Divorce Healing Strategies: How Intuition Guides Recovery, Confidence, and New Beginnings

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Bent Not Broken. Heartbreak and trauma may feel like the end of your story, but here it's the beginning of a bold new chapter. I'm your host, Coach Deborah Griffiths, and this is the space where women rise, rebuild, and rediscover their purpose. Remember this truth. You are Bent Not Broken. Today on Bent Not Broken, I'm joined by Susan Jane, an award-winning intuitive psychic author and coach based in Australia. With over 40 years of experience in spirituality and personal development, Susan helps people trust their intuition through life's most challenging moments. A survivor of emotional abuse, a near-death experience, and violent trauma, she now teaches others how to reconnect with their inner wisdom for clarity, healing, and direction. Susan also uses her unique practice of intuitive flower readings, which is interpreting nature's symbols to reveal life's purpose and personal guidance. So get ready for a powerful conversation on intuition, resilience, and self-trust. Welcome, Susan. Thank you, Deborah. When you hear intros like that, you think, are they talking about me? I understand. But I'm really excited about this because I've had my own personal experiences of what I think is intuition over the years. Did I always listen to it? No. But get started. So let's start with what is intuition?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

What intuition is for me is the communication between our spiritual soul or our spiritual self and our physical self. It's intuitive messages that are coming from our soul, trying to guide the physical body along the path of purpose. And do all humans have the ability to assess it? Absolutely. Every single one of them. In fact, we do it, but majority of times we just brush it off. And those that aren't following it, there could be something wrong with them. When you're looking at people that are dangerous, that's not their intuition talking, obviously a different aspect. But we all have the ability to tune into our intuition and listen because it's our spirit, it's our guide.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

So is it like those little voices that pop in our head, which can be our self-limiting doubts or thoughts, or is it something more physical? And I'm gonna elaborate on experience like the day I got married, as I was entering the church with my dad, I was on his arm. All of a sudden, my stomach did this huge flip, so much so that it jolted me, and I grabbed on to my dad. He turned to me and said, You know, you don't have to go through with this. And I already knew how much money had been spent, and I was looking forward to getting married, but you have 200 sets of eyes on you, and you're like, Oh, I can't back out now. But I didn't really think about backing up. I'm wondering if that is something our spirit talks to us through our body as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Absolutely. I have a little quiz on my website, and it helps you understand where you're at as far as what is your strongest intuitive nature. I call them intuitive natures because it's the way we receive those intuitive messages. We can receive them physically, exactly what you said. Your stomach churns, or you think, oh my goodness, I've walked into a room and I can feel the energy in the room. It's very palpable. My hands would go really blotchy and I couldn't understand why. And somebody said to me, you know, you should go and get that check. That doesn't look right. What it was, I worked out in the long run. I was doing a lot of healing at that stage. Whenever my hands went blotchy, it meant the energy was coming through. Somebody close to me needed a healing. And that's how I could start to work it out. They'd get itchy, they'd get irritated. So it's very, very physical. And then we have emotional messages. When the emotional messages start to come through, when something doesn't quite feel right and you don't know why, it's that emotional attachment. When you wake up in the morning, gray, you know, a bit blue, not quite sure what you're doing. These are intuitive messages coming through. These are true intuitive understandings coming through. When you feel happy all of a sudden, or you know, I don't know why I'm feeling this way, but wow, it feels good. And these are intuitive messages coming through as an emotional aspect. Then we've got mental. Now, mental are the thought patterns that come through. Sometimes we're juggling between our imagination, which is intuition, and our actual thought patterns, our knowledge, our logic, and everything else. So when we get these mental aspects, that's mental intuition coming through. I remember one case with mine, I was putting a renter in my home. I put a manager in my business and my kids, they were just heading off to university to another part of the state. And a friend of mine said to me, What happens if you don't get into university? I was 48 at the time. But remember hearing the words coming through, but not really thinking about it. I remember saying, if I don't get in in this course, I'll just do another course. It didn't matter. I was meant to be going there. And this mental thought pattern came through to give me an understanding, don't hold on to that negativity because you can move forward on that. And then we have other areas, the last one, which is spiritual messages coming through. When I'm doing my psychic readings and the spiritual messages come through, you really have no idea where they're coming from, but you have no idea about that information. Like you don't often have an attachment to it. There was another time when I remember saying something, and I it I don't even know where those words came from. So it's almost like channeling and things like that. So we have those different areas. So there's those four areas that we receive those intuitive messages. When you're walking down the aisle and you felt that stomach churn, it wasn't necessarily don't get married. I mean, maybe you shouldn't have, but it was a really strong acknowledgement to say, have you thought about it? Is this really where you're going? Is this what you're going to do? Because we all have free will. As much as the spirit is trying to guide us, we all have free will. And when we think about spirit and physical, the spirit comes into the physical body because the spirit doesn't have access to the five senses that you do have as a human being. The spirit can't taste, it can't touch, it can't do all those sort of things. It doesn't get those senses unless it's in a physical body.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

