Letting Go walks us through the moment-to-moment practice Hawkins calls the mechanism of surrender — fully feeling an emotion without resisting, judging, or acting on it until it dissolves on its own. The book explores how suppressed and repressed feelings sit in the subconscious shaping health, behavior, and relationships, and shows how letting go of fear, anger, guilt, and pride gradually lifts you into courage, acceptance, love, and beyond. It’s about what to do with the fear in your chest or the rage in your gut right now.​

Core Steps of Letting Go

1. Become Aware: Acknowledge and identify the feeling or emotion as it arises in your consciousness. This means bringing the emotion into your awareness rather than suppressing, repressing, or escaping it.
2. Allow it to be Present: Give the feeling permission to be there without resistance, judgment, or fear. The core principle is that "what you resist, persists". Do not moralize about it or try to change it; simply let it exist.
3. Focus on the Feeling Itself: Shift your attention from the thoughts or story surrounding the emotion (the "why" or "who caused it") to the physical sensation of the feeling in your body (e.g., tension in the stomach, tightness in the chest).
4. Surrender and Let Go: Consciously choose to release the desire to hold onto the feeling or the need to modify it. This is an act of willingness to let the energy behind the emotion dissipate on its own. You might ask yourself questions like, "Could I let this go?" or "Would I let this go?".
5. Repeat as Necessary: Emotions often have multiple layers or may resurface. The process should be repeated whenever the feeling comes up again until a sense of relief, lightness, or clarity is achieved. 

What you can get from reading it

• Learn the surrender technique step by step.
• Clear long-held emotional baggage that has been quietly driving your choices, health, and relationships from the background.
• Experience stress, grief, and conflict as invitations to release inner resistance, rather than problems you must control or fix externally.
• Use surrender as a way of life, softening into greater ease, clarity, compassion, and spontaneous joy over time.

About the author

David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, was a psychiatrist, spiritual teacher, and researcher who ran a large psychiatric clinic before devoting his life to consciousness studies. Drawing on decades of clinical work, spiritual practice, and his controversial calibration experiments, he became known for bridging psychological healing with nondual teachings, offering people a structured way to understand inner growth and enlightenment.