Lost, Burned Out & Starting Over: How to Reconnect With Your True Self After Divorce | Laura Hoorweg

SPEAKER_00 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. What if the answers you've been searching for are already within you? You just need someone who can help you hear them. Today's guest, Laura Hoberk, is an intuitive coach, spiritual counselor, and a psychic medium who blends deep compassion with powerful, no-nonsense clarity. Known for her uncanny accuracy and soul level insight, Laura helps women break free from burnout, release emotional and energetic baggage, and reconnect with who they truly are. If you're at a crossroads, feeling stuck, or ready to step into your next chapter, this conversation is your invitation to go deeper. Because with Laura, you're not just scratching the surface, you're transforming from the inside out. Welcome, Laura, to Bent Not Broken.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Thanks, Deborah. That was a great intro.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Well, thank you. I'm excited for this conversation. Now you're known for seeing beyond the surface. What are some of the biggest signs someone has lost connection with their authentic self?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Well, one of the biggest things I find with people is the with women is they feel lost. They feel like they don't know who they are, and they feel like they're just going through the motions. So when and you this can happen at any age. Some some people it starts back. I'm finding now it's starting to happen earlier and earlier. It used to be more kind of like a midlife thing for women and men, but now thankfully the young people are getting on this trail of discovery much, much earlier in life, which is great. And the really little ones, I think, are coming in, and I don't think they'll lose it. Like we basically lost it when we came in because society, our parents, religion, our cultures, they all told us who we should be instead of helping us find out who we actually were. And so most of us got basically trained and brainwashed and hypnotized out of knowing who we are were authentic selves really were. But I'm really getting excited because I think a lot of the new kids who are coming in, they won't go through that phase. They will hold on to who they really are, which makes them somewhat challenging. But it's a good thing, it's not a bad thing.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Excellent. Now, for someone who feels stuck or overwhelmed, what are some of the most important practices to reconnect with who they truly are?

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Really connecting with yourself is really about giving yourself space because one of the ways that we keep ourselves away from that connection is busyness. Like we're also busy. I always say we become human doings instead of human beings. So it's really about allowing yourself the time and space to do it. Now there's different things work different for different people, but the things that I find most effective, number one for sure, is meditation. Okay. It's like in real estate, instead of location, location, location, it's meditation, meditation, meditation. Okay. Because what that does is it opens up a space for us to actually really starting to discover who we really are. It brings us into silence, it brings us into reflection, it brings us into contemplation. So that's one way. Another way is journaling. Again, that takes us out of our normal busyness and allows us to just start getting pulling things out of who we really are. Because there's a process of writing. If you notice with authors and with even musicians and songwriters, they'll tell you that they didn't really write whatever they wrote. Okay. It was almost like it was channeled through them. And that channeling is when you get in contact with who you really are and your connection to something greater. The other way is for a lot of people, and it was for myself, especially when I was younger, is through nature. Just being out in nature. The Japanese call it forest bathing. And in terms of, you know, it can be anything from a park to a wooded lot on your property. Actually, honestly, the more wilderness it is, the more pristine wilderness it is, the better because it has a very different vibration. But you want to get into anything you possibly can on a regular basis. So if it's a park, then great. It's better. If it's your backyard, just being out in nature is a good thing. But again, the more wilderness, true wilderness it is, the more powerful the energy. Okay. So those are actually really three of the biggest dynamic things that can help you to start that process of connecting to your authentic self.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

I'm curious because I am so guilty of the busyness. I'm questioning myself is like, am I afraid to sit down and meditate or journal because I don't want to find out what I'm going to find out?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Maybe is there a fear with this? That is a big factor for a lot of people. I think too, the older you are, you know, people have this fear of, you know, what happens if I discover there's this thing, you know, I just waste it three quarters of my life. But to me, that there's no such thing as wastage because everything that we do is a learning process. Because that's our whole job. Like when you think, you change your way of thinking and you realize that life on this earth is all about evolving our souls. That's why we're here. So there's no such thing as mistakes, there's no such thing as going down the wrong path. Because out of every experience, we're learning something. And we're so, you know, we're so caught up in deciding whether something's negative or positive. I don't think there's anything truly negative because everything is a learning experience.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

