What if I told you that right now, as you’re reading this, you’re under a spell? Not the mystical kind involving wands and potions, but something far more pervasive and powerful—the hypnosis of your own mind. This isn’t some new-age nonsense; it’s the central insight of a transformative approach to inner freedom that’s refreshingly practical.
The Gentle Wake-Up Call: Recognizing Your Trance
Oddly, the journey begins with a startling but comforting revelation: we’re all walking around in a kind of trance. We’re hypnotised by the endless stream of beliefs, voices, fears, and assumptions that crowd our mental landscapes. These aren’t just external influences from our culture or upbringing—though those certainly play their part. The real culprits are the inner voices we’ve internalised so completely that we mistake them for our own authentic thoughts.
Think about it. How many times today have you caught yourself in automatic pilot mode? Maybe you were scrolling through social media while simultaneously berating yourself for wasting time. Or perhaps you found yourself rehearsing an argument with someone who isn’t even present. These moments of unconscious living are the trance in action.
To be fully alive—genuinely, vibrantly alive—means learning to de-hypnotise yourself by interrupting the script that plays on repeat in your head and remembering who you are beneath all that mental noise. This isn’t about achieving some state of perfect enlightenment; it’s about reclaiming your capacity for awareness, humour, and conscious choice in each moment.
The beautiful thing about this perspective is that it immediately offers hope. If you’re hypnotised, that means you can wake up. If you’re following a script, that means you can improvise. Inner freedom isn’t some distant spiritual achievement—it’s available right now, in this very moment, through the simple act of paying attention.
Meeting Your Inner Cast of Characters: The Troll Kingdom
Here’s where things get interesting—and a bit mischievous. Inside each of us lives a whole cast of inner characters, what we might playfully call “trolls.” These aren’t the scary monsters under the bridge from fairy tales. They’re the internal voices that judge, attack, manipulate, and sabotage our best intentions. The perfectionist who never lets you rest. The people-pleaser who sells out your authenticity for approval. The inner critic who provides running commentary on everything you do wrong.
Before you start planning their exile, here’s the plot twist: these trolls aren’t your enemies. They’re misguided parts of yourself that are genuinely trying to protect you, but they’re using strategies that stopped working somewhere around the third grade. The perfectionist thinks if you just try hard enough, you’ll finally be safe from criticism. The people-pleaser believes that if everyone likes you, you’ll never be abandoned. Noble intentions, outdated methods.
The revolutionary approach isn’t to wage war against these inner voices—that’s like trying to defeat your own shadow. Instead, you learn to befriend them, to understand their concerns, and most importantly, to stop letting them run the show. You learn to disidentify from their urgent whispers and to rewrite the stories they’ve been telling you about who you are and what you need to be safe in the world.
Each troll has its own personality, its own voice, its own particular brand of hypnotic suggestion. The key is learning to recognise these patterns. When you can name them—”Oh, hello there, Inner Critic, I see you’re worried about that presentation tomorrow”—you create space between you and the voice. That space is where your freedom lives.
And here’s the secret weapon: humour. Nothing deflates a troll’s power quite like a good-natured chuckle. When you can meet your inner drama with a gentle laugh, you transform from victim to observer, from hypnotised to awake.
The Great Identity Mix-Up: You Are Not Your Thoughts
One of the most hypnotic spells we fall under is the confusion between thinking and being. We become so identified with our thoughts that we forget we’re the ones having them. A thought like “I’m not good enough” gets upgraded to a fundamental truth about our identity, rather than being recognised as just a mental event that happened to pass through our awareness.
This confusion creates what we might call “identity hijacking”. We start believing we ARE our thoughts, our emotions, our habits, and our roles. “I am anxious” becomes more convincing than “I am experiencing anxiety.” “I am a failure” feels more real than “I had a moment of struggling with something challenging.”
The practice of de-hypnotic inquiry is about catching these moments of mistaken identity. It’s about learning to notice when you’ve confused a temporary experience with your permanent essence. Instead of “I am stressed”, you might discover “I’m having stressful thoughts right now.” Instead of “I am lonely,” you might find “I’m experiencing loneliness in this moment.”
This isn’t just semantic word play—it’s a radical reorientation toward reality. When you realise you’re not your thoughts, you discover you have choice about which ones to believe and which ones to simply let pass by like clouds in the sky of your awareness.
Becoming the Author of Your Inner Story
Much of our suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves—and more specifically, from the fact that we’re often unconscious that we’re telling stories at all. We think we’re just observing reality, but we’re actually narrating our experience through the filter of old beliefs, past hurts, and inherited assumptions.
The practice of rewriting your internal dialogue is both an art and a skill. It begins with simply noticing the habitual patterns of your self-talk. What’s the dominant tone? Is it encouraging or critical? Spacious or constrictive? Curious or certain? Patient or urgent?
Once you start paying attention, you’ll likely discover that much of your inner dialogue is surprisingly harsh. You might notice that you speak to yourself in ways you’d never speak to a friend. Or you might find that your mind is like a broken record, playing the same worries and complaints on endless repeat.
The next step is learning to identify which troll is behind which voice. Is that the perfectionist insisting everything must be flawless? Is that the people-pleaser apologising for taking up space? Is that the catastrophiser spinning out worst-case scenarios? When you can spot the troll, you can start to understand its concerns without being hypnotised by its urgency.
