Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

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• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

Resources:

Online Courses:

Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

Follow Boyd on
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X

Visit Boyd's website for more.

We bump along dirt roads into a wildlife concession roughly the size of Switzerland that not a single tourist visits. This land is not even game reserve, it's simply the Botswanan wild lands.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

Learn more about the work of Kalahari Research and Conservation Botswana.

Timestamps

3.57: Bushmen culture and lifestyle
5.33: The persistence hunt
11.12 - A remembering
13.51 Coming out of the portal

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

I am reminded that the wild has my heart. I reflect on how my work is, in some ways, to inhabit and remember wildness, in an ever more domestic world. I must not forget this secret art of my life - to be in tune with wilderness.

Our organic plans to meet with the Bushmen people are coming together. I am ready and excited to learn from the Bushmen people - who are renowned trackers and people of the land.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

Timestamps

(05:22 - - 06:08) The intersection of energy of the trackers and the energy of the Shaman

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

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This episode follows our pursuit of this majestic animal through wild and dangerous terrain. Deep down, I feel my own hunter - a desire to compete and survive. I feel a million-year-old drive to find what I'm tracking. I feel how in the wild, there is no margin for error. A mistake out here can mean instant death. And this proximity to real death is paradoxically full of life.

There is an intimacy to tracking. To walk in an animal's footsteps all day is to know that animal on a different level. And the beginning of a transformation and a deeper understanding of our own agency in the world. Tracking takes us on a journey of mastery and perseverance that challenges us to question the crafting of our experiences in the pursuit of what it means to truly be alive.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

Timestamps

(02:24) The alertness to lion tracking
3.37 - Archetypal energies of tracking
08.58 - Different worlds
10.22 - Finding the lions

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

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In most places, we wouldn’t bother following the tracks of wild dogs as the ground they cover is too vast. But here, in the Delta we have no boundaries or time constraint. We feel the vitality and the movement of the wild dogs and we begin to move as a pack. The hours pass and we follow onwards into a massive wilderness. We are interacting with the wild like few people can. The wild has started to shape us.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

Timestamps

1.34 - On the track of Wild Dogs
09.22 - Losing the track
12.35 - We will always remember this track

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

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Simplicity is abundance and the desert calls for a beautiful simplicity. I always know when I'm in an important experience because the experience itself starts to constellate new thought processes. I start to daydream about how to ignite the collective psychological abundance in our culture. What can we do to instill a sense of abundance in people?
I don’t know what we will find on our expedition - but I am excited about simplicity. I hope with the Bushmen people, I can touch an older way of life that might teach me how to live in this one.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.

-- Boyd makes reference to the book Boiling Energy, by Richard Katz

Timestamps

(4.26) - Learning about the life of the Bushmen people
(6.14) - Modern life structures
(7.41) - Simplicity in the desert

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

When I was working as a safari guide, I would notice that a story could always shift the group's energetic momentum towards you, which is important when you are guiding. More than being a momentum shifter, a well-crafted story could, in the right moment, be profoundly transcendent.

If you cultivate your capacity as a storyteller, you cultivate your life. If you are becoming a storyteller, you're working on your life as much as you're working in it. Stepping back to work on, and develop, the multiple stories that make up your life is important work. It will radically leverage your life and your impact in almost any setting.

Humans are narrative creatures. This has been true since the first people told stories around the fire. When you become a master of narrative, you become a world maker.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Visit Londolozi

• The Tracker Academy was established to preserve the indigenous knowledge of wildlife tracking.

• Connect with Andreas Sitole

• Learn more about David Rattray and Fugitives Drift

Timestamps

(5:35) David Rattray, South African Historian, and the story that set him apart
(15.32) - Working on your personal story
(19.57) - Andreas Sitole’s story ‘Into the Unknown’

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

There is a strangely universal truth that the more in touch you are with your own unique personal essence, the more what you have to say becomes universally meaningful. The most private things are the most universal things.

