David R. Hawkins

David R. Hawkins was an American psychiatrist and spiritual teacher whose Letting Go offers a method for releasing negative emotions, blending psychology with non-dual spiritual philosophy.

David R. Hawkins was a psychiatrist and spiritual teacher who treated thousands of patients before moving increasingly into the territory of consciousness research and non-dual spirituality. He is best known for his Map of Consciousness — a scale purporting to calibrate the energetic level of different emotional states from shame through courage to enlightenment — and for the kinesiology-based technique he called “applied kinesiology” for testing truth. Letting Go, published in 2012 and derived from his clinical and spiritual experience, focuses on a specific practical technique: surrendering to the feeling beneath the emotional surface rather than suppressing, expressing, or escaping it.

The core of the surrender technique is straightforward: when a difficult emotion arises, instead of reacting to it or pushing it away, allow yourself to feel it fully, without judgment, and notice what happens. Practitioners report that this simple shift produces genuine relief. The book presents the method through a clinical and spiritual lens, with case examples drawn from Hawkins’s years of practice, and many readers find its central insight — that resistance to feelings perpetuates them — both practically useful and philosophically coherent.

Hawkins’s broader framework — including his consciousness calibration scale and kinesiology claims — has been dismissed by the mainstream scientific community as pseudoscience, and rightly so. Letting Go is best read while separating its practical method, which has genuine parallels in acceptance-based psychotherapy, from the more speculative metaphysical scaffolding. For readers open to its framing, it can be quietly transformative; for those expecting evidence-based psychology, it will require significant tolerance for unverified claims.