Boyd Varty - Lion Tracking, Meaning Making, And Healing Trauma

All right, Boyd, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How you doing?

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, man, it's a pleasure to connect with you. And I've heard you on a couple other shows, and a couple of my buddies are obsessed, so they send their jealousy and.

Excitement to tune into this conversation. With all that said, let's begin how I always begin with, which is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Well, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. You know, my life came together at the confluence of two very unusual things. One is, from the time I was very young, I was apprenticed to master Shangan trackers. And so I learned the ancient art form of how you follow the trail of an animal across the landscape. And it's a very deep art form, being a tracker. And there's a psychology to it. And there's almost everything you could do as an artist, as an athlete in terms of performance, getting deeper into an art, becoming better at the craft you can do inside of the art of tracking, you know, and there's levels to it, for sure. So that was a. That was a very formative being in the bush in South Africa, being out in the wild. And then I had a series of initiatory experiences from the time that I was young. I had these encounters with my own mortality. The one that really scarred me is that I was involved in a pretty severe home invasion in Johannesburg in South Africa. And it was a terrifying experience. My mother and sister were tied up next to me by these men who had come in the house. They took me outside. They told me they were going to execute me. They put me on my knees. They put a gun in. Gun to my head. And in that moment, I. You know, I really froze with the. With trauma, not being able to protect my family, just all the things that come with that type of trauma. And I lived with that frozen state inside of myself from the time I was 18 to the time I was 23. And then when I was 23, and this is probably the core of your question, When I was 23, I was working as a safari guide. And a friend of mine, a fellow guide, said to me, you know, there's this woman who came on safari the year before, and I took her out, and she's a martial artist, and she's a fascinating woman. You should. You should try and be her guide. So I went into the guide room and I rubbed another guide's name off the board where you would get allocated your clients who were coming in. And I put my name there. That's how I met my mentor, Martha Beck. And the way that it went down is, you know, I was the safari guide. We went out the first day and sometime we were driving around and she said, the restoration of the planet will come out of a profound shift in human consciousness. She kind of was sitting on the safari truck behind me when she said it. And I felt something in me almost like snap around. And then a day or two later, we had been out for a morning safari, we'd seen animals. We got back to the camp and she looked at me and she said, boyd, you know, I can see what's going on inside of you. I can see how frozen you are. And I'm here, I'm. And I was sort of shocked and taken back. I mean, what do you. What do you mean? And she said, no, I can see that something has happened to you and you're stuck inside. And I'm the best in the world at getting people unstuck and I'm here for you. You know, there was something about being seen in that way. And I felt. I felt very vulnerable and I felt these tears well up in my eyes because she knew something that I was trying to push away. And then it all came out and we started talking and she was an incredible. Her art form was. She was incredible at guiding a person through a transformation. She helped people tap into a different type of knowing in themselves. And all of the stuff that I didn't know as a 23 year old beer drinking South African that we know about transformation, she was a master at. She began me on the journey of starting to find my path, starting to find my essential essence, starting to work out how to express myself in the world in a way that felt true and purposeful. And as I started to be in that process, my childhood as a tracker came back to me. And I realized that essentially what I was doing was attuning to a track. And it not an external track, but a track inside of me. I was starting to pay attention to that and learn to follow that. And that is really how my work started to blossom. And I started to one, track my own life and live on the track of my own life. And two, realize that this very weird Venn diagram that I had could actually be brought together into something and that. And that is how my sort of journey really began.

Yeah, it's. It's fascinating. I think one of the things that I appreciate about you and the work that you do, I Mean, first off, you're just a phenomenal storyteller. I'm sure that the South African accent doesn't hurt in the. In the storytelling. There's something about it that's just. That's just wonderful. It feels mystic in a way. But I think that there's this interesting convergence or intersection between tracking, healing and purpose that when I listen to you talk, seems to emerge almost naturally. And I would love. I want to just backtrack a little bit and give the listener some context if they're not familiar with you, because I think it's fascinating. So we'll talk about that, and then we'll return to this intersection between tracking, healing and purpose. I think that's a fruitful conversation. Can you give some context to, or sort of paint a picture of what it was like to grow up in the environment that you did? What was like to sort of be on the Landlozzi Game Reserve and how this shaped your childhood and. Because I think that might give just some. Some deeper context for the listener.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I would say a few things. So, one, I grew up on a piece of land that my great grandfather bought in 1926 in the wild eastern part of South Africa. And originally my family went there to hunt. And then in 1969, my grandfather, who was second generation, died suddenly, and my father, who was 15, and my uncle. And then very soon after, my mother took the property over, everyone told them, you should sell it. It's a drain. They took it over and they said, we'll. We'll somehow make it viable. And that's how we got into the safari business.

