Hale: Likewise.

Chris: Can you give our listeners, Hale, a little history of what the Sedona Method is all about?

Hale: Oh sure. Well first of all the Sedona Method is a simple, powerful, easy to learn, and easy to duplicate technique that shows you how to tap your natural ability to let go of any sense of inner limitation, any unwanted emotion, any unwanted thought, any unwanted belief, any voice in your head that's giving you trouble. All the things that we struggle with day to day that keep us from having what we want, doing what we want, and feeling the way we want to feel. So basically the Sedona method is a very simple, elegant, and powerful way to get rid of our excess baggage that we carry around. The Sedona method has been around for now over three decades. It was originally inspired by a man named Lester Levinson, my mentor, who back in 1952 was sent home to die from a second coronary. The doctors really didn't think he'd live more than a few weeks. But because of the intensity of the situation, he was really motivated you would say to find a solution, to find something he can do about it. So he went back to the web within himself, and he started to process this self inquiry and ask himself questions like who am I, what's the world, and what's it all about? What he discovered is that we all have no limitations what so ever except the ones that we hold in mind. Those limitations can be let go of released relatively easily if we're just willing to put our attention on it and let go. When he discovered that, he started working intensively on himself and over a 3-month period he went from literally a physical and emotional basket case. He was quite successful. He was living on central park south in Manhattan. He had migraine headaches, he had diverticulitis, he had perforated ulcers, he had jaundice several times a year, and he also had coronary artery disease. He also was miserable. He had actually had four years of psychoanalysis with an associate of Freud's who said after four years of working with him he said "Lester I'm sorry. Some people just can't be helped." Which is kind of odd. You know they couldn't get away with saying that these days. That would be a lawsuit, but back then you could get away with a lot. So he basically was desperate. When the doctors gave him that death sentence he tried to find a way to at least discover how he had gotten himself into this mess. As he worked on himself he felt happier, more peaceful, and more alive. His body healed. Then at the end of the three months he discovered that this sense of limited person that we all identify with isn't who we are and isn't who he was. What we are is this sense of unlimited beingness or presence that is always here, always now, always shining in plain view except we ignore it because we're so busy with our life history, the story, and the problems that we deal with day to day. So we ignore that which is even more obvious and more present. Once he discovered that within himself, part of the nature of that discovery is that you uncover that piece that is always right within you and that you are. He lived another 42 years after the doctors had given him just a few weeks to live. One our challenges when we talk to people about the Sedona Method is how quick and simple it is. It's not a difficult process to learn. The reason we have weekend seminars, the reason that we have 20-CD audio programs is because it takes a while for the mind to accept that positive change could really be this simple, this easy, this direct, this natural. Because we're always doing something without emotions. We're either suppressing them or expressing them. But with the Sedona Method you learn that there's a balancing point between those two. So sometimes it's appropriate not to deal with an emotion in this moment. You just don't have time, you don't want to. Other times it's appropriate to tell people how you feel, especially if you want to have healthy relationships. But the balancing point between those two is simply letting the emotion come up into awareness and choosing to let it go, choosing to let it pass through awareness. You can be doing that all day long no matter what you're doing in life. As you get more comfortable simply allowing emotions to come up into awareness and dissolve by themselves, you get less hooked into your stores. You get less buffeted by life's circumstances, and you're much more able to deal with what's actually here now. You're much happier, more alive, more at ease. For most people that translates into a lot more money and a lot more physical health as well. All the steps, the wording, and the questions that we use are simply designed to get you re-in touch with this natural ability to let go. So if you forget everything about the Sedona Method but you do remember that you have this