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SCP Podcast Episode 205: Boyd Varty – Following The Track Of Your Life

In this episode, join us as we talk with Boyd Varty, author of “The Lion Tracker’s Guide To Life”.  A wildlife and literacy activist Boyd Varty, had an unconventional upbringing. Born to a family of conservationists, Boyd grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in the South African wilderness, a place where man and nature strive for balance, where perils exist alongside wonders.

Since childhood, Boyd shared his home with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the wisdom of nature. Boyd survived a harrowing black mamba encounter, a debilitating bout with malaria, even a vicious crocodile attack, but his biggest challenge was a personal crisis of purpose. As a university student, he studied psychology and ecology, supplementing his education by learning martial arts in Thailand, hiking through the jungles of the Amazon, and apprenticing to a renowned tracker from the Shangaan tribe deepening his intimate knowledge of the natural world. Boyd grew up speaking the local language and learning the true meaning of coexistence between people and with nature.

Highlights of this podcast include:

  • Awareness begins transformation
  • Tracking
  • Authentic self vs social self
  • The story we tell ourselves 
  • Realistic changes
  • Healing 
  • Solitude in nature
  • The story we tell ourselves
  • And so much more
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The Way of the Tracker: The Path of “not this”

When a great tracker loses the trail of an animal, he may learn where it has gone by discovering all the places it has not gone.

In the moment the tracker loses the track he meets the full 360-degree dimension of possibility. The animal could have gone in any direction and so each path of blank, trackless soil is talking to him.

“Not this path”, “not this path”

As he walks he is eliminating wedges of the full degree of that rotation. Refining where the trail may run by learning where it does not run. In this way, a tracker is always on track even when he is off it.

I always wanted to be someone whose life was an expression of the things I cared about.  For me in some cases coming to that path began as an imitation of what I thought I should care about.

The gift of finding the path of ‘not this’. The realization that certain things I thought were for me was in fact not part of my path helped me know myself much more deeply.

By tracking imitation, my own trail twisted, turned and then opened to the authentic.  In this way, no trail is ever wasted by the tracker.

Walking in a life that is not for you can be the beginning of knowing the life that is meant for you.

The path of ‘not this’ is a part of the way of a tracker.