Oh, roughly. Roughly. How big is the property?

The property is about 14,000 hectares. So maybe. I think that's about 30,000 acres. Wow.

Okay.

And that's. And then if you go up in a helicopter and you look out to the east of us, you look into a further 10 million acres of wild land, which is the greater Kruger national park area. So it's just this tremendous swath of wilderness. And so my. My. My parents and my uncle set about trying to get this very ramshackle safari business going. But I think the thing that is important for this conversation is one of the things that happened is they. They met this maverick ecologist who told them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. And they said to him, well, what do you mean, partner with the land? And he started to show them how to actually restore the micro catchments and clear away the scrub bush that had had encroached the land as a result of cattle and start to return the grasslands. And so from the time I was very young, I actually watched this property being restored and I saw what it means to be in partnership with nature and how if you work a little bit with nature, nature responds incredibly. And, you know, I would see a scrub drew an area and then I would go back there a year later and it would be a grassland with rhino on it and waterback and zebra. And so the impulse towards the feminine power of healing went into my psyche in a very, like, tangible way. So that was something that I feel was absolutely formative for me. And then the second thing is, in some ways, I was initiated by the natural world. And I learned, you know, from the time that I was very young, you know, when you're in nature that you're on a very real edge and there is a way to conduct yourself and you will encounter your own mortality and your own need to take responsibility for yourself. You know, if you, when you're around animals, you have to act, act accordingly, you have to behave accordingly. And it's real. And so in a way that the natural world educated me like that. And I also learned that nature is a relational environment. Every animal, everything is operating in relation to everything else. And, and there's a. An invisible language that is flowing there and animals will talk to you in body language and everything has away. And if you learn that way, it's actually not a dangerous environment. It's an environment where you belong as much as the wild. And so that affected me from the time I was very young to this idea of I'm in an unseen conversation with everything around me. And so those were the, the big, the big kind of definers that I feel like have really have really affected me. And London is a. It's a reserve. People come from all over the world to have very deep encounters with nature. And my sister and I have slowly been moving the property from a luxury safari lodge into a place where people can come and have very, very deep experiences in nature where they can come to heal, where they can come to reflect. You know, when I think about men, wilderness, there's something about wilderness that is so innate to the male psyche and it's so difficult to sort of put your finger on. But it's as if in wilderness you can intuitively feel yourself in a way that you can't in a more sanitized domestic environment. It's like you don't know why, but you know that this wild place has something to do with you. And as you spend time there, it's like you. You know something about yourself just by being in the wild. And it's sort of fundamental to the masculine psyche. So all of that and then, you know, growing up around these incredible trackers, growing up around these Shanghai men. I mean, one of the things that I say in my book is that I feel like masculine initiation is about physical presence with another man's body. And it's almost like being close to that man's body. As you move through a wild place, you receive something. It's not about being told what to do or being lectured to. It's more this something sense of their body near your body is somehow defining and somehow helps you work out who you are. So all of that was a very rich and wild kind of childhood. That. That was at times a little scary. But really, when I look at it now, it's just I've always been deeply in a state of, like, watching how everything is connected to everything and knowing it has something to do with me.

There's so many strings that I would love to pull at within. Within what you just laid out. But I actually would like to tug on the thread of initiation a little bit more, because you've said that a few times. And, you know, a lot of the work that my organization facilitates is initiatory in nature. The men's weekends that we lead follow this sort of initiation arc. And I think what you're saying is. I don't know if I've ever heard it framed that way, but it's so accurate. You know, there's some kind of transmission that we receive around being around other men, specifically within the context of nature, you know, and when we get ourselves out of the sort of corporate environments or the city dwellings and into this sort of, like, raw and primal environment. I think of the way you said it, there's. There's. It's like you're a part of a. A hidden conversation, I think, is what you said before. And I think that we as men yearn for that in some capacity. So I would love for you to talk a little bit more about what role do you think initiation plays within a man's life? What do you think maybe is the side effects of not having that initiation? And then what are some of the important elements that you received through your initiations? Because it sounded like you went through maybe a few of them. And I definitely want to talk about the Shangun trackers in a moment when we loop back around to that intersection.

