Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #158 Boyd Varty - The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Boyd Varty is a life long lion tracker, a medicine man, podcaster, author, and deep thinker. His book The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life is a MUST READ... https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+lion+trackers+gu...ide+to+life&crid=3LAOHT76Z3XR2&sprefix=the+lion+tra%2Caps%2C183&ref=nb_sb_ss_organic-diversity_1_12   Help support the podcast by visiting our sponsors: Check out the best pre during and post workout |  drinkhydrant.com/kyle and enter the promo code KYLE      Check out Dry Farm Wines and get a bottle for a penny | DryFarmWines.com/Kyle   Ancestral Supplements - Grass-Fed Colostrum  https://ancestralsupplements.com Use codeword KING10  for 10% off / Only Valid through Shopify Option   OneFarm Formally (Waayb CBD) www.onefarm.com/kyle (Get 15% off everything using code word KYLE at checkout)   Get $100 off the Chek Institute’s Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 online course by using KKP100 at checkout |  https://chekinstitute.com/hlc1online/   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Instagram | https://bit.ly/3asW9Vm   Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY  

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's show with my guest, Boyd Vardy. Boyd is the author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. Somebody, if you're in fit for service or I guess through Instagram back in the day, I was talking about quite a bit. He's just a phenomenal dude. One of my favorite books ever written. It's only three hours on Audible. So the length of a Joe Rogan podcast, I highly, highly recommend you listen or read it. Just incredible. Boyd is a lion tracker from South Africa and we dive into his story and lifelong lessons he's learned down in the bush of Africa, as well as coming stateside to learn how to be a medicine man and everything in between. This episode was just fucking fantastic. I'm going to have him back on as often as I possibly can. He's got an incredibly good Instagram account as well, where you can follow him. He just did 40 days of solitary out in the bush. And I think he recorded a podcast or at least some mental notes from his experience at the
Starting point is 00:01:03 end of each day for 40 days straight. So a ton of wisdom from this guy. You guys are going to really appreciate this one. Make sure you guys check out all of our sponsors. They help make this show possible. And this episode is brought to you by Living Collagen by Ancestral Supplements. Ancestral Supplements makes New Zealand source nose to tail organ meats, bone marrow and living collagen and simple, convenient gelatin capsules.
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Starting point is 00:05:06 over at living with the Kingsbury's on Instagram. And I look forward to hearing what you think about this episode was absolutely one of my favorites. All right, Boyd Vardy, you're on the show. Cal gave me your book. I'm not sure when. He went on his first tracking adventure with you last year. Is that correct? Yeah, last year in Your Summer, Our Winter. Okay.
Starting point is 00:05:39 Yeah. And yeah, it's one of those books where I got it. And it's funny because I say this to a lot of people. Like if you're called to buy a book, you might not be called to read it. Don't beat yourself up over it if you read half a chapter and set it back on your bookshelf. Something I learned from a mutual friend of ours
Starting point is 00:05:56 is that the library is alive. It's a living thing. And as you walk by that, your energy will call you to the exact book you're supposed to read when you're supposed to read it. Totally. I mean, I remember my parents' bedroom when I was a kid was like a live book exchange. Books would come in there and go out. And books that should never have come to us out in the middle of South Africa would arrive there. So I know that feeling of the books wanting
Starting point is 00:06:21 to do something with you. Yeah. And it's funny too, because I had, I wanted to read it and I was supposed to read it because I knew you were coming here and I wanted to have the knowledge, but I still waited until the last minute. And right before we went to Tulum to coach people, somebody was telling me, I brought it with me, but somebody was telling me that it's available on Audible. And right when I looked at it, it was only three hours. And I was like, that's a fucking podcast. I'll sit and listen to a three hour podcast. that it's available on audible and right when i looked at it it was only three hours and i was like that's a fucking podcast i'll sit and listen to a three-hour podcast like it's nothing and so i listened to it straight through and then re-listened to it again because i was floored like absolutely floored i don't think i've ever i think it's safe to say i've
Starting point is 00:06:58 never read a book that is layered with that many gems in that short of amount of time you don't beat around the bush. Like it's fucking flawless. That's fantastic to hear. That's really, I really, I felt like the book only took six weeks to write when it eventually came. Took maybe like five years living before that. But there was this absolute feeling that like,
Starting point is 00:07:22 I just want to do something really simple and try and get the code in there, try and get the code of nature, of the wild self inside. So that's amazing to hear. You sit alone in your room with books and you never know what's going to happen with them. So that's amazing to hear. Yeah, it was absolutely incredible. Highly recommend it to people. Obviously, we've got you here on the show, so there's no reason to consider this a fluffing. This is the
Starting point is 00:07:50 fluffer round before that it takes you all the way. Talk about life growing up. I know you break a lot of this down in the book, but I do want to cover some of the book and then I want to get into some things that I feel might be the topic of another book. Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa. I grew up at a place where I'm fourth generation on the land there. It's a place where my great-grandfather and my grandfather and my father and uncle grew up hunting. And then when my grandfather died, my father was 15, my uncle was 17. And everyone told them, well, first thing is you got to get rid of that place. Hunting lions is a bad idea. It's out in the middle of nowhere. You got to get rid of it. And my father stood up in
Starting point is 00:08:36 a meeting with sort of the family advisors. And he stood up and he said, we're going to keep it as a 15 year old. And something inside of him knew. And his mother said, well, if you keep it, you know, it's going to be on you and you have to take care of me somehow. So he said, we'll make it pay. And that's how my family got into the safari business. But more importantly, I've always been interested in that thing inside of him that knew. And then what happened is the place was defunct. The cattle had overrun it. It was scrub land. Into the midst of that, they met a man. And that man, he was an interesting guy. He was a high school dropout who had been admitted into a science degree because he drew a picture of a moth with such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty
Starting point is 00:09:22 said to him, you're in. And this guy had then, after getting through biological sciences, gone and lived alone in nature. And during that time, he had a kind of shift. And it was like he was in tune with the way the system was working. He could feel the moisture moving across the land. He could feel the way the moisture move informed the trees and the plants and how that informed the animals. And it was all moving inside of him in some way. So he rolled up and he said to my father and uncle, and then very soon after my mother, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. You must think of the animals as your kin and you must start to restore the land. And then he started to actually physically teach them how to do that, how to clear away scrub,
Starting point is 00:10:03 how to restore the micro catchments where they were losing moisture. And then the land started to respond. And so somewhere deep inside of my psyche, I didn't know this until later in my life when I started to think about the healing arts, but I grew up inside of a piece of land that was coming back to its natural state. And I remember seeing pieces of land that were torn bare because you would clear the scrub away and I would think like, oh, this is terrible. And then a year later, suddenly on that clearing would be a herd of waterbuck. And then there'd be some zebra returning. And I was also struck by this guy, his name was Ken Tinley. When he looked at this defunct piece of land and he saw underneath it to this wild garden that wanted to be restored.
