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She has her hand over her sternum.
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We're on a one-on-one call.
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And she says, I know exactly why I do this.
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Then five minutes later, mid-sentence, she does it again.
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Goes quiet, agrees to something she didn't want, laughs it off.
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I don't say anything about it yet.
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I just watch her catch herself, catch herself.
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You're listening to The Emotional Truth, somatic healing and nervous system regulation for the midlife woman who's done everything right and still feels stuck.
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I'm Leslie Turner, somatic practitioner and intuitive coach.
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I work in the body.
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I work intuitively, and I have a pretty uncanny ability to see what's actually running underneath.
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The stuff that therapy touched but never quite moved.
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Because understanding why you do something and actually stopping it are two completely different things, and that's exactly where we work.
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We cover people pleasing, mom burnout, perimenopause, relationships, money, and what it actually costs the woman who's always been the responsible one.
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Short episodes, real stories, specific enough to stop you in your tracks.
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Let's get into it.
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Last episode, I told you about a belief that outlived the story that made sense to it.
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A woman who'd processed the memory completely and was still being run by the conclusion her body drew from it.
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A few of you wrote in after that one, and almost every message said some version of the same thing.
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I already know this about myself.
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I could tell you my pattern in one sentence.
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Why am I still doing it?
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That's exactly where this client was.
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She wasn't confused about her pattern or her stories.
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She could name it faster than I could.
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Going quiet, agreeing when she meant no, laughing off a boundary before she even finished thinking it.
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She had the language for all of it.
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What she didn't have was a way back into her body in the actual moment it was happening.
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So every time she'd catch herself two minutes too late, already having said yes, already having gone quiet, and just feel the familiar wave of frustration that comes right after that.
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She goes, I know better than this.
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So why didn't it change anything?
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She's on a virtual call with me.
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I have requested that she put her hand over her heart and her stomach.
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And for about two seconds, she's actually there.
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And then her brain grabs the wheel and goes, Oh, it's probably because of my sister.
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She said this this morning.
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And it always happens when and I said, No, no, no, no, no, no.
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I stop her.
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Stay here.
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Stay here with me.
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Don't make sense of this yet.
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Don't let your brain engage with this right now.
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This is about the body.
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It takes two or three rounds of me saying that before she actually stays put.
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Because every single time there's been discomfort, she finds the reason for it.
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And then the second she finds the reason, she fixes it.
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And just like that, she's gone.
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Back up into her head, three steps past the sensation she never actually let herself feel.
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And this isn't about fixing.
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This is about noticing.
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This is about letting a part of you that's uncomfortable or in pain or feeling the tension be honored instead of bypassed, buried, numbed, or shuffled behind the next 17 things on your to-do list.
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That part of her deserves to be heard before it gets explained away.
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There's a part that's easy to miss.
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Knowing and shifting live in two different places.
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Knowing something about yourself lives in the part of you that can explain yourself at brunch, that can text your best friend in a paragraph breaking down exactly why you reacted the way you did.
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Shifting lives somewhere lower, in the breath, in the shoulders, in whatever's happening in your chest right before you say the thing you didn't mean to say.
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You can be completely fluent in the first language, and never once set foot in the second one.
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This does not mean you're flawed.
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It's just two different systems, and only one of them responds to explaining.
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Think about it this way: you already know that your body doesn't wait for permission from your thinking mind.
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Someone tosses you something, and without warning, your hands are already up, already ready to catch it, before any part of you decided to catch it.
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Nobody chose that.
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The body ran a program it already had loaded faster than insight could get there first.
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I said this on last week's podcast.
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That's the same system underneath every pattern we're talking about on this show.
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And it means the way into that pattern isn't through more insight.
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It's meeting the system on its own terms.
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So back to this virtual call with my client.
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Once I finally got her to stay, hand on chest, hand on belly, not explaining, not fixing.
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I asked her just to find whatever was actually happening under her hands in that exact second.
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And she said she felt something tight, kind of solid there.
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I asked her not to change that, not yet.
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Just to say silently, I see you.
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I see you, tightness.
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You're welcome here.
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And take three deep breaths.
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Nothing more than that.
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And then her whole body went quiet in a completely different way.
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This quiet had her still in the moment.
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And she said, Oh, that's different than what I usually do, which is figure it out and then tell it to calm down.
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And that's the work right there.
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Most of us have spent years getting better at explaining our reactions and zero time actually meeting them.
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Because explaining is fast.
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You can do it in a sentence out loud to a friend, to your therapist, to yourself in the car.
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Meeting it takes longer to learn.
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And it doesn't come from a book because a book can't put its hand on your chest and sit there.
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Let me give you the other version of this: the one that isn't a client on a call, the one that's just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or morning.
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Maybe you're making a beverage, a coffee.
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The dog's been fed, one kid's yelling from the couch, Mom, I'm hungry.
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Like you haven't heard them the first four times.
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Your jaws tight from clenching it in your sleep again.
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There's a headache sitting low right in the back of your head, and you're tired in a way that doesn't actually make sense because you slept fine.
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Nothing huge is even wrong today.
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And underneath all of it, you're genuinely grateful, grateful for your life, for what you've built, and also quietly scared that it's not going to change because it's been a few years of the same thing.
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And some part of you are starting to wonder if you're the problem.
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And standing there, listening to the coffee percolate, the old track starts up.
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I'm not enough.
