February 4, 2025 • 34 mins
Have you ever felt like there was something you wanted to do — like write a book or take an improv class or start a yoga practice — but you were avoiding it because you hate the feeling of being a beginner?
It can be uncomfortable to not know what’s coming next, to make mistakes, to feel out of place, to wobble or stutter or unknowingly break decorum.
And yet reconnecting with the beginner in you is also liberating. There’s a freedom that comes with lowering your expectations, with waiting for cues, with learning as you go and even taking the pressure off for a performance of any kind.
In today’s episode, we’ll talk about the importance of being a beginner in all aspects of life and talk about how we can reconnect with the beginner in each of us.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about some of the really amazing benefits that can come
from being a beginner at something and why it's so
important to carry this beginner's mindset with us through our lives,
(00:46):
even as we become more surefooted in anything that we're
doing or trying. This idea came to me for two reasons.
Number one, because of the authors that I work with
in my program called a Book in six Months, which
is the largely first time authors or aspiring authors who
are working on their first manuscripts. Almost one hundred percent
of the authors that we work with in that program
(01:07):
are aspiring authors or first time authors. And two, because
I'm at the very beginning of a yoga teacher training
program right now, which I'm going to talk about a
bit on today's episode. I've been feeling really pulled for
a couple of years now to do a yoga teacher training,
even though it's been several years since I've even really
had a consistent yoga practice. I started yoga for the
(01:30):
very first time in twenty fifteen, and I want to
talk about that experience, like the first moment that I
ever walked into a yoga studio, and I practiced almost
every single day for five years, let's say close to
five years between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty, and then
when twenty twenty came around and the pandemic happened, I
wasn't able to go to my yoga studio anymore, so
I kept on practicing in my living room for I
(01:52):
don't know, a couple of months, from March of twenty
twenty until let's say May of twenty twenty, at which
point I was seven and a half half months pregnant.
I delivered at the end of July, so yeah, seven
ish months pregnant, and continued practicing for a little bit
on my own, and then just kind of petered out
and kept walking for the last part of that first
pregnancy and then hadn't really been back in a yoga
(02:15):
studio since then, So when I started to consider doing
my yoga teacher training, I was like, I'm not sure
how I feel about starting this really physically intensive program
when I'm not really in the physical shape in order
to do it. And one of the things that I've
been reminded of is how wonderful it is to be
a beginner at something. How wonderful it is to walk
(02:37):
in and be the weakest person in the room, to
be the least skilled person in the room, to not
know what's going on, to not know what's coming next.
There are so many gifts of having that mindset, and
it's one of the great benefits of actually being a
beginner at something. We tend to lose that along the
way somewhere, you know, the older we get, or the
more skilled we become at something, or the longer that
(02:59):
we've been practicing some certain art or skill or whatever,
or the longer we've been at a job, let's say,
the more we lose that beginner mindset, the more we
begin to come at problems, issues, projects, whatever with a
mindset like I know best, I've been doing this forever,
you know, I've got the answers, and it can really
block us and block our creativity. So many of the
(03:21):
authors who come into the Book in six Months program,
like I said, most of these authors are beginners at
writing a book. Whether or not they're beginners at writing,
many of them are very skilled writers, but they come
to the process of writing a book for the first
time and they see this as almost like a stumbling
block or a detriment, like I've never done this before,
i don't know how this works. You know, you're going
(03:43):
to have to tell me, And I want them to know,
and I want you to know, if you're listening to this,
that I don't see your beginnerness as a stumbling block.
In fact, in so many ways, your beginnerness makes you
more open to the process than I can be, because
I've done this so many times and so sure, there
are things that I know that you're not going to know.
(04:04):
There are like experiences I've had that you're not going
to have had. There are pitfalls that I can see
coming that you're not going to be able to see coming.
And yet there is an openness in you. There is
a sense of like a lack of agenda in you
that I would have to work really hard to have.
(04:25):
I would have to be really conscious and really intentional
if I were going to have that type of openness
around the experience of writing a book, because when I
sit down to write a book, I'm like, oh, yeah,
old hat, we've done this before. And you know, writing
a book is one of those things that tends to
bring out the beginner in you, even if you've done
it a bunch of times before. But in order for
the beginner to come out in you, it's almost like
(04:47):
the part of you that thinks, so I know what's
going on, the ego in you or whatever you want
to call that, the false self has to be brought
down to size, has to be brought down to its knees.
And so for a true beginner to come to the
process and experience beginnership much easier than for an expert
in the field to come to the process and experience beginnership.
There's a lot more obstacles that I would have to
(05:08):
overcome in order to step into my own beginnership than
there would be for you. And I was just reminded
of this because I stepped into the yoga room at
the beginning of January of twenty twenty five as a
kind of new beginner, because you know, I wasn't totally
new to yoga. I had done this thing before, but
I hadn't done it in a really long time, and
(05:28):
so I was in touch again with my beginnership when
I first started doing yoga in twenty fifteen, when I
stepped into the room for the very first time, one
of the things that an instructor told me was, in
particular with hot yoga, your goal in that first class
or first couple of classes is just to stay in
the room. So in other words, you're going to go
(05:48):
in there, You're going to learn all these postures, learn
all these posas. It's one hundred and two or one
hundred and four degrees in the room, depending on the day.
And your goal is not to get all the postures
perfect or to know you know how to do each thing,
or to have your technique perfect or anything like that.
It's not even to learn perfection or to move toward
(06:09):
perfection or to get better at the poses. Your whole
goal in the beginning is just to stay in the room.
And there's something about that mindset. My goal here is
just to stay in the room that opens you to
a whole way of experiencing the yoga practice that if
your focus is more on perfecting the poses, you don't
(06:31):
get to have that experience with the yoga practice. And
I can say this from my own personal experience from
kind of riding the highs and lows of my yoga
practice and experiencing myself in different seasons. So follow me
here for just a second. Okay. So I step into
the yoga studio for the very first time in the
fall of twenty fifteen. I'm told by this instructor to
(06:52):
make it my goal to just stay in the room.
And I'm a true, true beginner at yoga. I have
no idea what I'm doing, and in those early days,
it's weird to say this, but it was almost like
the easiest it's ever been was in those early days,
because my entire goal was just to stay in the room.
So I didn't have these expectations for myself. I didn't
have an agenda going into the room. I didn't have
(07:14):
I didn't even know what posture was coming next. I
was required to be one hundred percent present, to listen
to the instructor, to you tune in, to pay very
close attention to know what's coming next, to know what
to do, to know where to put my hand, to
know where to point my gaze, to know, you know,
what shape the body is trying to make. I had
to listen to every single cueue now for between twenty
(07:38):
fifteen and twenty twenty, Like in twenty nineteen, once I
was like getting the groove of this yoga thing. One
of the things that happened for me, and I'm not
saying this happens for every person, but what happened for
me and my practice is I really got to a
place where I felt like staying in the heated room
wasn't an issue for me anymore. My body had acclimated
to that very well. And I got into a mindset
where I was really trying to some of these more
(08:01):
in my mind, like exciting yoga posts, like I wanted
to get upside down, I wanted to do handstands. I
think this is a natural progression for anyone who does
whether we're talking about yoga, or whether we're talking about
you know, faith or religion, or whether you're talking about
another kind of creative practice or whatever it is that
we're talking about a natural progression as you move through
and you gain skills, is to be like interesting. I
(08:22):
wonder what else my body can do. I wonder if
I can kind of do this cool party trick, And
wouldn't it be so impressive if I could do this thing. Well,
that's like a natural stage that we have to move through.
