Earlier this week, I went through an ending.

After 4 amazing months together, I said goodbye to the women in the Gate Passage Collective -- a gathering of learning new skills and hands-on support for women going through big life changes.

Gate Passage is my phrase for a time of enormous change -- which always include endings.

As a whole, we aren’t great with endings. Have you heard of the Irish Goodbye (also known as ghosting, French exit, etc.)?

Instead of feeling and sharing the feelings and staying with experience, we can instead to choose things like anger, destruction, disappearing (aka the ghosting) to end things.

It’s not like you're taught in school how to do it (but this kind of learning would benefit you far more than memorizing the multiplication table).

If you've experienced trauma in childhood, endings can be so much harder to cope with.

The next time you're faced with an ending, I offer you some things think about to help you move through an ending that might feel better:

• How can I end things with grace and honor?

• How can I end things without denying or blaming the other person, and with owning the part I've played in it?

• How can I loosen my grip on the things that hurt and embrace what felt good?

So on Tuesday night, each of us took time to tell each other what this experience meant and how it felt to end our time together.

It was a lovely ending.