Darlynn Childress: [0:03] Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host, Darlynn Childress. I'm a life and parenting coach, and I'm someone who's very passionate about healing and supporting women when they're going through difficult seasons in their life. Today on the podcast, I'm speaking with Cindy Horwitz, who wrote the beautiful book Held by the Tide. I wanted to have this conversation because I really believe this book would be so helpful to many of you who listen to this podcast.
Darlynn Childress: [0:41] This podcast is called Become a Calm Mama, and how do we do that? I have the Calm Break, which is checking in, becoming aware of your body and how you feel, labeling those feelings, and then regulating through moving — either moving your body or moving your mind. If you've ever wanted a handbook or a series of exercises, journal prompts, and mantras that would actually help heal you, this book has all that. It's a journey of hope and healing through breath, movement, and self-love.
Darlynn Childress: [1:11] What I like about this book is that Cindy shares a lot of her own personal journey through grief, pain, and sorrow. She lost her mother when she was only fifteen, and then in 2023, her younger son was diagnosed with epilepsy. The journey to get that diagnosis was extremely painful, and the treatment protocol has been a huge challenge for her.
Darlynn Childress: [1:50] Even if you haven't gone through grief in this way, or you don't have a child with a medical diagnosis you're navigating, you'll relate to the common struggle we have as women to people-please and abandon ourselves in order to make everyone else comfortable, while we don't take care of ourselves. This is a conversation where Cindy and I talk about how to get out of that trap of self-abandonment, and how to take excellent care of ourselves through movement, breath, and building a better relationship with ourselves — with love, compassion, and kindness.
Darlynn Childress: [2:20] I really think you're going to love this. You can get a copy of her book, Held by the Tide, on Amazon or wherever you buy books. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Welcome, Cindy, to the podcast. I'm so glad you're here.
Cindy Horwitz: [2:43] Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here to talk with you today.
Darlynn Childress: [2:47] Yeah, we're going to be talking about your book, Held by the Tide, and I love the title so much. I wondered if you could share a little bit about the title — why you wrote this book and what it has meant to you. I want every person listening to get a copy of it, but just tell us: what does Held by the Tide mean?
Cindy Horwitz: [3:17] I wrote the book as a way to offer my life experience to others, in the hope that what I've lived through, and how I've learned to cope with the challenges I faced, could help others see themselves in my story — not necessarily the specific details, but the experiences of grief, of motherhood, of caretaking, of having those moments where you just lose yourself a little bit.
Cindy Horwitz: [3:47] Being held by the tide is about trust — trust in yourself, trust in the universe, if you will — that if you allow yourself to just be held, you know the tide is going to come in and the tide is going to go out. There are going to be moments that are hard, and moments that are joyful. If you allow yourself to flow with what is, rather than fighting against it, I think you learn to be in your body, with yourself, and with who you are.
Darlynn Childress: [4:42] Yeah, I love that, because it's so true that your book really shares how to be held in spaces that are painful. You share about these different times in your life, particularly with your son Easton, which we'll get into — how much pain and sorrow you've experienced, as well as joy. There's this idea of not trying to solve the problem or heal right away — eventually we heal, but you can't heal when you're in the middle of the pain. That's not how it works.
Darlynn Childress: [5:22] I think this book is a really beautiful example of how to walk through difficult times while being held within yourself, using body work, breath work, and movement to help us find that space within ourselves so we don't crumble. How do you think about it all?
Cindy Horwitz: [5:41] I think for a long time, I felt like if I just kept moving and kept going, and didn't really allow myself to stop and experience what was going on, that I would be okay.
Darlynn Childress: [6:02] That if you just plowed through it — kept going, didn't stop — you could survive it, or get through it. Something like that.
Cindy Horwitz: [6:12] Right. So the little practices are, I guess, my way of slowing myself down enough to experience where I am, to feel exactly what I'm feeling in the moment — wherever that is, in my body, my mind, my heart, my neck, wherever it is — and to soften that part of me through movement, breath, journaling, or mantra. When I talk about mantra, I'm really talking about talking to myself.
Darlynn Childress: [6:54] Yeah, like a positive affirmation, a sentence or two you repeat to soothe yourself — we can survive this, or I'm okay, or this is temporary. Podcast listeners know I call this move your body, move your mind, for when we need to calm our nervous system. Moving your mind is finding simple sentences that feel true and supportive and soothing, and there are a lot of examples of that in your book.
