Today is a big deal for me because today the membership I started over 6 years ago is closing.

Having started and ended a number of things in public view in my professional life over the years (a podcast with my husband, a business partnership with my mom, a variety of collaborations, my mastermind, and now my membership) has taught me a lot about how we relate to endings as a culture.

Mostly what’s been modeled is that when stuff ends, there’s a problem. 

When we assume that endings are bad, sometimes we hang onto things too long to avoid them. Or we gloss over them because no one taught us that it’s ok, in fact necessary, to grieve what was in order to be ready to call in what’s next.

When Mike and I ended The Kate & Mike Show in September of 2020, a bunch of folks assumed we were getting divorced.

When I’ve closed programs in the past, folks have assumed it was because it wasn’t making us any money or that I hated running them or our students weren’t getting results.

When short and long-term programs have been coming to a close, I’ve witnessed so many clients stop showing up completely, perhaps not able to engage with the ending at all. Or they suddenly have all kinds of complaints that hadn’t been present the previous 80% of the time, perhaps finding it easier to tolerate the ending if they’re mad.

When something ends, whether the ending was planned or not, we tend to jump to “something’s wrong” instead of, “Let’s fully take this all in as we let it go and make space for an even bigger YES!”

When TaKisha, our Head Empress in the Origin Membership, and I decided it was time to wind down the container, we knew we wanted to do it in a way that honored the beauty that had been created over 6+ years. 

After welcoming over 4,000 members through the program and compiling hundreds of hours of teaching, coaching, connecting, and healing our nervous systems, it wasn’t that there was a problem.

The membership made great money. The members got great results. It wasn’t hard to run. There were a lot of things we both loved about it.

But everything has a season and we both intuitively knew that the season of the Origin Membership was coming to a close.

It was time to make space for a bigger yes for ourselves and for our members.

Cycles and seasons have been the bedrock of the content of the membership since day one. So, it was only natural that we lean into the gifts of the season of Culmination (similar in energy to Autumn) to digest and integrate with our members, plus set us all up for the powerful new beginnings that always come to pass when we fully honor the ending.

In this season of graduations and thresholds of all kinds, I wanted to share a few of the key ingredients for our beautiful ending in the Origin Membership that left TaKisha, our Origin Empresses, and me feeling whole, complete, grateful, and ready to move onto the next chapter.

We brought our hearts and knowledge of the nervous system and what it needs to feel safe and paired it with our cyclical framework when it came to mapping out a beautiful ending for the Origin Membership.

We went slow.

We knew from past experience that our members needed time to digest change. So we announced that the Origin Membership would be closing in March, more than 90 days before that change would actually take place.

We talked about the ending and how we all felt.

We let our members in on our own emotional landscapes, including the sadness and the feelings of excitement, that we were feeling as we moved toward this ending. We didn’t pretend that it was all awesome. We didn’t pretend that it was all awful. We let ourselves be human and gave our members space to do the same.

We savored.

We kept reminding our members that now was the time to enjoy the community, the live calls, and the content so that when the doors closed they’d have felt like they really took it in. We encouraged them to savor their experience in all of our live calls and reminded them in our weekly emails. I savored right alongside them.

We let them take something with them, if they wanted.

We knew some members would want to keep the incredible vault of 6 years of feminine energy-based business building content to refer back to over and over again. So, we offered the option to purchase The Origin Vault at a discounted rate for members who wanted to take it with them.

We closed in ceremony.

We planned the best virtual Empress Graduation to honor our time together and send one another off ready for what’s next. It included opening space with lighting candles and calling in our maternal lineages by name, reflecting on our past selves, composting what we no longer needed as we stepped into what’s next, itemizing what we’d received during the experience, naming our gratitude for how we showed up and all of the beauty, and setting an intention for how we wanted to move into the next chapter of our businesses and our lives. And, of course, we danced.

If you find yourself in a season where something’s ending and you’re feeling ambivalent or avoidant about it, or if you just want to make sure you make it beautiful, I hope you use these elements as a guide to help you.

Endings are natural.

They’re not bad.

They might bring up grief, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad.

When we tend to our endings with our presence, we make a lot more space for the next beautiful thing to make its way to us. Plus, we set ourselves and others free to fully enjoy it.

May we all enjoy happy endings, this season and beyond ;)

Xo

Kate