The Mindful Guide to College Preparation:: A Five-Day Retreat for Students and Their Parents

By Lisa Palombo Moore

A childs departure for college can shake the strongest of parents. Without minimizing the anguish such separations bring, Lisa Moore shows how that turning point offers parents and their college-bound children a unique moment to deepen love, respect, and communication. Over five days, she conveys her bold message of self-transformation through a course of mindful practices including meditation, yoga, and directed journaling. This book will bring you face to face with aspects of your relationships youve never dared confront. You will emerge a stronger, more loving person.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504333757

Lisa Palombo Moore

LISA MOORE has been a teacher of teenagers and their families for the past thirty years. She is best known for her powerful teaching style that brings mindfulness to daily activities. Her key teaching is that through discovering and living one’s own truth, we can live joyful lives. This joy reaches the whole world. Lisa lives in New England and skis with her husband and two children as much as possible.

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Copyright © 2015 Lisa Moore.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Author Credits:

With S. R. Gilbert Art Work by Chaldea Emerson Deyman

Balboa Press

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3376-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3375-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015909566

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/04/2015

Contents

Bringing Mindfulness to the Entire Family

Finding a Time and Place

The Activities

A Checklist: What You’ll Need for the Retreat

Day 1:   The Trap

Peppermint Tea

Mandala Artwork

Movement

Interlude: The Unhappy Outcome

How to Meditate

Journal Activity: Minding the Trap

Closure

Day 2:   Shame and Forgiveness

Rooibos Tea

Mandala Artwork

Movement

Interlude: Forgiving Myself

Meditation: Forgiveness

Journal Activity: Shame versus Guilt

Closure

Day 3:   Looking within to Heal

Ginger Tea

Mandala Artwork

Movement

Interlude: Finding Your Grief

Meditation: Wisdom Resides Within

Journal Activity: Healing Wounds

Closure

Day 4:   Looking Forward

Masala Chai

Mandala Artwork

Movement

Interlude: The Beliefs of Others

Meditation: Walking

Journal Activity: Who Else Am I?

Closure

Day 5:   Healing Together

Green Tea

Mandala Artwork

Movement

Interlude: Breathing to Connect

Meditation: Loving-Kindness

Journal Activity: Compassion for All

Closure

An Ending?

Pull-Out Yoga Pose Sheet to Hang on Wall

Suggested Reading

Bringing Mindfulness to the Entire Family

The summer after I finished high school, my father had a heart attack. He stayed in a Buffalo hospital for nearly two weeks. When at last he came home, he was thin and pale—and my mother did not look much better. After one glance at their faces, and one minute in that fear-filled house, I knew that neither had the strength to move forward. Their emotional tanks were empty, and so was mine. I realize only now, though, that we shared the same tank. Children and their parents usually do.

I come from a family of five. By the time of my father’s illness, my brothers and sister had left home, allowing my parents and me to begin a new phase in our shared life together: friendship. Still, the final two years of high school had not been easy. I was questioning who I was and holding my self-image up to some pretty unrealistic ideals. Amid this turmoil, I could hardly wait to head off to George Washington University in Washington, DC. Like so many American teenagers, this would be my first time living away from home.

As August unfolded, my parents began cobbling together a routine. I was glad to see some type of rhythm return, but my own did not. For a long time, possibly all my life, it had been I, the child, who had carried my parents’ emotions for them—their pain, their trauma, and their worries. And now, as I prepared to leave home, I took on the enormous fear that at any moment my father might die.

The summer inched along, and then, the week before the start of the fall semester, I made up my mind. I called the admissions office, explained what had happened, and said that under the circumstances I couldn’t possibly leave my parents. I couldn’t enroll that semester.

But wasn’t I lying to myself? It is only now, thirty years later, that I realize the truth: I wanted to be appreciated by my parents. As an eighteen-year-old, I saw this great trauma as an opportunity to be seen and acknowledged as an individual. I wanted my father and mother to thank me for my help, for the sacrifice I made. That never came. Over the year that followed, this painful truth came into focus. I went away to college to see if I could exist without them because I did not exist with them.

Now that I am a parent myself, with children fast approaching college age, I have written a book for families who want to avoid a legacy of tangled and unspoken emotions. I want to open new pathways of communication—pathways that show a family how to be loving and supportive while granting autonomy to its individual members. For we don’t need to take on one another’s emotions in order to love, to be close, and to care. But in order to get there, we need to look carefully at our own experiences. I’ll start with my own.

My parents had been wounded long before I knew them—childhood traumas, including some terrible tragedies in the world wars, had fragmented my father’s family and left my mother’s irreparably damaged. The only way my parents knew how to cope with emotional pain was to bury it. They bundled their parents’ feelings up with many of their own