You talk about intuitive guidance. How can someone begin to trust their own inner voice, especially after years of self-doubt or external influence?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Well, the biggest way of trusting your own guidance is acting upon it. Because once you start acting upon something and you're seeing results, um, that gives you more confidence. And the other way is finding confirmation in different ways. Like that's what spirits always tell. They're not here for us to become dependent on them. They're mainly here to help us gain that confidence and give us confirmation so that we can trust our own intuition. They're here to help us connect with it, and they're here to help us give confirmation so that we can start trusting it and working with it more. So it's having the courage to simply follow your own intuition. Because the more you follow it and the more you get comfortable with it, and the more you see actual results from following it, the more confidence you're going to have in it, and the more confidence you're going to have the next time you get an intuitive spark and say, Oh, you know, I really feel like I should be doing this, or I'm really feeling like this is not the right thing for me. So it's really about action, taking action. Because if you just sit back and go, oh, it's just my imagination, or oh, you know, it's just wishful thinking, and you never do anything about it, well, then you're never going to gain any kind of confidence in it.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Good point. Many women listening are navigating some major life transitions. How can they tell the difference between fear and true intuitive guidance?

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Well, being hesitant is one thing, being truly fearful of something is something else. Because your your guides, your angels, your own intuition will never, you won't feel truly afraid. You might have still have some trepidation, you might still be a little bit wary, but that's different than actual fear. So it's really learning to distinguish between just feeling a little bit nervous or a little bit unsure of doing something and actual fear. Fear is there. People don't realize this. Fear is actually there to protect us. You know, there's a lot of people around that say, you know, I wish I was fearless. And they think that true courage is being fearless. That has nothing to do with courage. Okay. Courage and bravery are actually doing something, even regardless of the fact that you may be afraid of it. Okay, that's what real courage is. If you see somebody who you think is never afraid of anything, that's that's stupidity, that's ignorance, that's not true. That's just somebody being an idiot. You know, and if you look at a lot of these people who are doing really dangerous things or really crazy things, and they're like, Oh, I'm not afraid of anything. Well, good luck with that, because that's not courage, and it certainly isn't brave brain.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Past life work can feel mysterious to many. Can you explain what past life regression is and what someone can realistically expect from that experience?

