My battle as a beginner opens up a world of wonder, by Nataly Dawn

This episode is about embracing the discomfort of being a beginner and finding joy and connection through new experiences.

1. Embracing the role of a beginner can lead to unexpected joy and discovery.
2. Cultural and linguistic barriers can be overcome with patience and an open mind.
3. Precision and dedication in learning new skills can be deeply rewarding.
4. The vulnerability of starting over can foster deeper connections with others.
5. New experiences and challenges can redefine one’s perception of success and fulfillment.

1: Introduction to the episode

Nataly Dawn's early struggles with moving to France and the overwhelming new environment. Rohan Gunutilako: "Being a beginner can be uncomfortable for all of us, but it's a stage we must move through."

2: Adjusting to a new life

Nataly's adaptation to the French school system and the initial cultural shock. Nataly Dawn: "Even in church, things are so different here."

3: Learning and growth

The transformation from feeling out of place to finding joy in new beginnings, highlighted by her experiences with calligraphy and singing in French. Nataly Dawn: "I go to sleep at night humming the French that I learned that day."

4: Continuation in the U.S.

Her return to the U.S. for college brings new challenges and artistic explorations, reinforcing her beginner's mindset. Nataly Dawn: "I decide to do a special program where you get your MA and BA in four years."

5: Conclusion and reflections

Reflections on the ongoing journey of learning and the importance of maintaining a beginner's mindset. Rohan Gunutilako: "Where in your life might you explore bringing precision to see what it unlocks for you without judgment?"

1. Embrace new beginnings with an open heart and mind.
2. Approach learning with patience and attention to detail.
3. Find joy in the process rather than just the outcome.
4. Use artistic or creative outlets to express and cope with new challenges.
5. Engage with communities or environments that support your growth and learning.

When Nataly Dawn’s family moves from the U.S. to a tiny town in the middle of France, she finds herself unable to speak, read, or even play the way the other kids do. It’s embarrassing, being a rock-bottom beginner in 5th grade — but as she slowly learns the language, she finds a new kind of joy in the process of discovery. The singer-songwriter who is one-half of the band Pomplamoose shares how a beginner’s mindset — even if it’s uncomfortable at first — can be a doorway to connection and joy.
Learn more about Nataly Dawn at NatalyDawnMusic.com

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

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Nataly Dawn, Rohan Gunutilako

Content Warnings:

None

Lali Ali Kaglu
Listening to Conde Nast Travelers podcast women who travel, you will be transported to the ancient ruins of Pompeii, to New York City's most storied neighborhoods, and to the jaw dropping peaks of Bhutan. It's the best of what you love about traveling, experiencing different people, cultures, and perspectives, all from the comfort of your own home. Each week, join host and global journalist Lali Ali Kaglu as she shares her own experiences along with those of self identifying women travelers from all over the globe. How do the bestie comedian pairs of shears, Amada and Nicole Bayer, navigate travel together? What can you realistically expect from your first global solo travel experience?

How is dance used as a tool for healing in indigenous australian communities? If these questions piqued your interest, pack your bags and go on a journey with women who travel. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Natalie Dawn
My teacher, Madame Ritter, decides that I can fumble my way through math and science with my limited language skills. But when it's time for French, she looks at me and motions towards the door. I get up, grab my things, and walk past the rows of desks. I walk down a dark hallway and exit the building. It feels like a walk of shame.

I cross a courtyard, then enter a small stone structure and climb a dark wooden stairwell.

The stairs creak as I walk up. I take my time relishing this moment alone, away from staring eyes.

Rohan Gunutilako
As a child, Natalie dawn coasts through life until, at age ten, her family moves from Los Angeles to a tiny town in the middle of France. Being a rock bottom beginner demolishes her ego in the process. Her mind opens in unexpected ways. In this episode of meditative Story, the singer songwriter, who is one half of the band Pomplamoose, shows us how she learns to quiet her inner critic and cultivate a beginner's mindset as a doorway to connection and joy. In this series, we combine immersive first person stories, breathtaking music and mindfulness prompts so that we may see our lives reflected back to us in other people's stories, and that can lead to improvements in our own inner lives from wait, what?

This is meditative story.

I'm Rohan and I'll be your guide.

The body relaxed, the body breathing.

Your senses open, your mind open meeting the world.

Natalie Dawn
The slanted morning light warms up the red cobblestones on the path in front of us. I'm ten and my father is walking me to my new school in my new town in France.