Starting point is 00:10:49 And so when I started working with people, you know, when I would look at someone who was patterned with modern life shoulds, then there was a part of me that also was looking to the wild, the wild garden in the core of them. So I grew up inside of that. And then I grew up getting into tracking. So what we did out there is we took people on safaris. We did away with hunting. We started to protect the animals. We started to have amazing encounters with animals. There was one female leopard that started to allow herself to be seen. Word started to get out around the world that there was a place you could go in the middle of fucking nowhere in South Africa and go and see a wild leopard. But part of why we were able to do it is the Shungan trackers on the ground were some of the best trackers in the world. And the man
Starting point is 00:11:33 who's in the book by the name of Renia Simchlongo, he's probably the best tracker in the world, in my opinion. And so I started going out, I started to learn the process of following an animal across a landscape. How do you actually do that? And so I grew up inside of the skill and you can think of tracking like a martial art. You drill it, you learn it. It's almost infinite how deep you can go, how good you can get. You watch a master predict where the animal went in tune with the resonance of the animal. You teach your eye to see. I thought I was learning tracking. Then some stuff happened to me in my late teens. I had my first encounters with pretty severe trauma. I was attacked in Johannesburg with my family. We were taken in like a home invasion at a time when there was terrible violence in South Africa. My mother and my
Starting point is 00:12:22 sister were tied up in this hour-long ordeal. A year after that, I got bitten by a crocodile swimming in the river. And a year after that, my family went into a very difficult court case. And all of these things together, as a 20-year-old, I was absolutely frozen. I had too much current. I'd run through my nervous system. I felt myself, man, you know the place, just frozen, frozen, frozen. And I was working as a safari guide and I met this woman came on safari and a buddy of mine had driven her as a safari guide, taken her out a year before. And he said, she's into martial arts, you'll like her. And I mean, I was so shut down, beer drinking, you know, didn't mind the odd fight myself, South African. But something inside of me like took interest in that. And I went to the board where the guides would assign themselves to guests or actually the head guide would assign you to guests. And I rubbed someone else's name off and I put my name on. And anyway, I met this woman and immediately when I met her, I felt a kind of resonance with her.
Starting point is 00:13:29 And on the third day, and we were talking the same language. One of the things she said to me, which stuck to me was she said, the restoration of the planet will come out of a shift in human consciousness. And I felt something in me go like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then eventually on like the fourth day or something, she looked at me and she said, you know, I'm ready. And I was something in me go like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then eventually on like the fourth day or something, she looked at me and she said, you know, I'm ready. And I was like, what? She's like, I'm ready. When you are, I'm ready.
Starting point is 00:13:52 I can see what you're holding. I can see what you're carrying. And I'm here for you. And I felt like, you know, this wave of emotion. I felt like all of these defenses crumbling, this warmth. And she could see I was fucked and I was pretending. And she caught me, you know? And she became my first guide into learning how to heal. And then the tracking changed for me. And like everything that I saw
Starting point is 00:14:20 in tracking, I now started to see differently. As I went inward, as I started to work out how to heal, I started to see tracking totally differently. And I started to see it as a way of thinking about finding what we're actually looking for, following the real path, getting in touch with the track inside that, you know, my father had touched, that she had touched in that moment, like that, that different way of knowing. And, and so that's where like, most surprisingly to me, like I was most surprised by this, my journey into wanting to be someone who healed, wanted to be someone who supported healing, wanted to be someone who was involved in the restoration of our relationship with nature through a change in people started to all emerge. And it was like this weird Venn diagram started to come together of like my own
Starting point is 00:15:12 trauma becoming medicine, the land healing and this connection with nature and all starting to sort of come and the tracking, it's like super unusual and i was just like okay we can follow in a different way here so that's like that's kind of how it came together did you did you have like i mean you talk about in the book how you know spending months at a time in the states and that calling to get back into the wild you can feel even even if you're not necessarily engaged in the states as most people are in the states but you feel the vibration of it you feel that go go go do do do atmosphere and it fucks with you and you want and you have that deep calling to get home do you feel like part of your life like you almost had two worlds as you were growing up where there was this wild part but you still had the city
Starting point is 00:16:01 or were you guys always on the land and you didn't really have that effect until you got here? No, I mean, I went to a boarding school. I understood the city life, but my family always, we lived differently. We lived on the land. We had that feeling of being connected to the earth. It was very fundamental to us. And frankly, I never thought I was going to leave. And it was quite like, you know, when you start to surprise yourself in a shift in identity, because I was like, I'm going to be on the land. It's what feeds me. It's where I belong. This is where I'm meant to be.
Starting point is 00:16:35 And then through being in contact with this woman who became my mentor, I started to come to America, started to get involved in work that felt very authentic to me. And then suddenly this different version of my life started to open like, oh, America's a part of my story. And, you know, there's the resistance in that when your identity is changing, like, no, it isn't. But then something in me was pulling me. And still to this day, like, if I am inside of work that feels authentic to me,
Starting point is 00:17:02 I can be anywhere in the world because I'm in the presence of doing that. You know, the presence is coming through when I'm doing that work. And actually, it doesn't matter where I am, but if I'm here and I don't have the right workflow, then I feel it start to, the momentum start to fuck with me. The comparative dynamic of the environment, the sort of the natural isolation of things. And I'm lucky to have like good community even when I'm here, but it's, there's like a momentum to that energy, the busyness, the doing. And so part of like, if you're struggling with it, it's like, you're not just struggling with your own piece of it. You're struggling with like the collective momentum that's around you. Yeah. It's, it's, it's now become the global consciousness, right? And that's morphic resonance.