Yeah, I mean, it's A. It's certainly the case. I mean, one is a few things just happen when you go into nature. The first is that a real life sense of consequence becomes directly tangible to you. And when that. And you know, for example, When I was 10 years old, my father and I went out to hunt an impala. We found ourselves lying on a termite mound. And I took a shot and the impala sort of scattered. My father said, stay here and let's just see if that animal has gone down. And while we were lying there, you know, I felt this movement across my leg. And I looked down and there was about a 3 meter black mamba crawling over the back of my leg.

Oh my gosh.

I grabbed. My father said to him, shit, dad, there's a mamba. And I knew snakes. I was about 10 years old. I said to him, don't move, don't move. And he looked around, thinking I had seen it somewhere. And he sort of went, where is it? I said, don't move. It's on us. And we lay there for about three minutes as this snake crawled over us. And I remember looking across at my father and he had blood coming out of his mouth. He was biting the inside of his cheek so hard that the blood had started to flow. But in that moment, and I think of that snake as an initiatory moment, in that moment, it's all right there. One, there is direct consequence. Two, there is a responsibility to transcend your natural patterning, which is just to freak out and run. You have to go beyond that. You have to find the place in yourself where you want to freak out, but you, you have the capacity to react accordingly. So you're teaching yourself to be more with what the moment is requiring. There was this sense of being in a very dangerous situation with my father. And all of those things together have a kind of effect. And eventually the snake crawled a little bit away from us and he grabbed me and we ran over the top of the mound through a thorn bush. And I remember he tucked his head and. And we blasted through the thorn bush and we came out the other side and he had like a giant antler where a thorn had broken off in his face. And as I look back on it now, that was a very deep initiatory moment into consequence, into real life and into humility instantly, a sense that, you know, there are. There is a world around me that. That is far beyond me. And I think that. I think of that too sometimes as you sit around a fire as a man, as night falls in the wilderness, and, you know, as it falls and a lion roars nearby, or you can feel a bear out there, there's an instant sense of humility that is put in you. And that humility is a different way of looking at the world. And we lose track of it when we're trying to build ourselves to the top of the ladder or dominate or crush this game or crush this work, or, you know, we forget that, in fact, we will be humbled in life. And if we. If we're humbled sooner, we can live from a deeper and more different place. And it's a more connected place. So it brings us into belonging, it brings us into tangibility. I think what a lot of men are suffering for from now is, like, just a lack of the tangible. You know, things happen all day in digital realms, and you get to the end of the day and things have happened, but you haven't actually seen things happen. Whereas when you're in nature, you know, you. There's something about collecting the wood, making the fire. It brings you into presence. And that presence is actually very, very nourishing. So I'm rambling a bit, but the natural world, just by being in it, takes us into all of those dimensions of what makes a man feel solid and whole and in tune with mortality and in tune with consequence. And it's beautiful. You know, when I run these retreats, we'll have one night where we go. We leave the camp and we go and sleep on the ground. If a lion pride walks through that night, the person who's keeping watch has to see them. There's no vehicle, there's no tent. And we will have to handle that together as a group. And what's incredible is, without working too hard, come the next day, that group is incredibly bonded, and conversations start to open at a deeper level and men start to share at a different level. And you don't have to work so hard to break through the guards and defenses. It's like the stars and the moon and the real danger and the. The real fact that we rely on each other when we're sleeping out there on the ground, and a sense in our self of like, oh, my God, it's dark out here. And all of that brings us more into a more truthful place with who we are. And we. We stop the bravado, we stop the bullshit, we stop the act, and. And we can finally just say, like, we are all at the same level out here. Let's open up.

