Bringing Joy to the College Drop Off
Last week, my husband and I helped our daughter move into her dorm for her freshman year of college. The year leading up to this momentous occasion was INTENSE to say the least. 😵💫
I had to remind myself time and time again, to practice what I preach!
This meant I needed to:
release stress, control, sadness, worry, and fear out of my body
reclaim my energy out of stressful situations and people
validate my ability to create my internal wellbeing regardless of external circumstances
If you are looking for a high-vibe and happy college sendoff, actively manage your energy!
It doesn’t matter if it’s your first or fourth, sending a child off to college is a monumental milestone – one often fraught with emotion.
However, if you use simple energetic tools to process this transition, you can easily create a “clean” experience where both you and your child feel joyful with the “goodbye”.
Energetic tools are available to everyone.
We all have energetic tools we can use to transform stressful situations into positive and healing ones.
The key, of course, is that we have to be willing to use them!
Worry and fear are uncomfortable feelings, but they can also be addicting. We get an adrenaline rush when feel these intense emotions, and this energy helps us feel “alive” — an exhilarating change from the ho-hum, going-through-the-motions of everyday life.
Yet, if we dedicate ourselves to keeping our emotions flowing, we can create growth and healing in our relationships, even as they are changing before our very eyes.
Unfortunately, if we believe that such and such needs to happen, or so and so needs to do something, or that all the uncertainty with a situation needs to be resolved before we can relax, we’re going to be perpetually on edge.
We have the power to bring ourselves back to equilibrium at any time by using active energy management techniques.
Why energetic boundaries help make identity changes easier to process
I work with a lot of teens and they usually tell me one of two worries they have when heading off for college:
Most often, they feel guilty when they leave for college because their parents are so sad. They feel they need to downplay how much they are enjoying their college experience because they don’t want to hurt their parent’s feelings.
Less frequently, but equally troublesome, is when they don’t feel competent enough for college because their parents have done so much for them over the years, including helping them with the steps needed to get into a school in the first place.
Both these scenarios happen when we forget that we’re all unique souls on our own life path.
Without clear energetic boundaries, parents and children can enmesh their energies and to some extent even their identities. This exacerbates the grief and loss we feel when the closeness of those energies and/or identities change.
How do I actively manage energy?
Below are some techniques I have been doing all summer as we prepared for our daughter to begin college.
When I found myself future tripping either with worry or fantasy, I brought my attention back into the present moment. This practice creates immediate peace.
When my daughter wasn’t packing and preparing at the pace I would have personally or would have liked her to do to ease my own stress, I reclaimed my energy off her; released my judgement of her “procrastination” and focused on creating my own internal peace independent of her actions.
When my sons told me they were sad their sister was leaving, and my eyes swelled with tears for their grief, I gathered up my own emotions and released them out of my body – not because they are bad, just because I want to keep them moving rather than become overwhelmed by them.
The college goodbye
On the big day, my husband and I helped our daughter bring her belongings into her dorm. We met her roommate and her roommate’s parents. We did a last minute grocery run, and then it was time to say goodbye.
I was truly overcome with excitement for her. I’d been making energetic separations with her all summer, but I was still surprised how high-vibe and happy our departure was verses the emotional breakdown I had expected.
Energy work never ends; it’s a practice
Yet, as we drove south on the 101 headed for home, I found my attention in her dorm:
wondering how her room organizing was going
curious if she was scared or nervous
wondering how orientation would go, if she’d make friends, eat well, and on and on and on!
Every time I found my attention back with my daughter, I pulled my energy off her and put it back into my own body. I was setting her free energetically to have whatever experience she wanted/needed to have on her own and I collected all my energy so I could be whole in my own body, inside the car with my husband.
Perhaps My Greatest Gift?
As much I would have loved to have gone to college with her, my greatest gift was to set her free - mentally, physically, and energetically.
Learn Active Energy Management Tools
If you would like to learn simple, yet powerful, tools to help you actively manage your own energy, please join us in the Practicum — our monthly training on all things energetic! You’ll have instant access to all previous classes, including the one we just did on processing identity shifts.
This experience was literally one of the most stressful of my life! And that is saying a LOT given I’d already overcome years of infertility trying to get these amazing kids, survived cancer while completing grad school, and moved internationally three times in two years.