclosure:  I received this book for free from Hay House Publishing for this review. The opinions expressed in this review are unbiased and reflect my honest judgment of the product.