Photos by Jem
Real growth is rarely linear. Whether you are navigating a leadership transition, a creative block or a personal healing journey, there comes a point where traditional analysis reaches its limit. Some shifts must be felt and experienced and then integrated.
This is the core of a humanistic magick approach to change. By combining the focused depth of hypnotherapy with the reflective power of magickal tools such as tarot, visualization, and ritual, we have created a flexible framework for growth. This is all about using symbolic language to access deeper layers of the self.
What does it mean to use magick in a therapeutic or coaching context?
Magick (in Humanistic Magick) refers to the intentional use of symbolic, reflective and experiential practises. These can be meditation, visualisation, journalling, tarot, or ritual in order to support psychological insight, emotional processing and meaningful change.
Hypnotherapy and magickal tools work together by accessing the unconscious mind, creating emotional distance for reflection, supporting new perspectives and behavioural shifts and helping individuals move from feeling stuck to feeling integrated
Using Magick and Hypnotherapy for Personal Growth: Some Key Ideas
People often seek change when they feel stuck, fragmented or uncertain. Symbolic and reflective tools can help access deeper layers of thought and emotion through doing these creative things.
Integration happens gradually through awareness, emotional processing and choice. Magickal tools and hypnotherapy can support this process for spiritually minded people in a way that feels natural, intuitive and empowering
This approach applies across healing, personal growth, business, and leadership contexts.
A Different Way Into Change
There is a moment., it’s often quiet, often hard to articulate, when something no longer fits.
You might notice it as a sense of being stuck despite knowing what you’re “supposed” to do. It might feel like a lack of confidence in your role or direction or a feeling that you’re capable of more, but you’re unsure how to access it.
For some people, this shows up in their personal healing. For others, it is in their creative or business expression. For others still, it’s in leadership where the old ways of operating no longer feel aligned.
What connects these experiences is not the context, but the feeling. A desire to move from fragmentation toward something more whole, more authentic, more integrated.
This is where Humanistic Magick sits, as a bridge.
Working at the Edge of Awareness
Traditional approaches often begin with conversation, analysis and insight. But not everyone processes change this way. Some people think in images. Some feel before they can articulate. Some need to experience a shift before they can explain it. This is where hypnotherapy and magickal tools become powerful.
Practises such as guided visualisation, journalling, tarot or symbolic reflection and ritual or intentional action create a different kind of access point. One that allows the unconscious to participate in the process of change. So rather than forcing clarity, you invite it.
Recognising Where You Are
Carl Rogers described how people move from rigidity toward fluidity and self-acceptance as his “stages of process”. Whilst we are not psychotherapists, that movement still matters. In other words you might notice that when you first recognise you want to change, things can feel fixed, externalised, or confusing. As your desire and awareness grows, there is new reflection, questioning and emotional complexity in navigating the changes you want to make but soon, there is ownership, choice and the ability to act differently. Eventually, there is a sense of internal alignment and self-trust.
Change is not a linear journey. It is something people move through in different ways, and at different speeds, depending on what they are working through or stepping into. What matters is not the stage you’re at, but the movement toward integration.
How Magickal and Hypnotherapy Practises Support Personal Growth
The role of these practises is to deepen thinking. In other words they help people to access thoughts and emotions that are not immediately conscious. They help people to explore meaning without needing immediate answers. They create a sense of agency for people in their own process and they allow people to experience change, rather than just understand it.
For example, meditation and hypnotherapy can help someone feel what confidence or clarity is like before it fully exists in their external world. Tarot or symbolic tools can provide a reflective surface, allowing people to explore their situation without defensiveness. Journalling and ritual can help process emotions and anchor new insights into action.
This is where integration begins.
Case Studies: What Integration Can Look Like
1. Finding Space Within Grief
A client feeling stuck in their grief process struggled to move forward through conversation alone. By introducing tarot as a reflective tool, they were able to externalise their experience and create emotional distance. This helped them begin to accept the pace and shape of their grief. What changed was not the grief itself, but their relationship to it.
2. Rebuilding Confidence Through Inner Experience
A client experiencing low self-esteem used guided meditation and affirmation-based hypnotherapy. Rather than being told they were confident, they experienced moments of confidence internally first and began to shift how they saw themselves. This then translated into changes in their professional life. The shift came from felt experience, not forced belief.
3. Deepening Self-Understanding at a Later Stage
A client already engaged in their own personal development explored astrology and their natal chart. This wasn’t about prediction, it was about reflection. Through this, they were able to process emotions they hadn’t fully acknowledged, they found language for certain patterns in their life and reached a sense of closure and clarity. At this stage, the work was less about healing, and more about integration and meaning-making.
Why This Approach Works Across Different Contexts
Whether someone is navigating personal healing, building a creative or spiritual practice or stepping into a new way of leading…the underlying process is similar.
They are making sense of their internal world, reshaping their identity and learning to act from a place that feels more aligned.
Magickal and hypnotic tools support this by offering flexibility, as these tools meet people where they are). They offer depth because they access more than conscious thought and they offer agency when people actively participate in change.
Ethical and Practical Considerations
This work is always grounded in choice because of course not everyone resonates with these tools. It is grounded in transparency so that people understand what is being used and why and it is used with respect for individual beliefs, boundaries and readiness to try.
The intention is never to impose a framework, but to offer one that can be adapted. We can be as “magickal” or as grounded as needed.
A Holistic Way of Moving Forward
What this approach offers is not a replacement for therapy, coaching or leadership development models. But it offers a way to integrate them. To bring together insight and experience, psychology and symbolism and reflection and action.
So that change is not just understood, it is lived.
If you’ve found yourself thinking about change but unsure how to begin or if you’re feeling stuck between insight and action or you’re sensing that there is a more authentic way of being available to you…it may not be about doing more therapy or more coaching. It may be about approaching the process differently.
What might shift if you allowed yourself to explore change not just through thinking, but through experience?
References
Credit where credit is due, we aim to cite our sources because we value truthful content. 2 sources were used as part of our research for this article, and you are encouraged to follow our other links.
- Ducel Jean-Berluche, (2024) Creative expression and mental health, Journal of Creativity, Volume 34, Issue 2, 2024,100083, ISSN 2713-3745, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2024.100083.
- Rogers, C. R. (1995). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. United States: Houghton Mifflin.
About Humanistic Magick
Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. AI tools can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/
Citing This Work
If you reference this article in your own writing, teaching, or research, please cite:
Brookes, A. (2026). Using Magick and Hypnotherapy for Personal Growth: A Humanistic Approach to Healing and Authentic Change. Magenta School of Magick.
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