Good Life Project - Tracking Your Life | Boyd Varty

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Born into a family of conservationists and trackers in South Africa, Boyd Varty (https://boydvarty.com/) began learning the art of tracking lions at a young age. Not for hunting, but rather as a devotion. And, eventually, as a scout for guides to bring guests into the wilderness in search of seeing animals, most often lions, in a protected environment. Through the process, learning to connect deeply with the land and natural environment, he discovered how to see and follow threads that often took hours, if not days, to lead to a majestic and wild end. But, when it came to his own life, he found himself shut down after trauma, operating on autopilot until a chance encounter with Martha Beck changed everything and opened his eyes to the possibility of using his skills as a tracker to find his way back into a life of meaning, joy and connection. Now, a storyteller, coach, tracker, activist, founder of the Good Work Foundation and the author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life (https://amzn.to/2Ov4jnJ), he's on a mission to help others find their own paths to healing, wholeness and wildness or, in his words, to “Track Your Life.”-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Boyd Vardy, was born in South Africa into land that was owned for many generations by his family in the very early days as a place for hunting and in more modern incarnations as a place of conservation and renewal, he began learning the art of tracking lions at a very young age, not for hunting, but as a devotion and also eventually as a scout for guides to bring guests into the wilderness in search of seeing animals, most often lions, in this beautiful protected environment. And through that process, learning to connect deeply with the land and the natural environment, he discovered how to see and follow threads that often took hours, if not days, to lead to their majestic and wild. But when it came to his own life, he found himself deeply shut down after trauma, operating on autopilot until a chance encounter with a sort of world-acclaimed coach changed everything and opened his eyes to the possibility of using his skills as a tracker to first find his way back into a life of meaning, enjoying connection, and then eventually turn

around. And while still devoting himself to the land and to tracking, use that same skill set to help other people individually, in groups, and at scale. Now a storyteller, a coach, a tracker, activist, and founder of the Good Work Foundation, and the author of a new book called The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. He is on a bit of a mission to help others find their own path to healing and to wholeness and to wildness. And in his words, to track your life. So excited to share his journey with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot.

Flight Risk. You kind of split your time. It sounds like all over the United States and then South Africa kind of like pulsing and refueling. I'm really curious. I want to take a big step back in time, but I'm curious just in the way that you're sort of spending time now. I had a friend of mine that in the late 70s went to India, grew up in New York City, and considers India the place that he goes to kind of touch stone, to refuel, like that is the mother for him.

Do you have a similar feeling? Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely. There is something about, you know, having a generation-long connection with a piece of land. So it's been in my family for four generations. And then I witnessed my father and my uncle and my mother create this incredible transition on the land, taking it from a bankrupt cattle farm, actually starting to work on restoring the land and bringing it back to life. And so I sort of I grew up inside of that sense of restoration, and I grew up watching how that land came back to life.

And so you live in nature, you get into the rhythms of a place, you know the particular intangible feeling of certain areas of it, you know certain trees, you know the movements of certain animals, and you feel yourself as a part of that. So fill in a little bit more of the backstory here. You mentioned this land where you grew up, and we're talking about South Africa. Tell me a bit more about the area, because there's a real lineage to this land too. Well, the story begins, like many great stories, with the intake of large quantities of gin.

And it kicks off in 1926 when my great-grandfather was at a tennis party, and him and a friend were playing tennis and drinking gin, and they heard about these bankrupt cattle farms adjacent to the Kruger National Park in the wild eastern part of South Africa. And the farms were bankrupt for two reasons. One, it was very hard land, low rainfall. And two, lions were eating a lot of the cattle. And something inside of my great-grandfather,

and this has become something that I'm really interested in, something in him just knew that he had to go there. And he went there originally to hunt lions. And so they went there for the first time in June of 1926. They bribed a train driver to stop a train well south of the property. They got off and they just walked into this wild terrain. And they landed at the spot, which is now the Londolozi camp where I grew up. And then for three generations, my family would go there in the winter months to hunt. And it was very ramshackle. They had three mud huts. And I'm told occasionally

when it rained, people would go stand outside for shelter. It was just this very rudimentary type setup. And then in 1969, and there were a few defining moments in the journey, but the first one was 1969. My grandfather died very suddenly. My father was 15 and my uncle was 17. And in the wake of that loss, they gathered in Johannesburg. And all the family advisors said, well, first things first, you've got to get rid of that place where you used to go hunt lions. Hunting lions is a bad idea. It's dangerous.

That place is in the middle of nowhere. It's never going to work. So you've got to get rid of it. And this was also at a time in 69 where there isn't the same sort of social feeling about hunting that there has emerged over the last couple of decades. Yeah. And also there was nothing going on in South Africa. It was, you know, in the midst of a terrible ideology under the apartheid regime. No one went there. But my 15-year-old father stood up and he said to the family advisors, again, guided by something deep inside of him,

we're going to keep it. And the family advisor said, well, how do you plan, young man, to look after your widowed mother? And they stood up and there must have been like the arrogance and genius of youth and they said, we will make it pay. And that's how my family got into the safari business. And to my grandmother's credit, and again, the wisdom of the feminine, she looked at her sons and said, I trust you, go do it. So they headed off to this bankrupt piece of land where there was nothing going on and they started to get going. It was incredibly rudimentary. They had one broken Land Rover that didn't really work.

There was a trickling of people who came down there. There was almost, there was game there, but you didn't see it because it had been hunted. So everything was trying to get away from you. There was thick scrub all over the land, eye-high scrub. And into the story, and this was sort of the next defining moment, came a man by the name of Ken Tinley.

