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What if the thing you've spent your whole life managing didn't need to be managed anymore?
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What if it could actually move through you and be released?
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That's what four women showed me this year.
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Not by talking about healing, but by actually doing it.
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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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Today's episode is different from most.
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I'm not going to teach you a framework or walk you through a new idea.
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I'm going to do something simpler and honestly a little harder.
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I'm going to hand this over to the work itself.
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These are real transformations from real women that I've had the privilege and honor of sitting across from.
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Women who came in circling the same story, the same exhausted version of themselves, and found their way to something different.
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I'm sharing four of their journeys today, along with a few shorter glimpses into what this work actually creates.
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Before I do, there is a theme in Who Tends to Come and Sit Across From Me.
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They are the eldest daughters, the ones who function like a CEO of everyone else's life, the therapists and healers who hold space for the world, the moms who quietly organize everything so it doesn't fall apart.
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Do you recognize yourself here?
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You'll notice it as we go.
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I won't point it out every time, but listen for it.
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And before I share these with you, I want to say something important.
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These stories come from real clients, women who trusted me with some of the hardest, most tender parts of their lives.
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To protect that trust, I've changed identifying details and in some cases gently combined pieces of different journeys together.
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So if something sounds familiar, please know it isn't a retelling of a story specifically.
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But what I never change is the truth underneath it, what actually shifted, what actually healed.
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Let's start with a woman who taught me something about grief that I hadn't fully understood until we worked together.
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That love and resentment can live in the same body at the same time without canceling each other out.
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This is story one, and I call it the caretaker.
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I worked with a woman who spent years caring for a parent who was slowly declining in health.
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She showed up every day.
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Meals, appointments, the parts that nobody really sees.
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But underneath that, the caretaking was a very old story.
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Because when she was a kid, that same parent wasn't there for her.
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Not in the way she needed it.
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There was abandonment baked into the relationship long before those roles had to reverse.
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She's the one who remembers everyone's birthday, who shows up with the soup before anyone has to ask, who apologizes for taking up space in the middle of running herself into the ground.
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So when her parent finally passed, what she felt wasn't simple at all.
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It was grief, yeah, real grief, because she loved them, but it was also relief.
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And right beside that relief was guilt for feeling relief at all.
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And then underneath that, an old current of anger she'd never had room to feel because she spent her whole life being the one who showed up, the one who didn't get to fall apart.
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We worked through what it means to grieve someone you loved and resented at the same time, to let both be true without one canceling the other out.
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They're not in contradiction with each other.
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But that's what love looks like when it's tangled up with an old wound.
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What strikes me now, looking back at her story, is how much of the caretaking came from a nervous system that had learned decades earlier that being needed was the only safe way to stay connected, stay loved.
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That same wiring shows up in a lot of the women I work with.
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It just looks a little different each time.
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Story two, the one who couldn't rest.
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I
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worked with a woman who is, by most standards, absolutely brilliant.
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She's the one with the plan, the one holding it together, the one everyone else leans on, and she could not rest.
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Not wouldn't, actually couldn't.
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She makes lists in her head before she's even out of bed.
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Sitting still for more than a few minutes makes her feel itchy and vaguely guilty that she's should be doing something else.
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Even on vacation, she packs a project with her.
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Because somewhere early on, slowing down stopped being safe.
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If she wasn't rising to the occasion, organizing everyone else, producing something of value, being needed, some part of her believed that something bad was going to happen.
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So her nervous system learned one setting: hustle.
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Go, go, go, go, go.
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I remember one session where she tried to describe a weekend that she'd actually let herself do nothing, and she couldn't even get through a sentence without laughing at herself.
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Like the idea was almost embarrassing to admit out loud.
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That's how deep the wiring went.
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Rest was not neutral for her.
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It registered as risky.
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The work with her wasn't teaching her how to manage her time better.
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It was teaching her body that rest wasn't a risk anymore, that she could stop and nothing would fall apart, including her.
