Ahhh… It’s that time of the year, the New Year. A fresh start, optimistic beginnings, time to look ahead and see where we want our life to go. New Year’s Resolutions… boy, can these wonderful ideas ever get us into trouble. It’s natural, and fantastic even, to flip the page to January and envision a whole new version of ourselves. But, we can overdo it. We often feel everything about ourselves needs changing and it must be done all at once! For example, I recently found an old New Years Resolutions list of my own, it was from about 15 years ago. It went like this: “This year I want to stop being so uptight and learn to RELAX!” “This year I am going to let go of all that stupid stuff I am hanging onto.” “I am going to stop making excuses and do a work out every single day.” Sheesh… It was a list of demands that I be DIFFERENT, dammit. What is intended to be something to help us make positive change instead turns into a shame-filled list of everything we don’t like about ourselves, paired with vague, unmeasurable ways to “fix” these 10,000 things, all in one year or less. We charge ahead with gusto for a few days, lose our steam, feel like failures, and give up hope that anything will ever change. Instead of resolutions that punish ourselves, what if we had resolutions that inspired joy? I love the approach that nervous system expert Dr. Aimie Apigian takes on healing. She recommends that instead of focusing on how to fix ourselves, we ask the question “How can I become more alive?” This simple shift in perspective really lightens things up! Movement, creativity, connection with others, time in Nature, these are all things that can help us truly come alive. What are my 2025 New Year’s Resolutions? Good question. I have two of them. One is to visit a quiet spot in the woods near my house every day possible, to see what’s happening there, and to check in on what’s happening with me, even if just for a few minutes. This will help slow me down a bit, to be present with the world as it is in that moment. The other is to exercise my Body twice a day for 7 minutes at a time – jumping jacks, jogging in place, dancing (ideally this method) to get my blood pumping, my immune system activated, and to lift my mood and energy levels. I hope to do more than this for exercise over the week, but at minimum, even these two short segments per day will provide a lot of benefits. If I miss a day with either of these, it’s OK. I forgive myself, and start again tomorrow. AND I also give my son $2. Having accountability in some way helps absolutely every single one of us stay honest and committed to things that are beneficial for us. These two tangible, measurable goals will definitely help me become more alive, to be more connected to my Body and to my surroundings. Both will calm my nervous system. And the practice of accountability and self-forgiveness with these little things, helps prepare me for doing this with the big things. Finally, the feeling of success that will come with the many days that I can achieve these things, will boost my confidence to take the next step towards health and healing. If you’d like some help coming up with achievable New Year’s Resolutions that you can really stick with, and/or want some compassionate help understanding why certain goals may have been elusive, I’d love to chat. I’m offering a New Years Resolution Special , which is available all year actually, for any goal you have. For just $40 we can have a 20–30-minute call about your resolution(s) and what can help make it achievable, and I will serve as your compassionate accountability buddy by checking in with you via e-mail four times over the year. Learn more here . Meanwhile, I wish the best to you and yours in 2025!   If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com . If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Music and movement are definitely  a part of healing work. You know when no one’s in the car and you sing your heart out to the radio and it feels so good? You may not have realized it, but you are stimulating your vagus nerve which helps with nervous system regulation! And of course, dancing and moving the body is a great way to feel alive and to move emotions through. The body IS the gateway to freedom! I hope these songs inspire you to sing, dance, reflect, or just plain old feel some feelings. Enjoy. Brave – Sara Bareilles The Chicken Dance – Werner Thomas – one of my Midwestern favorites, you can’t take yourself too seriously while moving your body to this song… Enjoy – Tekno Freedom! 90 – George Michael Gospel – MarchFourth Marching Band I Am Light – India.Arie Let Down Your Guard – JJ Heller (sing this one to yourself...) Life is Beautiful – Keb’ Mo’ Light of a Clear Blue Morning – Dolly Parton Shine a Light - KAINA - Indeed, we are in this together...   