And Ken was a fascinating guy. He had dropped out of high school, but he had been admitted to a biological sciences degree at a university because he drew a picture of a moth with such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty said to him, okay, you're in. And after he graduated, he went and lived for a year by himself in Mozambique, and he connected profoundly with the landscape. And it's like he could feel the rivers inside of his own body, and he could feel the way the moisture moved across the landscape and how that informed the flora and fauna. And he was deeply connected.

He was almost in a kind of union with landscape. So he rolled up and he met these young boys and then my mother who were trying to get this safari operation going on this piece of land that had not much going on in it. And he said to them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. You must begin to think of the animals as your kin. And you must make sure that the local people who live here participate in the protection of these wild areas. So he said to him, well, partner with the land. What do you mean? He said, come, I'll show you.

And he took them out to where the cattle had grazed the land. And what happens when the land gets grazed bare, it starts to send up scrub. And so you get this thick scrub, and it's a way of defending itself. A landscape is like a person. If you're too harsh on it, it will create defenses. And he showed them how you cleared the scrub and you packed it into these deep erosive furrows where you were losing the moisture. And when they started to do that, they started to work with people to actually restore the land. It's this incredible sensation of the land coming back to life.

Suddenly a clearing would appear where there had been eye-high thorn scrub. And then onto that clearing, you would see waterbuck and wildebeest and then zebra and then rhino. And there was this feeling that as they worked with the land, the land was coming back to life. And then into the midst of that, and this was a kind of another defining moment, one afternoon they were driving home and it was just my father and my uncle in a land rover and in the late afternoon light after a day spent working on the land a female leopard stepped out onto the road and she stopped and she looked at them and that was like unheard of because up until that point if you saw a leopard it was trying to get away from you it was running for its life they

had been hunted but for a moment in a look, she created a moment of contact. And they drove home together in silence, and then they stopped the vehicle. And my uncle, who again, he's kind of a wild man, but in touch with something in himself, he turned to my father and he said, whatever just happened, that's my future. And for the next 12 years, he went out with a shungan tracker, a man by the name of Almonum Shlongo, who's Rhenius from the book's brother. And they tracked this leopard. And they built a relationship with this one wild leopard. And she, over years and years, started to allow herself to be seen. And then she had cubs. And the cubs grew up modeling their mother's trust of you could drive a land rover up to this wild animal and she would she was okay because she knew after years and years that they meant her no harm and so she became

called the mother leopard because for two reasons one she was the mother of all of these cubs and two because word got out all over the world that there was a place in the middle of nowhere in south africa where you could go and see a wild leopard. And that had like a kind of allure in the psyche of people. And people from all over started to come towards this restoration. And so that, and that's what I grew up into. And so something about that feeling and actually seeing a piece of land that wasn't conserved, but was actively supported in restoration and seeing how the land restored and then what it started to give us through that connection to it.

As we started to think of the land and the animals as our kin and started to feel that connection with it, a kind of tremendous sense of belonging and connection and purpose and love flowed into us from the land and the sense of custodianship and not of ownership but of being custodians of something wild and magical and just that was sort of the context into which my sense of what I wanted to do in the world was those were some of the foundations of it. When you're when you come into the family this is already all in progress. This is all in progress it's It's starting to be well established. And in fact, all through the 80s and 90s, it was getting really well established. More and more

people were coming. And the animals and the landscape was just going from strength to strength to strength. And yeah, I was witness to a kind of healing, you know? Yeah. Yeah. When as a young child, I mean, I'm imagining growing up there, it's got to be almost like the ultimate playground. I mean, just an incredible sense of it's a very learning to be learning the language of nature. It's a nonverbal language. It's a language of presence. The animals don't have a verbal mind,

so they're not thinking about the future or the past. You don't see lions lying around thinking like, damn it, we missed that kill yesterday, or I hope we get it. They're just present, and yet there's a language to it. And so once you learn that language, and I would equate it more to, rather than trying to rationally understand, in your mind, you feel the terrain, you feel the presence of a tree, you feel the way an animal communicates to you using its body language. So there's a lot of communication happening, but it's all in the feeling. And I would say that was my first language, the feeling of presence with these wild creatures.

That has become a big part of that great St. Francis. I think of St. Francis as kind of like a nature mystic because he just went rogue and went and lived in nature. But wherever you go, preach the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words. And I don't have a particularly strong religious slant, but I understand that he understood presence. That's beautiful. So all the things that you're describing sound amazing. Was this something that you just kind of stumbled upon? Was it something that you were taken under the wing of parents or friends of the family and taught that this is the way that it works in this natural world as a young child?

Or was it through observation or some blend of these things? Well, it was through observation, largely getting in touch with the feeling. And then from the time I was very young, I was exposed to men who had hunted and gathered on that land, particularly two brothers from the Mshlongo family, who were Shungan trackers, who had literally grown up hunting and gathering. And so I watched their way on the land and how in tune they were with it and what they could do as trackers. So that also sort of went in there. But I didn't fully make sense of what it meant until my early 20s. And then what had happened is when I was 10, I had gone to a boarding school, which was to be wrenched from this incredibly, you know, natural, wild place,

and then put into a rigid kind of old English, although in South Africa boarding school with the bell rings and you, it was a big transition. And I felt that. And then I had had two experiences in my late teens. The one was I had myself and my sister and my mother and our teacher at the time were attacked in Johannesburg. This was during a time when there was a lot of violent crime in South Africa during, just after the transition. And so we went through this sort of three hour, extremely strange experience of being tied up and held at gunpoint through this sort of three hour, extremely strange experience of being tied up and held at gunpoint and this sort of thing. And then a few months after that, I got attacked by a crocodile. I was sitting on the bank of a river and it was entirely my fault.