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Okay, this is one subject where I have a lot of problems with. Okay, because past life regression, what you're talking about, that's a hypnotic process, and that can be a very dangerous thing. There were some people who are very, very skilled at it, but most of those people are no longer with us. And there's a lot of people out there because the problem is that number one, when you're in a hypnotic state, you're extremely vulnerable to suggestion. Okay. So you can actually have false memories. I'm not even saying the people who are doing it are doing it intentionally, it's just that's part of the process. The other part of the process is if you're doing a regression with somebody who doesn't really know what they're doing, they can severely, severely traumatize you. Because real regression is where you're taken to back to past lives, and it's like you're standing outside of the experience and you're watching a movie. If you're not dealing with somebody who really knows how to take you through that process, what ends up where the people are actually in the experience? Okay, they're they're feeling the actual emotions, and that can be extremely traumatizing because, as we all know, your brain doesn't know the difference. If you're feeling the emotions, it doesn't know the difference between it being real and being something that's simply being remembered. That's why visualization works in the first place. So, this is why I'm saying that there's two huge dangers with the actual process of hypnotizing somebody and going through some kind of regression if you don't have an absolute expert involved in the process. One is extreme trauma, and two is the implantation of false memories, which both are devastating to the person. So the bottom line is I don't recommend going through that kind of a process.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Now, what I do with people is I can go back and I can see elements of past lives and I can give them the uh information, and also my team can source out where the true healing comes from is when we find a situation and the energies and the situation that has been brought forward from past life into this life, which is triggering some kind of trauma or some kind of wounding in this particular lifetime. And sometimes just okay, I'll give you a good example in my own experience. When I was a teenager, way back when, there was a style where they had those little neckerchiefs, those cotton neckerchiefs. Everybody's wearing those, okay? And at the time, it was a good thing that that was the style. Because for about a year and a half, I had this horrible rash around my neck. And I was going to the doctors and they were giving me all these different preparations, these different creams, and they kept telling me that it was eczema. One told me it was psoriasis. There was like three or four different diagnoses. And every time I got a different diagnosis, I got a different cream. Well, the problem was that every time I got a cream, it would all take it down to the point where it was like it was almost healed, it was almost gone away, and then boom, it flared back. And this went on for about a year and a half, and it was really horrible. And then finally, one day, it was really funny the way it happened, synchronistic, because I don't believe in accidents and I don't believe in coincidence. Fran, she goes, Well, take the scarf off. She says, I want to look at this. So she's looking at it and she goes, You know what? That looks like a rope burn. And as soon as she said that, it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, all these things went off inside of me. And I realized that this was actually a rope burn, and it was because I was hung, not just one lifetime, but several lifetimes I had been hung. And soon as I, even just the revelation of realizing what this was, this whole rash went away, like within, oh my god, like less than a day. Okay, without any creams or anything like that, just the revelation of knowing what it was from healed that energy. It went away, and I have never experienced it since. So it hit that's how powerful these things are. And a lot of times, just knowing what the situation in the past life was can totally heal that situation in this particular lifetime, the carryover of that particular energy. So it's not necessary to feel all the feelings and have to go literally through the experience in order to clear that energy and to release that energy to heal it. Sometimes, a lot of times, just knowing what happened and have some idea of when that was and why it happened can heal it in of itself. This is why I don't believe that these big hypnotic sessions are necessary in order to clear these energies because it's that simple. Just knowing it said healing people through conscious awareness. So sometimes all we need to know is to have a conscious awareness of what's actually happened to us, and we can heal that without even having to go through any kind of emotional stress again. There's no reason having to put yourself in danger of re-traumatizing yourself or having to live the emotions again in order to heal things. That's the bottom line. You can heal them in other ways by just consciously being aware of them. Because most of these things, even past, not only current things from this lifetime, but even past life things are usually at a subconscious level. And as long as they're in the subconscious, we don't have a conscious awareness of them. So this is why it's so hard to heal them. But once we have that conscious awareness, sometimes that in of itself is enough to let go of that energy and just release it and heal just by being consciously aware.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

So is this the same as like breaking generational curses?

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Okay, number one, I prefer that people don't use that word curse. Okay, because curses are things that cannot hurt you unless you believe in curses. Okay, there really is no such thing. What you're really talking about is generation. Some people call it generational karma, some people call it, I usually call it ancestral karma. Ancestral karma are simply energies that are carried over from one generation to the next. And the the way that they're carried over is through the DNA. That's why they're ancestral. Because they've discovered this now. We've known this spiritually for a long time. DNA is not just chemical, like the scientific world always believed that DNA was simply chemicals, it's actually energetic. And this is why the energies of these different traumas or different, sometimes I call them life lessons, are carried. We usually uncompleted life lessons are carried on from one generation to the next. So when you're talking about healing ancestral karma, healing yourself is breaking that chain. So if you heal it in your own lifetime, not only are you healing yourself, but you're also healing at a minimum, seven generations back and seven generations forward. So the way to clear ancestral karma is by healing yourself. And because of reincarnation, we can actually be our own great-great-great-grandmother. So if you want to look at it that way, not only are you healing yourself in this life, you're healing yourself in past lives. Not only your relatives, but you can actually be healing your own past life. You are, in effect, healing your own past life wounds. Okay. And you're also not only healing, actually, I hadn't thought about it this way before, not only are you healing that ancestral karma for your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, but if you look at it the same way, you could also be healing yourself in the future, okay? Because we actually reincarnate into our soul families. And our soul families are basically made up of our genetic families, plus friends and all kinds of relatives and people around us, because we tend to keep incarnating into the same soul family time and time again, because we're trading, learning lessons and not only learning lessons from each other, but also instituting lessons for other people, which is part of what we agreed to do before we come into each lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Okay. You often help clients uncover brute wounds and hidden beliefs. What's one common pattern you see that keeps women stuck in cycles or even self-sacrifice?