But I will say that my practice got more and
more challenging, and some of that was good, like challenging
can be a good thing, but it got more and
(08:42):
more of almost like a stumbling block for me. I
can't say that in twenty twenty, when I stopped doing
yoga that I was still really even doing what I
would now call yoga, in part because I had gotten
so attached to the postures looking a certain way, to
sort of mastering this thing, to the practice looking a
(09:03):
certain way, that when I was pregnant, I'm seven months pregnant,
I'm not able to go to the studio anymore because
we're in the height of COVID, and it was like
it wasn't just about me getting on my mat and
breathing anymore. It was about me doing these postures and
mastering these things. And I didn't have the instructor any
there anymore to help me, and I didn't have other
people in the room to kind of hold me accountable.
And I'm not being too hard on myself. I'm not,
(09:26):
you know, faulting myself for this or anything. I'm just
simply explaining how it happened, which is that I stopped
my yoga practice because my yoga practice wasn't for me
about getting on the mat and showing up and tuning
into my breath and staying in the room. My yoga
practice was now about something different, and I wasn't getting
(09:47):
what I needed, you know, needed in air quotes kind
of like I wasn't getting the thing that I was
going there for. I wasn't getting like praise or accolades
or you know, wasn't like mastering these really complicated poses.
I couldn't go upside down, I couldn't twist because I
was pregnant. There were all these things, and so I
just stopped my practice altogether. And I stopped my yoga
practice almost completely through twenty twenty twenty twenty one. I
(10:11):
believe when I was pregnant with my son in twenty
twenty one, I came back to the yoga practice for
a brief time with my friend Rachel, who I had.
I paid her to come over to my house and
to do you know, one on one practice with me
while I was pregnant with Charlie. That was a glimpse,
a tiny glimpse of the beginnership that I'm going to
talk about in today's episode. Because I hadn't exercised in
(10:34):
a really long time, I was out of the typical,
you know shape, I guess that my body was used
to being in. I didn't feel strong. I hadn't been
working out at all. Rachel came over to the house.
We would, you know, do this this yoga practice together,
just the two of us. It was always like very simple.
It was stretching. It wasn't anything crazy. It was just
breathing and stretching, which is yoga. That is what yoga is,
is breathing and stretching. And during that time, I was
(10:56):
forced to come back into relationship with my own beginnership
because I couldn't push myself to do these crazy postures
or poses or anything like that. It was just like, Hey,
we're going to do yoga together. We're going to breathe together,
We're going to get you on your mat, we're going
to bring your attention to your body, to various parts
of your body, and just pay attention, which, in my
(11:17):
opinion from today where I'm standing, this is all that
yoga is. And I would say the same thing about
writing too. This is all that writing is. This is
all that prayer is, This is all that art is,
This is all that creativity is. This is all that
being a human being is. Is being present, paying attention,
tuning in, you know, noticing what's going on, listening to
(11:38):
your breath, just getting curious. This is the yoga practice,
This is every creative practice. This is what it means
to be human. And yet I think so many of
us miss this because we miss what it's like to
be a beginner. Especially you know, if you're listening to
this episode, I'm guessing you're older than like twenty. You're
probably more like thirty or maybe even forty fifty or older.
(12:02):
And so when we get into the later years in
our life, what Richard RR calls the second half of
your life, there's a different energy, usually a different kind
of feel to this part of our life, the second
half of our life, than there was to the first half.
In the first half of your life. There's a lot
of beginnership, and in the second half of our life
(12:28):
there's not as much beginnership. There's some really great parts
to the second half of our life. There's a lot
more usually contribution and getting back and wanting to serve
and that sort of thing, and hopefully like getting over
that old ego hump that is really present in first
half of life. And yet I think one of the
sneaky ways that ego shows up in second half of life,
I would argue, is the feeling like I'm an expert.
(12:52):
I know what I'm doing here, I know what the
answers are, i know what the process looks like, I
know what the strategy is, I've got the next step.
I already know what's coming before anyone even tells me
what's coming. There's so many reasons why beginnership is super important.
It puts us in touch with the reality of who
we are, for one. But I also think that in
(13:13):
this particular time, that beginnership is an absolute necessity to
our own survival as a species moving forward, because the
world that we're living in is shifting so quickly, so dramatically,
that if you think you know what's coming next, you
are probably wrong. And I'll never forget my friend Christine
(13:34):
talking to me about this. I don't know, like twenty twenty,
twenty twenty one, some are in there as the pandemic
was unfolding in front of us. She was saying, you know,
prior to pandemic world, if leaders and teachers out there
in the world told you we have the answers, we
know the strategy, we know what to do next, you know,
we would have admired them. We would have thought, like, amazing,
(13:55):
how wonderful we should follow these people. These are the
people who are trustworthy. She's like, in this time, as
we move into the depth of this chaos and darkness,
if you hear a leader or a teacher tell you, oh,
I know what to do, I have the answer, I
know what's coming next, you actually, in some ways start
to think that they're insane, because who could possibly know
(14:17):
with the chaos that's unfolding what's coming next? Who could know?
These times are unprecedented, as we've heard over and over
and over again in the last five years. So because
the times are unprecedented for someone to say I know
what's coming next, or I know what's going to happen,
or you know, I've got the answers, I have the strategy.
It actually starts to make you question their sanity. And
(14:38):
so what used to work in the old world isn't
working in the new world. And in fact, it's not
even that it just doesn't carry over. But it almost like,
in this light, in this shadow, looks very different than
it looked before. Before it was like, oh, I admire
you for thinking, or I admire you for sort of
having the way or knowing the path. And now it's like,
if you're telling me that you know the path, I'm
(15:00):
looking at you like you're untrustworthy. You're kind of insane
to me if you know the path. And so beginnership
is more important than it's ever been. And I was
just noticing about myself as I stepped into the yoga
studio this second time that I'm not technically a beginner
at yoga, because I've done yoga before. But I arrived
(15:21):
in the studio with much more beginnership this time than
I have ever had in my practice, except for maybe
those first weeks that I practiced in twenty fifteen. I
had natural beginnership back then. I think there's a way
for us to access our beginnership even when we're not
truly beginners at something. So I hope you can see
that what I'm talking about here is not just being
(15:41):
a beginner at something like writing. As you are a
beginner at something like writing, if you're naturally a beginner
at something, you can begin to notice what is it
like to be a beginner at this thing, and notice
the benefits, the amazing benefits that come from being a
beginner at something, and then decide you want more of
that energy of beginnership in the other parts of your
(16:03):
life where you may not actually be a beginner, you know, like,
think for a second, are you married or you partnered
up with someone? How long have you been partnered up
with that person? Matt and I have been together I
think seven years. We've been married five five in November.
So we are not beginners at being married, we are
not beginners at being partners. But how could we bring
(16:24):
some beginnership into our relationship? Think about this, Okay, what
is it like when you first meet the person who
you end up falling in love with? When you first
meet that person, beginnership feels like so light and fun
and free, and this person brings out the best in you,
and you see all the most beautiful qualities in this person,
and you see past their flaws, You see right past
(16:45):
their flaws, and all you see in them is the
beauty of God. You know, this person is like the
most amazing person I've ever met. And when I'm with them,
I used to feel so good about myself and we're
both growing together and there's just that like excitement and
energy and connection in those early days of a relationship.
