Why I Love Tracking
To understand tracking, picture yourself alone in an airport or a train station. You’re reading the signs of the landscape (the message boards, the gate directions, the drone of announcements), but you’re also quietly observing, interpreting body language, studying behavior, understanding universal patterns and rules. You’re on a mission to get somewhere, but you’re simultaneously learning about the world you live in.
Tracking in the wild is the same, but this time the process is much more conscious. You notice animals’ footprints, smells, the behavior of birds, the direction of the wind, the way a patch of long grass has been dented by a creature passing by. Your senses have to draw on these signs and produce a “whole” understanding: who has been here, when, and why?
As you immerse yourself in the beauty of the experience, your consciousness drops down into a space where it is much more sensitive to your true self. You are in the flow, aware of how the nature around you reflects your inner nature, your internal landscape. As you solve the puzzle of your surroundings, new solutions to your own internal conflicts begin to suggest themselves. Before you know it, you’re on top of the pride of lions that you’ve been tracking. At the same time you’re halfway to solving a personal challenge that’s been on your mind for a couple of months.
There is nowhere that I feel more connected to the world and to myself than when I’m out tracking in the wild.
When you become a village builder you will step outside of culture. This is a great challenge, because what you’re left with is infinite possibility for your life; there are suddenly no parameters.
So how do we find our way to the life we want and our unique place in the village?
We track it.
You will find your way to your unique expression using the same skills that I learned from earliest childhood, tracking wild animals in the African wilderness.
These skills are:
- the ability to read the landscape of your body for the signals it’s giving you
- to become extremely aware of the subtlest signs,
- the ability to move fluidly between extreme detail and a broad vision for yourself
- the ability to generate an energy state that is focused, resilient and committed, yet also lighthearted and playful
- the ability to create a resonance with that which you are tracking.
For individuals, learning to track your own life is a journey into the self and to create a new vision for your life and yourself. It is the way to find your village and your place in it; to find your way into your own wild nature and in doing so, to find your way home at last.
Tracking in business
Tracking is an excellent modality for finding a new direction in your business. It will take your business into greater performance and into a more joyful medium. It shifts business into a place that transcends the product and becomes what the business stands for in the world.
This a huge corporate frontier, but one that is becoming more important all the time. In order for businesses to attract talent and to attract customers in a modern vernacular, they will have to stand for much more than their product. Businesses can have a huge impact in the world at this moment in time, and I believe all businesses should take up the mantle of being world changers.