Any type of trying to be commercially successful or thinking about the end user while you work will kill an artist's freedom. Yet if you are a storyteller, you want the story to be listener friendly. I always think about how a listener could put their own story into my stories. This is not a rule but rather an orientation. Like a compass, I point personal story towards a subtextual, universal story. A story always has an archetypal core.

Mentioned in this episode

Londolozi - https://boydvarty.com/retreats/visit-londolozi/
Learn more about the Tsalala pride at Londolozi - https://blog.londolozi.com/2021/12/07/the-legacy-of-the-tsalala-pride/

Timestamps

(3.30) The Tsalala pride
(06:43) Universal energies
(08:42) Living with severe depression and anxiety

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

Finding characters in life is becoming harder, as life becomes more homogenized. Characters almost always have found their own uniqueness and a path to express it. They seem to fit what they’re doing - they know what lights them up. They know what they have to offer. And almost always, they know how to live in a way that is unique to them.

Characters almost always have a different worldview, and they are often world class in an unusual field. When you spend time with a character who has mastered a state, your own sense of what is truly possible is expanded.

Characters help you imagine a world of possibility for yourself.

Timestamps

(5:40) Losing an arm to a crocodile
(8.10) Discovering your personal uniqueness
(11.25) Good reason to find characters

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

In this episode, I share my experience of being lost, tracking lions with group of guests on a Track Your Life retreat.

Stories are layered with meaning. Meaning is almost always a constellation of thoughts and beliefs that weave into a story - and retreat participants were pulled into an unfolding co-created story, making meaning out of the experience. They had learnt a basic universal lesson: there is always something unfolding as it should.

I learnt a lot during those few hours of being lost. In particular, I had learnt that nothing bad ever happened to a storyhunter.

Mentioned in this episode

-The Track your Life Retreat is an extraordinary experience of self discovery. Find out more: https://trackyourlife.co.za/

• Learn more about Londolozi

Timestamps

(02:06) Lost in lion country
(08:54) Making meaning of stories
(12:23) Run in the wild

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Visit Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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Storytelling is about providing context and meaning. It's a discipline of attention, a way of helping others understand the world around them.

Mentioned in this episode

• Listen to Boyd’s epic account of 40 days and 40 nights spent alone in a treehouse in the wild eastern part of South Africa. https://boydvarty.com/about/40-days-40-nights/ Learn more about Londolozi

Timestamps

(02:04) Barry, the Buffalo
(08:00) Safari storytelling tradition

Resources:

Online Courses:

• Become a Story Hunter - Sign up for the Story Hunter Online Course.

• Uncover the track of your life through the Track Your Life Online Guided Retreat.

Discover Boyd's books:
https://boydvarty.com/book/

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

• Follow the journey - Subscribe to the Track your Life Podcast and never miss an episode.

• Sign up to Boyd’s newsletter.

• Follow Boyd on
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• Visit Boyd's website for more.

Plaque rock is a beautiful dome of granite that sits logged deep into the river bank.
You can walk up onto it easily from the bank and then it falls in perfect smooth rock down to a pool below with a few young crocodiles and a lazy terrapin that live in it.
Beyond that is a second band of rock and then the thick green phragmites reeds of the river.
As a child when I would go there it may as well have been another planet.
Running and playing on the large dome we could have landed on mars.

The rock is warm in the late evening having absorbed the sun's heat and if you lay with your back on it will share that warmth with you. the whole rock feels alive. Like it has its own intelligence. Like the rock itself is a living presence.

As I sit there on a winter's day I am the centre of a small universe that spins around it.
Creatures slowly appear.
A kudu in the midst of the far bank.
A herd of nyala
Herons kingfishers flying past. A lizard scuttles out from under a rock to bask.