I thought I had good visibility in the water around me, but there was a little place where the bank fell away and this croc came out and bit me and tried to pull me into the water. And that's a, it was a whole... This is when you're around 18, right? When I was around 18. And so in the wake of those, I was, I had, you know, the kind of trauma that comes from that is just like, I was sort of, I was in a kind of shock. And I was very shut down. And, and very, and that feeling that I grew up with, I just closed it down. So there was something about, you know, they say that trauma is, it's a

kind of freezing and, and I definitely put up a certain amount of defenses and I was living with this very shut down, very unfeeling. I didn't want to go there. So I was frozen in some ways. And I was working as a safari guide and sort of enter the story, and it's just sort of one of those magical things. In the hero's journey, there's always the arrival of the magical helper. Right, the allies. Yeah. He has a guide.

But I met this woman. She came on safari. So you were back home then and doing safari. I was back home. I was just kind of in this sort of shut down state. But I was working, taking people out, guiding people. Shut down in terms of like how so? Just like holding a lot of emotion that I didn't know what to do with.

So just kind of locked down. I couldn't process really what had happened with the armed robbery, couldn't process, just couldn't process a whole lot of stuff. So I mean, it almost sounds like that. Was it some form of like PTSD? I would say that it was a PTSD that had brought on a kind of depression. Did you, were you able to talk to people about it or just kind of like took it all inside? You see, like that was part of the process is like in South Africa, it wasn't like, you know, there's sort of that macho culture. And we had an operating, we had a kind of, you know, coming from a hunting background and coming from a South African background. We just had our approach to things like we were bush people, just like you keep going, you know.

So we didn't have the means to work out how to work with that. And yet one day this woman arrived on my Land Rover. Her name was Martha Beck. And I felt an immediate connection with her. Did you have any idea who this Martha Beck was at that point? I had no idea. What had happened was a friend had met her a year before, a guide, and he had said to me, you know, this woman is really interesting.

She did a whole lot of martial arts with me and I found it really interesting. And I was a passionate martial artist. So I went into the ranger's room where guides got allocated to guests who were coming in on safari. And I rubbed someone else's name off and I put my name on because I thought, like, we'll talk about martial arts. That'll be interesting. And absolutely changed my life. You know, almost like something came through that made me do that, and met her, felt a really interesting connection and energy with her. But, but I was just taking my safari.

Right. So she was a client. She was a client. And we were having like a really interesting conversation. And I could sense there was an aliveness and an energy to her. And then kind of two things happened. One, I took her tracking, took her to track a rhino. And she said to me, you know, you and I do a very similar thing. Like the process that I just watched you use, this ancient art form and the, yeah, the process to it and the mentality that you just use to follow this animal into unknown terrain and find it i do the same thing but with people i help people find their purpose and meaning i help them track what's actually calling to them so that was that was sort of that struck

me um and then the next thing that happened was eventually on like the third or fourth day of me being her guide she just said to me like what's going on i was like well what do you mean so she sensed that something was off she was just and then she said i can see and it's just you know it's an amazing thing when someone sees you so i can see what's what's going on inside of you i can see what you're carrying and you need to let it out and like when someone hits a truth like that you know it's just like i'm standing next to my land holding my rifle and I just felt like myself totally burst open and you know I started to kind of it was this weird moment where this my my sort of client is hugging me in the car park and

I'm just like crying like a baby um but from that moment and this became this was what was formative about it, she helped me heal through the PTSD. She became a guide to me through how you find your way out of what has traumatized you, what has frozen you, how you find your way out of a stuck place, and how you find your way back to a life that enlivens you, that feeds you, that nourishes you. And because I was a tracker, she kind of guided me like a tracker. She framed it in there's something you're looking for. And that became incredibly informative then to the sort of one, you know, as a young South African, I was quite skeptical about life coaching or anything like that. But when I healed, I realized it was possible. And I became

a believer when something in me changed. And I wouldn't be so adamant about it if I didn't believe it from the inside of my own life, how a person can transform when they start tracking from a different kind of center. And then, so, you know, now it's like starting this kind of weird Venn diagram is starting to line up. Like grew up in a restoration, had an encounter with a mentor that helped me heal. And then the final piece was on the, towards the back end of that trip, her and I were in a conversation and she said to me, I was sort of in my mind, I thought conservation would be my path because that was my family's path. And then she said to me, the restoration of the planet will come out of a shift in human

consciousness. And that comes out of a lot of people learning how to heal or get in touch with their deeper self. And so those three things just suddenly lined up and there in front of me was very clearly my mission, you know, just restoring the land by helping people heal and restore and come back to a different place inside of themselves and so all of my work now is is inside of the restoration inside of helping people track what actually brings them to life what actually nourishes them because what i see is that a person who finds the place inside of them that knows what its purpose and mission is and when they really touch that almost immediately there's like a certain set of characteristics that fire and the one is a return to simplicity you start what you want is very simple when you find that place

you stop wanting stuff you stop thinking that things stuff from the outside is going to give you what you're looking for there's a there's a kind of a natural inclination and a pull towards nature and silence. There is an allure towards experience over status. And that just seems like a natural part. And people who find that, it's a kind of activism too I think because they without going around being activists they live their life and in fact they in some ways they give up fighting for change and they just live towards that thing that that is expensive that is nourishing that is joyful to them and in doing that they become a kind of living example of a different possibility. So that's become my mission now is to take the ancient art form of tracking

and give it to people and say, you are a tracker, and start the process of finding the way to the track inside yourself of that wild place in you that knows why you're here, that knows what you're here to do. In the way that a lion knows how to be a lion, and trees know how to bloom, and leopards know that they are solitary and private, and lions know they belong in the pride.