Cindy Horwitz: [7:24] Yes, for sure. I do believe that the things we say to ourselves, we believe. But this is deeper — it's more about recognizing, I am safe in this moment. This is a moment in time, and this moment will pass.
Cindy Horwitz: [7:50] My children actually joke with one another now. They'll say, "you are not in danger," when one is pissing the other one off. It's really about grounding yourself in the moment — I really am safe right now, I will get through this moment — and continuing to talk to yourself. It doesn't have to be a sentence or a positive affirmation, just giving yourself loving kindness, that whatever you're experiencing is okay.
Darlynn Childress: [8:29] Yeah, it's like real, true validation and emotional support in that moment — we're going to be okay, we're going to survive this, this is hard, and that's okay. It reminds me of a part of your book where you talk about self-abandonment. You wrote that as a young woman, you became the girl who made herself easy to be around — the one who didn't ask for too much, who knew how to make others feel good, the one who read the room before she even entered it.
Darlynn Childress: [8:59] You wrote, "I thought if I was helpful enough, agreeable enough, low-maintenance enough, I wouldn't be pushed away. But underneath that was fear — the fear that if I showed too much sadness, too much need, too much anything, I'd be left behind." I think we can all relate to that hiding, showing just the facade that the outside is fine, being there for other people, showing up in easy ways.
Darlynn Childress: [9:39] The call to tapping into ourselves is the opposite of self-abandonment. What do you think about that, and what have you learned? How did you get to no longer abandoning yourself, and instead inviting a conversation within yourself?
Cindy Horwitz: [10:03] I think we're kind of born into this world wild and free, just knowing ourselves. And then we get these messages — verbal and nonverbal — from our parents, from society, from peers, about how we're supposed to be in order to survive. Especially as young children, our survival depends on our parents' love and care, so we become what we think is lovable to our parents, and to society, in order to survive.
Darlynn Childress: [10:50] Belonging means safety. Belonging means not being abandoned.
Cindy Horwitz: [10:55] Exactly. That's deep within our DNA — that our survival is to belong.
Darlynn Childress: [11:06] We're dependent. We cannot survive alone. We know that, right?
Cindy Horwitz: [11:10] Yes.
Darlynn Childress: [11:11] We come wired that way.
Cindy Horwitz: [11:12] Yes. We belong to a tribe, and we do what we have to do to survive. Because of my life circumstances and the messages I received, I became very afraid that if I was a burden to somebody else, I would lose that person — that they would abandon me, that they would see me as too much, and that my discomfort would be too uncomfortable for them. I lived that way for a very long time.
Cindy Horwitz: [11:52] I will say this is one of the beautiful things that came from Covid, for me. During Covid I was alone at home with my children every day — my husband still went to his office every day — and I had to make a very conscious choice about how I was going to survive what we were all experiencing. I had pretty severe germaphobia always, something passed down to me by my mother, so the idea of a sickness that everyone could get and die just—
Darlynn Childress: [12:34] Threw you, especially because you had lost your mom. Death was a real thing. Your mom died when you were fifteen — you share that in the book — and that's a huge loss at that age, one that has a giant impact permeating throughout your whole life. When loss becomes real once, it becomes very real. I'm sure that got even more real for you during Covid.
Cindy Horwitz: [13:04] A hundred percent. My mother, who I lost, was very germaphobic, very ahead of her time when it came to health and wellness and taking care of herself. She was a person I viewed as the picture of perfect health, and then she got sick and died. That's a very real experience I carry with me.
Darlynn Childress: [13:33] You can't protect yourself from it. On some subconscious level, you realize you can be perfect and still get sick — so, okay, we've got to keep the standard up, and also, we're always vulnerable. That's a core belief that gets in there. And then your son ends up with a chronic medical condition that also comes out of this Covid period of time.
Darlynn Childress: [14:02] Sometimes it's interesting how our worst fears kind of happen — I don't know if that's a contract we have with the universe, or what it is, but it's an invitation to grow, an invitation to figure out a different way to relate to the world. Covid was almost a training ground for you, maybe. So tell us how you coped during Covid. What was useful to you in that period of time?