There's something you don’t do enough of….basking

My grandfather who I never met used to sit on this rock.
When I am there I can intuit his ancestral presence.
I am a part of what came before, I am a part of what will come after. I am not self made. I do not think of myself as a life apart. I am a part of life.
Inside of this understanding I see a bigger picture. For a moment I am set free from the innate narcissism that my life is in some way the most important thing that’s happening.
I am part of a chain of unfolding life.

My grandfather flew planes in the second world war. From north africa him and a rogue captain called hayward would fly to warsaw to drop supplies for the polish resistance.
Hayward knew that if they flew high over the city they would be a slow moving target for the anti aircraft guns. so when he saw the city which was on fire he would fly low down the river, dodging bridges moving too fast for gunners then drop his cargo and go. flying home with barely enough fuel.

After the war my grandfather took up lion hunting as a way to keep himself feeling alive.

Only later when I came to understand trauma did it occur to me that the lion hunting was a common behaviour for someone with severe combat experience and ptsd. The need to seek out dangerous extremes to try and get the sound back on in your life.

When my grandfather died suddenly at 54 the war was long over. Hayward loaded my 15 year old father in a plane and flew him from Johannesburg to the place where I now sat in the wild . flying over the rock hayward ever the renegade opened the window and tipped my grandfather's ashes out into the river.
That’s how plague rock became an ancestral place for my family.

When I was born my mother named me craig…..I cried and cried until the shangaans people told my mother I was crying for my ancestral name. they started calling me body and I became a quiet child.

As I sit here this morning I can look down across the pool at the base of the rock to the second ridge where a plague with my grandfather's name on it….a name that is also my name. boyd varty it reads he loved the bushveld.

I'm telling you this because your ancestry makes you close to your infinity and your mortality.

When I am here I intuit some deep transformation in my own life that seems to be happening on a grander scale in the world.
“the restoration of the planet will come out if shift in human consciousness” is my cry

My grandfather was a lion hunter. I am a lion tracker..
My grandfather had severe ptsd……I have worked intensely with how to heal extreme trauma.

We were both in love with the wild.

As a hunter he was intictual as a healer so am i.

In the men in my family for so long there was steel with no feeling .I am coming to respect both.

Why am I saying all this from some forgotten rock in south africa …..and what does it have to do with you.
Okay here goes.
If you have bothered to listen to these podcasts and they moved you or interested you then something in you is intuiting what's under the words.
You know that like me you are here for the mystery, you are here to live differently, you are here for nature, you are here to find your track.
Your whole life a part of you deep down has known the way we are living is not the way. maybe you couldn’t say it for fear of sounding crazy but a part of you knows.
A part of you has whispered I'm here for a different world……..I'm here to make that world by waking up to my life.

For starters you are the chain in ancestral life…..whatever you came from you can be the start of a transformation for generations to come.

Who knows the power of one authentic life. Life is full of platformless heros.
For all we know Nelson Mandela's grandmother may have been the person who gave him the fortitude to be who he was.
If you heal you heal the past…..if you heal you heal the future.
Just ask yourself truly do I intuit “something beyond conscious reasoning for my life”

I'm on this expedition on pure intuition.
On one level Who cares if I go on these expeditions to the places that call me.
Yet I'm called to this story in a way I realise I don’t have to understand.

Imagine we were planted here… those of us with that intuition to awakening like sleeper seeds waiting to bloom.
All your life you have felt it just beyond your amnesia ……you have been reaching for it like it just slipped your mind.
The faith it has taken.
The faith it will still take to say I will give up the rational and follow that other way of knowing.

If you're listening to this you are either stone cold right now… in which case i'm probably just going to annoy you over time and congrats you made it this far ……or you're on fire. something in you is saying yes.

I don’t mean to sound wafty….but im okay with it for a moment because I know that certainly the intuition has to lead to action.
But for now from a huge ancestral domed rock by a river in Africa hear a voice reaching out to you wherever you are right now.
Think of all the things that had to happen for these words to come to your ears.
Trust yourself. Trust what you know deep down. Learn to live beyond conscious reasoning.

That’s what i'm trying to do.

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/