You know, but you've got to go under all of the social conditioning and get back in touch with that place. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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I mean, it's a really interesting Venn diagram you described. And part of my curiosity is also, how do you go from that place of being shut down, meeting this one person who sees something's wrong, and from outside of the culture says what's going on here and then allows you to start to open that up and transform yourself to then actually saying, okay, so, and then pointing out the similarities between what you're doing, you know, between her approach to coaching and allowing people to come back to themselves and your tracking, sort of like the, you know, very similar process, but just applied differently.

How do you go from that place of awakening to this to then actually working with people on an individual level? I mean, there's a, what was your next step, I guess, is what I'm asking. Yeah, I mean, there was absolutely an arc. And one of the things, one of the ways you say it there is really important. Like, one of the dynamics of healing is when you say, she came and she saw. You know, that's in the shamanic traditions. The shaman lived outside of the village. He didn't live in the cultural, social dynamic.

And he came from the outside to help you create awareness. And he had to see from outside of you. So some of, you know, the way I was living, in some ways I was shut down, but I didn't have any labels for it. It was just where I was. I didn't even know that necessarily that there was something wrong because you're so close to it when you're in it. And then when someone comes to you from the outside and says, listen, I can see what you're actually carrying, they help you realize

like, oh God, the stuff that I'm carrying, it's not how it's meant to be. And I have to work on healing it. So from there, the process became sort of, I would say twofold. The one is I started to think about tracking in a different way. So I started to think about, I just used to go out and track it. I thought I was finding animals, but then I started to think about the process, all the different parts of it. And there's things within that, like one of the things that I realized is trackers are incredibly comfortable with the unknown.

In fact, the whole dynamic of tracking is to start without knowing. You go out to find the lion without knowing exactly where it is. And trackers cultivate a relationship with the unknown, and they use it to create a kind of aliveness and curiosity in them. Most of us are just trying to get away from the unknowns. We're trying to know exactly where it's going to go. And then I started talking to people and so many people said to me, you know, when I know exactly what the next steps are, then I'll make moves. And that's not what I saw from the tracker. I saw the tracker going without knowing. I saw the trackers use what I call the first track. So in the infinite possibility in a huge wilderness of where an

animal might have gone a lion could have walked anywhere they would find a first track and then a next first track and then a next first track and there was a way that they dialed down all of that possibility into a moment of presence and then another moment of presence and then another moment of presence and so it became clear to me that if you want to set out on a transformative journey, well, one, you have to go without knowing. And two, you're not going to know all of the steps. And that's part of what Carl Jung called the left path. You're not going to know. You get a little bit of knowing of what you need to do, and then another step towards something you know to do,

and then another little step towards something you know what to do. And you have to work moment to moment towards what feels a little better or what feels a little called to. I'm maybe going off on a bit of a tangent here. It's all good. You have to teach yourself to see your track. Trackers call this track awareness. I remember once I was walking along with some folks and I was hiking and they were walking down the path and I was walking the other way. And I knew that a leopard had walked down the path and they had no idea. And it's just this idea that as a tracker, there was information on this path we were on because I taught myself to see tracks.

I was tuned into that level and they weren't. And so this idea became really big for me when I started working with people, the idea that there is information, but you have to teach yourself to see it. There is information for you towards this thing that brings you to life, towards what nourishes you, but you've got to start tuning in to it. One of the ways you have to tune in to it is you have to be more in touch with your body. It's much less rationally what you should do and much more the feeling in your body. Like when you're with certain people, who energizes you? What activities make you feel expansive? And it's not

like this is what I should do because those rationales of what you should do, you know, it only takes us so far. But towards this other way of living, we need a different set of metrics and the energy in the body becomes absolutely critical to talking to us there. So all of this was happening as I was sort of working out, I wanted to work in this field. I was looking at tracking and seeing, like if you broke it down, this process, trackers lose the track all the time. And when they lose the track track they either go back to where they were last had a clear track or they go they just keep moving forward and trying things and you know they'll check open game paths they'll check any open ground and they'll move in big

zigzags and they're totally free within not knowing where the track is and they just trust that if they keep using their idea of general sense of where the animal was going, they'll cut back onto it, which was totally opposite to when I worked with people who said that they had, they felt lost, they felt stuck. It was this absolute frozen sense and a crippling sense of, I have to do the next thing I have to do has to be right. You know, like, like I have to make the right choice. And it's like, you know, give yourself a little space to try some things and get some feedback. But I mean, it's, it's interesting also that on that particular point, because I think when, when we do those human beings, we generally do it in a social context where there are people,

there are, there are parents, there are colleagues, there are friends, there are people who are watching us. And whereas if we were kind of doing it more in solitude, more like tracking an animal, when you do it with this big social context, with all these eyeballs on you, all of a sudden there's this sense of, okay, so if I try this, and then that's not quite right. And if I go a little bit this way, and that's not right. And if I go a little bit this way, and that's not right. And if I go a little bit this way, and that's not right. You know, okay, if it was just me in solitude, well, okay, that's interesting information.