So how could we bring that beginnership from the early
(17:06):
part of a relationship into a later part of the relationship.
Even if you've been with the person that you're with
for twenty years or fifty years, you know, how can
we cultivate some beginnership in the later parts of our relationship.
Think about your job for a second. What do you
do for work? I've been working in publishing since two
thousand and nine ish quit my job in two thousand
(17:29):
and eight, really started mid two thousand and eight, but
really started working in publishing in two thousand and nine.
So what are we at now, fifteen or sixteen years
that I've been working in publishing. I am not a
beginner at this job. I have written fifteen books fourteen
books something like that. I don't know, I've lost track
along the way. I think Write Your Story was my
fifteenth book, if I'm counting right, So I've written fifteen books.
(17:50):
I am not a beginner at book writing, but I
do remember some of the feeling of sitting down to
the page and being like, absolutely one hundred percent convinced
I have something really miraculous to say. And I think
that it's easy when you've been working in publishing for
fifteen years to kind of lose touch with the beauty
(18:13):
of what it feels like to be a beginner, like
that feeling of being like I know that, I know that,
I know deep in my soul that I have something
to say. I have picked up a lot of jadedness
working and publishing over the years, and could easily let
that jadedness take over my work as a writer. And
I think, honestly, this has happened for me a lot
(18:35):
in the last couple of years in particular, which I
think maybe one of the reasons why I feel my
soul kind of pulling me away from publishing as a job,
because I've picked up a lot of jadedness that has
blocked my creativity in my own writing. It hasn't allowed
me to use the fullness of my expression because in
my head, I'm like, this will never get published. No
(18:56):
publisher is ever going to be interested in that. And
I can tell you what a publisher want, I can
tell you what they're looking for. I can, you know,
take your idea and translated into what a publisher would
be interested in, and put together a book proposal document,
you know, and make the pitch and make it sound amazing.
And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that,
(19:17):
but sometimes there's too much distance, like I talked about
on last week's episode, between art and commerce. I'm not
saying that they can never coexist, but sometimes there's too
much difference between art and commerce, and so to chase
down commerce at the expense of art is tragic in
my opinion, you know. And I think I can so
(19:38):
easily get caught in that trap after working and publishing
for fifteen years, because I've lost the feeling of what
it's like to be a beginner at writing a book,
where you're just like I know that, I know that,
I know deep in my guts that I have something
miraculous to say, and I am going to get this
thing on the page, come hell or high water, and
almost in a way like you know, when you're really
a beginner, you're like, I don't care who public, I
(20:00):
don't care whoever reads it. I'm kind of terrified of
the idea that anyone ever could read it. And yes,
a part of you hopes that lots of people read
it someday and that you know you're you're lauded for
your many skills as a writer, but a deeper part
of you is like, I just am here to stay
in the room. That's my only job is to stay
in the room. When you are a beginner, your agenda
(20:21):
disappears out the door. Your expectations for yourself come way
down to like the lowest bar level being in that
yoga room and being like, my only job is just
to stay in this room. And if in order to
do that I have to lay on my back the
entire time, then that is what I will do. And
you get to a place, or at least I did
in my yoga practice, where you don't give yourself the
permission to lay on your back in the middle of
(20:44):
the room. And I just feel like this metaphor is
so poignant for us right now. It's so important for
us to take in that this might be a time
where we need to lay on our backs in the
middle of the room. Your whole job is to stay
in the room right now and stay with your breath,
(21:05):
And in order to do that, you may have to
lay on your back in the middle of the room.
But in order to give yourself that permission, the agenda
that you have for yourself, the expectations that you've said
that are so much higher than that, are going to
have to dissolve and go away. And if you have
this expectation for yourself that you should be able to
(21:26):
live the way you lived in the old world. And
I'm kind of using this marker of twenty twenty of
being like old world was before then new world is now.
I think you could move that marker. That's not like
a defined only one marker, But I'm just kind of
using that marker. If you're using the marker of twenty twenty,
if you're saying, like, I can live the way that
I lived before twenty twenty now I can have as
(21:47):
many social engagements I can be, you know, as connected
on Instagram or whatever other social media platform I can
run my business the way that I ran it before.
I can be the mother or the parent, or the
spouse or the partner or the whatever like I can
and help everyone. I can sort of be everything to everyone,
go on all these trips, whatever that looks like for you.
If you're like I can show up the same way
(22:07):
as I did back then. Now, if you are holding
that expectation for yourself, I believe you are going to
be sorely disappointed because the world has changed so dramatically
that there's just no possible way that you could do
that without splitting off from the truth of who you
are and splitting off from the truth of what is happening.
And that split will be deeply, deeply painful, And so
(22:29):
in my view, we have to bring that beginnership into
this period of time. Use my yoga journey as a metaphor. Okay,
I started yoga in twenty fifteen, did it for five years, consistently,
stopped doing yoga sometime in twenty twenty, come back to
yoga in twenty twenty five, and when I walk back
(22:49):
into that room, even though I've done yoga before, I'm
brand new. I'm brand new at it. My whole job
is just to stay in the room. So use that
as a metaphor. You are standing in a world that
you have lived in for X number of years. I
don't know how many years you've been here, but you've
been here, I'm gonna guess, if you're listening to this,
probably more than twenty years. I doubt many eighteen year
(23:09):
olds are listening to this podcast. So you've been here
for thirty years, thirty five years, forty years, fifty years,
sixty years, seventy five years, I don't know how many years.
However many years you've been here. You've been here that
many years. But you are a beginner, and your whole
job is just to stay in the room and stay
with your breath. And one of the things that I
stopped giving myself permission to do at some point during
(23:31):
the height of my yoga as I was able to
move my body in the most amazing ways and I
was in amazing shape, best shape of my life. I
lost sight of during that time the ability to say,
if I lose track of my breath, I'm actually not
doing yoga anymore, and I need to come back to
my back and find my breath. I need to just
lay on my back in the middle of the room
(23:52):
and find my breath. I wasn't giving myself permission for
that because I was like, I'm so far beyond that.
I clearly can, you know, do these sort of upside
down things and handstands and whatever else. And that was
all part of my process and an important part of
the process too. But what I want to bring your
attention to, if it feels like it fits for you,
is right now in the world that we're living in,
(24:12):
letting go of your agenda that you have for yourself,
letting go of those expectations that do not fit in
this new world that we're living in, and telling yourself
bringing some beginnership into your day to day that your
whole job is to stay in the room and to
stay with your breath, and that if you ever lose
track of your breath, that you're losing track of the
(24:32):
yoga practice, you're losing track of the let's call it
the human being practice, You're losing track of what it
means to be a human being here and now, present
in this moment, and that everything else needs to go
until you can come back to that. And I will say,
just being vulnerable and transparent that I do not do that.
(25:02):
I have crazy high expectations for myself for what I
should be able to achieve, or what I should be
able to accomplish, for how many people I should be
able to be in touch with or help or stay
in touch with or check in with or catch up
with or whatever. I have crazy high expectations for myself,
and I am described often as like type A or
very disciplined or whatever. I'm trying to learn to soften
(25:23):
to that so that if I lose track of my breath.
