Beginnings and Endings
Jan 06 2025

Happy New Year!
To mark the transition, here’s a wee muse on the theme of beginnings and endings.
A few weeks ago, in the final session of my online Creative Facilitation course, we explored the theme of beginnings and endings through play and reflection. Here follows a few of my experiences with beginnings and endings, along with an outline of the groups’ playful explorations and a poem I assembled from their musings in the Zoom chat-box.
What do beginnings and endings mean to me?
I shared with the group that getting conscious of what beginnings and endings mean to me has really helped my facilitation practice develop over the years. In my workshops, strong beginnings and endings are what contain the work and allows participants to take big risks and travel to great depths.
Through my dramatherapy training, which I completed 10 years ago, I got to know all my own stories around beginnings and endings. I realised beginnings made me feel nervous, so I would often rush through them as quickly as possible. I also discovered that I was holding a lot of trauma around endings, so I would (unconsciously) find ways of cunningly avoiding them. My rushed beginnings and bundled endings had an impact on the participants and the depth and safety of the work.
My dramatherapy training helped me bring compassion and healing to the parts of me who struggled with beginnings and endings and taught me how to use ritual, repetition and explicit boundaries to help people safely find their way in and out of the work.
Exploring Beginnings and Endings Through Play and Writing
To help the Creative Facilitation group get conscious around their relationships with beginnings and endings, in the final session, I invited them to play simple a copying game, noticing what other people were doing, copying what they saw and turning it up until a game is found.
Games developed like mercury, finding iteration after iteration, until at some point the games ground to a halt.
I invited the participants to pause and notice how it felt to be in the gap between an ending and a beginning. Then the next wave of games commenced.
After a few waves of games, I invited participants to journal on their relationship with beginnings and endings using the prompts:
“Beginnings are…”
“Endings are…”
Then I invited them to review their writing and share any nuggets they wanted to share in the chat-box. Their sharing was so beautiful and profound that I was moved to arrange it into a poem after the session had ended:
A poem exploring beginnings and endings...
Beginnings are full of questions
and curiosity
Exciting and intriguing...
anything could happen!
The beginning is a seed
Full of potential,
Possibility
showing us
Whats there
To work with.
Beginnings are a chance
to be someone new,
Where we start to work out
how and who we want to be
in this space
for a time.
Beginnings are a pause,
a moment between
not starting and starting,
between two points
of momentum.
Beginnings are having
to prove yourself
all over again.
Beginnings are calm,
new connections to make
and everything is possible.
When does a beginning end
and become a middle?
The middle..
To me is the hard part
It’s the nitty gritty
The place where it gets messy
We have to face ourselves
Meet things
Will we make it?
Some leave
We might opt out
Its revealing.
Endings are old grief,
new grief, a relief.
It’s completion
Complete
Relief
And celebration.
Handing it over,
letting go of that thing,
that thought, that idea!
It’s over
And something new
can begin.
Endings are the same loss
again and again
Hard to be in
and a place I’d rather move out of
quickly.
No more having to face things
A time to feel renewed,
to build or to start again.
It's nice to have a time together
in the pub afterwards
What is an ending
if it's knocking on the door
of a next beginning?
No ending is final
when it is beheld
by another.
To see an end
is to carry it with us.
Big thanks to the group for their permission for me to share this.
I wonder, dear reader, what do beginnings and endings mean to you?