It helps me start to narrow things down. But if I'm doing it while people are watching, then there's this like layers of judgment and expectation and shame that comes into the picture, which I think that's where my sense has always been that, because I agree with you, I think that's a really great and organic process that we all need to go through because nobody knows exactly what path is right in the beginning. But we have so much shame or expectation or fear of judgment and shame from the social context. We don't want to look like somebody who's just,

oh, they're just lost. They're just like going in all these different directions and they don't know which way is up rather than, no, actually, I'm sort of intentionally experimenting. Totally. I mean, what you're describing is straight on. And in fact, you know, one of the ways that Martha taught me was to say that inside of you is a wild self or what you might call, what she called the essential self. Overlaying the essential self is your social self. And your social self, we need it. We're social creatures. We need it. But in most of us, that social self gets so overdeveloped into the judgment, the shame, what we should do, what we're told is successful, not wanting to be seen as aimless, a culture that is obsessed with being busy, a culture that is obsessed with knowing.

You know, from the time you're a kid in school, it's like you get it right or wrong, you know. And so that socialization starts to be really crushing, whereas the tracker lives in discovery. The tracker lets themselves tune in, they let themselves discover. And there comes a point in the journey towards something that feels like a more essential expression of yourself, where you are going to be confronted by what you should do and have to do by that social self, that socialized other, you know, those eyes upon you. And that's where this becomes a path of being really courageous, because you have to step towards

the part of you that knows. Otherwise, you will be held in a life that is not yours by what you believe other people are thinking about you. And you know, it is true that in this culture, and I think it's Joanna Macy who says, in a society where the individual self is disconnected from the greater whole, so to me that greater whole is like the natural ecosystem. The search for meaning is then reduced to how am I doing in comparison. So it's a very comparative dynamic we live in. So if you want to go, if you want to get out of that, you're going to have to face how much you feel held by being good in the eyes of other. And you're going to have to cut yourself free of that and go wild, get in touch with that place and then just go. And you will be criticized. This is not an easy path. You will be criticized, you will be judged, and people will sell you their fears about why it's not possible.

But you have to know from deep inside yourself if you're called to it or not. If you feel that there is a more alive place for you, then you're going to have to go, it's not like live your best life. You know, it's the Instagram version of this. Like you're going to confront things. You're going to have to move through them. And inner work is real work and is deeply confronting. But what happens is as you continue to question those limiting beliefs, those judgments, those reasons to be ashamed, is you start to get free as you start to move through them. And as you start to get free, people start to feel it on you. And the weird thing is,

too, is as you start to get free, nothing sticks to you. You know, like when someone says the thing to you that you secretly believe about yourself like i secretly believe i'm a bit aimless so someone comes up and says well you're just aimlessly you know trying all these different things but there's no purpose to it now if i believe deep down that i am a bit aimless it sticks you know but if i am understanding that this is part of my journey to discovery and And I'm totally unashamed of being aimless. I'm like, you know, it is pretty aimless right now, but I trust that something will come out of it. You know, the energy around it is totally different. So it doesn't stick in the

same way. Yeah. And it almost, it not only makes you more comfortable in your own skin, but also disarms what people say. Because I think a lot of what people say, sometimes it's well-intended, but sometimes it's also intended to get a reaction. When it doesn't, it's sort of like, okay, that didn't work, so let me just drop it. And then even one step further, when you get really free, people don't even say that stuff to you because they can feel it on you. Right.

They just want to know what you're on. They're just like, I want to, you know. Yeah, it's like, I'll have some of that. So, you know, I was cataloging, tracking, and then just to kind of roll back, you know, this was through my 20s. I was really like I'd seen the land healed. I had healed. I'd met this incredible mentor, and I wanted to be involved in the restoration through people healing, through land healing.

But, you know, no one wants to hear from you in that space when you're in your 20s, and understandably so, you know, it's like, but so I just traveled. I spent a lot of time with Martha as she worked with people. I apprenticed, I learned, I started, I had another teacher who took me into ceremonial spaces, a man who was a traditional healer. He started to take me into ceremonial spaces and started to show me how you cultivate an atmosphere of healing how you start to create awareness for someone around a pattern and first they get aware of what they've been doing this you know what they're stuck in then they continue to do that with awareness and this is how ceremonial spaces do it now you're doing this thing that you're do that with awareness. And this is how ceremonial spaces do it. Now you're doing this thing, but you're doing it with awareness. Then you start to provide them with different tools to create a different outcome to what they're stuck in.

So it's like if they're very ashamed, the pattern is with a shame pattern, it's normally like in the ceremony, because everything that's happening in your life will play out in the ceremony. Their shame comes up. They want to isolate. So they'll go and isolate themselves. So the first time you work with them, you say to them, notice how you isolate yourself when you become ashamed. Then the next ceremony they come to, they get ashamed and they isolate, but they realize what they're doing. Right.

It's not autopilot. It's not autopilot. They're like, oh, my God, there's the impulse to. Right. Then they'll do that a few times until you say to them, you know, if you're a good guide, what you would say is, you know, why don't you try something different? Like, well, I don't know what to try. Well, what would feel a little bit, what would feel good? What would feel safer? Okay, try connection.

Okay, so now share your shame with someone. Tell them what's coming up for you. And of course, the minute you share your shame, mostly you realize it's not something to be ashamed of because everyone has got a version of it and you go into connection. So I learned like the dynamics of how you create healing. You don't do it all at once. You create a space for it. You create safety. You create awareness around patterns, you shape awareness, you provide tools, you provide different outcomes, you provide people with a context to create meaning of what happened to them. So I was, you know, I was just in this, I was out

tracking, I was traveling around apprenticing, I was sitting in groups for hours and hours and hours. I mean, hundreds of groups I sat in, watching people go through kind of a catalog of the trauma of our time, you know, and some of that trauma is there's so much more abuse, physical, emotional, sexual abuse than you could possibly imagine, you know. There's violent abuse, people who've grew up in violent situations, people who, there's abandonment, there's, so there's almost like these things that you would call trauma, you know. The things that happened that shouldn't have happened. But then there's a whole lot of things that should have happened that didn't.