This past weekend, I had a really rough weekend. That
was the only thing I can guess is that it
was connected to grief, to the loss of my dad,
and it came out of nowhere. I didn't see it coming.
I had a really hard time even getting out of bed.
I felt really teary and kind of like irritated and
(25:44):
frustrated and just bristly with everyone all day. It was
a two day stretch where I just didn't feel like myself,
and I regret to say that I didn't give myself
the permission to just come to my back and breathe.
That is your whole job to stay in the room
and to stay with your breath and everything else can go.
(26:05):
And I didn't do that. I still showed up to
the birthday parties and showed up to this, and showed
up to that, and went to the dinners and did
all the things that were planned and that we're on
the calendar, and did essentially the poses, did the moves,
and didn't stay with my breath. And I'm not shaming
myself for that or faulting myself for that. What I'm
(26:25):
saying is, how could bring some beginnership into this period
of time? Help me to soften in what's trying to
unfold for me, t help me to soften in what's
trying to happen in this time right now. I think
this is what this period of time is asking from us,
is asking us to come back to what it means
(26:47):
to be a beginner and to give ourselves the permission
to just lay on the ground and breathe, if that's
what is required to move through this time. I don't
know if this resonates with you at all. I don't
know if you feel like, in many ways your old
strategies are no longer working the things that you used
to do before, or you used to try that used
to you know, make you feel good about yourself, or
(27:10):
get you out of bed in the morning, or get
you through a slump, or you know, help with your
depression or whatever. Like, those things that you used to
work are no longer working, and now you're having to
rethink and reimagine everything. If you're feeling that way, I
just want to point out that is inviting and bringing
a beginnership back into your body. And there are some
(27:31):
really great perks to being a beginner. When you are
a beginner, no one expects much of anything from you.
When you're a beginner. In the yoga studio, people expect
you to spend half of the class on your back.
When you are a beginner, you don't have super high
expectations of yourself. Your only expectation of yourself is just
to stay in the room and keep breathing. When you
are a beginner, you don't have any big agenda. It's
(27:53):
not like, well, if I don't hit this pose in
this class today, then I'm a failure and I'm worthless
and I am going to quit. No, you don't have
any big agenda for yourself. Your agenda is just to
show up and be there. And so there are these huge,
huge perks to being a beginner, and I want to
invite you, if it feels like this fits, to bring
(28:16):
some of that beginnership into your partnership, into your your
workout practice, whatever that looks like, into your spiritual practices.
Maybe you've been a part of your church or a
part of your spiritual community or group for a really
long time and you kind of feel like you're not
a beginner anymore. Like new people come into the group
or join the church or whatever, and you're like, you know,
(28:38):
sitting in the front row. You've got your you know
what the expectations are. You know how to dress, you
know what to bring to service, you know what to say,
you know what to do. You've got your your rules
that you follow, You've got your list of things that
you you know, your expectations that you're supposed to live
up to. You volunteer, you do all these other things,
and maybe you don't feel like a beginner in your
spiritual practice anymore. I would push you, or you encourage you,
(29:00):
invite you to bring some beginnership back into your spiritual practice,
because you know, my assertion would be that if there's
no beginnership in your spirituality, it's not really spirituality that
spirituality is all about beginnership. It's all about seeing with
fresh eyes. It's all about being the one in the
(29:22):
group who is looking with curiosity, who doesn't totally understand
all the ins and outs yet. And sometimes in order
to invite that beginnership back into our lives, we have
to make shifts or changes. We have to almost put
ourselves in a position where things are different than they
were before. So maybe it's something really simple, some really
simple change you could make that would make you feel
(29:45):
like a beginner again in your life, like maybe changing
the way that you schedule yourself. You know, maybe you say, okay,
I am not going to I'm going to schedule you know,
five nights a week whatever where I stay in the house.
Or maybe for you, beginnership would feel like you need
the opposite thing. You need to like push yourself to
go out and socialize or you know, go meet people.
(30:07):
I don't know what it is for you. Maybe you've
been doing a particular workout routine for a long time
and you don't feel like a beginner doing it anymore,
and so you need a new one. You need to
pick something new to remind you that you are still
a beginner. Every human being is still a beginner, and
being in touch with our own beginnership is such a
vital part of being human and of connecting to other
people and connecting to ourselves. And so this is my
(30:28):
invitation for you, is to take stock of different areas
of your life and just ask yourself, how much am
I inviting beginnership into my life? And in what ways
am I allowing myself to be a beginner? Am I
giving myself the permission to just stay in the room
(30:49):
and breathe? And in my experience, if you don't invite
beginnership into your life, beginnership will find you. It will
meet you through loss or death, or change or hardship
or something else entirely. Illness sometimes will bring us into
touch with our beginnership. And so for anyone who's listening,
(31:12):
if you're listening and you're like, yep, check, check, check,
you know I've lost someone that I love, or I
have a chronic illness, or I'm facing some other kind
of unfixable problem in my life, like we talked about
on last week's episode. Then one of the things that
you can take from that is that it is inviting
beginnership into your life for you, so you don't have
(31:34):
to be like, how could I be a beginner again?
It's like life is giving you. Life is opening to
you to this opportunity to experience your own beginnership. And
in the last couple of weeks that I've been in
the yoga studio as a beginner, it has just reminded
me what a gift it is to be a beginner.
You know, what a gift it is to not be
the one who has to have all the answers, to
(31:55):
not be the one who knows what's coming next, And
you know, there is such a thing as And maturity
is also important, and with maturity comes responsibility and leadership
and all kinds of other stuff. So I mean, those
parts of our life are also vital. But I think
what I want to emphasize is that during this time,
(32:15):
as everything is shifting, everything is changing, everything is new.
The world is a new place today that it was
not yesterday, and it for sure was not five years ago.
And we're all, in many ways beginners at this new world.
And if you are living in denial of that, you're
living split off from yourself and split off from what's true,
(32:37):
and that facade is going to be harder and harder
and harder to hold on too. I think it's going
to create a lot of hardship for anybody who who's
doing that, And I think for those of us who
can soften into what it feels like to be a
beginner at this are going to have a much easier
passage through this rather difficult time. I think twenty twenty five,
(32:57):
and I don't know beyond how many. I don't know
how long this will go, but I do think that
we're moving into a really challenging time. And I think
that the way through the challenging time is not by
knowing the answers and having all the skills in place
and having a strategy, having a clear plan. I think
the way through this time is by softening. The way
(33:20):
through this time is by staying with our breath. The
way through this time is by staying curious, by lowering
the bar for ourselves, by staying in the room and
just staying, you know, staying with our breath, and by
not bringing a strong agenda into the situation, but by
staying open to what this whole experience is trying to
show us. So that's what I want to invite for
(33:42):
you and with you in this episode. Just know that
I'm not coming to this episode from a place of maturity.
I mean, hopefully there's maturity in the message, but I'm
coming from a place of beginnership. I am right there
with you having to change the way that I interact
with the world because this world that I'm living in
is brand new, and so I'm also taking this assessment
(34:04):
of my life. How can I bring more beginnership into
my relationship with Matt, How can I bring more beginnership
into my experience of being a parent? How can I
bring more beginnership into my work, into the way that
I contribute to the world around me? How can I
bring more beginnership into my art, into my spirituality, into
my everyday practice, into my yoga, into all of it.
