Track Your Life with Boyd Varty
How wisdom from the ancient art of tracking can teach you how to recognize the essential ingredients in a meaningful life.
About the show
Somewhere deep inside, you know what your gift, purpose, and mission are. Boyd Varty, a lion tracker and life coach, reveals how the wisdom from the ancient art of tracking can teach you how to recognize these essential ingredients in a meaningful life. Know how to navigate, don’t worry about the destination, and stay alert. These are just a few of the strategies that contribute to both successful lion tracking and a life of fulfillment. Trackers learn how to use all of their senses to read the environment and enter into a state of “greater aliveness.” When we learn to find and follow our inner tracks, we learn to see what is deeply important to us.
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Episodes
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Day 35 - Enchantment
May 6th, 2020 | Season 1 | 12 mins 13 secs
acceptance, bateleur, beauty, eckhart tolle, enchantment, enthusiasm, fasting, harmony, homework, mission, mystics, presence, stillness, tune in
I think of this experience as the slow removal as a shell. As the days went by I felt more myself. I felt the creativity coming back in, co-creating the story with nature. My energy levels return to new highs. My relationship with beauty was revived. I feel like so much of what I was trying to do before was trying to tune out, now I am trying to tune back in.
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Day 34 - So Many More Elephants
May 5th, 2020 | Season 1 | 11 mins 54 secs
assumption, danger, firefly, heat, irwin, kudu, rhino, tortoise, vultures, water
There were many elephants which required a certain type of bushcraft. What had meant to be a stroll through open clearings had turned into a tactical maneuver. In the outdoors dangerous situations often happen long before the danger. They happen through unexpected sliding variables. Assumptions you had made no longer fit the moment. Experience in some ways is the ability to arrest the preconceived ideas and assumptions to make new decisions out of those assumptions.
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Day 33 - Sinking In
May 4th, 2020 | Season 1 | 9 mins 46 secs
decentralized, ghandi, globalization, great heart, insurance, johnny clegg, nature, permaculture, river, run, sound, spirit
Ghandi was a huge believer in the village because he understood that in shared production of food you could produce enough to be free from colonial rules of survival. I don’t think small food gardens can be underestimated. And surely as markets continue to globalize in a world of radically accelerating uncertainty, you couldn’t do better than a back to basics insurance plan than small decentralized food gardens. Put the gardens at the center of your pocket of light.
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Day 32 - Being Elephant
May 3rd, 2020 | Season 1 | 11 mins 57 secs
ancestors, being, elephant, fingerprint, lion, lion tracking, tea
In late January I tracked a small elephant bull with a group of close friends. We tracked the bull for a few hours, seeing his huge tracks and into the dry riverbed. At different times a different person tracked. Each of them acquainted themselves with the elephant. As each member of the group trailed that elephant we became harmonized in perfect unfolding. We feel into intimacy with the elephant and each other. Where he had rested in the shade so did we. As we followed we started to know each other. Whatever happened after that day, there was an elephant we knew. We found him at sunset and not a word was said.
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Day 31 - Dialogue with Silence
May 2nd, 2020 | Season 1 | 10 mins 1 sec
compassion, currents, dialogue, elephants, friend, friendship, mountain, news, prayer, river
Each day I have sit in stillness with the absolute certainty I will die. The ones I love will leave me or I will leave them. I will not hide from that last veil to love. You can hurt me love or teach me the truth. Trust this life that made this river. Trust that I will find this river. Take me to those shores of grace I ask, I have so far to go and I am afraid of storms and loss. Take me to the peace that passeth. I don’t know the way but I sense it there from beyond the edges.
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Day 30 - The First Track
May 1st, 2020 | Season 1 | 10 mins 15 secs
anthony bourdain, carl jung, chinese saying, circumambulation, instagram, jungle oats, scotch, trackers, venn diagram
Carl Jung had an idea of circumambulation where you exist in your fullest potential in your future self. You achieve this future self by paying attention to what truly grabs you with the feeling of aliveness now. You move towards and also around your future self. As you do this you will see patterns and themes about what is core and essential to yourself. If you look back over your life you will see that there are themes that continually emerge on your Venn diagram. You see all of this as you spiral through time towards your future potential.
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Day 29 - Pattern Tracking
April 30th, 2020 | Season 1 | 12 mins 9 secs
adrenal, leopards mating, patterns, rhino bull, tracker, trauma, tree
get excited about it as a tracker as its all about how the pattern is laid down. We can learn with attention and all become pattern trackers. I’ve been thinking about how all the mystics found a way of living and then shared the peace and joy of that way. The doctrine often came after their lives. I have found a way to live here that is simple and peaceful. I have made a home in it, but is it making a home in me?
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Day 28 - Call me Crazy
April 29th, 2020 | Season 1 | 12 mins 17 secs
alternative energy, braiding sweetgrass, creative response, crocodiles, green models, mind, overstory, permaculture, waste management system, zen koen
While we can’t obviously live in trees in the wild, its worth noting that if we could most of us would be closer to enlightenment. There are really opportunities to questioning how we get off the progress train with nuance. We have to face the truth that not all progress is progress. Modern life ain’t it all cracked up to be. It’s certainly worth some of your capacity to innovate before you have kids and they become teenagers. Life architecture as an activism is a very engaging way to spend the blink of an eye we all get.
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Day 27 - Who Would You Be Without Your Story
April 28th, 2020 | Season 1 | 11 mins 43 secs
byron katie, clean pain, dirty pain, energy, hyena, running, sand river, scrub hare, wild dog, zebra
There is a weird metaphysical component to how life follows our stories. The key is to pay attention to the ones that cause suffering. What I’m sayin is that you have two options to become more aware.
Ask yourself what story you are telling about yourself when you re suffering
Or you can get into a hyena wild dog pack fight. -
Day 26 - Define Abundance
April 27th, 2020 | Season 1 | 11 mins 8 secs
abundance, book of mormon, community, nature, presence, quality, shame, stillness, success, utopia, warlord, wealth
What else happens when you get still is that you become aware there are many places in your life where you have not showered yourself in glory. You have to face up to a certain amount of shame in your own behavior that frankly if you keep busy you can hide away. To be still means that you can really revisit those moments. Even if you don’t want to it will come up.
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Day 25 - Sidetracked
April 26th, 2020 | Season 1 | 10 mins 43 secs
ancestors, camp life, elephant bull, elephants, feral, friends, kettle shower, leopards, mating leopards, parfuri, presence, stars, tracking, whales
My quest to track a big bull elephant has still not happened. It keeps getting interrupted by lion tracks and pegasus rhino. Still this is a mission that remains high on my priority list. An animal like that has presence who has walked the ancient paths of his ancestors. There are myths of elephants who used to frequent the eastern seaboards of Southern Africa and commune with whales. These animals exist in a conscious that is beyond the verbal mind. There is no future and no past.
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Day 24 - Pegasus
April 25th, 2020 | Season 1 | 11 mins 8 secs
aware, mission, pegasus, present, purpose, retreats, rhino, st frances, tracking
Losing tracks is part of tracking. Losing yourself is part of life. I consoled myself with knowing that some of Londolozi’s elite trackers lose the tracks from time to time. St Frances said wherever you go preach the gospel but only where absolutely necessary use words.