natural ability to let go, you'll find that you do it naturally, without effort. You'll find that you get a clutching inside, you open inside. When you do that, the excess energy that's gotten caught in your body and you mind just simply unravels. Just so people know what we're talking about, the beginning stages of the method is asking a series of simple questions. The first thing you do is you focus on an issue or something you'd like to feel freer about. Then you simply welcome whatever you're thinking or feeling about it, whatever your attitudes or beliefs are, you just let them be there for a moment. Then you ask yourself a series of very simple questions. The first question is "Could you let it go?" In my experience after working with hundreds of thousands of people and based on their experience and my own is you always have the ability to let go because you aren't your feeling. They're just feelings. They're not who you are, and they're not even true. A lot of times we treat feelings as though they're who we are and they're facts, but feelings are not facts, they're just feelings. Because of that, you can choose to let them go. So the first question you ask yourself or someone can ask you is "Could you let it go?" That's discovering within yourself if you're capable of it. The next question is "Would you let it go?" Would you just means are you willing to? A lot of times we're unwilling to let go of even things that we know are causing us suffering. But again we don't realize though that willingness is easy to muster inside if we're open to it. So if you're willing to let go, you answer yes to that question. If you're not sure, you say "I'm not sure." It's not important how you answer the question. The last question is when. When is an invitation to decide to do it now? So you ask yourself "Could I let it could, would I let it go, and when?" Just so you guys all have a sense of what we're talking about, those of you listening to this interview, let's just do it together. Allow yourself to think of some situation in your life that you've been putting up with, wanting to change, or wanting to improve. Right now it might be your concern about the economy, you're concerned about your job, you're concerned about your home. There could be a whole host of other issues. No matter what the financial situation is in our world, every day there are challenges. So think of a challenge. Think of something that you'd like to feel better about. In this moment could you just simply welcome how you feel about it, let it be here. Then as best you can could you let that feeling go? Just could you? Remember yes or no are acceptable answers just as long as you're honest with yourself and using your heart as opposed to your head as best you can. Would you let it go? When? Now again allow yourself to focus on that same situation. You may already feel different or you may not, but either way it's okay. Could you just simply ask yourself could I let this go? Just could I? Let's just do that one more time together. What you'll find is you can keep asking these same questions, which are the beginning stages or steps of the Sedona Method for as long as you need to produce the end result that you're looking for. So in this moment could you just simply as you think of that situation welcome how you feel? Then as best you can could you let that feeling go. Just could you? Would you? Now if you were doing this on your own, you could ask could I let it go, would I, and when or could you, would you, and when? Either one is fine. You can do it in the first person or the third person. Again, let yourself just be spontaneous with answering the question. Just avoid debate as best you can. The more open and spontaneous you are as you ask the question and the more you follow your heart as opposed to your head, the more powerful the process is. So just be natural with yourself and play with this. If you just take this one thing away with you from this interview and you start asking these questions of yourself, you'll find that you'll start to be able to tap this natural ability to let go because it is natural. Young children do this without effort. Unfortunately we as adults without realizing it train our children out of this in our attempt to make them more like us because we think that's what they need to do in order cope with life, but it doesn't have to be that way. What's wonderful as you start learning to let go and be more natural with yourself, you discover that you can keep all the wisdom that you gained as an adult and all the experience, but you can let go of all the excess pain and suffering, and you can really start living life more as you did when you were younger where you had this exuberance, love of life, this curiosity, and this openness that when you have with wisdom is very powerful.