He turns to me and says, what's the rule? As we get close to this enormous weathered wooden gate. Do your best and have fun, I say back to him. My dad is a pastor, so he's good at giving pep talks, but I don't really buy it. I know today will be full of strange foods I've never seen before and full of words I don't understand.

And I'm right. We walk into the school and head straight to the principal's office. My cheeks go flush with embarrassment as he tells me that I have to repeat fifth grade while I learn to speak French. It's just humiliating.

And the first day in class it gets worse. I can't understand anything the teacher says. Even the english teacher doesn't speak English. Back in my old life in Los Angeles, fifth grade is easy. I get straight as I sing in the school choir.

My best friend lives next door. Here im bad at everything. Even recess feels weirdly disorienting. In LA, we play foursquare and board games. Here, kids bring ping pong paddles to school.

Girls gallop around the courtyard pretending theyre horses. I'm the only girl who hasn't taken horse riding lessons within the first week. I get very good at telling my teachers j'mal a la tete. I have a headache just so I can get a break to go sit somewhere quiet and be sad.

When we first arrive in tours, this new town where my parents are missionaries, we live in the basement apartment of a very small, very old building. The floors are so crooked that if you take a ball and you put it at one end, it just slowly rolls to the other end of the room. There are low stone doorways you have to duck through. Even at ten, I feel too tall for France. I miss California.

But then it dawns on me I can't go home. The idea of never fitting in scares me. At night, when I lay in bed, my whole body aches. Our beautiful calico cat, Cleo, that we brought from LA, leans against me and I cry. As my mom rubs my legs, she says its growing pains perfect.

My teacher, Madame Ritter, decides that I can fumble my way through math and science with my limited language skills. But when its time for French, she looks at me and motions towards the door. I get up, grab my things, and walk past the rows of desks. I walk down a dark hallway and exit the building. It feels like a walk of shame.

I cross a courtyard, then enter a small stone structure and climb a dark wooden stairwell. The stairs creak as I walk up. I take my time relishing this moment alone, away from staring eyes. I pause, take a deep breath and step into my new classroom.

Drawings hang from the dark wood walls, and there are little kids sitting cross legged on the floor. They send me to learn French with the first graders. Instead of spending time with kids my own age, I'm with their little brothers and sisters. How can this be happening? What would my friends back home think?

I'm forced to be an absolute beginner, and it's so embarrassing.

The little kids classroom has the shade of a big oak tree from the courtyard. The windows sit wide open, and it's cooler than my other class. They're learning to write their letters, and I join in. Everything in France is handwritten, and the school system is precise about penmanship. We use actual fountain pens.

We practice the perfect loops required for our ls and our p's. As I start to draw the letters, I relax a little bit. I'm good at drawing. A boy sitting on my left peeks over as I draw the letter l and smiles. I'm a little embarrassed, but also, for the first time, not completely failing at this task.

Rohan Gunutilako
Being a beginner can be uncomfortable for all of us, but it's a stage we must move through. Often. The imagined fear of what others might think begins to fade into the background as we take small actions.

If you're learning something new at the moment, what small actions can you take to make that progress?

Natalie Dawn
Later in the week, we sing nursery rhymes. Through the rhymes, we learn to conjugate verbs together. Even though I don't speak French well, I'm good at singing because I've grown up harmonizing with my mother and singing in church. It turns out singing in French is a lot easier than speaking French. I go to sleep at night humming the French that I learned that day.

Every day, as my peers watch me leave my classroom, I think I'm the oldest and the worst at ever everything. But over time, something interesting happens.

They're so excited to see me and to share a book, a toy, a drawing, a song. As they surround me, my mood shifts. They play with my hair and sit on my lap. We develop a fondness for each other that cuts across language. They love to look at books with me to teach me.

I feel how much they want me to learn. I don't feel judged by these kids. They make me feel less like an outsider and more like part of a family. They, too, are absolute beginners. We're in it together, in this space set up just for us.

One day when leaving school, a first grader I sit next to waves goodbye and squeals with joy adument Natalie. See you tomorrow, Natalie. Her brother, my peer, stares at me for the first time. I don't feel embarrassed. My little friend's expression of joy and excitement is bigger than my feeling of shame.

The more time I spend with the first graders, the less I feel horrible about being bad at French, and the more I realize that no one expects me to be good. Everybody just expects me to be a beginner.

By the end of the fall semester, my marara tetes stop. It turns out I love calligraphy. The way the quill scratches and glides across the lines of paper. My penmanship becomes beautiful, and this keeps me engaged. My French picks up speed, and soon I'm far ahead of my parents.

Eventually, the newness of everything stops scaring me. It starts to feel fun.