Cindy Horwitz: [14:41] I think it was this contract with the universe for me, in that the universe basically said, this is your biggest fear — go. I made the decision very early on that I was going to take this time to be healthy, and when I say healthy, for me that's healing. I needed to heal the anxiety I was carrying around, the fear of being someone who could get sick.
Cindy Horwitz: [15:22] I made the decision to focus on a healthy mind and body. I woke up every morning and rode my Peloton with a group of friends, I did yoga, I practiced all the things I talk about in the book — they were really just salvation to me at that time, and that's how I survived. That's also when I really made the connection between body, movement, and breath, and how it changes how you feel.
Cindy Horwitz: [16:03] I think everything I did during that time laid the foundational groundwork for when Easton was finally diagnosed — I already had these tools, this toolbox I'd built up, for when you're living in a high state of anxiety and your body is in fight or flight. The only thing I could think was, I have to get out of this state, I have to be in a calmer state, and breathing — when I talk about movement, it's really breath to movement. When you link a movement of your body to your breath, it signals to your body that you are safe, and it has a calming effect.
Darlynn Childress: [16:57] Like inhaling when you're doing cat and exhaling when you're doing cow, or laying down — you describe all these exercises and movements in the book, with the yogic terms. Maybe someone's never done yoga — I doubt it, this podcast's listeners are on it — but when you're in child's pose, you describe going into that pose and having a beautiful invitation to breathe, feel grounded, and release your body into the ground. Or laying down in Shavasana — that's just laying on your back, ladies — and then, how do you breathe in and out and let go, or move through poses, inhaling and exhaling?
Darlynn Childress: [17:46] I love that we're not talking about exercise — we're really talking about how to reset your nervous system, how to ground yourself, which just means finding space in between the moments, finding the ground so you don't feel like you're drowning in a washing machine or in the ocean.
Cindy Horwitz: [18:09] When we're in fight or flight, we don't really have the ability to think critically — that's when we're very reactive to everything around us. When we can get into a calmer state, we have the ability to actually respond to our situation rather than react, whether it's to whatever's going on inside of ourselves, or around us — our partner, our children, a friend, a family member, or traffic when we're driving. Whatever's coming up, it gives us space to respond.
Darlynn Childress: [18:54] Going back to the self-abandonment question — what I read in your book is that the way you stopped abandoning yourself was by meeting yourself in those moments, connecting with yourself every morning during Covid, being curious, listening, having a better conversation within yourself. I see it that way too — my path to stop abandoning myself, stop being a people-pleaser and relational perfectionist, is becoming a better friend to myself, showing up to have better conversations with myself. I can't stop abandoning myself until I stop abandoning myself.
Cindy Horwitz: [19:41] Right — that self-compassion piece too, treating yourself the way you treat those you love. Holding yourself, giving yourself that compassion and self-love that you'd give to your children, or to someone you care deeply for.
Darlynn Childress: [20:01] The more you receive it from yourself, the safer we feel. You wrote about how there were a lot of fears that if you showed up with too much sadness, too much need, too much anything real, you'd be left behind. What I notice in your book is that you really realize it's not too much when we take a minute to connect with ourselves — through breath, through inquiry, journal prompts, curiosity, movement — we find out we aren't too much, it's containable, and it's okay to have needs.
Darlynn Childress: [20:41] I think it's very black-and-white thinking a lot of times — we think we have to not show anything, because if we show anything, it'll be too much. But when we start to reveal it to ourselves, it's like, oh wait, this is manageable.
Cindy Horwitz: [20:51] Yes. And it's also practicing allowing myself to be that quote-unquote burden to others — practicing allowing other people in. For a long time, I didn't trust that if I fell apart, or really needed somebody, that person would be there.
Darlynn Childress: [21:21] Yeah.
Cindy Horwitz: [21:22] So it's having that trust that the people around me who care for me, who love me, would be there — that I could practice falling apart in front of them. Also my own therapy, finding a therapist I trusted, where I could just fall apart, lay it all out there, and trust that it wasn't going to last forever.
Cindy Horwitz: [22:03] I think that's part of it too — I would always think, I've got to keep going, I've got to keep going, because if I stop and I'm too sad, and I allow myself to slip too deep into that pain and those feelings, I'm never going to get back up, I'm never going to get out of it, I'm going to get stuck.