This is just a start – if you have suggestions to add – let me (Deb) know at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Thanks for stopping by. Here, I share with you insights, education, personal experiences, and deep thoughts related to nervous system health and trauma healing, all with my Midwestern lens. You will get a taste of who I am and how I see the world. A friend once told me that I have “Dad humor”, and she was spot on. Explore these posts, and let me know if you have questions or comments, or your own deep thoughts – or even shallow thoughts – about these topics. I read each one and will respond if I can. Reach me, Deb Moses, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com Thanks for checking out my blog. And thanks for being human together. If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Grief. I had no idea it came in so many flavors. It used to be, when I would hear this word the first thing that came to my mind was the death of someone close to you and the deep pain that accompanies that loss. That’s not the only form of grief. In Part 2 , we’ll talk about “disguised grief” and how we all carry some form of it. But even for the death of a loved one, our culture doesn’t exactly embrace grief. Some cultures have funerals that last a week, mourning lasts a month or more. People are invited to sit in the sadness, to wear dark colored clothes, and even wail, a let-it-all-out kind of wailing. Gosh, the peace that must come after that kind of bold expression of grief…. Not so much here. It’s appropriate to cry at funerals – tissue boxes abound at funeral homes – but be sure not to cry too loud.  Quiet dabbing of the eyes is preferred. And then stay busy and move on with your life, don’t talk about the deceased. It’s not good to dwell, right? Some folks don’t want to have funerals for themselves for a variety of reasons, cost being a big factor and very understandable as death has become a profitable industry here in the U.S. But some would rather not have a funeral or an end-of-life service because they don’t want people to be sad. This is a sweet and caring sentiment, and there was a time when I might have thought the same, that I had the power, and responsibility even, to spare people from unpleasant emotions. I understand now that it’s actually impossible to deny people feeling what they need to feel upon our death. They will need to process the reality that for better or worse, we existed and had an impact on them, or they will need some time just to reflect on the fleeting nature of their own life.  People may very well be sad or have other emotions when we die, but there’s actually not a damn thing we can do about it! 😊  And, thankfully not, because it would mean robbing them of the peace that comes after feeling all the feels.... This kind of grief around death is more obvious, but disguised grief, well, by name, is more cryptic. ( Read more in part 2. )   If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com . If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

I once heard the phrase, “anger is a lazy form of grief.” This phrase is striking. One reason being that anger doesn’t seem lazy at all: it usually involves action and lots of energy. But to think of what it’s covering makes me stop in my tracks. What is the loss that I am trying to avoid by not feeling this grief? Feeling the grief would make it real. I have learned from Dr. Joan Rosenberg that words and feelings that signal disguised grief are these: cynicism, pessimism, grudges, resentment, envy, jealousy, bitterness, anger. All these point to things not working out as we had hoped. Grief around what we got but did not deserve, what we did not get and deserved, what never was, what is not now, and what may never be. According to Dr. Rosenberg, these are the makings of disguised grief. It could be the job you didn’t get. It could be the validation you didn’t receive from your parents. It could be the abuse from a lover or a marriage that ended. It could be an unfulfilled dream of a home of your own or the child you wanted but couldn’t have. It could be that your close friend betrayed you. It could be seemingly small, like not having it recognized when you put hard work into something or not being chosen for the team long ago. All these are the makings of quiet grief. And grief buried has an effect in some way or another. It shuts a part of us down. When we shut parts of ourselves down, we lose access to joy, and we lose access to our health. Our bodies store the grief. That sore shoulder that just won’t heal, the stiff hips, the lower energy in the morning, could very well be stuck grief. “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson The good news is that there are ways to move the grief through, to get unstuck. You can “name it to tame it.” You can give that love someplace to go, first of all to yourself, to the parts that hurt. If there is disguised grief you would like to heal, I recommend listening to and following the beautiful framework that Dr. Joan Rosenberg offers in this podcast . This may be all you need. If you find you want someone to walk alongside you and offer guidance in this release process, I would be honored to be that person. The best thing we can do for the people we love is to heal ourselves, and often this means recognizing, naming, and moving through grief. This way we can show them who we truly are, a person who is free to feel both joy and sorrow.  This frees them to do the same, to be fully human, to be fully seen. And this, in turn, allows us to thrive in our relationships together. Here. Now. In the land of the living.   If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com . If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