(34:26):
I hope this message resonates with you. I hope it
gets you thinking. I would love to hear from you.
You can come find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon
and I will be back here with you next week
on the Write Your Story Podcast. Until then, have a
wonderful week and I will chat with you soon.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about some of the really amazing benefits that can come
from being a beginner at something and why it's so
important to carry this beginner's mindset with us through our lives,
(00:46):
even as we become more surefooted in anything that we're
doing or trying. This idea came to me for two reasons.
Number one, because of the authors that I work with
in my program called a Book in six Months, which
is the largely first time authors or aspiring authors who
are working on their first manuscripts. Almost one hundred percent
of the authors that we work with in that program
(01:07):
are aspiring authors or first time authors. And two, because
I'm at the very beginning of a yoga teacher training
program right now, which I'm going to talk about a
bit on today's episode. I've been feeling really pulled for
a couple of years now to do a yoga teacher training,
even though it's been several years since I've even really
had a consistent yoga practice. I started yoga for the
(01:30):
very first time in twenty fifteen, and I want to
talk about that experience, like the first moment that I
ever walked into a yoga studio, and I practiced almost
every single day for five years, let's say close to
five years between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty, and then
when twenty twenty came around and the pandemic happened, I
wasn't able to go to my yoga studio anymore, so
I kept on practicing in my living room for I
(01:52):
don't know, a couple of months, from March of twenty
twenty until let's say May of twenty twenty, at which
point I was seven and a half half months pregnant.
I delivered at the end of July, so yeah, seven
ish months pregnant, and continued practicing for a little bit
on my own, and then just kind of petered out
and kept walking for the last part of that first
pregnancy and then hadn't really been back in a yoga
(02:15):
studio since then, So when I started to consider doing
my yoga teacher training, I was like, I'm not sure
how I feel about starting this really physically intensive program
when I'm not really in the physical shape in order
to do it. And one of the things that I've
been reminded of is how wonderful it is to be
a beginner at something. How wonderful it is to walk
(02:37):
in and be the weakest person in the room, to
be the least skilled person in the room, to not
know what's going on, to not know what's coming next.
There are so many gifts of having that mindset, and
it's one of the great benefits of actually being a
beginner at something. We tend to lose that along the
way somewhere, you know, the older we get, or the
more skilled we become at something, or the longer that
(02:59):
we've been practicing some certain art or skill or whatever,
or the longer we've been at a job, let's say,
the more we lose that beginner mindset, the more we
begin to come at problems, issues, projects, whatever with a
mindset like I know best, I've been doing this forever,
you know, I've got the answers, and it can really
block us and block our creativity. So many of the
(03:21):
authors who come into the Book in six Months program,
like I said, most of these authors are beginners at
writing a book. Whether or not they're beginners at writing,
many of them are very skilled writers, but they come
to the process of writing a book for the first
time and they see this as almost like a stumbling
block or a detriment, like I've never done this before,
i don't know how this works. You know, you're going
(03:43):
to have to tell me, And I want them to know,
and I want you to know, if you're listening to this,
that I don't see your beginnerness as a stumbling block.
In fact, in so many ways, your beginnerness makes you
more open to the process than I can be, because
I've done this so many times and so sure, there
are things that I know that you're not going to know.
(04:04):
There are like experiences I've had that you're not going
to have had. There are pitfalls that I can see
coming that you're not going to be able to see coming.
And yet there is an openness in you. There is
a sense of like a lack of agenda in you
that I would have to work really hard to have.
(04:25):
I would have to be really conscious and really intentional
if I were going to have that type of openness
around the experience of writing a book, because when I
sit down to write a book, I'm like, oh, yeah,
old hat, we've done this before. And you know, writing
a book is one of those things that tends to
bring out the beginner in you, even if you've done
it a bunch of times before. But in order for
the beginner to come out in you, it's almost like
(04:47):
the part of you that thinks, so I know what's
going on, the ego in you or whatever you want
to call that, the false self has to be brought
down to size, has to be brought down to its knees.
And so for a true beginner to come to the
process and experience beginnership much easier than for an expert
in the field to come to the process and experience beginnership.
There's a lot more obstacles that I would have to
(05:08):
overcome in order to step into my own beginnership than
there would be for you. And I was just reminded
of this because I stepped into the yoga room at
the beginning of January of twenty twenty five as a
kind of new beginner, because you know, I wasn't totally
new to yoga. I had done this thing before, but
I hadn't done it in a really long time, and
(05:28):
so I was in touch again with my beginnership when
I first started doing yoga in twenty fifteen, when I
stepped into the room for the very first time, one
of the things that an instructor told me was, in
particular with hot yoga, your goal in that first class
or first couple of classes is just to stay in
the room. So in other words, you're going to go
(05:48):
in there, You're going to learn all these postures, learn
all these posas. It's one hundred and two or one
hundred and four degrees in the room, depending on the day.
And your goal is not to get all the postures
perfect or to know you know how to do each thing,
or to have your technique perfect or anything like that.
It's not even to learn perfection or to move toward
(06:09):
perfection or to get better at the poses. Your whole
goal in the beginning is just to stay in the room.
And there's something about that mindset. My goal here is
just to stay in the room that opens you to
a whole way of experiencing the yoga practice that if
your focus is more on perfecting the poses, you don't
(06:31):
get to have that experience with the yoga practice. And
I can say this from my own personal experience from
kind of riding the highs and lows of my yoga
practice and experiencing myself in different seasons. So follow me
here for just a second. Okay. So I step into
the yoga studio for the very first time in the
fall of twenty fifteen. I'm told by this instructor to
(06:52):
make it my goal to just stay in the room.
And I'm a true, true beginner at yoga. I have
no idea what I'm doing, and in those early days,
it's weird to say this, but it was almost like
the easiest it's ever been was in those early days,
because my entire goal was just to stay in the room.
So I didn't have these expectations for myself. I didn't
have an agenda going into the room. I didn't have
(07:14):
I didn't even know what posture was coming next. I
was required to be one hundred percent present, to listen
to the instructor, to you tune in, to pay very
close attention to know what's coming next, to know what
to do, to know where to put my hand, to
know where to point my gaze, to know, you know,
what shape the body is trying to make. I had
to listen to every single cueue now for between twenty
(07:38):
fifteen and twenty twenty, Like in twenty nineteen, once I
was like getting the groove of this yoga thing. One
of the things that happened for me, and I'm not
saying this happens for every person, but what happened for
me and my practice is I really got to a
place where I felt like staying in the heated room
wasn't an issue for me anymore. My body had acclimated
to that very well. And I got into a mindset
where I was really trying to some of these more
(08:01):
in my mind, like exciting yoga posts, like I wanted
to get upside down, I wanted to do handstands. I
think this is a natural progression for anyone who does
whether we're talking about yoga, or whether we're talking about
you know, faith or religion, or whether you're talking about
another kind of creative practice or whatever it is that
we're talking about a natural progression as you move through
and you gain skills, is to be like interesting. I
(08:22):
wonder what else my body can do. I wonder if
I can kind of do this cool party trick, And
wouldn't it be so impressive if I could do this thing. Well,
that's like a natural stage that we have to move through.