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Not every pattern, though, shows up as busyness and avoidance.
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Sometimes what a person is protecting isn't productivity and hustle.
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It's a connection to something much bigger than any one relationship.
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And this next story is about a different kind of loss.
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This is story three, the grief of a loss that doesn't resolve.
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I worked with a woman living through a kind of loss that doesn't really have an end point.
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The grief of losing someone who was literally a part of her.
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She's the one who says, I'm okay, before you've even finished asking her how she is.
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Who keeps moving, keeps doing, keeps showing up because stopping means feeling it, and feeling it has always seemed like too much.
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For a long time, staying busy was the only thing that made the feeling bearable.
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Movement instead of stillness, because stillness was where it caught up to her.
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Part of the work was simply letting her stop running from it long enough to find out what was actually there.
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What shifted wasn't that the grief disappeared, it's that she found a way to walk with it instead of being flattened by it.
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She started to feel like she could see the beauty in her life again and to carry forward the part of her that was lost in a way that let that love keep shining instead of just being buried under the weight of it.
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That's a lot of the work, not resolving grief, but learning to live inside of it differently.
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Now, loss doesn't always mean someone dying.
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Sometimes it's a version of your life ending, a relationship, an identity, a sense of who you thought you could trust.
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That's where this next woman was when she came to me.
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This is story four, the one who stopped overriding her gut.
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She came to me in the middle of a huge personal transition, grieving something significant, her anxiety through the roof, her nervous system stuck in fight or flight so consistently it had started to feel less like a state and more like her actual personality.
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One of the biggest shifts came when she started listening to what her gut had already been telling her, instead of talking herself out of it.
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She'd catch a read on a person or a decision and immediately start second guessing it.
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But slowly, by working together session by session, she learned to just believe herself.
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The proof showed up in her body too.
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In one of our in-person sessions, she worked through tension she'd been carrying in her back and shoulders for years, tension that had nowhere to go until it finally did.
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And it didn't get managed down, it got integrated.
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Step by step, she learned to let herself feel things instead of rushing past them.
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And now, on the other side of that transition, she carries herself differently, like someone who trusts what she knows instead of needing someone else to confirm it first.
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These are very different women.
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A caretaker learning to hold grief and relief at the same time, a woman learning that rest wouldn't undo her, a woman learning to carry love forward instead of burying it, a woman learning to trust her own gut again in her mind and in her body.
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These are different circumstances, different ages, different chapters of life.
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But underneath every one of them is the same thing.
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A body that learned a long time ago to protect itself in a very specific way.
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A body that, with the right kind of attention, could learn something different.
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These are not four unrelated stories.
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These are a pattern showing up in four different lives.
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And it's a similar pattern I see in some form in almost every woman who sits across from me.
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These are a couple more examples.
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A woman whose adult children are struggling with addiction and mental health, who loves them fiercely and has also had to learn that love and boundaries aren't opposites, that protecting her own peace isn't abandoning them.
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A woman rebuilding her relationship to her own body after years of abuse taught her that it wasn't safe to listen to her own intuition.
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Because if she had, she would have known the truth long before she let herself see it.
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Different women, different stories, different chapters of their life, but on the other side of the work, something similar shows up in every single one of them.
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They feel lighter, more of themselves, more in touch with who they actually are and what they actually need.
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They know themselves not by what happened to them, but by who they are underneath it.
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They're empowered in a way that never felt possible before, confident enough to take bigger leaps forward for the first time in years, and centered in who they really are.
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That's not just about how they feel, that's how they see the world.
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And that's the biggest shift.
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That's what's actually possible.
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If you recognize yourself in any of these stories and you want to see what's on the other side of your own patterns, please come talk to me.
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We can look at what actually fits your time, your budget, and your life right now.
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And remember, if you're here and listening, you're already doing this work.
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We'll see you soon.
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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.