I heard this great phrase recently “Our nervous system will choose chaos until we re-wire it for calm.” Bingo.  That’s pretty much the answer to this blog question. Good night everybody! Ok, I will give a little longer answer to this very good question. So, not all of our nervous systems default to chaos. Some folks, due to a wide variety of reasons, are really calm under pressure, can handle the day’s stresses, sleep like a baby, and get up to take on the next day with gusto. That didn’t describe me, unfortunately. Oh, I had lots of get-go, and accomplished a great deal day-to- day, but I was often dragging myself through it all, had horrible insomnia and digestive issues, felt increasingly unable to handle the pressures in my life, and felt a sense of dread about what else was going to be put on my plate when I already couldn’t “do” life. Yes, I was dealing with depression and anxiety, but underneath all of this was a dysregulated nervous system. Regulation is the ability to keep the nervous system in a state of health and balance. A dysregulated nervous system is one that overcompensates – swinging a person from high stress and anxiety down to feeling collapsed and frozen, with not much room in between, or even feeling both extremes at once. It’s like having both the gas and brake on in your internal vehicle. Another great analogy I’ve heard is feeling like both Tigger and Eeyore. An unhealthy nervous system can be connected to many health issues, chronic pains and illnesses, insomnia, bad habits, irritability, feeling numb to emotions, flooding thoughts and catastrophizing, despair, fatigue, struggles with focus, difficulties in relationships, and fears that keep you from making changes that you’d really like to make. Not such fun stuff… But here is the really magnificent, beautiful part: Unlike changing neuropathways in the brain (the process for creating new habits and thought patterns, where we ultimately want to go), which takes weeks, you can change the state of your nervous system in seconds. Simple tools, even as simple as deep breaths, or touching or looking at an object that is calming to you, can shift your nervous system state. A trusted healing mentor can help you to take these powerful steps, in the moment. The more we can shift to a state of calm, the more we provide a solid foundation for deeper work, like updating our neuropathways in the brain, and thus changing our habits and ways of being. And, as we learn more about ourselves, and the unique ways our nervous system responds to stress, we can see that our responses to certain situations are predictable. This is great news!  Because, once we create awareness, we can feel the disruption via signals from our body. This means…. get ready for it… this means… we can do something about it! Did you catch that? We have the power to change this!! We are no longer a victim to what is happening around us. This skill is even better than sliced bread! By using tools like those mentioned above, and others that I teach (catered to your specific struggles and needs), with increasing consistency (no one is expected to change their ways all at once), we really can change our daily experience of life in a positive way. Ultimately, this awareness – and cultivating a feeling of “calm aliveness” as nervous system educator and trauma healing expert Dr. Aimie Apigian explains – is what we are after. We want to feel peace, like when we are sitting at the beach, but we are also not looking to be in some sort of zen coma. We also want to feel alive. We want to feel that we have capacity and agency to do what we need to, and most importantly, what we want to, in life. We can live from that balanced middle ground, without the swings to extremes. For me, working towards nervous system regulation has given me a strong foundation on which to heal from trauma, find more daily peace, and move towards what I want in life. If you are looking for some nervous system regulation in your life, give me a holler. I’d love to help guide you to this sweet spot where we can really live life more fully. If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com . Disclaimer : I, Debra (Deb) Moses, am not a licensed physician or therapist. The information on this website is intended for educational and informative purposes only and is not intended to substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this site. If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

I don’t call myself a healer because I don’t heal anyone. You, your Body, your Spirit, and whatever your name is for the Divine are in charge of that. I am a healing mentor. I walk alongside, as a fellow human, with some skills to share. I am in this too, right there with you! This outfit I’m running is called “Honey Creek Healing”, with an ”-ing”, because healing is an action, an ongoing thing. Few of us will reach enlightenment in this life, so letting go of that hope or expectation would really be helpful. As psycho-therapist Laura Anderson says, “If we keep the definition of healing as constantly working toward an elusive end goal, we’re going to be very discouraged.” Healing is not a linear journey. Our Western minds really have a hard time letting go of this one, myself included. While not opposed to it, I tend to avoid using the phrase “healing journey” to keep away from this temptation. In this embodied life, one never gets to this mythical land of “healed” – where heavenly light beams from you and you are free from all earthly concerns. That vision can set us up for some unrealistic expectations of the human experience. I prefer to think about it as strengthening your bone matrix. With proper care, diet, and weight-bearing exercise, bone becomes stronger, more fortified. It becomes harder to break and quicker to recover if stressed or broken. Or healing can be like the growth of a strong tree. A tree is never done growing. It might reach its maximum height and then becomes thicker, stronger.  