Starting point is 00:17:46 Eckhart Tolle talks about that. You have the pain body of all of mankind is in that state right now. Totally. Totally. And to try and to realize that you're dealing with yourself, you're also dealing with that collective is quite something. I had a vision. I was, let's see, I did when Tasha was pregnant with Bear almost five years ago,
Starting point is 00:18:07 or maybe no, it was five years ago, I spent a month in Central and South America. And my goal was to find a new place to live where I could be close to some of the plant medicines that I like to partake in. And I spent a week in Peru, a week in Colombia, a week in Costa Rica, and a week in Panama. And in each place, I was looking for a place to relocate and start a family. And I was planning on running an MMA gym, but really just diving headfirst into the medicine. And once I realized none of these places were going to work, I decided, well, if I'm here, let me actually do the medicine. And it was in a ceremony with Yahe, ayahuasca, in Colombia, where it was a very clear download that I'm trying to run from the problem. And the problem is being led by Western culture in the United States. And so the way to do that
Starting point is 00:18:54 is to go head first, just like your buddy riding into the, into the elephants, right? Like it's not to turn away from that. It's to be right on the front lines. And so that, that was like, oh, I'm not moving anywhere. I'm staying staying right here and it was so definitive it was the knowing with a capital k and that and that work needs to be done here it clearly needs to be done here and and to me like to me that is the call of the tribe of forgotten trackers there is no model we have to live differently if you look into the culture for your model of how to live, you won't find it. You have to make it up from the inside. And in order to do that, you have to get in touch enough with yourself to start to work out what actually makes you feel
Starting point is 00:19:37 alive, what actually nourishes you. And people who start to do that work of going inward to me become a kind of activism to it because you literally start to live differently, more simply with a deeper desire for experience over stuff. A natural inclination towards creativity and service starts to flow into it. Community and connection becomes primary over anything else. And then in living like that, it's almost like you're not even telling anyone to get out of the system. You're just abandoning it into your own path and making a different way of living that people then look at and say, well, if he's doing it, it must at least be possible. So the new activism to me is
Starting point is 00:20:24 to literally live differently um and there's no you're right like you can't run from it you gotta we gotta make this thing from the inside abandoning the old way and like tracking something different but it's cool because there's no model and that's why the path of the track i was reading like uh they say i might butcher this a bit but you know the wayfinders the hawaiian wayfindfinders, I always think of the Hawaiian wayfinders and the tracker as a similar thing. It's the Hawaiian wayfinder, instead of sailing the boat to the canoe, would pull, sorry, sailing the boat towards the island. They would imagine pulling the island towards the canoe. And I kind of dig that image.
Starting point is 00:21:01 And then thinking like the path of the tracker and the wayfinder is to reach for the the as yet unimagined and then like make it real here you know make it real in life here yeah um as some way of of bringing a different future towards us yeah and i think i think you're you're capable of doing those things that go against the grain when you have some degree of certainty, but it's funny. I was, I forget which book it was in. It was either a Chogom Trungpa's meditation book that I just read meditation in action, which is also phenomenal. Was that Trungpa? Yeah. He's a renegade. Incredible. Yeah. Duncan Trussell. I just podcast with him and he's like, you gotta read this book, man. And so that was one that I finished as well.
Starting point is 00:21:45 And he was saying that both of those lines of polarity are the same. When you have confusion or when you have clarity, you're on the fucking same path. You're on the path. You're on the track. You're fucking doing well. Yeah. When you have it all figured out or when you don't need to figure anything out, that's the other path.
Starting point is 00:22:05 That's the path of stagnant. That's the path of not getting shit done. Apathy. Yeah. Where you're literally withering away. And I think about that and it's like, okay. Because I've toggled back and forth and I've had a lot of deep medicine, not just with the plants, of course, but through the books, through the meditations. And it feels like it's kind of like compounding interest. Like you get to a certain point and like just a wave of
Starting point is 00:22:29 lessons start coming. And I toggle back and forth between clarity and confusion and really just put things in perspective that I'm on the track. I'm on the right track when that happens. But, you know, to your point, your book alongside Essentialism by Greg McCown definitively got me off of all screens. Tosh had a, we had a medicine journey, I think two years ago with psilocybin and, you know, our son as a two-year-old was addicted to the TV. It was a fucking argument. Every time we said no TV during the day, we can watch a movie at night. I'm like, this kid's too young to be that hooked. Like, what is the draw? And then I was like, oh, we're hooked. So in the journey, she was like, we need to get rid of our TV. So we gave it away to
Starting point is 00:23:12 a friend and that's improved our sex life. It's improved the amount we read. It's improved the amount we paint, all that shit. And then after you're listening to your book, that really resonated with me was, okay, that was the first step. What else do I do in life that takes me away? It's the screen. And so I got rid of all social media. Amazing. Permanently. Yeah. Just fucking gone.
Starting point is 00:23:36 I would love to hear how that's just constellates everything differently, right? Like so much changes when you get all of that attention back. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, there's a business differently, right? Like so much changes when you get all of that attention back. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, there's, there's a business avenue for that. Is that going to hurt finances? All this shit. But when I really boil it, when I really boil it down, I don't need to be a millionaire. Everything I have is I'm, I'm provided for. I'm safe. We have a home, we have food. I can eat good quality organic food and we can travel and experience the world. What is this doing for me negatively far outweighs what it's doing for me positively without question. I mean, as you're talking, what I'm thinking about too is like
Starting point is 00:24:16 going back to your earlier point is of the two paths is, you know, in tracking, we say, we talk about the path of not here. Like, so when you've lost the track and you are, what the trackers will do is they start moving, they start checking open ground, they start trying things, but they know they've lost the track. But the point is that they're losing the track is part of it. The tension of like, oh, I'm not on track right now. There's the awareness that you're not on track, which means you're on track, you know, as opposed to just nothing. Yeah. And so the same with the, with the screens,
Starting point is 00:24:49 like you just sort of notice like what makes me more myself, what brings me more to myself and inside of like what I'm hearing, this mission of yours to, to like do it differently here. Like the only way to do it is to do it, is to be someone who's outside of those structures and can almost like report back, you know, to people who have now become embedded in them. Like this is how it used to be. And this is how it feels over here. And there's something so unique to me about that. Yeah. So that's going to be an interesting one.
Starting point is 00:25:21 It is interesting. Yeah. I did like a seven day fast over the holiday over christmas break and it was it was funny because when i agreed to it it was like sure no big fucking deal you know and then three days into it i would click open instagram just naturally i'd pick up my phone and click it open and then be like oh shit i'm not supposed to be on this yet and then i'd then i'd get rid of it before I'd see anything. But like, it was that automatic. And the thing is listening to your book, you know, realizing that if anything I'm engaged in, if I'm fully present, there's a lot of magic in that moment. And anything that pulls me away from that is pulling me out of life.
Starting point is 00:26:00 So anytime I was in the moment with family, friends, a workout, whatever bandwidth was taken up in my head of, should I get a video of this? Should I get a photo? What am I going to write that inspires people? It's all bullshit, right? And even though it's actually me showing what I'm doing in life, it's taking me out of the moment of actually doing it. Yeah. It's pulling you to a track that's actually taking you away from more presence yeah and it's constant it was absolutely constant you know i've zero judgment i'm bottom my wife's still on instagram i have zero judgment about it um for those because that this has become the modern way you know so like there's no fault in doing that but for me as my awareness
Starting point is 00:26:42 grew i came to understand how how invested I was in that and what that investment was taking away from me. Like, who am I feeding? Which wolf do I feed? Right. And so like, that was like, no, there was this fucking no brainer. I'm wondering when you, when you know you're on track, what, how does it speak to you? Like, what is it for you when you, like, how does it, how do you know what your track is when you're on it? Yeah. So there's, there's like this feeling that I got and it really, it came to me through plant medicine. Some people, you know, and as you know, with your experience, and I definitely want to dive into this, some people will use ayahuasca, for example, as one of the, one of the powerful premier medicines that people are getting into.