Chris: For more interviews on health, mind, body, and spirit, go to Michael Senoff's hardtofindseminars.com. It sounds very simple. You've seen thousands of people's lives changed with this. Can you kind of tell our listeners what you've seen with people?

Hale: Sure. Well I don't know where to start honestly, but the most common benefit that people report is that no matter what's going on around them, they're feeling happier, calmer, more alive, and more centered inside. Honestly, that to me is the most profound benefit anyone gets because especially now with all the crises that we're all dealing with, the financial crisis, the environmental crisis, the breakdown of our society, and just the challenges we all face on a personal level every day. The fact that if you can just go through the same thing with a sense of equanimity, with a sense of inner calm, relaxation, and openness, with a sense of being happy whether or not things are going your way every moment, that is priceless to me. That is the most commonly reported benefit from releasing. That increases exponentially over time. Some of the other things that people report as they release is one of the things that you'll find in your relationships is that your unresolved emotions and the things that you're unable to resolve within yourself about your past relationships, prevent you from being fully present, open, and honest with the people that you're with now. What happens is you'll discover that as you let go at your core there is only love. That love naturally finds harmony in all relationships, both personal and business relationships. So the more you let go, the more your relationships ten to straighten out. Again, this is pretty universal with people as they learn how to release. Another thing, when we first started doing this work in the 70s, we were talking about how if you release your emotions, if you stop suppressing and expressing them, what you discover is that your health straightens out. So even though we've never tried to treat, diagnose, cure, or even advise about any kind of health issue with people, what we've had reported back to us is another almost universal benefit of learning go, is that your body relaxes, opens, and your cells become more alive. The body, because we're not getting in the way, we stop obstructing the body's natural ability to heal itself. People find that even long- standing health issues, either the symptoms go away, or the stress or disease you have about the symptoms go away. Either way you feel a lot better. Right now with the popularity of the movie The Secret and the book The Secret, even though it's been out now for years, it's still on the New York Times Best Sellers List...I'm one of the 24 teachers in that move. Over half the teachers in that movie use the Sedona Method. If you were trying to manifest abundance in your life, you're trying to attract to you through the law of attraction what it is that you would like more of in your life, the critical piece that most of the teachers in The Secret agree with me about, because they're all using this process is that if you don't get rid of the excess baggage from the past, if you don't organically change your attitude from the inside out, if you simply put a happy face on top of your problem, if you pretend everything is okay, it doesn't work. If you ignore your problems, it doesn't work, but if you confront them and let go of the emotional content, the mind naturally thinks and feels more positively, and you start attracting more of what you want in your life. So again an almost universal benefit from releasing that increases over time is people have a lot more money, a lot more success, a lot more ease in all the endeavors that they start out to complete. Honestly, there hasn't been enough research on the Sedona Method. Most of our reports are just from the testimonials that we get every day. But some of the research that's really pertinent to what we've been talking about is the Harvard University and SUNY University, State University of New York, did a pilot study that unfortunately they never got the funding for to take it to completion, but what they discovered is they compared the Sedona Method to a control group and to a group that took a process called Progressive Relaxation, which teaches you how to relax the frontal muscle on your forehead. If you can relax that muscle, many people find that their whole body relaxes more. When the compared the Sedona Method to both the control group and the people who were in progressive relaxation, the Sedona Method people their heart recovery rate was better, their blood pressure was better, even their muscle relaxation was just as good as people who were consciously trying to relax their muscles. In some areas it was 360% better than progressive relaxation at helping all the other things that progressive relaxation is designed to do. Another study that was done a while back with Mutual of New York, the MONY corporation, is they took a group of their field underwriters, which is by the way is the euphemism for insurance salesman and saleswoman. One group was in the Sedona Method and no sales techniques, just the actual Sedona Method process. One group didn't. They tried to match them in age, time with the firm, their sex, and everything. They tried to get as compatible group as possible, and they tracked them over a 6-month period. Over 6 months, the group that was in the Sedona Method outperformed the control group by 33%, which is an amazingly large increase in sales. Most sales trainers if it's just a five or 10 increase from teaching people actual sales techniques. But we didn't teach any sales techniques. What we did is we simply taught people how to deal with their emotions about the selling process, about cold calling, about dealing with no, and all the other things that come up when you're in the sales process. What was even more amazing about the study is that it was broken down to two three-month segments. The first three months there was about a 22% increase in sales over the control group. But even more amazingly, the second three months there was a 44% increase in sales. So the average was 33 over the six months, but the results actually increased over time. That never happens from any kind of training. It's extremely unusual to see that people are getting increasing results over time. Most trainings when you take them, most processes when you learn them, you're real enthusiastic when you first do it. Then as you get distracted by life, have set backs, or whatever happens in life, you tend to use it less and less or get less and less benefit for it. But the exact opposite happens when you use the Sedona Method.

Chris: The sedona.com website is very, very extensive, and you have great articles on there. One that you mention on there is some statistics on what Americans are going through right now. Thirty-five to 40% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Financial difficulties are the number one cause of divorce. You've got a great article on how the Sedona Method can help you in challenging financial times on home foreclosures, what you need to do emotionally. Foreclosure filings in the U.S. increased by 81%, and probably now that's even more to two million houses. It's still going to be rugged, it looks like.

Hale: Yeah. It looks like it could be rugged for a while. You know the world is in a state of crisis and most people are dealing with their own personal challenges, but when you're reacting to a crisis or to a challenge when you're feeling victimized or you're feeling defeated, you're likely to have a much worse outcome than if you're feeling your inner resilience, your inner ability to respond instead of just react. What happens as you let go, as you discover that yes you may have had a setback. You've probably had friends who have had set backs, and it set them back almost permanently. It seems like they never got over it. Whereas you might have another friend who had this amazingly terrible set back, but they bounced back like almost nothing happened. They didn't deny it happened, but they were able to find the emotional strength inside to just keep going and to find new solutions. Well what happens with the Sedona Method even if you're feeling defeated and crushed at the moment, or you're feeling really nervous, stressed, or anxious, those are just emotions. They're just feelings, and you can learn to let them go. When you do let them go, then you have the ability to really start from a fresh new place as opposed to schlepping a lot of excess baggage with you so you'll get back on your feet a lot quicker. You'll suffer a lot less. You can't change if you lose your home or you lose your job. You can't change what's already happened, but you can certainly stop from making some of the same mistakes. Or if it wasn't your fault, if you didn't make any mistakes but certain circumstances happened that you had no control over, as you let go, you'll discover that you can rise to the top of any situation, even the ones that are most challenging. So what people are reporting back to us is that they're so grateful that they have this tool, especially now, because it's a lifesaver. It's basically a survival tool. Some people when they get into crisis, it changes their whole lives in a negative way. Whereas other people can change their lives in a really positive way. It may not be great; it may not feel terrific at the moment. It may be a real struggle for a while, but you can struggle and suffer, or you can struggle and find a way through that's much more life affirming.