SPEAKER_01 20:47

This is the greatest wound to humanity of all wounds. And I think it's particularly prevalent in women in the female gender is self-worth issues. Feeling not good enough. Uh, because it has been perpetuated in women, because women are taught basically from the second they arrive on earth that everybody else is more important than they are, that they're here to serve everyone else. Their needs, wants, and aspirations come second to everyone else, not only the males, but also children, parents, everyone, but now. So the biggest thing that I find holding back women is a feeling, a lack of self-worth and a lack of worthiness. They sound like they're the same thing, but they're not quite the same thing. Okay, so this is really what holds people back, and this affects men as well, but it's a little bit different the way that it manifests in men. And it's not quite the same. Women feel an innate lack of worth where men tend to experience a lack of worth because of things that they do or don't do once they're here. Because it's like women from the time that they're very, very young girls think of themselves as unworthy. Males tend to think of themselves as unworthy if they don't reach certain benchmarks that society describes for them. Yes. So it's a little bit different. And sometimes men too, from a young age, can feel, especially if as boys, they're, you know, they go through different kinds of traumas, they can also from a very young age feel a sense of worthlessness, but it's not, it's in a different way. It's in a different way, but it's just as dis debilitating as it is for women. You know, it's just, and I think now the way the culture has shifted, I think actually you're finding more and more of that with young males, that they're they're actually feeling a worthlessness the same way as a lot of young girls are. And I think that's why you're finding more and more anxiety issues.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

You describe your work as both grounded and mystical. What does holistic self-care actually look like in real everyday life?

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Wow, it's actually extremely practical. There's four pillars to self-care there's physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It's like four legs of a chair. And holistic is working with all four of those pillars. It's not the same for every person, but there's different flavors, different variations. And it's really about finding out what you're most comfortable with and what really works for you. The physical stuff is pretty universal. How you do it is very individualistic, but it's universal in terms of physical self-care. It's making sure you get healthy food into you, which is non-processed fresh food. I don't care what diet plan you're on. And when I say diet plan, I mean if you're a vegan, if you're a vegetarian, if you're a meat eater, if you're an omnipotent, which one of those do you subscribe to? Or none of them. But the real thing is about whole unprocessed foods, as natural as you can possibly get and afford. That's number one. The other one is huge. It's quality water. And this sounds simplistic, but it's not these days. And I'm not talking about bottled water, by the way. Bottled water is a fallacy. Most of the bottled water is full of crap. Okay, whether it's added salt, whether it's stuff that leaches from these horrible plastic bottles that it's sold in. And people think that bottled water is better quality water. It's not, okay. What you need is properly filtered water from as clean a source as you can get, and then it's filtered through filters, okay. The other thing is physical is exercise. And I'm not talking about being in the gym, I'm talking about being active. And like I said, that can look like totally different things for different people. And the fourth thing of physicality is sleep, okay? So it's quality food, quality water, quality activity. Let's call it activity instead of exercise. And the fourth is sleep. Those are the four pillars of physical self-care. The next one is mental. And mental is again about taking care of your mental health. And one of the biggest ways to take the reins of your own mental health is meditation, meditation, meditation. There's other things you can do too. It sort of goes back to some of the physical things. If you want to be healthy mentally, you have to have quality sleep. The other thing is you also have to have that exercise, that that activity that also plays a big role in your mental health. The other thing is relationships, and this is huge in this day and age, is making sure that you're cultivating real person-to-person, not this all the time. There is some good things about this in terms of having, you know, friends online.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