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I'm not doing enough.
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I'm not marketing this business well enough.
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I'm not entertaining the kids well enough.
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I'm not working out enough.
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My body's changing, and I'm not, and it doesn't stop on its own.
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It just keeps stacking one knot enough onto the last one until you're four thoughts deep and you missed whatever your kid actually said to you.
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That's the moment.
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Not later.
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In 20 quiet minutes, you don't actually have right there, jaw tight, headache low in the shoulders and the skull, spiral running in circles.
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That's when this has to work.
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So instead of riding the spiral all the way down, you pause, one hand, wherever the tightness actually is.
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Maybe it's not your job, maybe it's lower in your stomach, holding the whole morning, and you say silently, I see you.
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It's okay.
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We're safe here.
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Not, I'll deal with you later.
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Not shut up so I can finish making coffee.
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The same line every time until your body starts to recognize it as true, instead of just something nice you're saying to get through the moment.
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That moment isn't your inner work failing you.
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It's just proof of exactly what I'm describing.
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The insight arrived a long time ago, and the body never got the memo.
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So let's actually do what this woman did right now, together, wherever you're listening from.
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Now, if you're driving, keep your eyes where they need to be and just do this with your attention instead of your hand.
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Otherwise, one hand on your chest, one on your stomach, or wherever pulls your attention first, not wherever you think it's supposed to go.
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Don't try to change what's there.
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So take a deep breath here and notice.
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Notice if there's anywhere in your body that feels tight, heavy, buzzy, hollow, whatever word shows up first is correct.
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Now silently say to it, I see you.
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Not I'm fixing you.
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Not calm down, just I see you.
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You're allowed to be here.
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And then go one layer further.
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Because this is the part most people skip straight past.
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Ask the sensation one question.
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Is it moving or is it holding completely still?
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Notice what it's doing.
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If it's holding still, that's usually abracing.
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Embracing is trying to protect you.
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You don't have to figure out what it's protecting you from.
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Don't give meaning to this just yet.
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That's your explaining brain trying to sneak back in through the side door.
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You're just receiving whatever comes the way you'd receive a text from someone before you've decided how to respond to it.
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So stay here, taking some deep breaths, and ask, is there anything you want to tell me?
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I want to tell you what usually gets in the way here, because it gets in the way for almost everyone the first few times you do it.
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The first is in patience.
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You do it once, nothing dramatic happens, and you decide, this must not have worked.
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It's not supposed to be dramatic.
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You're not looking for a lightning bolt.
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You're looking for a slightly different relationship to the sensation that you had 10 seconds ago.
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The second is the urge to immediately start fixing what you found.
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The second you notice the tightness, some part of you wants to breathe it away, stretch it out, talk yourself out of it.
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Let that part wait.
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Witnessing and fixing are not the same motion.
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And fixing too early is just explaining again wearing another costume.
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The third is feeling silly.
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You probably feel a little silly the first time.
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Do it anyway.
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The part of you that feels silly is not the part you're trying to reach.
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That's it.
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That's the whole practice.
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Two minutes, maybe less, because it's easy to hear something that short and assume it was too small to count.
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It wasn't small.
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That's body-based work in its most basic form.
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It's not necessarily a framework that you memorize it.
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There's no five-step protocol to this.
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Just a felt shift you can access anywhere, including standing in your kitchen on a Tuesday with a kid tucking at your shirt and a meal not yet prepared.
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I see this exact gap in almost everyone who comes to me.
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Women who can recite their attachment style like a resume and still go silent in a meeting the second someone disagrees with her.
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Women who understand intellectually completely that they're allowed to rest and still can't make themselves sit down because it's only safe when they're busy and productive and making something of value.
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Women who've done years of therapy can tell you exactly where their pattern started and still watch themselves repeated at the dinner table.
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None of them are missing information.
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What you're missing is a practiced way back into the body live in the moment it actually counts, not after.
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Not in the version they tell their therapist about next week.
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That's the actual difference between hearing about a two-minute practice in an episode and doing it with someone in the room who's watching for what you don't say out loud.
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What you just did alone for three breaths, that's the smallest version of what we build together, one-on-one, every single time.
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Or when we meet in the intuitive circle.
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Every intuitive circle meeting is asking you, what's live for you right now?
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What has triggered you?
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What is your body holding?
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And we go into it.
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Each member goes into it.
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And then I teach you something about this, the emotional patterns.
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And we go into an actual somatic practice of what this can feel like to not carry it with you for the rest of the week.
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This is not more information coming at you.
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This is a practiced way back into your body with me right there, catching what you'd miss on your own.
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I want to thank you for being here.
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If you're here and listening, you're already doing this work.
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And this is what we do every other week in the circle.
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Come try it.
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If this episode landed somewhere, don't just let it sit there.
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That feeling you have right now, that's not a coincidence.
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That's your nervous system telling you something is ready to move.
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The Intuitive Circle is my membership where we stop circling around it and actually move through it twice a month, live with me, body-based, real time, and specific to what's actually running for you.
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Doors are open right now.
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Go grab your spot at Leslie Turner.ca slash the intuitive circle.
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And if this was the episode that made you pull over and think, wait, is she talking about me?
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Please subscribe, leave a review, and send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it.
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You know exactly who I'm talking about.
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You can find me on Instagram at the Leslie Turner.
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Until next time, the fact that you're here and listening means you're already doing this work.