The Sedona Method and the Dhamma: Where They Meet

Can a modern releasing technique and a 2,500-year-old path be pointing at the same place?

I came to the Sedona Method years before I got serious about the Dhamma. Lester Levenson’s releasing work became the basis of the method, and Hale Dwoskin later developed and shared it more widely. At first it looked thoroughly Western: a handful of questions, a willingness to let go, and sometimes a shift you can feel in a few minutes.

Then I started noticing something. The more time I spent with the early Buddhist teachings, the more familiar the Sedona questions sounded. Not identical. Familiar. Like two people describing the same room from different doors.

This is my attempt to map where they meet, and where they honestly part ways.

One disclaimer before we start: I am not a Buddhist scholar or a teacher. These are a lay practitioner’s notes from practice, not an authoritative comparison.

What the Sedona Method Actually Asks You to Do

The method is simpler than the marketing. You notice a feeling and allow it to be present instead of immediately pushing it away. Then you ask a short sequence of questions: could you let it go? Would you? When?

Common targets are the “wantings”: wanting approval, wanting control, and wanting security. You are not fixing the world. You are working with your grip on it.

If you have never tried it, that is the whole shape. The rest is repetition.

Releasing Wanting vs. Letting Go of Craving

Buddhism identifies craving (taṇhā) as the origin of suffering. Craving conditions clinging (upādāna), the grasping that keeps the process moving. The training is not an attempt to arrange life so that nothing unpleasant can reach you.

Sedona says something that sounds close. Letting go of wanting love does not mean rejecting love. It means loosening the needy, grasping quality that turns love into anxiety. Buddhism also distinguishes wholesome intention from the craving that demands a particular result, although the frameworks are not identical.

Both point at the same insight: freedom does not arrive when you get everything you want. It arrives when you are no longer driven by the wanting itself.

Releasing a wanting is not the same as deciding that its object is bad. The practical test is whether some of the compulsion drops away, leaving more room to choose wisely.

Welcoming a Feeling vs. Mindfulness

A core Sedona instruction is to welcome a feeling before you try to release it. In my experience, fighting an emotion can easily add another layer of tension.

This can resemble mindfulness, but it is worth being precise. In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the contemplation of feeling (vedanānupassanā) means knowing a feeling tone as pleasant, painful, or neutral, then observing its arising and passing. Here, “feeling” does not mean the whole emotional story.

The difference is more than technique. Sedona uses structured questions with release as the immediate aim. Buddhist mindfulness trains clear knowing without requiring the present experience to disappear. They can exercise a similar capacity to stop resisting, but they are doing different jobs.

Diving Into the Core vs. Emptiness

One of the more advanced Sedona moves is to dive into the core of a strong emotion. Sedona teaching describes finding that nothing solid is there: space, silence, or peace rather than the dense object we expected. This can reduce the weight of an emotion.

There is a useful parallel with Buddhist emptiness (suññatā), but not a direct equivalence. In the early texts, the world is called empty because it is empty of self and of what belongs to self. Elsewhere, emptiness is practised by recognising what is absent from experience and clearly knowing what remains.

That is different from saying an emotion is physically made of empty space or that reaching a quiet state proves a doctrine. Diving into a feeling may loosen the mind’s habit of making it solid and personal. That is valuable on its own.

Later Mahāyāna traditions develop emptiness in broader philosophical directions, especially in Madhyamaka. I do not need to collapse those teachings into a Sedona exercise to recognise a practical point shared by both: examine what feels solid, and it may not be what you assumed.

Presence-Awareness vs. Conditioned Knowing

The “Fifth Way” of the Sedona Method is described as surrendering into Presence-Awareness: recognising experience as appearing in awareness rather than happening to a separate “me”.

This language may sound like some Mahāyāna, Zen, or non-dual teachings, but I would not present it as a straightforward Buddhist equivalent. In the early Buddhist texts, consciousness is impermanent and not-self. Even refined states of knowing are not offered as an eternal identity hiding behind experience.

There is still a useful shift here: experience becomes less cramped when every thought and feeling is no longer treated as “me” or “mine”. The difference is that early Buddhism does not replace the ordinary self with a metaphysical Self called awareness.

Thoughts Are Not Self

This is another point where careful wording helps. Saying “I am not my thoughts” can quietly imply that a more permanent “I” exists somewhere else. The Buddha’s analysis is more thorough: form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness are all to be seen as “not mine, not I, not my self.”

The practical effect is still immediate. When I stop treating a thought or emotion as a personal command, identification loosens and another response becomes possible. I do not need to decide what I ultimately am before I can put that down.

Where the Two Paths Part

The overlaps are real. So are the differences, and I do not want to sell you a tidy synthesis that ignores them.

• Framing. Buddhism is a complete path of ethics, meditation, and wisdom leading towards liberation (nibbāna). The Sedona Method is a releasing system that can be used inside many worldviews. That flexibility is both its strength and its limit.
• Method. Buddhist practice includes sustained mindfulness, collectedness, ethical restraint, and insight. Sedona uses specific questions and several direct approaches to releasing emotional charge.
• View of awareness. Sedona’s later teaching can speak of awareness as what we truly are. Early Buddhism includes consciousness within what must be seen as impermanent and not-self.
• Goal. Sedona material often promises improvements in happiness, relationships, health, and success. The Buddhist path is directed towards the ending of greed, hatred, and delusion, not merely a better version of ordinary life.

I find the two most useful when they are complementary rather than forced into agreement. Releasing can reduce enough emotional charge for sitting to become possible. The Dhamma gives that relief an ethical framework and keeps releasing from quietly becoming another attempt to control every experience.

My Next Action

Keep the daily sit. When an emotion is hot and I cannot settle, use the releasing questions first, then return to the breath. When I notice that I am using the method to force an experience away, stop and simply know what is present.

One week of that, then notice what actually changed.

A Practice to Try

For one week, try a simple sequence when a strong emotion appears:

1. Notice the bodily feeling without starting the story again.
2. Allow it to be present for one breath.
3. Ask the releasing questions once, without demanding a result.
4. Return to the breath and notice whether the grip changed.

The point is not to prove that Sedona and Buddhism are the same. It is to see whether one small tool helps you meet craving and resistance more clearly.

For the early Buddhist teaching underneath this comparison, read the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) on not-self, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10) on the contemplation of feeling, and the Suñña Sutta (SN 35.85) on the world being empty of self and what belongs to self. For the Sedona account of the method’s origins and techniques, see its pages on Lester Levenson, the first four ways of letting go, and the Fifth Way.