And in a way, they're much more dangerous because they're just built into the culture in a way, they're much more dangerous because they're just built into the culture in a way. There's a certain kind of isolation that we grow up with. There's a certain kind of disconnection, a comparative environment in which you can never just be and belong, you know. You can never just be yourself. an incredible amount of programming around ideals that are constantly put on you on how you should be, what you should be to be happy, what you should want, what it means to be a good man, what it means to be a good woman, what a good family, you know, what it means to be successful. It's given to you from the external constantly. And so some of that work becomes, and I'm not

saying it's all bad, but you know, people are living with a tremendous amount of external expectation and trying to base their life on where they are within that kind of pyramid of what was put on them. And they don't even know it. And so some of that work then becomes defining for yourself what actually feels good, what actually feels connected, what actually feels nourishing, what actually feels like success, what actually feels. So you've got to get all of that stuff out of you and start to self-define. And to self-define, that's inner work.

You have to start going inward and saying, you know, this is what I was told. Like for me, the other day I wrote this success list. And for me, success is having a lot of time to go tracking. And if I went to be the CEO of something, that's going away. There's a lot of things that can take you away from that. Success is time to write. Success is connected relationships. success is having financial successes i i want enough you know to be able to do what i want to do that's um i like the simplicity of that and so success is being able to put on my calendar that next

year i want to go spend 40 days alone in a treehouse in the bush and being able to do that. You know, so it's very much like, for me, it's totally different to what it would be for someone else, but it's self-defined in a way. So all through my 20s, I was doing that work and following that path. And then the natural expression of that, it just became to start to share those spaces.

So I would never consider myself a teacher of any sort. I create spaces now for people to have experiences in. So I create spaces for people to go tracking. I create ceremonial spaces. I create coaching circles. I create. It's just what is natural to me now. And it seems like there, I mean, you describe it as tracking spaces, ceremonial spaces, coaching spaces. Are those just different

in name? Yes, they are. And they're different in contextual activity. But really, all of them result in the same thing. All of that work will make you more present. It's about being together in a more connected way. You know, if you facilitate and you create that space well, there's a connection that happens. I call it the village consciousness. Like there's a more natural way we learn to be together, which is more real, which is more we don't sit around sharing social niceties. It's connected. If you watch people who've been in ceremonial groups with each other, a language emerges, and it's not a language of verbal language.

It's a language of connection. They are much more naturally warm with each other. They know how to hold safe space for each other. There's a kind of natural physicality to it, which is not weird in any way. It's just like more natural connected. I would imagine. Right. I imagine it's also a lot of what you see with animals. It's exactly what I see. You know, people get, you know, natural with each other in the way pride of lions are natural with each other. People bump up against each other, lean on each other. There's just a connectivity.

A little while ago, I was in a ceremony. There was a 70-year-old woman in the group. And, you know, in the cultural context, there's not a lot of context for her to be touched. But she comes to the group and she discovers in the group her status as an elder. She discovers that she's holding an archetypal energy for the group. She has wisdom. She's lived. She can provide guidance to the younger people. And because of the elder status, she can touch anyone and anyone can touch her. And it's this really beautiful thing to see. And that's how we awaken a different way of being with each other. So, and I really believe that I want, my work is still connected to healing landscapes. I feel like the age of restoration is upon us. We must rebuild our connection with nature and we must reclaim. I think like the movement that I think should start is we need to start identifying wild places and reclaiming them and bringing them back to their natural state.

It will do something so phenomenal for the psyche and for the spirit of humanity if we enter off of the back end of this age of endless information into an age of restoration. And everywhere we start to see people reclaiming little pieces of wildness. And then the other part of that is reclaiming that wildness in ourselves. Right, our own aliveness. Totally. Right, because it starts on that level and then ripples out. Yeah. And people who find that, as I was saying earlier, they start to live differently. And I feel like people who live differently can drive a kind of cultural change like people who are a lot of

people who are living really simply with less stuff less you know less impact less usage um closer to the earth closer to their own water closer to their garden you know things like that um understanding their food source connected to their community with a language of feeling, those people are going to start to pull other people towards them. I mean, I think that's part of the change right now. I mean, as you're sharing that, the person who immediately came to mind is Greta Thunberg, this 16-year-old climate change activist who, when she came here, she didn't fly. She took a boat and took two weeks to come here. And the way she lives, she's so authentic to what she feels and what she talks

about that, and so genuine and real. And it comes from such a visceral place, you can tell that it's exactly what you're saying. So many people before her have tried and shared nearly identical, quote, information. Yeah. But there is something about her and the way she lives and the way she interacts with others that all of a sudden millions of people are responding to

and rising up in reaction to. It's phenomenal. And, you know, I get a call a couple of times a year from parents. And, you know, they'll say to me, can you talk to our son? Can you talk to our daughter? And I get on the call with these kids. And, you know, maybe 17, 18, standing at the doorway of their adult life. And they're looking out at what's being offered.