Even in church, things are so different here. They drink real wine for communion, and they use a real metal chalice instead of paper cups.

I watch my parents during the service, and their faces remind me that this move to a new place, a new culture, has made them absolute beginners, too. I'm learning from this first year in France. When you allow yourself to be a beginner, when you create the space for yourself to truly learn, then you get the the joy of discovery without the weight of your own expectations.

After eight years in France and Belgium, I move back to the US to go to Stanford. As I walk into my freshman dorm for the first time, I notice sideways glances. I'm a tall, skinny, euro trash girl with super short bangs and a mullet. My clothes are brands no one has heard of. I look weird.

I have an implacable, vaguely european accent. I don't understand greek life or the grading system. The gorgeous, sunny, palm tree covered campus looks like a movie set about an american university, and I feel like an outsider all over again. Also, I feel like I'm failing. When I get my first graded paper back for introduction to the humanities, it's marked up in red.

It's well written, but it's the wrong format. This just isn't how you write papers here. My face flushes red. I feel humiliated. Now that I'm a bit older, being a beginner is uncomfortable.

Painful, even.

I decide to do a special program where you get your ma and ba in four years. I know that I want to master in french literature, and that requires a ton of reading, so I pick a major that requires no reading. Studio art at this point. I've been serious about my music for years, but art is just a hobby. I'm not that good at painting.

I'm not amazing at photography. Once again, I'm coming in at ground level. Eventually I sign up for a sculpture class because I'm drawn to woodworking. I get this idea of doing rogue public installations. I want to install a piece of art in the middle of the night without asking anyone's permission and just leave it there and see what happens.

I set out to build a giant ladder leaning up against Hoover Tower in the middle of campus. At midnight, two friends and I quietly haul the three ladder segments onto the lawn in front of the giant structure.

It's a warm, balmy night, but I'm sweating because I'm scared. We finally manage to get the ladder up and it barely holds together. I take a few photos as proof, but it looks pretty awful. I dont take into account the fact that there are security cameras everywhere and by early the next morning, campus security takes it down like its gone. It just disappeared.

Its a complete failure. I had nothing to show for my hours of work. It was just a poorly executed idea and everyone in the class knew it. What was I even doing here? I feel like an imposter.

I have ideas for more installations swirling around in my head, but I'm really bad at executing them. There's no one in this department who can actually teach me how to build the things I want to build. I recognize I need to create a space away from everyone else, like the first graders classroom where I learned French. I need to stop pretending that I know how to do this. I need to just let myself be a complete beginner and start from scratch.

So I do some research, and I find a woodworking shop in south Palo Alto. One afternoon, I awkwardly load my heavy cruiser bike onto the Caltrain, go four stops and ride to the warehouse.

It has giant steel roll up doors. When I walk in, there's a small office to the side and a large open space with scary looking machines used for cutting wood. The owner, Gary, is a gruff and exacting cabinet maker in his fifties. He has gray hair and tanned, leathery skin. He's very matter of fact.

I know nothing about woodworking and he doesn't usually take apprentices. But he needs a website and I can build that for him. He relents. The first thing he gives me is a small stainless steel ruler with tiny measurements on it. It feels lightweight and solid in my hand.

Pointing to it, he says, you gotta keep this on you at all times because the most important measurement is an 8th of an inch.

Afternoons and weekends, I return to the warehouse. The place is rigorously organized. Everything is always in its place, it smells like varnish. Gary won't let me touch the table saw. Mostly I help with assembly and installing.

We don't just eyeball stuff. I measure, measure, measure, measure again. Then Gary appears to check my work. He isn't okay with me leaving sawdust on the floor. Sweep it up, keep a clean workstation, he says.

There are no shortcuts. I wasn't used to the bar being this high. Actually, I prided myself in trying to find the fastest shortcut, getting the biggest payoff for the least amount of work. I hate waiting for the glue to dry completely before taking off the clamps. I'm his impatient apprentice, but Gary teaches me the devil is in the details.

I came to Gary knowing that I wanted to be a beginner, but I didn't really want to do the work. I didn't understand the time it takes to go from being a beginner to being skilled. Every other medium I've worked in before this I've leaned into because it's forgiving. I really like oil painting because if you mess up, you can just wipe it off with some turpentine and start over. But here we only get to cut this wood once.

It's expensive. Gary runs a small business. There's a responsibility that's intimidating. I'm not just slapping a ladder together and calling it art. So precision and care become my own ladder to hold onto.

As I'm learning something about this, precision reminds me of calligraphy. It's really satisfying, like a whole new world is opening up to me.