Chris: You're listening to an interview on Michael Senoff's hardtofindseminars.com. Now did Eckert Tolle use the Sedona Method? Now, here's a guy who sat on a park bench for two years. He was doing something. Look where he is now, you know.

Hale: Yeah. Eckhart Tolle is in great shape. You know what's interesting is the feedback that we get from the work that we do is that what we do is we basically make Eckhart Tolle's work practical. His books are wonderful. I really enjoy reading his books, but they don't give me real practical tools of how to live presence, awareness, awakening, or enlightenment in life where as the Sedona Method is a tool to show you how to do that. So we get calls every day, and e-mails every day, and people come to us every day who have been turned onto this whole direction by reading Eckhart Tolle's books but need a way to apply it in life, and that is what the Sedona Method is. We have a lot of free support on Sedona.com for people who have taken our program, whether they do it through our audio program or seminars or just read the Sedona Method book, which is in bookstores everywhere. There was a woman who was sharing on a live chat that I was conducting that her son-in-law had this terrible health set back. She had been releasing with her daughter, which in and of itself she he had been using the Sedona Method with her daughter was miraculous for their relationship, but her daughter and her were able to keep a calm mind and do the right thing to help them with this health crisis. Plus he recovered way quicker than anyone, including the doctors thought was possible partially because he was also letting go. They were all just being really supportive of each other as opposed to just feeling victimized, feeling out of control, and letting the problem itself run them over. They also did the exact right thing to get the correct treatment in time. Otherwise, it would have been life threatening. Well the first thing that I would recommend is if you would just go to sedona.com we have a free newsletter that we don't have to spend any money on, you can just sign up for, or we also have a DVD and a CD that's a 2-hour DVD of a seminar that I taught for Jack Canfield, who's a good friend of mine. That DVD usually sells for $50, but you can get the DVD and the CD, which actually teach a lot of what we do, for just the cost of shipping and handling. That's available on sedona.com. So those are two things you can do. The other thing is if you're a reader you can go to any bookstore and just get the book, the Sedona Method book, because it's carried in Barnes and Nobles, Borders, and most individual bookstores carry it as well. You can also of course order it on Amazon.com. Again, if you go to Sedona.com, you'll notice under seminars that I usually just do seminars here in Sedona. It's such a beautiful place, and people come here from all over the world. So I really don't travel as much as many speakers do, although there's such a demand now I may start doing it more. I haven't traveled to do weekend seminars in cities, I think it's now four years since the last time I did that, but I'm just getting this inner sense of support to do it. The cool thing about the Sedona Method, you discover as you let go, the more you let go, the more loving you feel. The more you let go, the more in love you are with life. The more you let go, the more you naturally feel less judgmental, more caring, accepting, and loving towards everyone, and you don't have to force it. You don't have to effort. You don't have to make it happen. It just happens spontaneously. I've been doing the Sedona Method since 1976.

Chris: Now if there's one thing that you would like people to know about how this can affect them or change their life, or just one thing you'd like them to know, what would that be?

Hale: The first thing is that feelings are just feelings. They're not facts, they're not you, and you can let them go. You can just take that much away with you. You'll discover that your life will start to change just by exploring that as a possibility that you're not your feelings and they're not facts. They're just a reaction to what's going on in the moment and that you can be free of them. You can let them go. Then the other thing that people be open to as a possibility is that enlightenment, freedom, truth, goodness, beauty, joy, or love that you may be seeking externally is already what you are. You don't have to grow into that. You don't have to get it. In fact you can't because you already are in. I don't want you to take my word for it. I would like you to simply explore this for yourself. Look within yourself and start noticing that all the goodness that you've been seeking is already right within you waiting for you to discover it for yourself.

Chris: Hale, thanks so much for joining us today. We look forward to talking with you again soon.

Hale: I look forward to that too. Thank you so much.

Chris: That's the end of our interview, and I hope you've enjoyed it. For more great health-related interviews, go to Michael Senoff's hardtofindseminars.com.