There are moments in life when the familiar structures we rely on begin to feel insufficient. A diagnosis changes the trajectory of an ordinary week. A loss fractures the assumptions that once held our world together. A season of uncertainty stretches longer than expected, and the mind, in its urgency, starts searching everywhere for certainty. We turn to information, advice, and endless external inputs, hoping clarity will emerge through accumulation. Yet one of the central questions beneath all of that searching remains deeply personal: how to find inner guidance when the external world cannot provide the answers we need.
In this episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles welcomes back Suzanne Giesemann, who previously appeared on the show in Episode 622 for a powerful conversation on soul awareness. Since that discussion, Suzanne’s work has evolved in meaningful ways—shaped not only by deeper spiritual insight, but by physical pain, health challenges, and a more embodied understanding of what it means to live connected. In this conversation, John and Suzanne explore what it means to trust inner wisdom in a world built to keep our attention elsewhere.
A former U.S. Navy Commander turned spiritual teacher and evidential medium, Suzanne brings a rare blend of rigor, grief, and spiritual inquiry to this dialogue. Their conversation moves through intuition, suffering, self-worth, embodiment, and purpose, but at its center is a quieter and more demanding truth: peace is not something we acquire from the world. It is something we remember when we stop abandoning ourselves.
Why We Feel Disconnected in the Age of Constant Information
One of the most revealing parts of this conversation is Suzanne’s observation that disconnection is often less about loneliness and more about misplaced attention. We live in a culture that rewards external orientation. From childhood, we are taught to seek approval, adapt to group expectations, and measure our worth through visible outcomes. Over time, this shapes not only behavior but identity.
Suzanne explains that much of this conditioning happens beneath awareness. We learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable and which are not. We adjust accordingly. What begins as adaptation eventually hardens into habit. By adulthood, many people no longer know the difference between who they are and who they learned to become.
This is one reason so many people feel disconnected even while functioning at a high level. They have become proficient at performing life without fully inhabiting it. The cost of this disconnection is subtle at first—restlessness, dissatisfaction, anxiety—but over time it becomes existential. It begins to feel like living at a distance from your own life.
The Limits of Relying Solely on Physical Perception
Most of us have been deeply conditioned to interpret our reality exclusively through our physical senses. We trust only what we can see, hear, touch, and measure. However, relying solely on this narrow perceptual lens creates a powerful illusion of separation. It forces us to view ourselves as isolated fragments operating in a chaotic universe, causing us to miss the broader field of consciousness that naturally unites us. Spiritual blindness occurs when we filter out the underlying reality that we are inherently interconnected aspects of a unified whole.
How Technology Changes Our Relationship with Wisdom
Technology is explicitly designed to streamline human connection, yet it often fractures our relationship with deep internal wisdom. When a question or life anxiety arises, our automated muscle memory is to look downward at a screen. This constant outward focus conditions us to value information over insight. We accumulate vast amounts of secondhand, human-input data from the web, but we completely starve our access to the primary source of personal truth waiting quietly within our own hearts.
Why Modern Life Keeps Us Looking Outward
Modern societal structures thrive on drama, comparison, and relentless external verification. From early childhood, we are taught to adjust our behaviors to gain group acceptance, praise, and predictable routines. The left hemisphere of the brain thrives on this external structure because it craves predictability and fears sudden change. Left unchecked, this cognitive loop turns us into robotic beings, endlessly managing the external circumstances of our lives while completely ignoring the development of our interior world.
From “Hey Siri” to “Hey Spirit”: Turning Inward for Guidance
The central metaphor of Suzanne’s new book, Always Connected, emerged from a simple but profound realization. One morning, she saw the phrase “Hey Siri” and understood that by adding the letters P and T—peace and tranquility—it became “Hey Spirit.”
It is a clever linguistic shift, but it carries real psychological weight. In practice, most of us have developed the habit of seeking external answers before internal ones. We search, scroll, and consult before we pause. The reflex itself reveals something about our relationship with uncertainty: we trust information more than intuition.
Learning to Trust Inner Knowing
Moving from “Hey Siri” to “Hey Spirit” is a potent metaphor for shifting your primary authority from artificial external data to boundless internal intelligence. Artificial intelligence can deliver highly sophisticated, structured data, but it is completely devoid of heart, openness, sensitivity, and soulful energy. Your soul, sharing the exact same consciousness as the divine field, already knows the answers to your deepest inquiries before you even voice them. Trusting your intuition simply means learning to bypass the rigid filters of the nervous system to tap into this fresh, highly personalized cosmic stream.
The Spiritual Practice of Pausing Before Reacting
To access this inner intelligence, you must implement a cognitive circuit breaker throughout your ordinary day. When a moment of frustration, distress, or curiosity hits, your natural reaction will be to reach for your device. The practice requires you to deliberately pause. By interrupting that automated loop, dropping your awareness out of your busy head, and calling out to spirit, you realign with your true nature. This intentional pause creates immediate spaciousness in your field, allowing higher guidance to feed you the exact insights you need to navigate the moment with grace.