How has your personal intuition guided you through your experiences of emotional abuse and a near-death experience?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Mine I have to be honest, didn't listen to it often. Didn't listen to it often enough. But I started to acknowledge it. I started to go, oh, I knew I should have done that. I felt like I should have done that. And I didn't. And I started to understand the consequences of not following it. And these weren't big dramatic consequences, but just little things that started to come through. I'd started to take aware of the thought patterns because my strongest one is mental intuition, actually. And then I bring in the spiritual side. So my strongest one is mental. We do go through the stages of those, and depending on what's happening in our life, we can revert back to I need physical information because I'm not listening at the moment. So you need that physical push or that emotional push. They will come in different ways. With mine, personally, I was going through a few experiences. I've had a childhood or a teenager actually, it was more teenager, a very negative experience where I left my body. We can go back into that later if you wanted, Deborah. I left my body and I watched the situation happening in front of me. And then almost, and this was an attack on me, a physical attack on my body. Almost 12 months to the day, I had a near-death experience. I know that they weren't dreams. I know they were real, but I don't know what they are. And because I was so young, I was only 19, 20 at that stage, I had no idea of what they were. And it wasn't until I was going through my emotional abusive relationship and getting an understanding of that, that I started to go to the library and get books. And I would just absorb myself in books, whatever books I could find. So there was Real Magic by Wayne Dwyer, and there was Eckhart Tolle's, you know, all the all the different personal development books, spiritual books, financial books, because I knew I was financially stuck as well. So anything I could find that was self-empowering for me. As I'm reading these books, I'm getting an understanding of what actually happened. I could reflect back and go, oh, that starts to make sense. When I had the attack, I did not tell anyone about it. My mother found out, my family found out, but I wouldn't tell anybody. We didn't go to counseling in those days. You just didn't talk about it. So I dealt with it for a long, long time. I went through the emotional abusive relationship trying to work my way through this. And that's when you sort of go, something's got to change. And that's what these books were doing. So with these books, and I say this for podcasts, for anything, take out what you can, what resonates with you, and then let the rest go. You don't have to follow it to a T. You take on board what's yours, what suits you, and what doesn't. That's listening to your intuition. If it doesn't suit you, then it's not for you. And that's fine. It's not wrong, it's just not for you. So that's following your intuition. So I started reading these books and getting this understanding. I read about astral traveling, where you can leave your body. You're always attached to your body, but the spirit can leave. That's called astral traveling. So I thought, okay, I'm going to practice this. And I practiced and practiced, probably about six months. I left my body. I got so excited about it that as soon as there was any emotion attachment to it, straight back into the body. But I did it and I didn't need to do it again. I know people that do astral traveling a lot. My daughter does it. I proved that there was this spiritual side of us and we could see our physical side. I proved that made sense then to the attack and what happened in the attack, and that made sense to the near-death experience and how I experienced that. So with the attack, I actually watched it. And one of the things that really stood out to me is as a spirit, we are not connected with emotions. I could watch what was happening, and I call it her or she because it didn't feel like me. I could watch what was happening to her body, and I was not emotionally connected to it at all. Didn't mean anything, didn't feel anything. It was just there.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

So in practical everyday situations, how does intuition help us make better decisions and avoid harm?