And they're like, you know, they're like, I don't want to do this. I don't know what the parents say they don't. They're not motivated. They're depressed. They're lackluster. And, you know, there's like, get on with it. And I'm like, well, you know, when you, if you looked into this culture right now, what do you want to sign yourself up for? You know, it's difficult. And the minute I say to them, I totally understand. I get it. But are you willing to find your peace in it and go and live

your life inside of it? it puts the responsibility it gives the responsibility back to them and says there's a different way go inward find what you call to and do that and then and those kids become so incredibly authentic like you can just feel it on greta there's something i kind of feel sometimes i feel like she's like a gift to the earth from the earth you know it's like she is you can feel that there's something, I think the right word is authentic, and you can feel that authenticity pulling. And I feel like we need a lot of people getting in touch with that place inside of themselves and kind of like firing the algorithm

through humanity of a different way of living. Yeah, so great. And I feel like, you know, it's interesting because I often ask, well, why don't we do that? You know, and we options that are already defined and mapped and prescribed by the people like immediately around them who they look to for like, you know, to tell me what is right, rather than just turning inward and saying, there could be millions of expressions that are right for me, let me figure it out. But again, that requires you going to a place of being comfortable taking action in the face of sustained, sometimes high-stakes uncertainty for a really long time, which we're horrible at. But I wonder if also part of what's going on there is that we don't necessarily believe finding that thing that will allow us that feeling of aliveness is possible anymore.

I think for so many people, they just feel like it's actually not out there. This is just what being a grown-up is. And I know people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s who have all shared that feeling with me. You know, it's interesting in your book, you, in the early part of the book, you describe being in South Africa with these two other friends, like dear friends of yours and trackers and waking up really early in the morning. And your job is essentially to try and track where lions are so that people who are going out on safari later in the day, you can report back to their guides and they have some sense of where to bring them so they see these beautiful animals.

But it starts out with real early in the morning, one of you actually hears the whir of a lion somewhere out in the distance. You have some sense of where it is. But the difference to me, and then you spend the next eight, seven, eight, nine hours slowly going through the wayfinding process of tracking these. The difference, I think, in that versus the tracking that we do in our own lives is you know you're looking for a lion. You know what it sounds like, and you know with certainty that it's out there. I think when it comes in the context of our own lives, we often don't know what that thing is. We don't know what it sounds or looks or feels like, and we often don't even believe it's out there.

Yeah, absolutely. And there would probably be times where I would have believed that too. Yeah, I think we've all been in those moments. I think we've all been there. And part of being a... I think it's also important to know that part of being human is that you will forget you will forget what it means to be a human you will forget what was meaningful like all cultures knew that you will arrive at places in your life where you feel stuck

and nihilistic and lost like that's a part of being a person. But I've watched enough people arrive at that point, be stuck in it sometimes for years, and then realize that part of what was happening is they are stuck in a socialized belief system and they keep trying to be good within that context and they keep you know thinking that if they just get to this level then it'll be and some and something has to change and that's the that's the beginning of inner work and

and you're right part of what makes it so freaking difficult is we don't know but and that's where where Campbell says you know people are not looking for the meaning of life they're looking for the feeling of being alive. And most of the people who I first meet who are at that juncture, they are looking for the thing out there, like looking for the next thing. And when I start doing that, then I'll be happy. And I'm like, well, you know, that'll probably contribute to it. But the beginning of inner work is stumbling around, not knowing what you're looking for, but paying attention. And then suddenly, like a tracker, one thing emerges, just one thing that makes you feel a little bit better.

And these things are quite outrageous. I mean, I've had a few conversations over the last little while, what the native people called your medicine way. It's like the emergence of something very unique that brings you to life and that you have to offer. And it's sometimes very strange things. Like someone starts to find that inside of gardening, they go into a kind of timeless presence. One guy told me, a high level CEO the other day,

told me that he's been looking around, he finds when he's crafting, knife making has become this like central thing. And, you know, it's kind of weird. And for other people, it's like they have to start to share. They have to start to, it's different for everyone. And that's part of the process. You stumble around, but you stumble around with presence. Then you start to notice how your body talks and you just pay attention to what feels a little bit more expansive. You start to notice what grabs your attention. Notice what you're noticing. Now you're becoming a tracker. Now you start to take some steps towards bringing more of that in your life. And then here comes a thought, well, I can't just do that. I can't

just do the things that make me feel good. I have responsibilities. I have all these things I have to do. And then that becomes like the first place you run into your socialization. Well, like, yes, you do. But what kind of life do you want to have? How willing are you to start to design with that? And yeah, maybe you can't do it all at once, but at least you start to feel the pull. And what I do believe is that there is something in you that knows how to do it in the way your body knows how to heal. in the way your body knows how to heal but it's so outside of our context of you do this then you do this then you do this then you're happy that's how this is different and this is why tracking is the metaphor because

it's much more subtle you're finding your way to the part of you that knows part of you that knows how to heal the part of you that knows how to live. The part of you that knows how to live. But you've got to be courageous. You've got to follow. You're going to be in uncertain terrain. And that's why when I started taking people tracking and saying, we're going to go track on one level. But on another level, you know, start to think about this process as the process by which you find your way, you know.

And then I just didn't have to work so hard at facilitating because it was all there. Once people started to, I don't know, it's dynamic. It changes. I have to get present inside of it. It was just all there, and the metaphor became so powerful. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. It's almost like the thing that you have to set in the beginning is sort of like the invitation to be present, and then everything else kind of reveals itself,

both in your internal environment and the external environment and what it's going to teach you. But that first step is so hard for so many people, especially in this day and age, when we live in a world which is defined almost entirely by invitations for distraction and to not be present. You used a phrase, when you become present to what you're present or when you notice what you're noticing, which in this related traditions I've been trained in, we might call meta-awareness or meta-attention, an awareness of where your awareness is being placed. And that one capability is such an astonishing unlock key for everything in life. Game changer.

But it's so rarely taught in any sort of meaningful or deliberate way. Yeah. And that's why, I mean, it's almost magical. And I'm careful with that language. But we always say that the first movement of being a tracker is wanting to track. And there's something about it because you arrive at this point where it's like, okay, either you achieved the ideal of the culture and the highest success as by culturally defined, and you realize, well, that wasn't it. Or you don't, and you're feeling terrible about it, and you know that there's something

else for you. This is not right. So you arrive at a point where you're like, I can feel it. I long for it. I have a sense of something that there's more for me in some way. I have something to offer that is not being expressed. It's very, you know it's there in some ways. Now the first intention, I want to find it.