Darlynn Childress: [22:25] Yeah, that all-or-nothing thinking — if I tip, I'm never coming back, and it's terrifying, like I'm not going to be rescued, no one's going to help me, I'm going to be alone. I think that's what anxiety does — very black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. And when we dip our toe in, we realize, oh wait, we didn't die.
Cindy Horwitz: [22:44] Okay.
Darlynn Childress: [22:44] We survived that, and we can survive it again and again and again. Those are the first bits of vulnerability. I know for me — and maybe this is true for you too — this happened when my friend died by suicide. It was a shock, and it was the first time in my motherhood journey that I couldn't get out of bed. I grew up with a depressed mother who didn't get out of bed, so if I didn't get out of bed, I became her, or something like that. I needed to be hyper-capable, over-functioning.
Darlynn Childress: [23:33] And then I couldn't. I literally couldn't. I had to rely on my husband — that was the first time I'd ever relied on him in twenty-plus years of marriage at that point — and on friends. It was around my son's birthday, and my friends bought him a cake and a present, because I could not do it. And then I realized, oh, it's okay to let people love you. It's okay to let people take care of you. They want to — they love me and want to be there for me. It's an honor and a privilege. It's not a burden.
Cindy Horwitz: [24:13] Right.
Darlynn Childress: [24:14] I don't know what it was like for you when you started to unburden yourself in that way, or show your pain.
Cindy Horwitz: [24:21] I think it was similar. I think the first time — we can talk about Easton.
Darlynn Childress: [24:34] Share a little bit about him and what happened.
Cindy Horwitz: [24:37] E is a super bright, creative, funny, loving soul. From the moment he was born, I sensed something. The best way I could describe it is that I would feel like I'd lose him energetically for a second, and there'd be this space between us. I couldn't explain that to anybody because it sounds a little strange.
Darlynn Childress: [25:15] But I think moms would understand that.
Cindy Horwitz: [25:20] Yeah. I had an older son already, so — although obviously every child is unique, and I wasn't comparing one to the other — I'd kind of done it before, so my instincts picked up on things. Had Easton been my first child, maybe my instincts would have been a little different, but I sensed something. Things were just different in little ways — even his ability to chew food was different, I could tell.
Cindy Horwitz: [25:59] He's extremely bright, extremely strong-willed — "no" is not in his vocabulary, which I think is a beautiful thing because it's part of his perseverance. But I always sensed something, and he had different medical things that were misdiagnosed for a long time. Through this deep desire to figure out what was going on with him and help him, when he started third grade, I could really see he was struggling — struggling at school, struggling with what teachers and therapists would say was ADHD.
Cindy Horwitz: [26:48] "This boy has ADHD, this is why he's struggling." That really didn't fit for me. Yes, his behaviors fit, but it didn't fit that ADHD was the only thing going on with him, because of this weird energetic loss I would feel, and other symptoms he was having that were continuously misdiagnosed.
Darlynn Childress: [27:20] So you had the behavioral issues, and then some medical and relational issues, and everybody's separating them out — this is ADHD, the medical is, well, we keep guessing over here, and the relational is who-knows, immaturity, or something you couldn't even explain — energetically, I lose him.
Darlynn Childress: [27:46] But as a parent, you're holding all those parts of him in a holistic way, and you're like, this doesn't make sense — the answers I'm receiving are too compartmentalized to actually encapsulate what's happening for my child. Is that fair?
Cindy Horwitz: [28:06] That is correct. That's exactly how I felt — that there was something more that could explain what was going on with him. So I kept pursuing different opinions and testing to try to figure this out. I'd say that's part of my perseverance — I would not give up.
Darlynn Childress: [28:35] "No" is not in your vocabulary.
Cindy Horwitz: [28:37] Yes — this is where he learned it from. He was eventually diagnosed in 2023 with focal epilepsy, which means he had seizures coming from one specific part of the brain, which is what they picked up on his first EEG.
Cindy Horwitz: [29:04] True to Easton's nature, this was not basic, easy epilepsy — it's been a journey we're still on. You'd asked me about practicing allowing myself to be held. The first time I really experienced that was when he had an exploratory brain surgery. My two best friends came with me to the hospital — my husband was there too, but my two best friends came, and I really practiced letting them take care of me. I let them order me lunch, I let them sit with me, I let them talk with me, and I let myself just be held by them. It was okay. It felt good.
