From "Hey Siri" to "Hey Spirit"
Reclaiming Inner Guidance in an Over-Optimized World
The woman staring at her smartphone screen wasn’t looking for a notification. She was looking for herself.
She had spent decades building a highly structured, successful path, executing routine milestones with left-brained military precision. From the outside, her life appeared completely organized and predictable. Yet, sitting in a quiet room, she realized she was caught in a digital loop. Every time an internal question or an uncomfortable spike of anxiety arose, her automated muscle memory was to look down at her screen, asking a virtual assistant for direction.
She had become extraordinarily successful at maintaining a life, but she had forgotten how to find her way home.
Listening to spiritual teacher and former U.S. Navy Commander Suzanne Giesemann describe that technical friction, I realized she was calling out a quiet crisis affecting millions of high performers. We live in an era obsessed with external optimization and data hacks, yet we are profoundly blind to our own interior world. We treat our minds like machines to be programmed rather than landscapes to be explored.
Life belongs to us. But we no longer know how to inhabit it.
The Napkin Moment That Changed Everything
The Limits of a Secondary Life
We have become deeply conditioned to rely solely on our physical senses for our inner truth. We trust only what can be measured, tracked, and input into the World Wide Web. But this narrow focus acts as a pair of dark sunglasses, shielding our eyes from a deeper layer of reality and trapping us in the suffocating illusion of separation. We turn to artificial intelligence for answers, forgetting that digital data is merely secondhand knowledge.
Turning Inward for Real-Time Direction
True transformation requires a cognitive circuit breaker. For Suzanne, that clarity materialized in a sudden, playful play on words given to her early one morning by higher consciousness. Her guides instructed her to write down “HEY, SIRI!” in large capital letters on a nightstand pad. Then, they told her to insert two missing letters: the P and the T from peace and tranquility.
H E Y , S I R I !
▲ ▲
│ │
P T
│ │
▼ ▼
H E Y , S P I R I T !
By simply adding those two letters, a common digital command was instantly transformed into a powerful, playful prayer: “HEY, SPIRIT!”
Not long after, Suzanne sat at brunch on Park Avenue with Hay House Vice President Patty Gift. She grabbed a paper napkin, sketched out the “Hey Siri” to “Hey Spirit” blueprint, and watched her publisher’s eyes widen in real time. Right there at the table, the vice president looked at her and said, “Put that into four sentences, and I’ll draft a contract tomorrow.” It was a divine setup that bypassed months of grueling academic proposals, proving that when your heart is in the right place, things fall into place effortlessly.
The Root of the Wobble: Moving Into the Hara
Bypassing the Spacey Mind
To find real inner guidance, we have to examine where we anchor our presence. For years, wellness frameworks have told us to get out of our heads and drop into our hearts. But during a grueling three-month period of physical agony caused by a herniated disc, Suzanne’s guides brought an overlooked mystery to her attention: the Hara.
Located in the lower abdomen, the Hara is an essential soul-centered energy center known in Eastern traditions as one of the three Dan Tiens. Suzanne realized that during meditation, she would physically sway, letting her energy scatter into spacey, ungrounded dimensions. The moment she anchored her focus squarely in the belly, the swaying stopped completely. Her connection across the veil became immovably solid.
The Cost of Guarding Your Field
The body reflects exactly where we contract and hold dense energy. When we spend a lifetime tensing against past traumas or worrying about how we look to others, we guard our fields. This unconscious, defensive contraction is the root cause behind lower back issues and chronic digestive ailments. We are gripping the wheel too tightly. True spiritual resilience means letting down those defensive barriers so higher consciousness can drop in.
Staying Grounded on the Balcony of Life
Shifting from Performer to Observer
When you learn to view your existence through a wider lens, your relationship with adversity changes completely. Earlier this year, Suzanne faced a major health crisis when a dermatologist diagnosed her with facial skin cancer.
Her response wasn’t panic or despair; it was a curious, detached acknowledgment: “Isn’t that interesting?”
Just five days after undergoing intensive surgery that left her face significantly altered, she was invited to speak on a behavioral science podcast boasting half a million views. Her human ego wanted to hide. But by stepping onto the “balcony” of her awareness, she recognized that her physical body is simply a temporary costume. She completed the interview with a massive medical bandage on her face, completely unbothered by external judgment. She had chosen truth over performance.
Learning to Trust the Shared Field
One of the most challenging ideas in Suzanne’s work is also one of the simplest: separation is not the fundamental reality we assume it to be.
We move through life as isolated actors, protecting our interests, managing our identities, and carrying private burdens that we rarely reveal to others. Modern culture reinforces that instinct. Achievement is individual. Failure is personal. Success belongs to those who can outwork, outlast, and outcompete everyone around them.
Yet Suzanne argues that beneath those distinctions lies something far more connective. We participate in a shared field of awareness that binds us to one another, whether we recognize it or not. The loneliness many people experience may not arise from an actual absence of connection, but from forgetting that connection was there in the first place.
I find that possibility deeply hopeful.
It suggests that flourishing is not about constructing a self entirely from scratch. It is about remembering that we belong to something larger than our own striving. The work is less about becoming extraordinary and more about becoming available—to stillness, to guidance, and to the people whose lives intersect with our own.
Build Real Significance: Three Minutes to Peace
To begin separating your authentic awareness from external scripts, clear three minutes of space today and execute the SIP of the Divine practice:
Sit in Peace: Stop your outward momentum, take a deep breath, and drop your focus directly out of your busy head into the stillness of your heart and your Hara.
Observe the Weather: Act as the pristine blue sky, watching your thoughts, worries, and bodily sensations float past like temporary clouds. Notice them, let them go, and do not judge the content of the storm.
Turn to the Subject: In that silent gap between actions, ask your internal guidance system: “What is the highest thing I need to know right now?”
Rewrite Your Internal Narrative
To dismantle the old ruts of separation, look directly at your routines and answer these three diagnostic questions:
What digital or professional loop are you using to edge out your inner voice?
Where is your physical body holding tension or “guarding” against life?
What is one small area this week where you can swap an external search engine for an internal pause?
Transformation doesn’t require you to climb a physical mountain on your hands; it begins when you take off the dark lenses of your old beliefs and trust the stream that is already breathing you. Step back from the performance, look within, and let the peace flow like water.
Listen to the Full Episode Featuring Suzanne Giesemann
Download the FREE Companion Workbook and Reflection Guide
Learn More About Suzanne’s Work
Purchase Her New Book: Always Connected: How to Find Comfort, Clarity, and Direction from the Spirit Within
Access Daily Messages: Download the free Awakened Way application on iOS and Android.
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© John R. Miles 2026. All rights reserved.
Great reminder to stop looking outside ourselves for every answer. Sometimes we need to pause, listen to ourselves, and trust what we already know.
I loved this! The way you described everything, it was very relatable and made sense. Made you feel things and make you think things through your life.