But I will say that my practice got more and
more challenging, and some of that was good, like challenging
can be a good thing, but it got more and
(08:42):
more of almost like a stumbling block for me. I
can't say that in twenty twenty, when I stopped doing
yoga that I was still really even doing what I
would now call yoga, in part because I had gotten
so attached to the postures looking a certain way, to
sort of mastering this thing, to the practice looking a
(09:03):
certain way, that when I was pregnant, I'm seven months pregnant,
I'm not able to go to the studio anymore because
we're in the height of COVID, and it was like
it wasn't just about me getting on my mat and
breathing anymore. It was about me doing these postures and
mastering these things. And I didn't have the instructor any
there anymore to help me, and I didn't have other
people in the room to kind of hold me accountable.
And I'm not being too hard on myself. I'm not,
(09:26):
you know, faulting myself for this or anything. I'm just
simply explaining how it happened, which is that I stopped
my yoga practice because my yoga practice wasn't for me
about getting on the mat and showing up and tuning
into my breath and staying in the room. My yoga
practice was now about something different, and I wasn't getting
(09:47):
what I needed, you know, needed in air quotes kind
of like I wasn't getting the thing that I was
going there for. I wasn't getting like praise or accolades
or you know, wasn't like mastering these really complicated poses.
I couldn't go upside down, I couldn't twist because I
was pregnant. There were all these things, and so I
just stopped my practice altogether. And I stopped my yoga
practice almost completely through twenty twenty twenty twenty one. I
(10:11):
believe when I was pregnant with my son in twenty
twenty one, I came back to the yoga practice for
a brief time with my friend Rachel, who I had.
I paid her to come over to my house and
to do you know, one on one practice with me
while I was pregnant with Charlie. That was a glimpse,
a tiny glimpse of the beginnership that I'm going to
talk about in today's episode. Because I hadn't exercised in
(10:34):
a really long time, I was out of the typical,
you know shape, I guess that my body was used
to being in. I didn't feel strong. I hadn't been
working out at all. Rachel came over to the house.
We would, you know, do this this yoga practice together,
just the two of us. It was always like very simple.
It was stretching. It wasn't anything crazy. It was just
breathing and stretching, which is yoga. That is what yoga is,
is breathing and stretching. And during that time, I was
(10:56):
forced to come back into relationship with my own beginnership
because I couldn't push myself to do these crazy postures
or poses or anything like that. It was just like, Hey,
we're going to do yoga together. We're going to breathe together,
We're going to get you on your mat, we're going
to bring your attention to your body, to various parts
of your body, and just pay attention, which, in my
(11:17):
opinion from today where I'm standing, this is all that
yoga is. And I would say the same thing about
writing too. This is all that writing is. This is
all that prayer is, This is all that art is,
This is all that creativity is. This is all that
being a human being is. Is being present, paying attention,
tuning in, you know, noticing what's going on, listening to
(11:38):
your breath, just getting curious. This is the yoga practice,
This is every creative practice. This is what it means
to be human. And yet I think so many of
us miss this because we miss what it's like to
be a beginner. Especially you know, if you're listening to
this episode, I'm guessing you're older than like twenty. You're
probably more like thirty or maybe even forty fifty or older.
(12:02):
And so when we get into the later years in
our life, what Richard RR calls the second half of
your life, there's a different energy, usually a different kind
of feel to this part of our life, the second
half of our life, than there was to the first half.
In the first half of your life. There's a lot
of beginnership, and in the second half of our life
(12:28):
there's not as much beginnership. There's some really great parts
to the second half of our life. There's a lot
more usually contribution and getting back and wanting to serve
and that sort of thing, and hopefully like getting over
that old ego hump that is really present in first
half of life. And yet I think one of the
sneaky ways that ego shows up in second half of life,
I would argue, is the feeling like I'm an expert.
(12:52):
I know what I'm doing here, I know what the
answers are, i know what the process looks like, I
know what the strategy is, I've got the next step.
I already know what's coming before anyone even tells me
what's coming. There's so many reasons why beginnership is super important.
It puts us in touch with the reality of who
we are, for one. But I also think that in
(13:13):
this particular time, that beginnership is an absolute necessity to
our own survival as a species moving forward, because the
world that we're living in is shifting so quickly, so dramatically,
that if you think you know what's coming next, you
are probably wrong. And I'll never forget my friend Christine
(13:34):
talking to me about this. I don't know, like twenty twenty,
twenty twenty one, some are in there as the pandemic
was unfolding in front of us. She was saying, you know,
prior to pandemic world, if leaders and teachers out there
in the world told you we have the answers, we
know the strategy, we know what to do next, you know,
we would have admired them. We would have thought, like, amazing,
(13:55):
how wonderful we should follow these people. These are the
people who are trustworthy. She's like, in this time, as
we move into the depth of this chaos and darkness,
if you hear a leader or a teacher tell you, oh,
I know what to do, I have the answer, I
know what's coming next, you actually, in some ways start
to think that they're insane, because who could possibly know
(14:17):
with the chaos that's unfolding what's coming next? Who could know?
These times are unprecedented, as we've heard over and over
and over again in the last five years. So because
the times are unprecedented for someone to say I know
what's coming next, or I know what's going to happen,
or you know, I've got the answers, I have the strategy.
It actually starts to make you question their sanity. And
(14:38):
so what used to work in the old world isn't
working in the new world. And in fact, it's not
even that it just doesn't carry over. But it almost like,
in this light, in this shadow, looks very different than
it looked before. Before it was like, oh, I admire
you for thinking, or I admire you for sort of
having the way or knowing the path. And now it's like,
if you're telling me that you know the path, I'm
(15:00):
looking at you like you're untrustworthy. You're kind of insane
to me if you know the path. And so beginnership
is more important than it's ever been. And I was
just noticing about myself as I stepped into the yoga
studio this second time that I'm not technically a beginner
at yoga, because I've done yoga before. But I arrived
(15:21):
in the studio with much more beginnership this time than
I have ever had in my practice, except for maybe
those first weeks that I practiced in twenty fifteen. I
had natural beginnership back then. I think there's a way
for us to access our beginnership even when we're not
truly beginners at something. So I hope you can see
that what I'm talking about here is not just being
(15:41):
a beginner at something like writing. As you are a
beginner at something like writing, if you're naturally a beginner
at something, you can begin to notice what is it
like to be a beginner at this thing, and notice
the benefits, the amazing benefits that come from being a
beginner at something, and then decide you want more of
that energy of beginnership in the other parts of your
(16:03):
life where you may not actually be a beginner, you know, like,
think for a second, are you married or you partnered
up with someone? How long have you been partnered up
with that person? Matt and I have been together I
think seven years. We've been married five five in November.
So we are not beginners at being married, we are
not beginners at being partners. But how could we bring
(16:24):
some beginnership into our relationship? Think about this, Okay, what
is it like when you first meet the person who
you end up falling in love with? When you first
meet that person, beginnership feels like so light and fun
and free, and this person brings out the best in you,
and you see all the most beautiful qualities in this person,
and you see past their flaws, You see right past
(16:45):
their flaws, and all you see in them is the
beauty of God. You know, this person is like the
most amazing person I've ever met. And when I'm with them,
I used to feel so good about myself and we're
both growing together and there's just that like excitement and
energy and connection in those early days of a relationship.
So how could we bring that beginnership from the early
(17:06):
part of a relationship into a later part of the relationship.