I want to be a tracker. And that becomes where you start to notice where you're putting your attention. And just that, when people start to say, I'm looking for it now, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, I'm going to start tracking it. I'm going to start paying attention to it. I'm going to start paying attention. You're right. It's kind of magical because suddenly things start to show up. There's like things start to emerge into that kind of, I actually think of intention as a kind of refining of what you're looking for. It's like when you set an intention, you cut out all the path of not here.

You're looking for it to come through to you. And when you start to put your attention on what brings you to life, you will start to notice small and unusual things. And it won't be the whole thing all at once. It won't be the whole, but it'll be pieces of it. And then you start to string those pieces together. And that is the art form of the left-hand path, the path towards following your bliss. And Jung said of that path, he said, you follow your bliss. There's a good chance you

won't be respected for a while, but you will be living your life and it's true that the left path is not easy you're you're you're crafting something but if you start to dynamically put those pieces together of aliveness joy expansion the things that make you feel solid like you're serving you start to live from the energy in the body rather than just plain rationale you'll need rationale along the way if you start to be willing to try things without If you start to be willing to try things without knowing, you start to be willing to do things you care about, although they might not have financial gain. If you start to just follow, it will start to, over time, it starts to solidify. Yeah. It reveals what you need out of it. It reveals itself. And I've seen people do phenomenal things now. I've seen people change their lives radically.

I've seen people heal. And I'm a believer now. And I wasn't when I started. One other thing I wanted to explore with you is, because it's such a natural part of both who you are, where you grew up, and where you keep returning to, is the role of nature and returning to natural environments and the effect that it has on us in this process and its importance. I mean, there's a few things that I think are

fundamental about it. One is there's physiological changes. You get yourself into a natural state, your nervous system starts to change, your entire physiology starts to shift as you connect with a natural space. There's a good chance if you're in a natural space that your attention is not being mined. You know, we live in a time where our attention is constantly being taken from us. So you become, your attention comes back to you. The natural world is a nonverbal environment. And so as you go into a nonverbal environment, slowly you'll feel the momentum of your verbal mind slowing down. And as it slows down towards nonverbal,

what naturally starts to happen is you go into wordlessness, so there's a stillness. And then when you go into wordlessness, you go into a kind of connection with everything. You know, it's not tree, river, rock. It's just you present there amongst it all. And when that happens, immediately you feel yourself as a part of something. And you feel, it's a strange paradox for me i feel very much myself and very much a part of something else you know it's a strange thing of feeling connected to something much bigger and much more myself than i

have felt before and um a little while ago i i stood next to a maybe like a 300-year-old baobab tree, and the tree is hollow, 30 feet tall. It's been an elephant that's taken the bark off, and it's this beautiful hollow all the way up, maybe like another 30 feet upwards. And it looks like this giant root. You know, baobabs are called the upside-down tree because they look like roots. And the top of the tree, a swarm of bees have made a hive.

And as they're buzzing at the top of the tree a swarm of bees have made a hive and as they're buzzing at the top of the tree the vibration is traveling down this empty stem and it's being amplified almost and it's coming out of the slight hole in the side of the tree and as I stood next to it I could feel it was it was like getting boom boxed by a thaw like a 300 year old didgeridoo and as they were changing pitch I could feel their vibratory field changing in my own body. And it's just an incredible amount of information there. Not rationally, not that I could rationally understand, but a kind of feeling of being,

that something very important was happening. And that between the tree and me and the bees and that silent place, there was, I was understanding something that I can't put words to. And I think that's what happens. There is information in every moment that is beyond, in every time we put our hand on the bark of a tree, when we stand next to a huge redwood, when we walk on a beach,

our body is taking in an ancient information, the information of union and belonging and harmony. And we need more of that, for sure. Yeah, it's like there's been a transmission. That's the best word for it. Something is transmitting into you. And the more time you spend in nature, the more you will be able to amplify your ability to receive that. Yeah, and be aware of it in the first place. And be aware of it. And feel yourself as a part of it. And I think I say it in the book, so much of the anxiety and depression that we're dealing with now is just undiagnosed homesickness

for connection with the natural world. You know, it's like fundamental to us that we know ourselves in relation to that river and that tree and these rocks and those plants on our window ledge and the way the season turns and that one bird that arrives every morning. We get to know that. And we know ourselves then as a part of um as connected to relationally rather than in comparison and that is an absolute game changer yeah i so agree with you and that that has always been my place um you know like my motherland is nature yeah my that is

a place where i go when i'm upset when i'm, when I need to be in my head and just, like, figure things out. I just, yeah, there's something really powerful about reestablishing that connection. You know, it's like you're tapping a vein again. And it's like she's infinitely abundant once you know how to go there. Like, I know, and it's the same as what you're saying, like, I know I can take my sorrow, I can take my uncertainty, I can take it to nature, and I will come back different. And it's, and like, God, just like, I always have that to turn to.

And that comes out of learning to be connected to it. Yeah, I love that. This feels like a good place for us to start to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life, discover what makes you present. Find your way into the people the encounters the activities anything that makes you present and when you spend time there you'll spend time connected to something much bigger than you you'll spend time absolutely as yourself and there's something more than yourself

and i think after all of my journeying, all I'm ever trying to do is to simply be present. And it's not always that easy, but when I am, there's nothing I want for. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening.

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