Starting point is 00:27:22 Some people will talk to an animal or another being, some people will hear a voice. I don't hear anything. I can have a dialogue where I ask a question, but the question is always answered with a knowing and there's no words. It's just that fast. Like, like it was just downloaded like Neo with his head plugged into the matrix, like, Oh, okay. And it's the aha moment. And there's so much certainty in those answers. It's absolutely undeniable. And so that knowing where the capital K is really my sensory piece. And all of these medicines are, as you know, bridges to our own intuition, to our own connection to source, to our own realizing what that we're not separate, right? But that's always there. It's not just when I'm an ayahuasca or on psilocybin, it's always there if I'm tuned in properly. And I think that, you know, there's definitely practices that do
Starting point is 00:28:09 that from breath work to meditation, to quiet time, to being in nature, but it's in the stillness. It's in the feminine energy that I receive those downloads, not in the doing, not in the writing, not in the talking, right? It's in the silence. And I think with that knowing, uh, it's, it's very clear. It's as clear as night and day. And I think that that was, you know, anytime I feel like I'm on the right track, there is that degree of knowing. It's an interesting, uh, cause what part of what, you know, I'm saying to people is that in order to live towards your track, you have to come out of all of this, all the rationale and learn to know from a different place, learn to know in a different way. And it's like, when you just say it to someone, it's, it sounds kind of like heady, like, okay,
Starting point is 00:28:54 learn to know in a different way. Like, but it's, it's like, you slowly start to attune to it. You almost like teach yourself how you know, when you know, and by just by paying attention to it or by being inside of ceremony or by you almost like in tracking, they call it the development of track awareness. Like you train your eye to see certain things. And at first it's like you might get every third one, but over time you just, you get better and better at seeing this trail. And then it can be amazing to walk with a tracker who's got incredible track awareness and realize they're almost seeing double the information that you're seeing. Cause they're, they've, they've coded now to that way of like that the earth speaks. And you go inward and you keep paying attention. And at first it's like, oh, that's, that's feels
Starting point is 00:29:39 like a bit of certainty. I lost it. But with time you get, you just get more and more in touch with yourself. And that's kind of why it's hard to talk about with people. It's very personal to say, find your unique track, learn how it speaks to you, learn how you know when you know, learn how your wild self wants to be in touch with you, learn your own uniqueness. And it all starts to, at first it's just saying, I'm looking for it. And then with time you kind of code into it yeah yeah i think that that's so important is that the everything you could have all the money all the whatever all the all the fill in the blank all the women all the things that you want and still not feel right and still not be happy and still not have the deep joy that's inherent and
Starting point is 00:30:22 and really the as paul sel states, it's our fucking inheritance. It's our gift and our birthright that has through culture been exterminated and must be found. Right. But, but until you have some, I mean, I guess that is the first idea is I don't like what's going on. I want to change. Yeah. And for me, what I see with people is people say to me, I'm in a transition. I can feel what I've been doing is not feeding me. And you only need to coach your first two or three billionaires to realize the whole culture presents ideals, ideals, ideals, ideals. And then you either realize the ideal and realize,
Starting point is 00:31:07 well, that ain't it. Or you fall short of the ideal and there's this continuous feeling, which I'm sure you've seen a ton of in ceremonies of like, not good enough. It's like so pervasive, not good enough. And then what's weird is then you talk to the people who've achieved the ideal, you know, still not good enough. And so then it has to be something different. Okay. So nothing outside of me can tell me what's going to make me happy. I'm going to have to start to go inward. But what am I going inward towards? So I'm in a transition. My relationship has changed. I long for something. And to me, the beginning of tracking is wanting to track. It's like you arrive at that place where you say, I don't know how to move forward.
Starting point is 00:31:49 I don't know who I am or what I want to be. I don't know where it goes from here. Okay, that's okay. You don't know. Relax into the unknown. The inclination of the tracker is to live in unknowns. And then from that place, start to pay attention. Just start to pay attention. And suddenly things will start to emerge in your life. It's kind of miraculous.
Starting point is 00:32:12 The minute you have a client, I'm totally lost. I'm totally stuck. Okay. So you're looking for something. Yeah. Okay. So this week, you don't know. We've got that. You have no fucking clue what you meant to do, what you call to, what you call to what lights you up what makes you feel alive this week just pay attention to the fact that you don't know and see what you get and suddenly like out of that essential nature something starts to come you know it's magical it's totally magical yeah yeah the the tracking really to me stood out because of the parallel with um any of the birds, you know, the sacred birds, the eagle medicine, the condor medicine, you know, as we, as we tap into that spirit animal, I know people are going to fucking shrug off that terminology, but if we tap into the spirit animal
Starting point is 00:32:56 of the great birds, we can begin to see with eagle eye vision, right? And we can see from a higher place down low of everything that's happening in our life with greater perspective and awareness. And that's something that the first time I heard that really called to me and spoke to me. And then this idea that as we begin to track ourselves, which you get into in the book, as a tracker, finding the track of the animals, you learn to track yourself, to track your own thoughts, your own awareness, your own emotions, how everything starts to unfold for you when you do that. Yeah. I mean, it's all these paradoxical places that start to emerge. You try less because it wants to come through. And so there's like the dynamics of like striving and thriving. You got to show up, but it's coming through.
Starting point is 00:34:01 And then at a certain point, like I remember once with my teacher, when he was teaching me ceremony work, we would travel around and, you know, we would land in like some random place and then I would go to a house and there'd be 20 people there. And then he'd facilitate, run the ceremony, get on a plane, go somewhere else and 20 people would be there. And I said to him, you know, how do you do this? How do you, like, who runs all of this? Who does all of this? And he said to me, said to me oh no i don't do this this is what happens around me and i just like really like that idea like when you get into your own harmony then certain things will happen around you like wherever i go um there'll be a space where uh
Starting point is 00:34:37 healing will start taking place or conversations there'll be stories there'll be fires um uh like that'll just happen wherever I go. That'll happen because that's like my harmony. That's where, and it's a nice idea that it's, I'm not trying to do it. That's what happens. Yeah, I love that. You know, the paradox of showing up and, you know,
Starting point is 00:34:58 if you lost the track, you just keep moving forward, right? And then the track appears again, it reappears, right? Like it's, and again, like I'm, I'm, I'm into this book, um, realization it's Paul Selig's latest one. And there's a lot of pieces that are coming together, but as he talks about that, letting the soul or letting your high self take the driver's seat, the small self or the ego is still there. You don't banish that you're intertwined with it throughout your life and it keeps you alive, but it's a new driver. And that driver, it's almost, it's kind of like not my will, thy will. And that didn't always resonate with me, but this kind of recaptured it in a way that did. It's, it comes with ease. It comes with grace. You know, there's no effort other than the
Starting point is 00:35:41 intention and actually doing, you still have to do, but it's done in a different way. It's not done through busting your ass. It's not done through outgritting the next guy. It's not done from climbing some fucking ladder. It's done by showing up and with the intention to learn and to be present with it. And that notion of presence, then once that sort of starts to take root, I guess, then like sometimes it does ask for intensity. Sometimes it does ask for like a time where you've got to push a bit, but from the presence, not just from the mindset, like you gotta bust your ass all the time. It's like, this is what's being asked of me now. This is what now it's asking for me to actually rest more. Now it's asking for me. And to me, like just access to all of that is, becomes the key, like being able to have different gears and be, and you can only do that when you're out of the mindset of like, this is how you do it.