How Suzanne Giesemann Learned to Stay Grounded Through Health Crises
Spiritual frameworks are often most clearly tested in moments of physical vulnerability. Suzanne shares openly about the recent health challenges that altered her relationship with her body.
What Recent Physical Challenges Taught Her About True Surrender
Even the most advanced spiritual teachers face extreme earthly challenges that offer direct opportunities for somatic and psychological growth. Recently, Suzanne endured a severe health crisis, starting with a herniated disc that left her in three months of absolute agony. Soon after, she faced a significant cancer scare that required major facial surgery, leaving a temporary physical void that had to be structurally crafted over.
Instead of contracting into victimhood or panic, Suzanne met these intense physical challenges by moving instantly into a state of curious inquiry, asking, “Isn’t that interesting?” By refusing to resist the physical reality of the situation and choosing absolute surrender, she discovered that the soul can step back onto the balcony as an observer, allowing the body to process intense pain and emotional tolls without drowning in unnecessary suffering.
Setting Ego Aside During Major Medical Updates
A massive test of this inner alignment arrived just five days after Suzanne’s skin cancer surgery. Still wearing a large, prominent medical bandage on her face, she received an invitation to appear on a major behavioral science podcast with an audience of over half a million viewers.
A traditional public persona driven by ego would have instantly declined due to fears of external judgment or aesthetic vulnerability. However, by looking directly at the situation through the eyes of the soul, Suzanne recognized that the message was infinitely more important than her temporary human costume. She stepped in front of the cameras completely unbothered, demonstrating that when you ground yourself in inherent value, the fear of how you look to others completely evaporates
The Role of the Hara: Embodied Spiritual Awareness Beyond the Mind
One of the most important evolutions in Suzanne’s work is her focus on the Hara—the energy center located in the lower abdomen, long emphasized in Eastern contemplative traditions.
For years, Suzanne centered her spiritual practice primarily through the heart. That brought openness, but she later realized it lacked grounding. The Hara became the missing piece. It introduced stability into her practice, a kind of inner anchoring that transformed how she experienced intuition.
Moving Past the “Spacey” Mind to Anchor Your Field
Prior to incorporating this insight, Suzanne’s meditation practice often caused her body to physically sway. While the expansive energy felt incredible, it was ungrounded, often leaving her feeling spacey or detached from her physical vessel.
When her guides directed her to focus explicitly on the Hara, the transformation was immediate: her body stopped swaying entirely, and her trans-dimensional connection became completely solid, clear, and stable. True spiritual expansion does not require you to float out of your body into a disconnected, spacey state; it requires you to become deeply, intentionally embodied as a soul right here in the center of your physical organism.
The Physical Consequences of Guarding Versus Being Open
When we fail to stay open and grounded in our personal power, our bodies pay a direct physical price. A lifetime of past emotional trauma, fear of judgment, or internal self-loathing causes us to subconsciously tense up. We spend decades guarding our energy fields, tightening our muscles to shield ourselves from the perceived hostility of the outer world.
This dense, defensive contraction is precisely why so many high-achieving individuals suffer from chronic lower back issues, colitis, and complex digestive ailments. The gut area is the absolute seat of your personal power. When you choose to step back, dissolve your defensive barriers, and hold your awareness firmly in the peace of the Hara, these tight physical systems finally relax, allowing high-frequency consciousness to flow smoothly through your body.
Key Highlights from this Episode on How to Find Inner Guidance
- Why learning how to find inner guidance begins by stepping out of mental noise and into embodied awareness
- Suzanne’s discovery of the Hara and why grounding in the body transformed her spiritual practice
- How a skin cancer diagnosis and a herniated disc became spiritual teachers
- The “Hey Siri” to “Hey Spirit” insight that inspired her new book
- The deeper purpose of evidence-based mediumship and why it changes how people grieve
- How self-worth is often buried beneath years of adaptation and conditioning
- Why disappointment can become an entry point into trust
- Suzanne’s practical three-minute “Sit in Peace” method for reconnecting to peace
Finding Comfort After Loss Without Losing Hope
Grief is where Suzanne’s spiritual journey began. The death of her stepdaughter did not simply break her heart; it dismantled the worldview she had been living inside.
This is often what grief does. It destabilizes the narratives that once felt sufficient. In that rupture, people are forced into questions they may have spent years avoiding: What remains after loss? What endures? How do we continue living when the world no longer feels recognizable?
Suzanne’s path into evidential mediumship emerged through this rupture. What began as a desperate search for continuity became a lifelong inquiry into consciousness itself. Whether or not one shares her spiritual conclusions, there is something universally human in that search.
Grief often begins as an experience of absence. But over time, for many, it becomes an education in presence. Not because the pain disappears, but because love changes form.