Rohan Gunutilako
For Natalie, working with precision brings satisfaction. Where in your life might you explore bringing precision to see what it unlocks for you without judgment. Embracing the mindset of a beginner.

Natalie Dawn
One day I'm walking to the art department through this little grove of trees. It feels like a respite from campus. Suddenly, you're on a dirt path with sunlight barely streaking through the tree branches and birds chirping overhead. I notice an area where the trees form a circle around a small clearing. It feels like a secret world or where a cult ritual might happen.

And I think to myself, what I'd really like to do is put a cabinet on that redwood tree. It feels just like the lion, the witch in the wardrobe, a world full of mythical creatures and surprise. It's a return to my mischievous idea of stealth installation. But this time, I dont want the impulsiveness of the project to take away from the craft. So I tell Gary my idea, and as usual, hes practical, specific, precise.

The project is confounding Garys never installed a cabinet on a curved, irregular surface. Okay, he says, furrowing his brow, youre going to need to calculate the circumference of the tree because you aren't putting it on a flat surface. It's a rounded surface. So first you calculate how to cut the wood so that it actually fits up against the tree the way it should. He tells me, get these measurements.

When I come to Gary with problems, he helps me solve them. But he isn't going to do this project for me. The installation, the building, thats my job. The first draft isnt right. It isnt precise enough.

After weeks of persevering, we eventually put a small two door cabinet right at eye level on the redwood. Theres a tiny shelf in the middle. When you open up the cabinet doors, you see the shelf, and then behind it, just tree bark. It's magnificent. There's no back.

It's beautiful. It's structurally sound, and it feels meaningful. Then something unexpected happens. When I go back a week later and open up the cabinet, someone has put some shiny coins on the shelf. I return again and see other objects.

A figurine, a pine cone. It's like a small treasure trove. Months later, having dinner at a friends dorm, I overhear a girl say, do you know about the secret cabinet in the little redwood grove? You have to see it. I can't believe it.

Everything inside me lights up. This thing I made has a life of its own. People are drawn to it. I feel like I'm part of something that's bigger than my original intention, bigger than myself. It's the closest I get to having a real sense of purpose in the world.

This feeling when I make a piece of art that resonates with people. Working with Gary, I tap into a true, deep curiosity. I realize that if I dig deeper, I might find something new, something worth the effort. I go from thinking I need to work hard every day to I get to be curious. I seek out experiences where the act of learning is fulfilling in and of itself.

Several years after graduating, I'm visiting LA. At this point, I've been writing original songs for 15 years, but each time I pick up my instrument, I doubt that I'm capable of creating something new. I ask a friend who lives there if I can borrow his guitar.

He drops it off one evening at my Airbnb, and I sit in the living room under the open wood beams in the large old window.

When I strum the beautiful old instrument, I'm surprised that it's tuned completely differently than anything I've played before. The finger patterns I know for chords don't work. It forces me to play around and find the sounds that I want to make. The easy thing to do is to retune the guitar. Instead, I embrace it.

I just start to see what happens. I hum a note with my voice and then let my fingers travel up and down the frets until I find it. Then I decide to retune a string to another key and I do it all over again. I'm making sounds that are almost absurd, but I love how I can start from scratch and make something totally unexpected. Once you become familiar with something, you actually have to create the to become a beginner again and again and again.

When you leave your comfort zone, there's a sense of mystery, a challenge. In that space where you push yourself, you are finally able to make discoveries. Theres no ego, just curiosity. Each surprise yields joy. I ask myself, where does this melody want to go?

An accidental note leads to an idea and that idea gets refined until all the pieces fit together.

When I work this way, I get to blend the mindset of being an absolute beginner with precision. Around each note. I try and then retry. Over time, I choose to write a whole album this way. Sometimes it's a relief to just fully admit that we are new at something.

Were so determined to avoid shame. We want to take the easy way, but sometimes that just means not really engaging, not getting to experience the untethered thrill of the unfamiliar.

When we let ourselves shift into a beginner mindset and create a space where it's okay that we don't have any clue what we're doing that extinguishes our expectations.

And when that happens, the world awaits.

Chris Renner
We were traveling to London and I took the advantage of bringing my son with me. We had about two days prior to when I needed to be there. We rented a little car and we headed out on one of the major interstates and I bet we were probably 20 minutes down the road. We're looking around and we're thinking, this interstate feels a lot like America. That's Capital one business customer and pinnacle company's founder Chris Renner with a serendipitous real life travel moment.