Starting point is 00:36:39 Okay. What's it's being, what's being asked now? What's being asked? What's being asked? And that in that way, like the presence of the tracker to me is super alive like i mean these guys we would go out into a wilderness area of you know six million acres would be the greater area to go and track a lion which is like you know a 400 pound athlete that can run the 100 meters in four seconds and can bite you, you know? And, and so it's not like it, the presence was super active. It was not like the idea of pro, we're just going to be really present and relaxed. Like it was super active. And actually, if you, if you got into an encounter with a lion and the lion was,
Starting point is 00:37:19 was uncomfortable with your presence, lions do two things when they're uncomfortable with you. One, they get up and they move away, you know, highest form of martial arts, get away. Or two, particularly if they have meat or if they're with cubs, they come towards you. And in that moment, you're in such a dynamic presence conversation because they are talking to you with their body language and you are conveying a message back with your body language. But actually what you're in is a conversation of presence. They're saying to you, you're too close now, don't push me any further.
Starting point is 00:37:49 And you can hear the tone of the growl, the intensity of the gaze, the shape of the shoulders, you know, all of that. And then you have to meet that. And there's an incredibly active form of presence to just be there with it and to let them feel you. And then you sort of have a totally nonverbal discussion. And then the minute their energy comes off, you give them space. But it's changed my whole idea of what presence was, like how active and intense presence can be. I don't know how I got onto that. It might've been a joke.
Starting point is 00:38:22 No, that's beautiful. Talk a bit about, you know, you talk about your grandfather and your father and you talk about how tracking this relationship with the father in tracking. Unpack that because that really resonated with me. I think, you know, as a dad and a father of our firstborn as a male, you know, thinking about that fatherhood and that is a term that gets used in the West, you know, among how we view God, even though God is all that fatherly energy. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that part of my journey is I would say that growing up, my father's an amazing man, but because he had built, he had built something from the time he was 15 and there, and the stakes were like, you can't fail. He, he, and as part of, part of building this place,
Starting point is 00:39:14 creating this place was a defense against some of the grief he had felt. And so the modus operandi from my father growing up was just go, you just do it. And there was no presence to it. It was just do, do, do. It was just pedal to the metal, do, do, do. And the way that he had grown up from his father was to like, I guess it would be like considered the shaming culture, you know? What are you doing?
Starting point is 00:39:37 You don't know how to do that. You do like do this, but there was no like guidance into it. And so one of the things, then I grew up inside of that, like always being pushed by him and my uncle to things that I wasn't ready for. And then not, and it was like a work it out dynamic. You got to work it out. I'm grateful to it in some ways, but like, you know, what I would have liked to work it out with a little bit of guidance,
Starting point is 00:40:00 try this, which would be, which would be a more native way of mentoring. And that's where I was lucky to, to meet Alexius and they started to actually mentor me. And they started to give me some, you know, give me tools and actually coach me and push me, but then help me grow and support it a little bit. And so I realized that inside of mentorship, it's wonderful to push, but you push with support and you catch and you coach and you guide. And so I didn't have that initially with my father, but then when I started to do my own work, I started to get mentored. I started to feel a bit more solid. And I started to realize that he didn't have access to that. And so what started to change is when he would say to me, you know, just build what you want to build, do what you want to do.
Starting point is 00:40:50 I would, instead of going into shame, which I did for years, and this only happened like maybe in my late twenties, I would, he would say something and I would be like, I'm trying to do that. I would just go into all the shame and defense. Eventually through having other mentors, other male mentors, I would be able to say, instead of going into the shame, I would say, I want to do that. I don't know how, can you help me? You know, and it was so simple on one level, but I was being overrun by the feeling of shame before I could say that.
Starting point is 00:41:18 And then suddenly that gave him access to another place. And he actually- It took him out of his programming. It took him out of the programming that the three of us had been in, but being well-mentored broke me out of it. And then asking for help when he said those sort of things broke him out of it. And with my sister's kids now, I can see something totally different happening. So a lot of the book and a lot of the way that tracking was given, you know, tracking is an art form that you learn out of being present with someone who knows how to do it.
Starting point is 00:41:52 It's not something you can learn out of a book. It's something that occurs inside of shared presence and being with people who knew how to track is how I learned how to track watching them being. And it's almost like I started to absorb their bodies. You know. I absorbed their knowing, could almost feel it in the energy field. And then as I started to track, I also started to feel myself not as a lone man. I started to feel myself connected with every person who had followed a track over hundreds and then thousands of years. And inside of that, having to know myself as an individual gave way to being a part of a much longer story in the masculine.
Starting point is 00:42:33 And so all of this became like little masculine awakenings, the importance of mentorship, the value of being pushed, but being pushed with guidance, going into dangerous situations with people and sharing in that danger together with presence, learning to get through where shame was overwhelming me and actually ask for what I needed. And now my father and I have this incredible relationship and it literally pivoted on that day where I just said, can you help me? And it was like someone had hit him over the head. He was like, he got this confused look on his face and he was like, yeah, do you want me to help you? And I was like, yeah, I don't know how to do this. I have no idea how to do this. He's like, oh, well, you need to do this. And I was like, thank you. And now he's
Starting point is 00:43:25 like my greatest advisor. But I guess what I'm saying is when we start this process of going after our inner track, inevitably to come to the authentic track in yourself, you will run into your role and you will run into your trauma. And as you start to move the roles, like my role was, I have to know how to do this because everyone had always told me I knew how to. I was stuck in that. I have to know. Well, it turns out I don't have to know. I have to be better at asking.
Starting point is 00:43:52 And then the trauma, some of the things that I was ashamed of that I didn't know how to handle. As that started to move, I started to get more and more access. And out of that authenticity that started to take place, out of getting in touch with that track inside myself, the relationships around me started to just naturally heal, started to change. And so the work of the inner tracker is to go without knowing, to start without knowing, to teach, to develop track awareness, teach yourself to see your track. And you'll have to include your body in that. So what actually feels good becomes critical in teaching yourself what you actually want, not more, but more of what you actually want.