Darlynn Childress: [30:07] It was more than okay. It was like, wow, I actually like being cared for — it's not as scary, demeaning, or shaming as I thought it would be. That's how I experienced it too.
Cindy Horwitz: [30:18] Right, and I can continue to do this now. That doesn't mean there haven't been moments where I still revert to the old pattern — I notice myself withdrawing when things are overwhelming or stressful, staying within myself and not sharing as much what's going on. It's hard, because we all have very busy lives — it's hard when you speak to someone once or twice a week, and then you have to spend that conversation telling them all the terrible things that have happened.
Darlynn Childress: [30:59] The new updates on your child's medical journey.
Cindy Horwitz: [31:03] Right. So there have been times I've kept things to myself, or tried to power through the experience.
Darlynn Childress: [31:14] Right.
Cindy Horwitz: [31:14] Because healing is a daily practice. Of course, there are still moments where I go into fight or flight, still afraid to let others see the real, deep fear or pain I'm in.
Darlynn Childress: [31:30] I think that's normal too, because there's a time and a place — we're not saying go through the world sharing every moment of your pain. I think self-care is this inner wisdom of, I'm going to take really good care of myself right now, and maybe that's sharing and reaching out, or maybe that's not talking about it right now, because I need to escape, or I don't have the bandwidth for this conversation.
Darlynn Childress: [32:09] There's an integrity to that which is different from "oh, everything's fine, no worries" — that fake version is a kind of self-abandonment, which I'm sure you resort to sometimes, as do I. But there can be room for genuine integrity and authenticity, where we know we're not necessarily okay, but we also know we're taking care of ourselves. And if there's an appropriate place to say, "hey, girlfriend, I actually need to talk to you" — that's taking care of yourself too.
Cindy Horwitz: [32:49] Yeah, and I think that's part of it all — this idea of really knowing yourself, because we can only know ourselves when we continue to be curious about ourselves, continue to talk to ourselves and check in. What I really practice is checking in with myself — are you not calling them back because you don't want to burden them, or because in this moment, what feels good is to not talk about things?
Cindy Horwitz: [33:29] If that's the answer, then allowing myself that time not to talk about it, but reminding myself, okay, now let's check in again — you've had some time to marinate in this on your own, where are you at now? Can you reach out? Can you let yourself be sad in front of someone, or vulnerable in front of someone?
Darlynn Childress: [33:54] Yeah, that's really radical honesty with ourselves, within ourselves — building that relationship so we feel emotionally safe enough within ourselves to say the truth and trust those questions. If we answer them honestly, there won't be anger. I think we have inner critics that can be really cruel, and that's why we aren't honest within ourselves. The safer we feel, the more time we spend with ourselves in love, the more honest we can be.
Darlynn Childress: [34:33] Just like with our kids — I want a relationship with my children where they feel emotionally safe enough to be vulnerable, to admit a mistake or admit pain. But if I haven't created enough emotional safety, they won't do that, and that's a huge loss for them, because they don't have someone they can be vulnerable with. That's true for within ourselves as well — creating enough emotional safety within ourselves.
Cindy Horwitz: [34:58] Yes, and also modeling that it's okay to be vulnerable, okay to be sad, okay to be scared or nervous about something — that all these emotions are part of being human, and we don't have to hide any of them. We won't be judged for having this human experience of feeling.
Darlynn Childress: [35:29] Yeah, modeling that to our kids, and then testing the waters ourselves in our own relationships. You wrote this really beautiful thing about having a child with a medical diagnosis: "No one talks about how much of yourself you lose when you're fighting this hard for your child — the quiet unraveling, the slow erosion of ease, of identity, of dreams, the weight of advocacy, of managing, of vigilance, of being the one who holds it all together."
Darlynn Childress: [36:08] I think many moms can relate to that, if you have a child with any non-typical situation —
Cindy Horwitz: [36:15] Right.
Darlynn Childress: [36:16] Autism, ADHD, medical issues — this non-typical world is such a heavy burden. What are your go-to strategies to lighten that load?