SPEAKER_00 11:06

No, can't guarantee you anything's going to avoid harm. That may be where your path is, but if we start to listen to our intuition in an everyday sort of way, you start to get better at it. Listening to your intuition is giving yourself time. Everyone talks about meditation. It is a form of meditation. It is time to just sit. Give yourself that space and permission. As women, we don't often give ourselves permission to do nothing. We're listening, we're taking it on board, we're sitting there, we're breathing, but we often don't give ourselves permission. My first step was to actually give myself permission to stop. Not worry about the washing, the dinner, not worry about this, not worry about that. And it gave myself time to stop. So for every day, connecting with who you are and your intuition, give yourself the time to do it. Ten minutes is enough. Five minutes, if that's what you can give to start with. Give yourself five minutes and make it regular, make it every day, but give yourself that time. Now, push comes to shut. If the five minutes you can only give is in the shower, so be it. Make the shower your time. But to connect with your intuition and make good decisions, there's three things you have to do. You have to ask, you then are open to receiving information, and then you action on it. And like you said, Deborah, I have often asked, I have often received, and I have often not actioned.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

You talk about in the five minutes of giving yourself that time. And you're right, women, we're so busy with taking care of kids. And if we've just gone through a divorce or we're going through the divorce, we're in this major storm, we can't even see the trees through the forest. And and I think that's so important because you need to heal. A lot of women I have spoken with that have gone through divorce. That's the biggest challenge. Maybe they don't give themselves enough time to heal before they jump right back into the next relationship. And you know how important it is to pause and take care of you first. So often we prioritize everybody else and we put ourselves on the back burner. And we've got to learn not to do that.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Yeah. When my relationship broke down, my two older children were living with their partners and my younger one was just heading off to university. So I was really just myself. You talk about making good decisions and connecting with your intuition. I remember after the relationship broke down, going for a month with eating jam sandwiches for dinner because I could not make a decision. From going to a relationship where you're both making decisions to having to make major decisions on your own, like signing off on houses, how to fix the tire on the car, all these major decisions just to keep yourself going. When it came to a meal, I could not do it. Just could not think. I'd go to the shopping centre, could not think for the week ahead of me what to buy to make for dinner. And it got to a stage where for over a month I ate jam sandwiches for dinner. And then I started going, well, hang on, I could do stir fry. So I started on the stir-fries. And yes, I bought different sauces, so they taste a bit different, but they were still stir fries. But it's about being gentle with yourself. Sure, I'm not eating properly for one month, but it doesn't stay that way. We can change it step by step, and we need to be gentle with ourselves. So giving ourselves five minutes, even in the shower, and go, just for five minutes, it's just about me. How is my body feeling? Where am I going with this? What is my heart saying to me? What is good, what's going on in here? You're asking the questions. Asking the questions in the shower. What's do you go to bed at night? Oh, just tell me, tell me, give me some sort of guidance about what decision I should make. And then you have dreams at night and it helps you. Or you wake up and you have a shower and that helps you. It's asking, and when you're asking out loud and talking about it, it makes your body, your spirit, your soul, everything else open up to receive those messages. If you're not asking, you're not open to receiving.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

For someone who feels disconnected from themselves after trauma or divorce, what's the first step to reconnecting with their intuition?

SPEAKER_00 15:29

My first step with anyone, doesn't matter what you've done, what you're experiencing, these are my first steps. Create a space for yourself. For me, it was in the master bedroom. I have a little cushion that I slid under the bed. I would pull that out. I'd have a few little bits and pieces like a crystal or if you want your Bible, things like that. And I would dedicate five minutes a day for me to sit. And so I yes, I'm going back to the same thing. But that was so important to start to learn to give back to me instead of giving to everyone else, and to start to really understand what my soul was asking me to do, what where I needed to go, where I needed to be. So I would say find your sacred space, wherever that is, that you can access it day and night if you need to, or access it weather-wise, and then structure your day to make sure that you can give yourself at least five minutes there. That is your very first step. If you can do that for a month, you are so well on the way to healing.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Can intuition be strengthened like a muscle? If so, what daily practices do you recommend to help people develop it?

