moving into winter, a message to 2025 clients

This message is for everyone who crossed paths with my counselling and supervision practice this year. Yesterday was my last day and this morning I am looking out my window and note the smush of feathers perfectly imprinted where an owl tried to fight its own reflection… this is for me a perfect capture of 2025 and leads into my message to you all.

First, thank you to each client and supervisee who chose to work with me. You took a risk — you showed up to see if I might be a good fit. Some of you stayed, some moved on, and all of you answered a quiet call to tend to the soft, vulnerable parts of yourselves. I honour that courage and hold it with warmth and care. Whether you came once or many times, you paused long enough honour your experience and let something be witnessed and heard.

As we move toward winter and pass through the darkness of solstice — that still moment like when breath hangs in the cold morning air and the warm light of spring still seems far away — we enter a season of metabolizing and composting, stillness and waiting. Counselling, too, is a kind of composting practice. Allowing the materials of our lives to sit an piles and break down into the component parts. To offer the opportunity to that which harmed us to become nourishment for our restoration: by pruning and thinning, by creating space for new shoots to form. An unfurling of clenched fists, a softening of the body as it releases, a surrender to the truth of impermanence and change. In these acts of composting, many of you found grace, dignity, and a clearer path.

For some, the work was simply choosing where to place the next step and trusting yourselves. For others, it meant loosening old stories — your own and those imposed by others — and coming into a fuller presence, telling yourselves a truer story about what it means to be human at this particular moment and place in time. Many of you reconnected with tender younger parts within, seeking affirmation of the beauty, worth, and love you deserve and may not have received. Befriending and protecting that inner child matters more than I can say.

What I witnessed this year is this: 2025 has not been easy. It has carried loss, illness, oppression, deception, addiction, betrayal, gaslighting and death — and it has also carried liberation, birth, empowerment, dancing, unmasking, expansion, and access to new resources. Through it all, many of you accessed strength and presence in conditions where life felt impossible. You sought meaning amid rapid change and learned how to ground yourselves meaningfully in the truth of your lived experience. You learned to trust yourselves.

No one was “fixed,” and no finish line was crossed. Instead, many of you gained deeper access to yourselves — learning to navigate complex lives in ways that feel lighter, more aligned, and more true.

For those whose burdens grew heavier, whose suffering intensified, you continued to honour your experience. You kept showing up. You keep trying. And for some, there is not yet a light at the end of the tunnel. You are still in it — walking forward as best you can, step by step.

This year also brought significant expansion — whether like branches reaching toward the light or like mycelium growing quietly in dark, nourishing soil. This included leaving harmful relationships, centring yourselves, reclaiming energy, asking for help, expanding into more aligned paradigms, and sometimes gently stepping into — and sometimes landing hard in — lives that feel more aligned and alive. None of this has been easy. Transformation rarely is. It has been messy, tear-filled, deeply honest work, alongside laughter, insight, and reflective silences.

Simply put: it has been a wild wild year. I am deeply honoured to have witnessed your courage within it. I have been doing this work for almost 20 years and I am consistently in awe of the diversity of and dignity in people’s capacity to show up for themselves.

Thank you for choosing me to walk alongside you in this work, thank you for knowing when you needed a break and thank you for knowing when you’re done. While I don’t imagine 2026 will necessarily be easier, I do trust our capacity to meet what comes. If you choose to, we can together face each shift, challenge, and moment of growth or liberation as it arrives — one step at a time.

I would like to finish with this offering of a poem.

WINTER GRIEF
David Whyte, 2023

Let the rest 

in this rested place 

rest for you.

Let the birds sing quietly

and the geese call

from far off

and let the sky race

from west to east 

when you cannot 

lift a wing to fly.

Let evening trace 

your loss in the branches

against a fading sky.

So that you can give up

and give in

and be given back to,

so that you can let

winter come and live

fully inside you,

so that you can

retrace the loving path

of heartbreak 

that brought you here. 

So you can cry alone

and be alone

so you can let yourself alone

to be lost,

so you can let the one 

you have lost alone, 

so that you can let

the one you have lost 

have their own life 

and even

their own death

without you.

So that the world

and everyone who has ever lived 

and ever died can come and go 

as they please.

So you can let yourself not know, 

what not knowing means.

So that you can be

even more generous in your letting go

than they were in their leaving.

So that you can let winter 

be winter.

So that you can let the world alone

to think of spring.