Where to Start with David R. Hawkins: A Reading Guide
Where to start with David R. Hawkins — how to approach Letting Go, his practical guide to surrendering negative emotions, drawn from decades of clinical psychiatric work. A complete reading guide.
By Lena Fischer
David R. Hawkins (1927–2012) was an American psychiatrist and author who spent several decades as a practising clinician before turning to writing about consciousness, spirituality, and the nature of mind. He is best known for Power vs. Force (1995), which introduced his Map of Consciousness framework, and Letting Go (2012), which focused on the practical surrender technique he had used with patients and considered his most directly applicable work. His writing combines clinical psychiatric experience with a spiritual framework influenced by mystical traditions; the resulting books have found a large audience among readers seeking emotional healing tools that go beyond conventional therapy without abandoning practical grounding.
Where to Start: Letting Go (2012)
The essential David R. Hawkins — and one of the most practically effective books in the emotional healing genre. Letting Go is built around a central technique that Hawkins spent decades developing and applying: when a negative emotion arises, allow it to be fully present without the three typical responses — suppression, escape, or external expression. Stay with the feeling itself, not the thoughts about the feeling. Allow it completely. When it is fully allowed, it dissolves.
This is the surrender technique, and it runs against most conventional emotional wisdom. We are generally taught either to suppress negative feelings (control yourself, don’t show that) or to express them (talk it out, get it out of your system). Hawkins argues from clinical observation that both approaches maintain the emotional energy in the system: suppression drives it underground where it continues to shape behaviour; expression reinforces it by making it real and rehearsed. Surrender is different from both — it is neither controlling nor amplifying the emotion, but allowing it to complete its natural arc without interference.
The technique is consistent with contemporary acceptance-based therapies, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which was developed independently from a cognitive-behavioural framework and arrives at similar practical conclusions. Hawkins developed his approach within a clinical psychiatric and spiritual framework rather than a CBT framework, but the overlap is substantial enough that readers familiar with either tradition will recognise the logic.
The Map of Consciousness is the book’s conceptual architecture. Hawkins presents a hierarchy of emotional and spiritual states — from shame and guilt at the bottom (the most contracted and energy-consuming states) through fear, anger, and pride, up through courage, neutrality, acceptance, reason, love, and peace. Each state has characteristic thought patterns, relationships to the world, and physiological signatures. The map provides a framework for understanding where the surrender technique is pointing: not simply the absence of negative emotion but a progressive movement toward states with more energy, clarity, and freedom available.
Hawkins applies the technique systematically to every major life domain — relationships, health, finances, career, grief, anxiety, depression. This is one of the book’s most practically valuable features: the same basic approach is demonstrated across all forms of suffering, which means the reader develops confidence that the technique has general applicability rather than being domain-specific.
The caveats are worth noting directly. Hawkins’s specific claims about consciousness calibration — that different emotional and spiritual states have precise numerical calibrations he can measure — are not scientifically validated and should be treated as a working model rather than empirical fact. The later chapters, which move toward mystical states, are less practically grounded than the earlier ones. The core surrender technique, however, is independent of the more speculative claims, and its practical effectiveness does not depend on accepting the broader theoretical framework.
Reading David R. Hawkins
Letting Go is Hawkins’s most practically oriented book and the best starting point. Readers who want to understand the broader framework should then read Power vs. Force (1995), which introduces the Map of Consciousness in more depth. Both stand alone.
For the full David R. Hawkins bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the David R. Hawkins author page on Editors Reads.
Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with David R. Hawkins?
Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (2012) is Hawkins's essential book — a practical guide to releasing the suppressed negative emotions that underlie much chronic suffering, built around a central surrender technique that Hawkins developed over decades as a psychiatrist. The technique is immediately applicable and is consistent with contemporary acceptance-based therapies. It is one of the most practically effective books in the emotional healing genre.
What is the surrender technique in Letting Go?
The surrender technique is simple to describe: when a negative emotion arises, allow it to be fully present without suppressing it, escaping from it through distraction, or expressing it externally. Focus on the feeling itself rather than the thoughts about the feeling. Allow it fully and stay with it. Hawkins argues that both suppression (driving the emotion underground) and expression (reinforcing it through venting) maintain negative emotional energy in the system, while surrender allows it to complete and dissolve. The technique runs counter to most conventional emotional wisdom but is consistent with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
What is Hawkins's Map of Consciousness?
Hawkins's Map of Consciousness is a hierarchy of emotional and spiritual states running from shame and guilt at the bottom, through fear, anger, and pride, into courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, and peace at the top. He uses it to show that each emotional state has characteristic thought patterns, behaviours, and worldviews, and that the surrender technique progressively moves the practitioner up the scale as negative emotional layers release. The map is a useful conceptual framework for understanding emotional development, though Hawkins's specific claims about consciousness calibration lack scientific validation and should be treated as a working model.
What should I read after Letting Go?
After Letting Go, Steven C. Hayes's A Liberated Mind provides the academic foundation for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the evidence-based therapeutic approach most consistent with Hawkins's surrender technique. Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now covers the presence-based approach to suffering with a complementary emphasis on thought-watching. Mark Williams and Danny Penman's Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan provides the MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) framework — another evidence-based approach with considerable overlap with Hawkins's method.