Nothing different, nothing very exciting. And we looked at each other in the front seat, kind of turn your eyes meet and I said, I think it's time to get off the highway. Took a right down the gravel road and my son turns and looks and says, hey dad, I think that's Stonehenge over there. Imagine that out of the middle of nowhere and we just thought, how did we find this place? I think it just spoke to the desire to find some adventure in the mundane.

Lali Ali Kaglu
Using his Capital one Venturex business card, Chris was able to redeem his travel rewards to take his family on his business trip abroad. This serendipitous travel moment is part of Capital one business's spotlight on real entrepreneurs and their business's offsite adventures. To hear more stories from real business owners, visit Capitalone.com business hub. Again, thats Capitalone.com business dash hub. Thank you Natalie.

Rohan Gunutilako
That was really lovely. Natalies story reminded me of one of the most influential meditation books of the last 50 years, Zen beginners mind by Shunryu Suzuki in the beginners mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. What a great line. So the cost of not being a beginner is less openness. But it's more than that.

In Natalie's story, when she writes French, when she plays a guitar strung to a different key, she's doing things which she thinks are familiar, but with freshness and the delight that comes with that, new pathways open up. So of course, for our closing meditation together, let's do a bit of that.

We're going to do a practice together that I suspect you've never done before. It works best if you've got your eyes open. To be honest, it only really works if you've got your eyes open, but it can also work in the dark. Blink now. Blink again.

That's it. That's what we're doing. Blinking and knowing what it feels like.

Blink. Blink again.

Letting the simplicity of this sensation bring you into the now of your body.

We spend so much of our day looking at things, and to ensure our eyes don't dry out, we automatically blink to keep them as refreshed as possible.

So for this short time together, we're going to notice each time we do making the experience of blinking the most important thing in our universe right now.

Blink. Blink. Letting the eyes be open and knowing what it is to blink. Mindfulness, presence, reasserting itself with each blink, blink, blink.

Blinking is pretty interesting. We can do it on purpose if we want. We can stop it happening if we want, for a little while at least. But it also just happens by itself, just like breathing.

Letting this most tiny and ordinary of actions bring you back into the moment. Blink and know that you are blinking.

Not doing anything special, just noticing. Blinking whenever it happens and noticing what happens when you notice. Noticing how the visual field is when you include the simple sensations of blinking.

Blink.

Blink.

Paying attention to the sensations of blinking.

Falling in love with them, if that makes any sense.

Then seeing what you can notice about the area around your eyes. Do they feel tired or dry? Or do they feel relaxed?

Can there be some precision here with the attention, the precision that was so important to Natalie in her woodwork, just carrying on with what you're doing and when you remember to just noticing blinking.

Playing with the idea of foreground and background. Keeping the blinking in the foreground and everything else in the background.

And now if you can, letting everything else be in the foreground and blinking in the background.

We're all beginners here. Just smile and blink.

Blinking. You remember you are here. Blinking. You connect with your body blinking. You explore modes of attention.

Traditionally, the automatic natural process that has been used in meditation has been breathing. But blinking is just as good. It's always available over 10,000 opportunities to be aware and connected each day.

Now I've shared what I like to think of as a secret technique with you. I hope you have some fun with it and associate it with the beautiful thing that is beginner's mind and beginner's heart, the theme that Natalie's story today invites us into.

So thank you Natalie and of course thank you for listening. We hope youre safe and well. Wed love to hear your personal reflections from this episode. You can email us@helloeditativestory.com or you can find us on all your favourite social media platforms. Our handle is editativestory.

On behalf of the team at Meditative Story, thank you for spending time with us today. We love creating the show for you and if the show serves you in a meaningful way, we'd love to hear from you. Would you take a minute right now to write us a review in your podcast app? When you leave a review, it really inspires our team and we're a group who derive so much energy from understanding how meditative story impacts you. It's also a way for you to pay it forward by helping others discover the show.

So if leaving a review speaks to you today, we'd really appreciate it.

Meditative story is a wait. What? Original our executive producers are Darren Triff, June Cohen and Rebecca Grierson. Jay Punjabi is our supervising producer. The series is produced by Dorothy Abrams.

Original music and sound designed by Ryan Holiday. Our script writers are Hannah Brenture, Peter Keckley, Marie McCoy Thompson and Florence Williams. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Emily McManus, Anna Pisino, Sarah Tata, Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin, Sami Oputa, Leah Sarametis, Colin Haworth, Chineme Ezekuena, Charlie Menezes, and Adam Heine. And I'm Rohan Gunutilako, creator of the Buddhafi Meditation app and your host.

Visit meditativestory.com to find the transcript for this episode. Sage.