Honouring Endings to Allow for New Beginnings
In the Celtic calendar, Samhain, the Celtic New Year, marks both an ending and a beginning. A moment of deep pause between light and dark. The Western calendar celebrates the New Year with high energy, parties and New Year Resolutions which rarely last. Instead, the Celtic tradition invites us to begin our year with quietness; a still moment of reflection, to look inward and enquire within. To ask what is ending before we ask what can begin.
For many of us, this rhythm can feel both unfamiliar and liberating. The instinct to plan, produce, and perform runs deep, but Samhain asks something different of us. It asks us to slow down, to honour endings, and to listen for what is quietly emerging beneath the surface.
Honouring Endings
In business and in life, endings are often rushed or in truth, avoided all together! Projects are closed, roles shift, teams change, companies are taken over and there is rarely a moment to give it a second thought. That is done, on we go. We so often skip over the more difficult feelings of the ending by focussing on the what is next. However, if we move too quickly to the next challenge and target, we forget to acknowledge the emotional event of the ending. Then we aren’t truly present to the transition and we can miss the process and the learning that endings offer. We move quickly to the next target, the next challenge, the next beginning.
If we skip over endings, like they are nothing, we lose the wisdom they carry. Endings are an opportunity for out breath. They can bring completion, clarity, and perspective. They offer us the chance to harvest insight before moving forward. As one cycle closes, the next can begin, but this is much harder if we haven’t fully completed and let go through a ‘good ending’.
Learn Endings! This season, resist the temptation to race ahead. What is ending? What has completed? What has gone? Perhaps create your own moment of pause. Light a candle. Reflect on what you’ve accomplished this year, what you’ve learned, and what you’re ready to release. Create an intentional ending. This does not need to be long and involved, it could be as simple as having a quiet 15 mins, taking a long exhale, writing down what is ending and acknowledging by saying something outloud like, “that chapter is now complete”.
Reflection Before Resolution: Great for Leadership
Reflection is not ‘navel gazing’ (as one client said to me), it’s a courageous act of leadership. It requires honesty and humility to ask:
What has truly worked this year?
What drained me more than it nourished me?
Where have I grown?
What am I being invited to change?
This is not about perfection, it’s about alignment. Like the aeroplane which constantly makes small course corrections, reflection allows us to adjust, recalibrate, to steer back toward what matters to us the most. Research shows that high-performing leaders who engage in regular reflection make better decisions and sustain higher wellbeing over time. Reflection creates coherence between values and actions, and purpose and performance.
Try: Set aside one hour (yes one whole hour) for personal reflection. No laptop, no agenda. Just a pen and paper (your journal?), a quiet space, and the willingness to listen to your deeper self.
Begin with the End in Mind
If this resonates with you and you are used to this kind of reflection, I offer you one of the most powerful reflection practices. As the year ends, consider your own ‘end’. The end of your time in a body on this planet (whether or not it is your ‘death’ is a whole other discussion, perhaps for another time!). The fact that your body will one day go back to the earth, can be a very powerful exercise of pure clarity.
What do you want people to say at your death?
What do you want to be remembered for?
What qualities, contributions, or relationships will show that you had a life well-lived?
This exercise will bring focus to what truly matters and reveals your “North Star”. What is your deeper purpose that can guide your leadership through the year ahead. When you start with the end in mind, your goals become expressions of meaning, not just metrics.
For many women leaders, this reflection also surfaces what needs to be released. If you have outdated ambitions, inherited expectations, or measures of success that no longer fit. The end becomes the compost for new growth. (When I did this exercise for the first time, I found a whole load of things I believe I wanted to achieve, which I actually had no interest in truth! Truly eye opening!)
An Invitation
As this Celtic year closes, take time to honour your endings. Reflect deeply, breathe fully, and let integration do its quiet work.
When you begin again, and when you step into your new cycle of leadership, creativity, and service, do so with clarity, coherence, and alignment.
The end is never the end. It is simply the fertile dark from which new light is born.