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Oh, you gotta play. When you're ready to develop, it's really you gotta play because we receive the messages so many different ways. So we with obviously receiving it in four different ways to start with, we also receive it through the chakras. Sometimes you get these feelings through the chakras as well. The best way to develop your intuition is to play. When I say play, if you use your pendulum, oracle cards, angel cards, allowing yourself to be open to different areas. Some people like doing palm reading, some people like taking a piece out of the Bible, and then you allow the intuitive messages to come through about that section of the Bible. So it's all about playing. And I do mean playing. I want you to be lighthearted, I want you to be open, I want you to enjoy it. It's not meant to be a job, it's meant to be this beautiful connection, not a job. It becomes a job when you start getting a bit panicky and you go, okay, I need to have an answer for this. That becomes a job, and that's okay because we do get that way. But if you're learning to develop it, you will start to take on board experiences that you are feeling. One of the ones I wanted to tell you about, Deborah, was my partner and I were driving down the main highway on the Gold Coast here. Now we'd been talking about something, and anyway, the big billboard went past and he said, Did you just see that billboard had exactly what we were talking about? And I said, No, I didn't see it. We kept on going because it was a fair drive. And on the radio they started talking about it. And I said to him, Oh my goodness, they're talking about it now too. And he said, Oh, I didn't hear that. He needed to see the billboard going by. I needed to hear it to make it really stick. And these are the sort of things that I want you to be aware of. Those signs, those little moments, you know, when you get a song stuck in your head? Why is that song stuck in your head? There's an intuitive message behind it somewhere along the way. These are the sort of things to take into consideration. There's no such thing as chance, it's all synchronicity. Everything has been put in place for you so you can see it. And if you don't see it, they'll show you again. You know when you stump your toe and then you hit it three more times? Find out what stumping your toe on that foot means because that's that message coming through in a physical form.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

You talk about intuitive flower readings, and I'm wondering how much nature, you know, sometimes we really do need to stop and smell the roses. I'm out here in a desert environment, and you wouldn't think there'd be little hummingbirds, but there are from time to time. There are. Both of my parents have passed on, and I heard the connection where there's either butterflies or hummingbirds could be representative of a parent or a family member. So I'm wondering, is nature trying to get our attention? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah, absolutely. If you're seeing hummingbirds or butterflies, there's a reason behind it. Now, I know my sister turned around and said, Oh, I saw butterflies, there's this brown butterflies down here, and I'm sure they're mum. I'm sure it's mum trying to connect with me. Now, whether it is or not, does not matter at all. If she feels it's her mum trying to connect with her, you go with that because that's her intuition. That is how her spirit is guiding her. And that is just absolutely beautiful. Up here we have blue. We have blue butterflies coming around. And it's about us getting an understanding of it. So when you see a hummingbird, a butterfly, a gecko, and you have a thought of a family member or something that comes through with it, it is connected. Because why would you think about your mum or your dad when a hummingbird's there? There's a reason behind it, and that's where your intuition is starting to connect the two things. When we see a hummingbird, what does that mean to you? They seem to sit in mid-air, they're just amazing to look at, but behind the scenes, they are flapping their little wings like you wouldn't believe. Hard for the workers to get that nectar. Yes. Exactly. So even if it isn't connected to a parent or somebody who's passed, it could be connected to something else. And you start to look at it. Why is there all ants all over the place? What does ants mean? Oh, maybe I haven't been busy enough. Maybe I'm not asking the community to support me a little bit more. There's all these signs and the understanding behind them. Now, the same with the flowers. We can go into the flowers in the same sort of way. When we're looking at nature, there's a reason behind why everything is there. There is a reason behind why your plant grows and why one plant doesn't grow. There's all these understandings behind it. None of them are set in concrete. It's like reading dreams. They're all very subjective. We can get a better understanding of them. So, like your little hummingbird, it could mean mum's around. Or it could mean people are seeing me as just floating there and getting everything done, but actually, I'm really exhausted because I'm flapping my little wings just to get food on the table. So you've got those two little areas, or the other aspect is I'm so pretty, I'm so pretty, and everyone loves what. Watching me. But there's always different ways that we can look at it. What about doing readings? A ring in someone's palm can be so many different things. A ring could be an engagement, a marriage, a breakup if the ring's broken. It could mean you're going around and around in circles. You got into the same relationship and you're starting to go around and around in circles. So there's lots of different areas that we can look at when we're looking at different signs and symbols. And this is where I bring in the flower readings. What I didn't want to do with the flower readings is have people try and remember this particular flower means this. What I didn't also want is you're restricted to a deck of cards or you're restricted to what's growing in your local area when you're doing a live flower reading. Why should we be restricted? So I came up with this other aspect for flower readings, and that is reading an image of a flower. So you can choose any image in the world, and you know how many flower images there are on Google. Even if I said to you, pick a red rose, there's millions of them on Google, millions of pictures of red roses, some in bud, some in full bloom, some are got a little bit of white on them, some are in nature, some are cut, some are this, some are that. Some are when you're looking at a picture, some are to the left, some are to the right. You know, there's lots and lots of ways people can take a photo. You can pick a flower image. So that's what I do with the flower readings. We look at our goal. What goal do we want? What do we want to get, you know, whether it's out of life or I want more money? What's my financial goal? You start to think, okay, my financial goal. I want to feel, I want to have freedom, I want to, I want to have financial freedom. That's how it feels. And you get in touch with that feeling, and then you go, what colour? What color does financial freedom mean to you, Deborah? Like green for money. Green? Yep. And green is often green is often a financial freedom because you've got the green back in America. Yeah. So let's Google green flowers and you would look at all the green flowers, and one of them will give you the same sort of feeling. Your intuition will connect with the image that you see. And that is when we do the reading. You're not restricted to what's growing, you're not restricted to a card deck, you're not restricted to anything. All you're doing is then really honing in on your intuition. That picture there feels right. That feels like my financial freedom, that picture there. And then we do the reading on it. What mean? What do the stems mean? What do the leaves mean? Leaves are your guides. What are the petals meaning? Petals are about attraction. So, what do you need to put out there to attract the financial freedom you want?