Even if you've been with the person that you're with
for twenty years or fifty years, you know, how can
we cultivate some beginnership in the later parts of our relationship.
Think about your job for a second. What do you
do for work? I've been working in publishing since two
thousand and nine ish quit my job in two thousand
(17:29):
and eight, really started mid two thousand and eight, but
really started working in publishing in two thousand and nine.
So what are we at now, fifteen or sixteen years
that I've been working in publishing. I am not a
beginner at this job. I have written fifteen books fourteen
books something like that. I don't know, I've lost track
along the way. I think Write Your Story was my
fifteenth book, if I'm counting right, So I've written fifteen books.
(17:50):
I am not a beginner at book writing, but I
do remember some of the feeling of sitting down to
the page and being like, absolutely one hundred percent convinced
I have something really miraculous to say. And I think
that it's easy when you've been working in publishing for
fifteen years to kind of lose touch with the beauty
(18:13):
of what it feels like to be a beginner, like
that feeling of being like I know that, I know that,
I know deep in my soul that I have something
to say. I have picked up a lot of jadedness
working and publishing over the years, and could easily let
that jadedness take over my work as a writer. And
I think, honestly, this has happened for me a lot
(18:35):
in the last couple of years in particular, which I
think maybe one of the reasons why I feel my
soul kind of pulling me away from publishing as a job,
because I've picked up a lot of jadedness that has
blocked my creativity in my own writing. It hasn't allowed
me to use the fullness of my expression because in
my head, I'm like, this will never get published. No
(18:56):
publisher is ever going to be interested in that. And
I can tell you what a publisher want, I can
tell you what they're looking for. I can, you know,
take your idea and translated into what a publisher would
be interested in, and put together a book proposal document,
you know, and make the pitch and make it sound amazing.
And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that,
(19:17):
but sometimes there's too much distance, like I talked about
on last week's episode, between art and commerce. I'm not
saying that they can never coexist, but sometimes there's too
much difference between art and commerce, and so to chase
down commerce at the expense of art is tragic in
my opinion, you know. And I think I can so
(19:38):
easily get caught in that trap after working and publishing
for fifteen years, because I've lost the feeling of what
it's like to be a beginner at writing a book,
where you're just like I know that, I know that,
I know deep in my guts that I have something
miraculous to say, and I am going to get this
thing on the page, come hell or high water, and
almost in a way like you know, when you're really
a beginner, you're like, I don't care who public, I
(20:00):
don't care whoever reads it. I'm kind of terrified of
the idea that anyone ever could read it. And yes,
a part of you hopes that lots of people read
it someday and that you know you're you're lauded for
your many skills as a writer, but a deeper part
of you is like, I just am here to stay
in the room. That's my only job is to stay
in the room. When you are a beginner, your agenda
(20:21):
disappears out the door. Your expectations for yourself come way
down to like the lowest bar level being in that
yoga room and being like, my only job is just
to stay in this room. And if in order to
do that I have to lay on my back the
entire time, then that is what I will do. And
you get to a place, or at least I did
in my yoga practice, where you don't give yourself the
permission to lay on your back in the middle of
(20:44):
the room. And I just feel like this metaphor is
so poignant for us right now. It's so important for
us to take in that this might be a time
where we need to lay on our backs in the
middle of the room. Your whole job is to stay
in the room right now and stay with your breath,
(21:05):
And in order to do that, you may have to
lay on your back in the middle of the room.
But in order to give yourself that permission, the agenda
that you have for yourself, the expectations that you've said
that are so much higher than that, are going to
have to dissolve and go away. And if you have
this expectation for yourself that you should be able to
(21:26):
live the way you lived in the old world. And
I'm kind of using this marker of twenty twenty of
being like old world was before then new world is now.
I think you could move that marker. That's not like
a defined only one marker, But I'm just kind of
using that marker. If you're using the marker of twenty twenty,
if you're saying, like, I can live the way that
I lived before twenty twenty now I can have as
(21:47):
many social engagements I can be, you know, as connected
on Instagram or whatever other social media platform I can
run my business the way that I ran it before.
I can be the mother or the parent, or the
spouse or the partner or the whatever like I can
and help everyone. I can sort of be everything to everyone,
go on all these trips, whatever that looks like for you.
If you're like I can show up the same way
(22:07):
as I did back then. Now, if you are holding
that expectation for yourself, I believe you are going to
be sorely disappointed because the world has changed so dramatically
that there's just no possible way that you could do
that without splitting off from the truth of who you
are and splitting off from the truth of what is happening.
And that split will be deeply, deeply painful, And so
(22:29):
in my view, we have to bring that beginnership into
this period of time. Use my yoga journey as a metaphor. Okay,
I started yoga in twenty fifteen, did it for five years, consistently,
stopped doing yoga sometime in twenty twenty, come back to
yoga in twenty twenty five, and when I walk back
(22:49):
into that room, even though I've done yoga before, I'm
brand new. I'm brand new at it. My whole job
is just to stay in the room. So use that
as a metaphor. You are standing in a world that
you have lived in for X number of years. I
don't know how many years you've been here, but you've
been here, I'm gonna guess, if you're listening to this,
probably more than twenty years. I doubt many eighteen year
(23:09):
olds are listening to this podcast. So you've been here
for thirty years, thirty five years, forty years, fifty years,
sixty years, seventy five years, I don't know how many years.
However many years you've been here. You've been here that
many years. But you are a beginner, and your whole
job is just to stay in the room and stay
with your breath. And one of the things that I
stopped giving myself permission to do at some point during
(23:31):
the height of my yoga as I was able to
move my body in the most amazing ways and I
was in amazing shape, best shape of my life. I
lost sight of during that time the ability to say,
if I lose track of my breath, I'm actually not
doing yoga anymore, and I need to come back to
my back and find my breath. I need to just
lay on my back in the middle of the room
(23:52):
and find my breath. I wasn't giving myself permission for
that because I was like, I'm so far beyond that.
I clearly can, you know, do these sort of upside
down things and handstands and whatever else. And that was
all part of my process and an important part of
the process too. But what I want to bring your
attention to, if it feels like it fits for you,
is right now in the world that we're living in,
(24:12):
letting go of your agenda that you have for yourself,
letting go of those expectations that do not fit in
this new world that we're living in, and telling yourself
bringing some beginnership into your day to day that your
whole job is to stay in the room and to
stay with your breath, and that if you ever lose
track of your breath, that you're losing track of the
(24:32):
yoga practice, you're losing track of the let's call it
the human being practice, You're losing track of what it
means to be a human being here and now, present
in this moment, and that everything else needs to go
until you can come back to that. And I will say,
just being vulnerable and transparent that I do not do that.
(25:02):
I have crazy high expectations for myself for what I
should be able to achieve, or what I should be
able to accomplish, for how many people I should be
able to be in touch with or help or stay
in touch with or check in with or catch up
with or whatever. I have crazy high expectations for myself,
and I am described often as like type A or
very disciplined or whatever. I'm trying to learn to soften
(25:23):
to that so that if I lose track of my breath.
This past weekend, I had a really rough weekend. That
was the only thing I can guess is that it
was connected to grief, to the loss of my dad,
and it came out of nowhere. I didn't see it coming.
I had a really hard time even getting out of bed.