Starting point is 00:44:35 You'll have to accept that you're going to lose the track on this journey. And losing the track is part of it. Never track alone. You know, try quickly to get people around you who, if you're going to go into the wilderness of a life that is unyet imagined, like it's good to have some people around you who don't sell you their fear, you know? Yeah. And then watch for what happens around you when you start to live like that without you trying, you know, to do anything. It starts to come through you. And that's the activism to me, to live as a track, to make new ways of living. about um the commitment that it sounds like the community uh has down here but how it's also spreading um it's like make make up your own path make up your own path that's the path of the
Starting point is 00:45:32 tracker i love it and you talk about uh the encouragement that you have there's a there's a couple a couple things you say repeatedly and uh these terms from, and I forget the name of the tribe, the language that you're speaking, but the, we will get. Oh yeah. Yeah. We will get, we will get. That was the one where I was like, like not half awake. I was awake and paying attention.
Starting point is 00:46:01 There's also 16 hours of travel door to door to get to the moon. So I'm fucking hurting. And I hear that through my earphones and it was just like a spark lit me up inside. Oh, I love that. Yeah. That's Rhenius' mantra. You know, there's some things about Rhenius that were just gold. Like this is a guy who was born under a tree, grew up hunting and gathering.
Starting point is 00:46:23 Like the primary way that his family got meat is they would track lions. And when they found the lions, they would run in and scream and try and chase the lions off the meat. And then they would cut themselves a piece of meat. So, I mean, he grew up wild. And I talk about it a little bit in the book, but he doesn't have the structuring of this sort of psychological cultural milieu. He's so much more present. It's so much more moment to moment, has like this incredible lightheartedness. And he's a master of his craft.
Starting point is 00:46:59 And to hear him say, you know, it'll be getting hot, it'll be getting difficult. And he just dials it down to, we'll get this, we'll get this, we'll get this. And he just, I've been thinking a lot about track selection at the moment. Like he will look at a track of a lion that walked a long time ago, and he's realistic with himself about whether it's worth following or not. But he's also willing to really push himself to like really reach for a track like this is this lion walked here a day ago. I don't know if we can do this. And I've been thinking about like how cool that dynamic is in our own lives to like have enough realism to not be like irrational about what we're trying to do and yet to have enough confidence to reach
Starting point is 00:47:40 beyond ourselves and select a track that is going to push us enough, but not leave us totally floundering and in failure. And he's just got that. And to spend time with him is just to be inside this incredible confidence of someone who's in their mastery. Go out in the bush with him, you know, think you're going to track a lion, hears a bird alarming, finds a huge python in a tree. He's just in tune with the language of that place. Finds a drag mark, you know, follow the drag mark. Find where a leopard hoisted a kill. Knows how to find a beehive.
Starting point is 00:48:14 Knows how to, it's just beautiful to be with someone who is in what I would think of as like the following state. He's in constant creative response to like what is happening out there. And he'll guard with a plan and then boom, he'll be willing to break it if something else is speaking to him right now. And other times he'll be on like a track that we've been on for a long time and come across something that seems fresh. And he's like, no, no, no, stay on this one. He's just, I don't know what his selection mode is, but he's so good at discerning what path he's on. And then other crazy, like, this is just coming to me now, but like on the group that Cal was on, you know, it's the fourth day, we're tracking lions. The group has slept out in the bush. Guys are getting
Starting point is 00:49:01 tired. It's 11 o'clock in the morning. And I decide the group is like running out of gas. I decide to call it. So I say to Reneas, look, Rene, you know, everyone is really tired. I think we got to let these guys go back to camp. Now, this is a guy who's been tracking lions for 50 years out there. And it would be so easy for him to say like, oh, the group's tired. Cool. Let's pack it in. He says, I can't leave it. I can't leave it. I'm saying, no, the grip's tired. Let's go back for breakfast.
Starting point is 00:49:29 He's like, I can't leave this track. I have to stay on it. And it's just like, to me, there's no reason for him to have to do it. But something inside of him can't let it go because to the tracker, there's something that has to be discovered here that he's now a part of um i just like that idea of you know being finding something that is so engaging to you that you just you just never want to leave it alone yeah because then it's not work right that vocation is is a is a thing of passion he's totally in his passion it's not work at all for him and i and just being around that is like
Starting point is 00:50:05 i'm almost trying to like absorb that too yeah it's so beautiful well i want to look up uh a couple things i jotted some notes down on the phone here the other thing he used to say to me he used to take me to a game path you know and he would say to me uh walk down the game path and come back and tell me what you see. So I'd walk down this game path, which is a track that the animals use between the water holes and the clearing. Walk down and I would say, you know, I can see the tracks of some impala here and a hippo walked here during the night.
Starting point is 00:50:41 He'd say, hey, I'm fine. Fine, but we are long good of foot. He'd say, young boy, go look again. I would walk back up the path and I would like drop down and there I would see like where a squirrel had run across the path. I would see where sometime during the night an owl had come down to try and catch a mouse and you could see where the wingtips had touched. I would see where the impala had walked over the tracks of a leopard. And like every time I went down that path, there was more information.
Starting point is 00:51:06 And I was coding almost, teaching myself to see more information that was there. And then sometimes he would say to me, hey, I'm fine. Pusa mati pel, puza matila. Young boy, like drink water, drink water. And what he was meaning was when an animal drinks water, it puts its face right down to the waterhole because it
Starting point is 00:51:25 obviously doesn't have hands. So he's saying to me, put your face right down to the ground. So look closely there. And it was kind of like, it's a way he was teasing me to say, like, look properly. You don't, you can't see it like a proper tracker. So he was put your face right there close by the ground. But, you know, when I started coaching people, that idea became absolutely incredible. The idea that there, there is information there, but you have to teach yourself to see it again. And most people have become so overwhelmed by their social self that that's what they've taught themselves to see. How do I fit in socially? How am I doing comparatively to everyone else? Um, am I at the appropriate place for this time in my life
Starting point is 00:52:07 in the social structure? Oh my God, I'm not quite there yet. I haven't re... And they've just coded themselves to be tuned to that. And then like deep down, here's the wild self inside of you. The part of you that knows what your medicine is, that knows what your mission is.
Starting point is 00:52:24 Part of you that knows what actually makes you feel good knows what your mission is, part of you that knows what actually makes you feel good and alive. And part of the work of becoming a tracker, someone who can make new paths, is just to tune yourself to that place, teach yourself to see that again, tune out of all of that noise and into something that actually feels good. You know? Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, one thing I wanted to bring up was your plant medicine work. You know, you, you talked about coming, you know, traveling, working, apprenticing. I think, I think in any of these things, you know, it's, it's like martial arts or, or, or tracking or more medicine work. You have to live that experience you can't read about it in
Starting point is 00:53:06 a book i can't watch youtube videos you know from some kung fu master and all of a sudden learn it it needs to be done and it needs to be practiced and it is in the practicing that i start to build some equivalency talk about your practicing uh with the medicines um one of the first ceremonies that I was in, there were a few things that happened. One that were very transformative for me. The first was I had this, from the time I was young, because I felt so connected to nature, I had this incredible pain over the state of the world. And it had almost overwhelmed me. And it was part of what was hurting me so deeply. And in the first session, two kind of amazing things happened. The way the ceremony was structured is it was very unstructured.