And things like you're referring to the Zoom meetings. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Yeah, there's there's good stuff to that too. But people need to have one-on-one physical relationships. Okay. That we are tribal beings. We need to have close relationships. That is absolutely paramount for, and that's why so many people, that's why there's becoming a mental health crisis, by the way. The other thing is actual family and friend relationships, actual loved relationships, okay, in your life. And that goes on to the next one in terms of emotional health. All those see, everything's connected. Everything is connected in this world. And in order to be emotionally healthy, you have to have good, strong emotional relationships. And when I say emotional relationships, I'm not talking just about relationships with others, I'm talking about the relationship with yourself, which is one of the biggest ones that people fall down on. Because if you don't have a healthy emotional relationship with yourself, I guarantee you, you're not going to be able to have a healthy emotional relationship with others. Okay. And the last one is spiritual. Now, again, this can take a multitude of forms. The bottom line here is we as humans have to have some kind of connection with something greater than ourselves. And I don't care what you believe in, it doesn't matter whether you're religious, you're spiritual, you're not religious, you're connected to nature. I don't care what it is, there has to be some kind of connection to something greater than yourself. So that is all four pillars. And like I said, every one of those pillars has the basic needs or requirements, but how you manifest them on an individual level can look very different from person to person, or it can look very similar to others. It's really making sure that all four of those components are there, and then you are a strong person. And that's the thing that builds resilience. And I'm telling you, in this world and going forward, resiliency is the most important thing. So if you're if you want to not only survive but thrive, you need to have a very high level of resiliency mentally, emotionally, and physically, and spiritually for that matter, is the people who are can stay in hope and can stay in a positive mindset, a real positive mindset, not you know, unicorns and butterfly type ridiculous realistic, realistic. Okay, that's a good word. Is people who go into fear, that's what they don't want us to do. Because if you go into fear, that's when you go start going down the drain. Okay, you you infect your mental, emotional, your physical being, and you're also extremely easy to manipulate. People that's when you know, when the powers that be, regardless of who we're talking about at that particular moment, they love to have people in fear because people in fear are really easy to manipulate. If you want to stay strong and level-headed, you need to stay in realistic, positive frame of mind and think. Because when people are in fear, they can't think. Right. Okay, you go into the limbic system of your brain and you lose this, which is your cognitive center, your higher brain, where you can actually discern and think things through logically. People who are in fear are in their limbic system in the old fight or flight portions of the brain, and that's why they're so easy to manipulate. Well, that's funny. We started with that whole idea. The whole idea of why we're here is to uh evolve our souls because this is why we're so challenged when we're here. People always ask me, like, why is life so challenging? Let's face it, life can be pretty demanding and pretty brutal at times and not always fair. Like, you know, you're looking for fair, you're on the wrong planet, okay? But the reason is is because that is the way that we evolve most rapidly, okay, in terms of our soul development. We also evolve on the other side, but it's extremely slow, okay. Just look at it when everything's going right, and you're, you know, it's la-da-da-da-da, and you don't have to deal with anything, you're not really evolving. You're just kind of going along with the flow. Everything's easy. You're not really thinking about any kind of personal development. You're not forced to really look at yourself in the mirror and go, oh, you know, maybe I should be changing some things. Okay. You're just, it's la-di-da-di-da. So that's basically what it's like on the other side. So that's why your development on the other side is so slow. This is why people are literally, okay, I know this is hard for people to understand, but literally people are lined up, they're queued up to get into this planet, okay? Because they know that this is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, plays in the whole universe to expand at your soul on a soul level, and to do it in a very quick, very efficient manner is schoolhouse earth. I've been told over and over again that earth is totally different than any other place in the universe for that reason, which is the reason that it's the only planet of free will. Because our free will is what gets us into trouble. That is what really generates our lessons because we can make choices and kinds of different choices, and depending on, you know, think of your hand, there could be five different roads that you have a choice to go down, and every one of those involves different challenges. So it doesn't make one necessarily worse than the other. You know, I always say if you see somebody who has had or is having a really difficult life, they came in with a plan to evolve their soul on a very rapid, in a very rapid rate. Because the more challenge that is involved in somebody's life, the bigger the plan they came in with to evolve themselves in a very short period of time. There's some people who come into this lifetime with a plan to clear the karma and the energies from 10 different past lifetimes, and they decided to do it all in one lifetime. That is the reason that they are having such an incredibly challenging life. And those people are very brave. So I always say to people, don't look down on somebody if you see them having an incredibly difficult life, because that is a soul that's come in with a huge mission to really evolve themselves in a very short period of time.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

Interesting. Laura, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. For our listeners, is there a way? Do you have a website, a way to get a hold of you if they want to know more, a book, all that good stuff?

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Okay. Well, my website is ww.spirit speaks to the number two.me. You can also find me on all over Facebook, all over Instagram, so I'm on LinkedIn. And I know our wonderful hostess is going to have all my links in the show notes. Absolutely. If you want to contact me directly and you know set up a session or find out some information, super easy. It's just Laura Horwig at gmail.com. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Perfect. Thank you again, Laura. It's been a great discussion. Take care. Thanks, me. Bye. 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.