Healing is like becoming an old sentinel oak – trunk getting wider, roots going deeper, branches and leaves balanced low to high. Or, healing can be like becoming a soft and majestic weeping willow with unmistakable presence, flowing, flexible, strong enough to bend, to feel… never finished, there is no end goal in mind, just being. Bones and trees are not invincible – they are part of the real world of things that break, but bones get knit back together, and some trees when cut to the ground re-sprout from their roots. They are resilient, in a constant, steady march towards aliveness, however that looks. Healing means turning all the “what ifs” to “even ifs” – as in even if it all falls apart, even if the bone breaks, the tree is cut down, I will be ok, I will heal again and again, and grow back again and again, no matter what comes at me – no matter how slow or even stagnant I am at times, life WILL flow through me. Healing brings us to this belief, that we deserve to heal, that we are worthy of healing, of becoming strong, and that we have the capacity to do this. If you are reading these things and doubt is filling your Body – know that that sensation is not coming from you. It was a story told to you, through words, actions, or inactions by people or a society that were and are suffering… This isn’t your Heart speaking. You CAN heal. You can be strong, you are still here, reading this, breathing, heart beating. There is a lot of proof in that pudding alone. Do you like pudding? It’s OK if you don’t. It’s not for everyone. But healing is. If you are open to it. And have even the slightest bit of courage. I may not know you, but I know that you are stronger than you think. This is true of all of us. If you want to check out the flavor of pudding/healing that I offer, give me a shout. If not, that’s cool – there are many paths to healing, and Divine timing for it too. Thanks to my healing process, I deeply trust that you will find your way. Peace to you. If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com . If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Oh, what a mixed bag the holidays are! There’s connection and joy and festivities. And there’s additional tasks, obligations, and don’t forget the expectations of how this all “should” be feeling. And then add in that relative that doesn’t seem to understand personal space at the family gathering, and wow, our stress levels can sure rise! Know that you are definitely not alone in this stress, and also know, that there are things you can do within your control to reduce it. Over the holidays, we often fall out of our usual routines. It’s nice to have a break from the ordinary, but our nervous systems do like to have some predictability. Try to keep at least some small element of your usual routine.  Get up or go to sleep at the same time if you can. If you usually take a nap mid-day, dare to ask at the big family gathering if there’s somewhere you can lay down for a bit. If you usually walk every morning, try to squeeze in even a short one while visiting the relatives out of town. Your body will naturally breathe deep when experiencing something familiar, even in a different place. If you are not used to prioritizing yourself at times like this (and I get it, you are SO not alone!), doing even one thing to hold your own space can feel incredibly empowering. Making healthy boundaries for yourself can also be helpful to others! If the holiday gathering gets to be too much, volunteer to take that barking dog for a walk, leave a serious conversation about politics and go play with the kids, offer to run out and get the milk or ice that is needed. Hard to leave the place? Don’t forget the bathroom.  What a wonderful place the bathroom is! You can find one everywhere you go, and no one can argue with your need for it. Pretend that traditional Christmas chili really got to you and take a nice long time in there… Splash cold water on your face and neck to re-set your system, take some slow, deep breaths, in the nose, out the mouth, shake your body a little, and come out more refreshed. The point is, take action , even a small one, for yourself, and your sanity. You have the power to do so! Even a small action, taken for your benefit, can be incredibly empowering. You are not just at the mercy of everything happening around you. Make a plan with some options. And since accountability helps all of us, tell a friend or trusted relative what your plan is, so they can help you stick to it. As with all things nervous system related, it’s amazing how the smallest of actions can yield big results. We’d love for others to read our minds, but only you know how you really feel, and therefore only you know best how to take care of yourself. And when you speak up and ask for a place to nap or let others know that you just need a little quiet time alone, you free others to do the same. The joy that comes from knowing that you can and will take care of yourself, even in the smallest of ways, can really help you tap into the joy of this season. Be well my friends and take good care!! P.S. The holidays can be a very emotionally difficult time, and you are definitely not alone.  If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this is outside the scope of my expertise. Please pursue immediate support from your primary mental health clinician or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.   If you have comments, deep thoughts, shallow thoughts, questions, anything you’d like to share in response to this blog, I would love to hear them. Please send a message to me, Deb, at honeycreekhealing@gmail.com .