Then comes the creative part: experimenting with different ways of speaking to yourself. Not through forced affirmations or toxic positivity, but through honest, spacious language that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Instead of “I always mess everything up,” you might try “I’m learning and sometimes that involves mistakes.” Instead of “I should be further along by now,” you might experiment with “I’m exactly where I am, and that’s the perfect place to start from.”
The goal isn’t to convince yourself of things that aren’t true but to speak to yourself in ways that allow for growth, possibility, and the fullness of your humanity.
Your Toolkit for Transformation: Practical Magic for Daily Life
This approach to inner freedom comes with a collection of practices that are both deeply practical and surprisingly playful. Think of them as “practical soulcraft with a wink”—tools that work precisely because they don’t take themselves too seriously.
The 3-Step Troll Dialogue is a simple but powerful technique for engaging with difficult inner voices. First, you notice and name the troll. Then you get curious about what it’s trying to protect you from. Finally, you thank it for its concern while gently declining to let it drive your life choices.
The Confusion Diagram helps you untangle the knots we create when we fuse our sense of identity with external things like appearance, approval, and performance. When you can see how you’ve tangled yourself up, you can begin to gently untangle.
Re-minding practices are about becoming more conscious of which thoughts you choose to “remind” yourself of throughout the day. Instead of automatically replaying old loops of worry or self-criticism, you learn to deliberately remind yourself of things that are actually helpful and true.
Experiments in permission involve giving yourself permission to play with freedom rather than striving toward some idealised version of “betterment”. What would it be like to give yourself permission to be imperfect today? To disappoint someone? To not have all the answers?
These aren’t rigid methods with guaranteed outcomes. They’re invitations to experiment, to play, to discover what happens when you approach your inner life with both seriousness and lightness.
The Radical Act of Outrageous Compassion
Perhaps the most countercultural aspect of this approach is its emphasis on what we might call “outrageous compassion”. This isn’t the soft, enabling kind of compassion that lets you off the hook for your choices. This is the fierce, bold compassion that meets your shadow with laughter, loves your trolls without being controlled by them, and forgives yourself in full view of your flaws.
Outrageous compassion means refusing to participate in the cultural trance that says growth requires self-punishment. It means recognising that the voice in your head that calls you names and threatens you with catastrophe isn’t actually motivating you toward positive change—it’s just recreating old patterns of fear and control.
When you can meet your mistakes with curiosity instead of condemnation, when you can acknowledge your limitations with humour instead of shame, and when you can extend the same kind of patience to yourself that you’d offer a dear friend, you step out of the whole game of trying to earn your worth through performance.
This kind of compassion isn’t about lowering your standards or abandoning your growth. It’s about recognising that you don’t need to be threatened into aliveness. You don’t need to be scared into authenticity. The part of you that wants to grow and contribute and love well doesn’t need to be intimidated into action.
Coming Home to Your Authentic Self
The ultimate destination of this journey isn’t some state of permanent bliss or unshakeable confidence. It’s something both simpler and more radical: learning to live from your authentic aliveness rather than from the trance of performance and approval-seeking.
This means rediscovering your capacity for spontaneity—the ability to respond freshly to life rather than from old scripts. It means embracing ambiguity and uncertainty not as problems to be solved but as the natural texture of a life fully lived. It means finding your way back to playfulness, joy, and irreverence as legitimate responses to existence.
When you’re no longer hypnotized by the voices that insist you must be perfect, productive, and pleasing at all times, you discover something extraordinary: you’re already enough, exactly as you are, in this moment. Not because you’ve achieved some spiritual milestone, but because your worth was never actually conditional on your performance in the first place.
You begin to live from what we might call your “spacious self”—the part of you that’s curious rather than certain, present rather than anxious, responsive rather than reactive. You discover that you don’t need to manage your life like a project plan with predetermined outcomes. You can live it—wild, messy, mysterious, and fully awake.
This isn’t about achieving some final state of enlightenment. It’s about remembering, moment by moment, that you have a choice about how you relate to your experience. You can live from the trance of old stories and automatic reactions, or you can live from the fresh, alive awareness that’s always available in this very moment.
The invitation is simple: wake up. Not once and for all, but again and again, with humour and compassion, for the rest of your beautifully ordinary, extraordinarily precious life.
I’m currently reading The Outrageous Guide to Being Fully Alive by Jack Elias and Ceci Miller, a 2021 release subtitled Defeat Your Inner Trolls and Reclaim Your Sense of Humour. It was born from Jack’s long work as a hypnotherapist and student of Zen (Suzuki Roshi), Trungpa Rinpoche, and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, with Ceci bringing her own grounded sensibility and mastery of mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Core Premise: You Are Hypnotized—and You Can Wake Up
The book opens with a gentle but radical claim:
We are all in a trance—hypnotised by beliefs, voices, fears, and assumptions. Not just from culture or upbringing, but from the inner “trolls” we unconsciously serve.
To be fully alive is to de-hypnotise yourself—to interrupt the script and remember who you are beneath the noise.
This sets the tone for the rest of the book: inner freedom is possible—and it begins with awareness, humour, and choice.