You’ve been hypnotized before. Probably this week. Possibly on your couch, twenty minutes into a movie you swore you’d only watch a little of.
Hold that thought, because today we’re covering a topic near and dear to my heart and my practice: hypnosis. What it is, why it works, and how to get some in your life. One of my mentors calls it the medicine of the imagination, and that’s the best three-word definition I’ve found. (The video version is here if you’d rather listen.)
What hypnosis actually is
Melissa Tiers, a well-known hypnotist, describes hypnosis as a state of focused awareness with a bypass of the critical factor of the mind, which creates heightened suggestibility. In plain terms: a person is guided into a trance, a state of deep relaxation where the usual mental gatekeeper steps aside. In that space, thoughts and beliefs can be altered. And since thoughts and beliefs drive behavior, you replace the negative ones with helpful ones and the change shows up later in real life. Voilà.
The myths first
Let’s clear out the cartoon version. There’s no swinging pocket watch, no “you’re getting very sleepy,” no spiraling black-and-white swirl pulling you into the Twilight Zone. And nobody is going to make you cluck like a chicken or bark like a dog. Stage hypnosis has absolutely done that in the past, but that has nothing to do with hypnosis in a therapeutic setting, where the entire point is getting you somewhere you want to go.
The reason none of those props are needed: it’s pretty easy to hypnotize someone who’s open to it. Because you already go into trance all the time.
You’re already doing this
A few examples of everyday trance.
The movie one I already mentioned. A good movie gets you to suspend disbelief so completely that you forget you’re in the theater, or on the couch with Netflix or Tubi. A scary scene comes up and you’re jumping, or if you’re one of my friends, screaming.
Then there’s the drive (or the walk) you don’t remember. You travel a route you take all the time, arrive, and realize you have no memory of getting there. Your body ran the rhythm while your mind went elsewhere. That’s a trance.
Church counts too. If you’ve ever been in a Southern Pentecostal congregation and watched folks catch the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues (the technical term is glossolalia), you’ve watched trance brought on by rhythmic singing, chanting, clapping, and drumming. Sister Jones on the mother board has been halfway to hypnosis this entire time. Yes, she has.
And flow states: lost in a project you love, no sense of time. Same family.
Hypnosis is like all of these, with two differences. You enter through deliberate deep relaxation, and there’s a goal. Everyday trances just happen to you. Hypnosis is trance pointed at a supportive change, aimed at leaving you better than it found you. Calming the body’s stress response is a big part of the mechanism: a stressed body thinks narrowly and shuts things down, while a relaxed one can notice resources and possibilities it couldn’t see before. You’re not asleep. You’re deeply chilled out, able to respond, and you’ll remember the session afterward.
What it’s good for
Hypnosis shines at quieting the inner critic: shifting negative self-talk into something more useful, working through imposter syndrome, managing anxiety. It helps people heal from emotional experiences past and present, whether that’s loss, betrayal, or a grieving process that has them frozen in place. Some people are so locked up by emotion and anxiety that they can’t move forward at all, and hypnosis helps bring them back into themselves so they can. (Past life regression is one route for that emotional work, and I’ll cover my own experience with it separately.)
Then there’s pain. Hypnosedation, using hypnosis to relax patients around surgery, has picked up real momentum: more than 30 clinical trials have affirmed its use, with patients reporting less pre-operative anxiety, needing less pain medication during surgery, and experiencing less post-operative pain, nausea, and fatigue than typically comes with general anesthesia.
I can vouch personally. I recently nearly chopped off a finger and needed stitches, and when it was time to have them removed, I used self-hypnosis to stay calm and keep my attention off the pain. When the nurse said she was done, my honest reaction was: oh, you finished already? That hypnosis stuff really works.
It’s also used for addictions (smoking especially) and weight loss. And I’ll say the quiet part: it’s fun. There’s a trippiness to hypnosis that’s a whole lot safer than drugs.
Hypnosis at Homegirl Astrology
The announcement at the end of the video is now just a fact of the practice: Homegirl Astrology serves clients with hypnosis. I’ve been working with clients this way for a while now, and the visible shift in energy after a session gets me every time. People tell me they feel lighter, ready to finally do the thing. One client called the self-actualization that comes from it life-altering.
If you’re curious, watch the full video for the whole intro, and when you’re ready to try a session, come see me.
Peace, homies.