Cindy Horwitz: [36:29] I think that for me, living with a child with epilepsy is always kind of bracing yourself for the next seizure, or the next phone call from school — whether Easton had a seizure, or got in trouble at school — you're kind of always in that hyper-alert state, waiting for something to happen because of the nature of his diagnosis. I really had to teach myself how to live and function, and not be in that state all the time.
Darlynn Childress: [37:17] Because hyper-vigilance and anxiety.
Cindy Horwitz: [37:21] Right. It's exhausting — it was very hard for me to be present for my other child, hard to experience joy, even with so much joy around me, hard to just relax. That's where this foundational toolkit I'd developed during Covid really came in — being able to recognize in my body what was happening, when I was holding my breath and not breathing because I was racing, or my heart was racing, or I just didn't feel settled.
Cindy Horwitz: [38:11] It starts with being able to recognize that. That's when the breathing and the self-talk really saved me — I recognize it, and then I just breathe, and I tell myself that whatever it is, I will be okay. If the phone call comes, I'll deal with it when it comes.
Darlynn Childress: [38:35] I love all the tools you mention in your book — on page 28 there's so much gold, a movement invitation for how to move your body, a breath work invitation, and some tools. I wondered if you could share some of those.
Cindy Horwitz: [38:53] One I really like is writing one page every night about everything I wish I could say out loud.
Darlynn Childress: [39:00] I loved that when I read it — I laughed out loud. Writing one page each night about everything you wish you could say out loud.
Cindy Horwitz: [39:09] Yeah, as a mom, I go to bed at night thinking about different things that happened during the day, how I handled them, how in hindsight I could have handled things differently. In the beginning, a lot of it was about this vision of what I had hoped Easton's life would be — writing that down, this idea of two things being true at once: having joy and having sorrow, being sad and grieving.
Cindy Horwitz: [39:59] It was this idea of who I thought he was going to be, or the life I thought he was going to have, versus really embracing the life he does have, who he is, and how the challenges he's faced made him so strong, so resilient, so deeply compassionate toward other people. That's what it was about for me — writing it all out with no fear of judgment from anybody, especially not myself. Sometimes we think things in a moment, and then we don't think them anymore, but just getting it all out.
Darlynn Childress: [40:48] I love that you wrote, "placing my hand over my heart and saying to myself, this is hard, and I'm still here." There's a lot of evidence that just putting your own hand on your heart can release oxytocin — it's very soothing. And you also say, "I can hold this, and I can rest," that both things can be true at the same time. And then there's walking slowly — I picture walking slowly with your hand on your heart, saying, this is hard, I'm still here, I can hold this, and I can rest.
Cindy Horwitz: [41:21] Yes, walking is huge. On the days I can't get to the yoga studio, or can't do yoga at home, I walk a lot. Especially if you can walk barefoot, with your feet in the ground, you feel held by the earth, and you know that you are okay in that moment.
Darlynn Childress: [41:54] That's all this is — this entire book is an invitation to whoever's reading it to tap into that, that you are okay in this moment. If that's the takeaway, that's the best takeaway we could possibly offer: that whatever grief, whatever hardship, whatever pain you're carrying, you can handle it. You can reach out to people, you can be angry and disappointed and sad, you can feel all of that, and you'll survive it. Everything is survivable.
Darlynn Childress: [42:33] There are so many wonderful things in your book that help us understand how to do that. I really appreciate you writing it.
Cindy Horwitz: [42:38] Thank you so much for having me, to talk about all these things that help us to be human.
Darlynn Childress: [42:49] Any last thoughts you'd like to share?
Cindy Horwitz: [42:52] I really hope people take away from this that there's no finish line — there's no being healed, or feeling like you've perfected something. I certainly haven't perfected anything. I practice these tools every day, and there are some days where I don't. It's just being okay that, however much time goes by that you're not using these tools, or you're feeling disconnected from yourself or your body, it's okay — you can go back at any time and reconnect.
Darlynn Childress: [43:33] You're always there for you.
Cindy Horwitz: [43:35] Yes.
Darlynn Childress: [43:35] Breath is always there — we're always breathing, we can tap into it. We're always moving, we can do it intentionally. We're always having a conversation in our head, we can just invite ourselves to a lovelier one.
Cindy Horwitz: [43:48] Yes.
Darlynn Childress: [43:50] Thank you. I love this.
Cindy Horwitz: [43:51] Thank you.