Starting point is 00:53:57 It was like you were allowed to just follow the meds and go, you know, and that might pull you into connection in the group. It might, it wasn't sort of a lie on your mat. But on the first night, one of the things that the medicine kept saying to me is it would just show me this beautiful natural image, like a jungle would just like burst into my inner vision. And then this voice would say so clearly, look how old I am. And then a mountain, look how old I am. And it's like, it was hours of this spirit of nature just saying to me like,
Starting point is 00:54:28 oh, you're so sweet to care, but look how old I am. And it was incredibly healing for me. And that was of like, it doesn't matter what happens, that thing's okay. We're not okay. It's okay. Yeah. That was, I mean, that was very deep for me. And then the second thing was in more of a heart space, just really feeling like having grown up around animals and understanding how energy is shaped and how an animal moves and conveys through their shape and presence a language. Almost immediately I could feel the unspoken language in the room and I could feel myself moving with the energy and creating little encounters with people that brought them into
Starting point is 00:55:10 different parts of themselves, that brought them out or helped them go in. And it just was like, to me, it was like wild. It was just the wild in that room, you know, in that room, in somewhere in California, in some house in California california it was like oh i know this um but i had a lot of my own work to do and going to your point where you started is like i had to learn so many places inside of those experiences and that um and i was really well mentored by my teacher in that space and and then the natural inclination came to start sitting for people and it came out of feeling how much i had changed how much i had opened how much had been shifted um and you know i don't have to tell you it's a vocational thing like it's when it starts to you know when you start to know what to do and it's you're under instruction and you start to do what you know to do. And I had a phenomenal time being a student of that energy and being a
Starting point is 00:56:10 student of, of that place and being a student of those plants. And, and what was great about it is it also showed me so much of what people were carrying. And so what started to happen is like everywhere I went outside of ceremony, like I knew what we're all carrying, you know, and, and that, that helped a lot in other spaces just to understand what the way that this thing structures us, this thing we're in, it actually keeps structuring us Towards isolation, towards incredible self-judgment, towards never achievable ideals. And to realize like, oh, that wasn't just me. Like that's patterned on.
Starting point is 00:56:56 Yeah, we're handed it like a kid today is handed an iPad. It doesn't know the world without an iPad because that world didn't exist. Exactly. They've only been born into the world with the iPad and they have parents that will hand them an ipad yeah right like we're born into all these agreements they talked about that in the four agreements domingo ruiz talks about that the uh collective consciousness as a uh a form of domestication and i was like that is a fucking dark way to view the world. And the second time I read it, I was like, oh yeah, of course. And we are domesticated. And actually, to me,
Starting point is 00:57:34 wildness, some of the initial movements of wildness might be like, fuck this, I'm breaking out. But actually, wildness is so so regal and it's just living in pure integrity, you know, your own, of your own making and having enough, having done enough work to realize the difference between who you think you are and what was given to you. And then being able to choose from a different place. And so to me, like to travel to America and be like in New York city or to be in somewhere where it feels domestic to me, but to be doing the work I'm meant to do, I'm wild. I'm wild in that moment because it's coming out of what I know to do in the way that a lion knows how to be a lion and a leopard knows that it's solitary and everything out there in nature knows how to be itself. And to me, being myself is tracking,
Starting point is 00:58:33 taking people tracking and setting for people. You know, if I'm doing that, I'm in my wildness. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's one of the paradoxes that I see that's on the same line as being a student and a teacher at the same time. And I think that's something that I learned in jujitsu. The more you teach, the more you learn. And that's something where, too, and this isn't to...
Starting point is 00:58:54 Obviously, you do a great job explaining some of the differences of Reynos' culture in not having hierarchy and not explaining it, even though it kind of falls into the tracking game. Nobody's ever going to explain it. there's no pissing contest yeah so i'm not i'm not trying to say like uh i'm a black belt and another person's a white belt and i'll learn from them but black belts learn from white belts right like you black belts can learn from everybody whereas a white belt might only learn from a blue belt or a purple belt yeah right when you have a certain level of equivalency whether that's master or not you learn from everyone you belt or a purple belt. Yeah. Right. When you have a certain level of equivalency, whether that's master or not, you learn from everyone you encounter. And as Ram Dass says in Becoming Nobody, I think, I think Kyle just mentioned that book to you, which is phenomenal. He talks about how his guru shows up in every form possible. Right. And he's the example of,
Starting point is 00:59:39 he only likes like the broadcast mic. He doesn't like the standalone mic. Yeah. And he's, you know, as Ram Dass with the mask of Ram Dass showing up for all these people on high you know prayer hands big smiles and he sees a fucking stand-up mic and loses his shit yeah this is the shit he's like i was very specific you know he just starts getting into like how why he doesn't want to lean over this table for the next five hours while he's talking and he has a point but the point is that he he recalls is oh the guru showed up but the point is that he, he recalls as, oh, the guru showed up as the standup microphone. Right. And I think that's, that's like such an important piece. If we're tracking our own thoughts and our own awareness, we can see the guru show, the guru will show up as everything. Yeah. I mean, I mean, coming out here yesterday,
Starting point is 01:00:20 you know, um, I had two flights cancel and I was texting with Cal and he said to me, oh, I see your guru is United and American Airlines today. And like, it is like, it's cool to see like, okay, I'm not at equanimity even close because this shit is irritating me. But there's like, there was even enough, like there was enough awareness to say like, oh, this is what's happening. I'm not going to fight what's happening. There was just a little bit of space and then a little blip and then like, okay, here's how it's going. But I really like that a black belt learns from everyone.
Starting point is 01:00:54 It's a really nice way of saying it. And I felt that too with Alex and Renia. They were clearly mentors to me. But then as time went on, the mentorship started to give to all of us. The fact that we were even in something like that, it started to, like I said, there were places in different places in life where we were giving to each other in different ways.
Starting point is 01:01:23 And Alex, who was Renius' real first mentee, or I think you would call it. I mean, he really opened up Renius' life. So Renius gave him this ancient wisdom. And then Alex started taking him to different parts in the world. Now the two of them are like professional public speakers. They teach all over the world. They run tracking all over the world. They run tracking
Starting point is 01:01:45 all over the world. And through the relationship, they became international. They became so much more than what each, any one of them would have been individually. And inside of the mentorship, to me, it's like when you give like that to someone, or when you are someone who's well mentored, you become someone who wants to mentor. like it just starts to happen you just want to be the sort of person who passes it on um and i've even felt that in my few encounters with jiu-jitsu it's like yeah man some like you know purple belt takes the time to deal with your white belt like flailing self like there's like a just a natural warmth that suddenly they're like yeah this wasn't not super fun for him to roll with you, but like he did it. And then there's like this, thank you. That's like gratitude that's built in there. And you remember it when you get a little higher up the ranks.