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Interesting. But it all goes back to what we were talking about before about taking that pause, taking that five minutes, taking that just to absorb and listen.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

And that's so often what we are so bad at is listening with our own communication with between people. We seem to always want to talk over everybody and not really listen to what to what they have to say.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Yes. We want to be heard, and we do that over the detriment of other people.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Yeah. We want to feel validated by being heard.

unknown 25:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Interesting. So if we're not absorbing some of the information, we're not listening and getting an understanding, then it's not a two-way street. So you're just continuously throwing out your energy, but you're not actually getting energy back. It's a give and receive. I don't want to take it.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Okay, I like that. And how many of us are bad about receiving?

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Exactly. I don't want to take anything, but I have to learn to receive it.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

I can resonate with that. Something I have to work on. That's a good analogy. So for our listeners in the middle of a major life transition, what's one message does their intuition most need them to hear right now?

SPEAKER_00 26:09

Please be gentle with yourself. I know I gave myself help emotionally and mentally. It was like, should I have done this? Should I have done that? Well, just kept on going and going. Be gentle on yourself. You are doing the best you can do with the knowledge and the understanding that you have got now. It's easy to reflect back and say, oh, I should have done this and I should have done that. But if I hold on to that negative energy, all I'm doing is punishing myself. I don't need to do it now. So please be gentle with yourself. Just be gentle. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

If anyone wants to contact you or take your quiz on your website, what's the best way to do that?

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Uh the website is called intuitivenature.com.au. It's got the Australian business AU at the end. You can book readings there. You've got the quiz there, and I've got online courses to help you develop your intuition.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Great. And I'll put all of that in the show notes. Thank you, Susan, for a very informative discussion today. I know I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me on, Debra.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

All the best. And look after those people that are listening to you because that's what makes our job so much easier because we can just give and give, and it's so nice.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

It does. It does. All right. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Bent Not Broken. I hope that this episode reminded you that even through life's toughest moments, you are bent, not broken. If this message inspired you, please share, rate, review, and subscribe, as it helps us reach more women who are ready to rise and rebuild. And until next time, keep living bold and walking in your purpose.