I felt really teary and kind of like irritated and
(25:44):
frustrated and just bristly with everyone all day. It was
a two day stretch where I just didn't feel like myself,
and I regret to say that I didn't give myself
the permission to just come to my back and breathe.
That is your whole job to stay in the room
and to stay with your breath and everything else can go.
(26:05):
And I didn't do that. I still showed up to
the birthday parties and showed up to this, and showed
up to that, and went to the dinners and did
all the things that were planned and that we're on
the calendar, and did essentially the poses, did the moves,
and didn't stay with my breath. And I'm not shaming
myself for that or faulting myself for that. What I'm
(26:25):
saying is, how could bring some beginnership into this period
of time? Help me to soften in what's trying to
unfold for me, t help me to soften in what's
trying to happen in this time right now. I think
this is what this period of time is asking from us,
is asking us to come back to what it means
(26:47):
to be a beginner and to give ourselves the permission
to just lay on the ground and breathe, if that's
what is required to move through this time. I don't
know if this resonates with you at all. I don't
know if you feel like, in many ways your old
strategies are no longer working the things that you used
to do before, or you used to try that used
to you know, make you feel good about yourself, or
(27:10):
get you out of bed in the morning, or get
you through a slump, or you know, help with your
depression or whatever. Like, those things that you used to
work are no longer working, and now you're having to
rethink and reimagine everything. If you're feeling that way, I
just want to point out that is inviting and bringing
a beginnership back into your body. And there are some
(27:31):
really great perks to being a beginner. When you are
a beginner, no one expects much of anything from you.
When you're a beginner. In the yoga studio, people expect
you to spend half of the class on your back.
When you are a beginner, you don't have super high
expectations of yourself. Your only expectation of yourself is just
to stay in the room and keep breathing. When you
are a beginner, you don't have any big agenda. It's
(27:53):
not like, well, if I don't hit this pose in
this class today, then I'm a failure and I'm worthless
and I am going to quit. No, you don't have
any big agenda for yourself. Your agenda is just to
show up and be there. And so there are these huge,
huge perks to being a beginner, and I want to
invite you, if it feels like this fits, to bring
(28:16):
some of that beginnership into your partnership, into your your
workout practice, whatever that looks like, into your spiritual practices.
Maybe you've been a part of your church or a
part of your spiritual community or group for a really
long time and you kind of feel like you're not
a beginner anymore. Like new people come into the group
or join the church or whatever, and you're like, you know,
(28:38):
sitting in the front row. You've got your you know
what the expectations are. You know how to dress, you
know what to bring to service, you know what to say,
you know what to do. You've got your your rules
that you follow, You've got your list of things that
you you know, your expectations that you're supposed to live
up to. You volunteer, you do all these other things,
and maybe you don't feel like a beginner in your
spiritual practice anymore. I would push you, or you encourage you,
(29:00):
invite you to bring some beginnership back into your spiritual practice,
because you know, my assertion would be that if there's
no beginnership in your spirituality, it's not really spirituality that
spirituality is all about beginnership. It's all about seeing with
fresh eyes. It's all about being the one in the
(29:22):
group who is looking with curiosity, who doesn't totally understand
all the ins and outs yet. And sometimes in order
to invite that beginnership back into our lives, we have
to make shifts or changes. We have to almost put
ourselves in a position where things are different than they
were before. So maybe it's something really simple, some really
simple change you could make that would make you feel
(29:45):
like a beginner again in your life, like maybe changing
the way that you schedule yourself. You know, maybe you say, okay,
I am not going to I'm going to schedule you know,
five nights a week whatever where I stay in the house.
Or maybe for you, beginnership would feel like you need
the opposite thing. You need to like push yourself to
go out and socialize or you know, go meet people.
(30:07):
I don't know what it is for you. Maybe you've
been doing a particular workout routine for a long time
and you don't feel like a beginner doing it anymore,
and so you need a new one. You need to
pick something new to remind you that you are still
a beginner. Every human being is still a beginner, and
being in touch with our own beginnership is such a
vital part of being human and of connecting to other
people and connecting to ourselves. And so this is my
(30:28):
invitation for you, is to take stock of different areas
of your life and just ask yourself, how much am
I inviting beginnership into my life? And in what ways
am I allowing myself to be a beginner? Am I
giving myself the permission to just stay in the room
(30:49):
and breathe? And in my experience, if you don't invite
beginnership into your life, beginnership will find you. It will
meet you through loss or death, or change or hardship
or something else entirely. Illness sometimes will bring us into
touch with our beginnership. And so for anyone who's listening,
(31:12):
if you're listening and you're like, yep, check, check, check,
you know I've lost someone that I love, or I
have a chronic illness, or I'm facing some other kind
of unfixable problem in my life, like we talked about
on last week's episode. Then one of the things that
you can take from that is that it is inviting
beginnership into your life for you, so you don't have
(31:34):
to be like, how could I be a beginner again?
It's like life is giving you. Life is opening to
you to this opportunity to experience your own beginnership. And
in the last couple of weeks that I've been in
the yoga studio as a beginner, it has just reminded
me what a gift it is to be a beginner.
You know, what a gift it is to not be
the one who has to have all the answers, to
(31:55):
not be the one who knows what's coming next, And
you know, there is such a thing as And maturity
is also important, and with maturity comes responsibility and leadership
and all kinds of other stuff. So I mean, those
parts of our life are also vital. But I think
what I want to emphasize is that during this time,
(32:15):
as everything is shifting, everything is changing, everything is new.
The world is a new place today that it was
not yesterday, and it for sure was not five years ago.
And we're all, in many ways beginners at this new world.
And if you are living in denial of that, you're
living split off from yourself and split off from what's true,
(32:37):
and that facade is going to be harder and harder
and harder to hold on too. I think it's going
to create a lot of hardship for anybody who who's
doing that, And I think for those of us who
can soften into what it feels like to be a
beginner at this are going to have a much easier
passage through this rather difficult time. I think twenty twenty five,
(32:57):
and I don't know beyond how many. I don't know
how long this will go, but I do think that
we're moving into a really challenging time. And I think
that the way through the challenging time is not by
knowing the answers and having all the skills in place
and having a strategy, having a clear plan. I think
the way through this time is by softening. The way
(33:20):
through this time is by staying with our breath. The
way through this time is by staying curious, by lowering
the bar for ourselves, by staying in the room and
just staying, you know, staying with our breath, and by
not bringing a strong agenda into the situation, but by
staying open to what this whole experience is trying to
show us. So that's what I want to invite for
(33:42):
you and with you in this episode. Just know that
I'm not coming to this episode from a place of maturity.
I mean, hopefully there's maturity in the message, but I'm
coming from a place of beginnership. I am right there
with you having to change the way that I interact
with the world because this world that I'm living in
is brand new, and so I'm also taking this assessment
(34:04):
of my life. How can I bring more beginnership into
my relationship with Matt, How can I bring more beginnership
into my experience of being a parent? How can I
bring more beginnership into my work, into the way that
I contribute to the world around me? How can I
bring more beginnership into my art, into my spirituality, into
my everyday practice, into my yoga, into all of it.
(34:26):
I hope this message resonates with you. I hope it
gets you thinking. I would love to hear from you.
You can come find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon
and I will be back here with you next week
on the Write Your Story Podcast. Until then, have a
wonderful week and I will chat with you soon.
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