Hale Dwoskin, founder of The Sedona Method, a technique for releasing negative emotions and experiencing greater inner peace and happiness, has more than four decades of experience teaching workshops and seminars around the world. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace, and Emotional Well-being.
In this conversation with Rupert, they discuss the nature of the self and the revelation of true happiness.
In response to Hale’s opening question about the nature of awareness, Rupert describes it as ‘ever-present, unlimited, inherently peaceful, and unconditionally fulfilled.’ This nature that is our essential being is the most intimate, simple, and ordinary experience we have. But recognizing it can be challenging as it is so familiar and close to us that we often overlook it and are distracted by the content of our experience.
It is within our grasp to recognize it, however, and we can do so without practice, effort, or discipline. All we need do is relax our attention from the content of our experience and explore that which is aware. In so doing, we become aware that we are aware. This awareness of our awareness, then, enables us to recognize and embody our true nature as peaceful, unconditionally fulfilled beings.
Continuing on this theme, Rupert explains that the experience of being aware is present in everybody’s experience, but most people’s sense of being themselves is mixed up with their activities, relationships, and feelings.
When Hale inquires about guiding people, based on their various specific concerns, to pathways to happiness, Rupert ultimately says: ‘The pathway to happiness, the unveiling of our innate happiness, is simply the removal of ignorance of our true nature, it is not something we need to develop.’ This is the Direct Path, the removal of the ignorance responsible for our psychological suffering. It is the revealing of the ever-present happiness that was there all along, not one of progress toward a future destination.
Over the course of this warm-hearted conversation, the two acknowledge the ease with which we can know the peace of simply being and the value of true friendship based on the shared love of truth.
Rupert concludes by suggesting that this love of truth is essentially the only thing that can be completely shared among a diversity of people, emphasising:
“And this is why any relationship that is not sourced in this understanding, is ultimately unsatisfactory. If we were to take the last two-and-a-half thousand years of spiritual practice investigation, insight, formulation – from all the different religious and spiritual traditions – and we were to distill them into a single phrase, it would sound something like this: Being is happiness, and being is shared. That is, the nature of our being, is happiness itself. And we share our being with everyone and everything . . . If we understood this . . . and we led a life to the best of our ability that was consistent with this understanding, no further spiritual instruction or practice would be necessary."
