Ep. 6 Running With The Truth (How to Stop Ego-Based Striving and Trust Your Inner Voice)

The year of the horse has a different energy - and if you felt a shift coming, you weren't imagining it. This episode is about what it actually means to step into a new year after a season of shedding what was never really yours. We talk about letting go of striving that comes from ego rather than truth, reclaiming your inner voice, and what it looks like to start a year aligned instead of just ambitious.

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

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Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Welcome to the first intuitive drop of 2026. Now take a deep breath with me just for a second. Inhale and exhale. Because we've made it. There's something about the start of the year that feels kind of different. Not like a reset button or a clean slate. Those feel too neat, I suppose, but like a threshold, a doorway into a new energetic chapter. We're closing out the long, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes liberating season of the snake. That shedding, dissolving, releasing of everything that wasn't ours to carry. And now we step into the gear of the horse, which brings in motion, clarity, power, and truth. The horse doesn't hide. The horse doesn't wait for permission. The horse just runs. And the question I keep feeling my head with or feeling in my body, maybe you felt it too, is what truth are you ready to run with? Because those old ways, they're kind of crumbling right now. The endless striving for money, more prestige, more visibility, more doing. It's losing its charge. And this isn't because ambition is bad. It's because ambition that comes from ego and fear is unsustainable. Maybe you've noticed this. Maybe you're resting as you enter January. I know I am. Maybe you're going softly into this month as opposed to setting lofty goals and resolutions. I do believe people are waking up. The collective nervous system is saying, enough. We're craving success that feels real and an impact that feels clean, maybe even a way of living that doesn't burn us out. Are you claiming that for 2026? So this past year, I got to work with women from all across the country. Women in business, women in motherhood, women in big transitions. And no matter what their story looked like on the surface, there was this shared current underneath it all. A quiet but powerful return to their inner truth. One woman had spent most of her life outsourcing her decisions and her worth, her self-worth, to everyone else. Her family, bosses, partners, even spiritual mentors. She learned early that her voice didn't hold as much weight as others. So she stopped trusting it. When we started to work together, her intuition was so clear, but she didn't trust it yet. I remember saying to her, you already know the answer to this. And then watch as tears and emotions welded up because she knew she did. She'd been conditioned to ignore this very real truth. Now, over time of working together, she started listening more inward instead of scanning outwards for other people's opinions. And little by little she stopped asking for permission and started responding to her own inner guidance. And now she hasn't second-guessed herself in months. That's not a coincidence. This is confidence. That's the nervous system remembering what safety feels like. And that's a woman returning to her natural state of inner authority. When we would were taught right from the get-go to ignore that. And that's the shedding we're talking about, the release of that old programming that said, your voice isn't valid. Because there's no truth in that. There never has been, but certainly not now. Another client's story still kind of gets me, it moves me every time I think about it. She is one of those women who can hold everything: work, family, community, expectations. She's the one that always rises to the occasion and she's been doing it her entire adult life. But she was so tired, burnt out, yeah, running on fumes, and still trying to smile through it all. She kept saying, I just need permission to do it my way. And that line, permission to do it my way, really stuck with me because how many of us are still waiting for someone to hand us that permission slip. Now, when we traced it back, we found that her inner child, the little girl who got praised for being good and obedient and the helpful one, the one who cleaned up quietly and didn't make waves, the one who learned that love came from compliance and not rocking the boat. And she realized, oh, I've been living this pattern my entire life. And that part that had been punished for being too much, too loud, too opinionated. She was still running the show in the background. And the moment she saw that, she took her power back. She gave herself permission. And the thing is, she didn't swing into rebellion. I've swung into rebellion before, and anger and rage from decades of being the good girl. But she didn't. She became softened, I suppose, to the truth. She didn't let herself get hard and closed off. She honestly became more free. And that's what this new energy is about: not overthrowing everything, but dissolving the false identities that we have built to survive. I really believe this isn't just individual work anymore. It's collective. You can feel it in the air, in the conversations, in the way people are questioning things they used to accept without a thought. The old egoic systems, the ones built on scarcity and comparison and fear, they're losing their grip. We've lived through years of being told what to fear, what to chase, who to be. And it's not, it's not that fear doesn't exist anymore. It's just not working the same way. People aren't buying into it like they used to. We're seeing, I guess, behind the curtain, essentially, there's a the psyops of fear, the control separation. They relied on us having dysregulated nervous systems. Because when people are anxious and running a mile a minute, they're easier to control. But when people are grounded in their truth, they are impossible to manipulate. Because calm people, calm, grounded people, they make different choices. Regulated people move slower. Loving people don't compete, they create. And that's the world that's emerging. That's the one I want to interact with and influence. So as the old paradigm of work harder to earn more and be seen more kind of collapses, what rises is something quieter, truer. It's rooted in service and community and compassion and self-responsibility. It's not the end of the world, it's the beginning of a new one. Hopefully focused more in the matriarchal path. So, what does this mean for you, for all of us, for me, for everyone? It means we have to start focusing on what's real. We let our bodies lead, because the body doesn't lie, it doesn't know how to lie. We start making slower, cleaner choices because that rushing is actually a trauma response. We serve from love, not from obligation, because service doesn't have to mean self-sacrifice or self-erasure or martyrdom. We measure success not by how much we do, how much we produce, but how how we feel at peace, how deeply we feel peace. And we remember, truth doesn't need to be loud to be powerful. When something is rooted in truth, it naturally expands. When something is built on ego or force, it eventually falls apart. It has to, because it's not rooted with any sort of foundation. So if you're feeling that subtle pull to do things differently this year, listen to you. Listen to your body. If your body tightens when you think of old ways of working or doing things, showing up, striving, that's not resistance, it's wisdom. Your body's telling you it needs to do it a different way. And basically your nervous system is saying, we're not doing this anymore. Let's try something else. So as we step into this new year, this new year of the horse, let yourself run with truth. Not the frantic running of survival, but the free, powerful movement of a soul that knows where it's going. And no, you don't have to have it all planned out. You don't have to know the destination. You just have to trust that what's true will always find its way forward. This isn't the year that we strive harder. It's the year to embody deeper, to walk in truth, to serve with love, to speak what's real, even if it's scary, even if your voice shakes, because that is what will change the world. Thank you for being here, for being part of this shift and for continuing to do that inner work, the deeper work, because your regulation, your truth, your love has a massive impact. It ripples out further than you could ever know. So here's to running with the truth that remains.