Starting point is 01:02:31 Yeah, exactly. That's why the purple belt's doing that. Because they remember flailing all over the place, holding their fucking breath, grunting through everything. And somebody whispered to them, slow your breathing down, relax. You're okay. find a position you can hang out in you know whatever that cue is right and i think that's that's such an important piece but people one thing that i see in you that is is so important is there's also this idea of and they joke about it in the movie frozen too have you seen it i haven't seen it okay it's fucking awesome but olaf the the snowman sings a song about how he can't wait to be older because then he'll have it all figured out.
Starting point is 01:03:08 Yeah. Everything will make sense. Yeah. It's like the adult humor of it, you know. But that never fucking comes. No. You know, it absolutely never comes. But people in the West have this idea that they're going to finish college and they'll
Starting point is 01:03:22 never need to read a fucking book again. Doctors are that way, right? Now, that's not all doctors. I don't want to paint with a broad brush. There's plenty of doctors who continue to learn. I just had Dr. Craig Conover on. He's glued to the new science, the latest cutting edge stuff. And he's thinking outside the box in a lot of ways. There's plenty of people like him in the world, but equal to, if not more than, there's people who have done their learning and they're done learning. And one of the things I see when I look at you or I look at a master and I look at somebody who's really achieved a high level of understanding is that you never stop learning. You never stop being a student. I almost think that's the characteristic of mastery is that desire to
Starting point is 01:04:01 keep learning. And I think of Renius, like I remember being out in the bush, coming around the corner. I mean, this is a guy who took people on safaris for 25 years. Every single day he took people out. 25 years of doing, like guiding people. He's out there. He's got a tree book out.
Starting point is 01:04:20 A guest asked him about some tree that he hadn't seen before. So now he's keying the tree to work out what it is. You know, there's no sense of like, oh, I'm done with that. The other day he says to me, you know, I've been watching zebras. I'm like, okay, where's this going? He's like, I noticed zebras spend time with giraffes when they want to cross a thicket. They wait for the giraffes to cross the thicket and they use the giraffe's height. And then they cross after the giraffes have crossed the thicket.
Starting point is 01:04:53 And it's just the sort of thing like I'm aware of it. I'm a wilderness guy. I'm out there a lot. But when he's, I'll just drive past and say, oh, giraffes and zebras. He will look and he will say, what's happening here? Why? You know, the other day, just before I came out to America, we get onto the tracks of a male leopard. He's doing some coaching with me. He's trying to, you know, I'm always trying to get my level up. I spend time with him and he says to me, what do you see? A male leopard walked down the road here.
Starting point is 01:05:22 He said, okay, tell me more about it. So I'm looking. I said, no, it's a male leopard. He's walking down the road here. He says to me, look closer. So I look a little bit closer and I can see that the back foot of the leopard is landing well in front of the front foot. So I say, it's moving quite fast. I say marking territory. He says to me, it's moving too fast for marking territory. There's something going on here. And don't just say, oh, leopard. Why? What's happening? What's actually going on here? He delves. Turns out male leopard following a female leopard that he wants to mate with. He's going quick. Yeah. He's moving fast he's like whoa
Starting point is 01:06:05 um flash forward three and a half hours um we find these two mating leopards in a thicket and he said and he says to me afterwards you see don't just you look but you don't see you know you look but you don't see look and ask why delve. Delve a bit. Pay attention. And it's obvious, but it's endless. And I can see to this day, there's places where I fall asleep in my own life. I get into doing things by route. I don't ask myself, what do we actually want here? What are we actually going for? You know, what's actually calling?
Starting point is 01:06:42 And that's why even around the, like, the, what do you want to do stuff? Like we're obsessed with more, right? So more must be better. We've got more coming with this more we can do. It's like, we don't want more. We want more of what we really want. What are the things we really want? And it starts to get, or it gets complicated, like around career and stuff where there's money and there's it's like how much should i want like how much is enough yeah maslow's hierarchy of needs is the real deal yeah and and like at a certain point does going for that start to pull me out of what i'm actually called to and you know so it's a pretty dynamic and that's why the tracking is moment to moment track for track presence to presence.
Starting point is 01:07:26 Otherwise next thing, you know, you know, because you can, you are, and just because you can, doesn't mean you should sort of thing. Anyway, I guess that's just where I'm really like really in that right now,
Starting point is 01:07:37 deciphering, like what do I want to do? Like, how does, how do I want to keep designing something that keeps me close to the bush, keeps me close to the art form, keeps me close to tracking. It doesn't start to pull me into, you know, a whole lot of things that are good, but start to take me away from what like really feeds me.
Starting point is 01:07:54 And yet, you know, doing some of those things is part of it. So it's just getting the balance right. And not just, and being mindful about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that comes with listening, right? You just listen. Listening, stillness, attention. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. And that comes with listening, right? You just listen.
Starting point is 01:08:06 Listening, stillness, attention. Big time. Well, I do want to leave with one other quote that you say a number of times in the book, which is absolutely phenomenal. And it really spoke to me because as I was talking about toggling back and forth between clarity and confusion, this really sung to me big time. And it's, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. Yeah. That's another one of his greatest hits. I don't know where we're going, but I know how to get there. And I mean, it's so rich, right? I mean, we don't know where we're going on this path. Everyone's going to say like,
Starting point is 01:08:44 I'm going to try and find this thing that's going to make me happy. I don't know where we're going on this path. Everyone's going to say like, I'm going to try and find this thing that's going to make me happy. I don't know where to go. But if you're present moment to moment, it's going to start to show you. And you just, you have to take the infinite possibility of this idealized place I'm going to get to and dial it down into what's presence now. What's presence now.
Starting point is 01:09:01 What's presence now. And that will a little enough of, moment to moment, what could make me a little more present today, starts to make an ultimately different life. It starts to take you where you're going, but it's not through going there. It's through actually being here. Fuck yeah, brother. So beautiful having you on. Everybody check out the Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd, B-O-Y-D, V-A-R-T-Y. And we'll link to it in the show notes. Dude, it's been so incredible getting to know you. And I absolutely cannot wait to go in 2021 with Cal, my boy, our boy, and get out and track and eventually take Bear out there. I think that'll be really powerful to have my son out there on the land. Yeah. Beautiful. We'll look forward to having you, man.
Starting point is 01:09:45 Be good to track a lion together. Beautiful brother. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for tuning into today's show with my man, Boyd Vardy. 100% you need to order his book either on audible or, uh, well, that's if you're listening and anywhere else you would get books, obviously Amazon's top dog there. But if you like your local store and you're allowed to go into it, just get the book. It is an absolute game changer. I know you guys appreciated this episode
Starting point is 01:10:11 as much as I did. I love y'all and I'll see you in a week. Thank you.

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