The Validation Lessons Learned from Evidential Mediumship
True healing after a devastating loss requires more than forced positive thinking or vague wishful platitudes; it requires undeniable evidence. Suzanne advocates strictly for ethical, evidence-based mediumship, in which a practitioner captures highly specific, non-public data points—such as unique childhood habits, specific food flavors, or highly accurate historical references—to prove that a loved one still exists.
She points directly to the real-time example of a couple, Patty and Dave Hart, whose beautiful daughter Lauren had passed after a horrific battle with cancer. In an unedited, 45-minute reading, the sheer density of undeniable gold nuggets dropped their jaws, clearing away the dense gray pall of grief from their auras and completely transforming them by proving that their daughter was still right there, moving forward with them in spirit.
Building Spiritual Resilience: The 3-Minute “Sip of the Divine”
If you are struggling to build a consistent spiritual practice, Suzanne removes the two most common human excuses: “I don’t have enough time” and “I can’t quiet my busy mind.” She introduces a simple, elegant daily intervention called the SIP of the Divine (Sit in Peace).
This practice requires just three minutes a day to completely reset your neural pathways and expand your spiritual resilience:
- Stop and Breathe: Pause whatever task you are doing, slow your physical momentum, and take a long, relaxing breath.
- Drop Your Awareness: Intentionally drop your focus completely from your busy, analytical head and anchor your presence in your heart and Hara.
- Become the Blue Sky: For exactly three minutes, simply step back and act as an objective observer of your awareness. Do not try to fight or stop your thoughts; treat them exactly like passing clouds and temporary weather patterns. If an itch arises, scratch it and let it go. If a distant lawnmower sounds, notice it and return to the silence.
Through this basic practice, you will quickly notice a profound realization: you are not the temporary weather pattern or the passing cloud of anxiety—you are the infinite, pristine blue sky behind it. This creates immediate, beautiful spaciousness in your daily life, smoothing out your mental ruts and allowing the pure, unconditioned peace of higher consciousness to drop in and guide you forward.
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Guest Bio – Who Is Suzanne Giesemann?
Suzanne Giesemann is a spiritual teacher, evidential medium, and best-selling author who teaches what she calls “21st Century Spirituality,” blending contemporary consciousness research with ancient spiritual wisdom.
A former U.S. Navy Commander and aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Suzanne’s path shifted dramatically after the tragic loss of her stepdaughter, leading her into deep exploration of consciousness, grief, and spiritual connection.
Today, she is recognized as one of Watkins’ 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People and is the author of 16 books, including Always Connected and The Awakened Way. Through her teachings, workshops, and global audience, Suzanne helps people cultivate deeper peace, trust, and connection with the wisdom within.
The Practice That Can Bring You Back to PEACE in 3 Minutes | Suzanne Giesemann on YouTube Now!
Learn More and Connect
👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Suzanne Giesemann mean by “always connected”?
Suzanne uses the phrase to describe the idea that human beings are never truly separate from the larger field of consciousness. In her view, connection is not something we create but something we become aware of. Through practices like meditation, embodied presence, and intuitive listening, we can strengthen our awareness of that connection and draw comfort, clarity, and guidance from it.
How can I learn how to find inner guidance?
Learning how to find inner guidance begins by slowing down enough to hear yourself beneath the noise of daily life. Suzanne emphasizes practices that shift awareness from the analytical mind to the body, especially through the heart and the Hara. Inner guidance becomes easier to recognize when we create space for stillness and learn to differentiate fear from deeper knowing.
What is the Hara and why is it important to Spiritual Practice?
The Hara is an energy center located in the lower abdomen and is central to many Eastern contemplative and martial traditions. Suzanne describes it as an anchor point for grounding and stability. By bringing awareness into the Hara, people can cultivate a stronger sense of presence and emotional regulation, especially during stress or uncertainty.
How does the “Sit in Peace” practice work?
The “Sit in Peace” practice is Suzanne’s three-minute daily practice designed to help people reconnect with awareness. It involves pausing, breathing, and observing thoughts and sensations without attachment. The practice helps create space between stimulus and response, making it easier to respond with clarity rather than on autopilot.
Can spirituality help with grief and loss?
One of the most powerful themes in this episode is the way spiritual inquiry can reshape grief. Suzanne’s own path into mediumship began after profound personal loss. While spirituality does not remove grief, it can offer a framework that expands our understanding of connection, meaning, and continuity beyond physical life.
What is the primary difference between “Hey Siri” and “Hey Spirit”?
“Hey Siri” represents our modern, unconscious habit of immediately turning to the external, physical world and artificial intelligence algorithms to find fast, transactional answers. “Hey Spirit” is a playful circuit breaker that trains us to turn our attention inward first, allowing us to connect with boundless consciousness to receive insights that are fresh, profoundly wise, and immensely personal.