Yeah. I remember camping as a. As a kid, and I grew up in Northern Canada. So there's not lions, but there's grizzlies, right? And grizzly bears. Well, I mean, grizzly bears are a real problem. And there's moose, which moose in real life are terrifying. They're like these monstrous things. You see photos of them and you're like, oh, that. That looks cool. Looks big. And then you see one in a bull moose in real life, and you're like, holy, that thing is huge. And I remember camping as a. As a teenager, and we were outside in, in tents and we could hear a bear not too far from us. And all the guys are out of the tents immediately. We're probably like 15, 16 years old, and we're all out of the tents immediately. And we're like trying to make a plan, you know, what's, what's going on. And does anybody have a gun? Does anybody have a knife? Does anybody have their mace? Right? And this, this conversation is unfolding because we had sort of gone off into the wilderness solo. And it's wild how that type of experience where you can't help but come face to face with the largeness that is the world and the smallness of you and the frailty of us as human beings is. There's something so humbling, you know, it sort of reduces our arrogance and this ignorance that we sometimes carry that. That we can conquer and dominate everything. It eradicates it in a moment, you know, in just a heartbeat, in a moment.

And you know, when that bear is sniffing around out there, you're having an encounter with yourself. You're having an encounter with that animal, but you're also having an encounter with yourself. And if young men don't have guided encounters with themselves, if we, and actually all men, if we don't have an opportunity to have an encounter with ourselves, we're left wondering. And it's the wondering, who am I under pressure? Who am I in the face of it? Who am I? That then results in this reckless pushing in the wrong directions or this constant attempt to prove. And so the more opportunities you have to work out, who am I in the face of real life, real adversity, all of that stuff, the chip that you feel of someone who's got a lot to prove comes down because you actually have more of a sense of who I am in those spaces, the bravado. That's why, you know, the classic example is that's why martial artists are never aggressive people, because they know it's the one who's still trying to work out, have I got it? That's where the edges always are. The knowing gets established through more encounters with yourself. Knowing where your edges are, knowing how far you can push, finding your grit, finding how you handle fear, finding how you handle the fear of being vulnerable. And that's why those spaces so well guide, well guided radically change a man. And that's why the work you're doing is so incredible and important in these times. Because it's, it's, it's a lost art form.

Yeah, it is. And I think, you know what's interesting is I've become more and more present to the importance. I have a, he's almost two, I have a, almost two year old son. And I think I went through a bit of a period of being so focused in, on career and building and when my son was born, all of a sudden this sort of very primal urge came back online. Go out, go out in nature, be out in nature. Take men, you know, deeper into nature. And so like this year, everything that we're doing is just outdoors, you know, in Zion national park, in Olympic National Park. And so just taking men into the depths of the forest and the wilderness because it, and it sort of was sparked by having my son remembering my childhood, which was so outside. Everything was outside, you know, whether I was camping or building igloos in the snow or whatever it was. And this sort of emergence of the importance of bringing him through those experiences and the excitement that I had within me to bring him outside. I mean he's, he's not even, you know, he's going to be two this, this spring and summer and I'm like already planning tenting outside, you know, and taking him camping and, and so, but I wanted to circle back on this, this, this initiation I think with the Shangan trackers and kind of get a sense of what did you take out of that? What did you start to learn about tracking? Why was that so important? And, and how did that fit into maybe initiation for, for you personally?

It was deeply initiative for me. And the beautiful thing about it was the Shangan people, they allowed me to be with them. And it was through the share the being together that I slowly started to learn how the process works. I think that that's a, that's a missing piece. It's not like they were like, okay, now we're going to take you and teach you. It's just the consistent ability to be and to watch and to observe. When I made mistakes, they would never scold me for making mistakes or tell me or, or judge me. They would just Slowly adjust me. And as I started to learn the skill through shared presence, through being with them, I started to get more and more confidence. You know, there's like, it's just something so beautiful about learning something, Starting to know that you're good at it. Starting to feel like, here's a thing that I can do. It's just, it's just such a great way for someone to get solid in themselves. Any skill that you learn to do. So it was all of those things, and in some ways it was just hard to say, but it was just being with these guys who are such masters of their craft and learning how they moved and learning how they handled dangerous situations and then being with them in, you know, we would, we would go out and we would track lions and you know, you find the lion, lion would growl at you. And watching how, how much presence they had, and I think that was, I would say that in some ways that was the biggest thing is, I guess what I saw in them was a different model of power. And they were never trying to be dominant over the animals, dominant over the environment, dominant over me. You the student, I'm the teacher. They were constantly in a state of deep presence. What I mean by that is they were in tune with what the moment was asking for. And so when it was, when it was light hearted, they were light hearted. When the terrain became thick and dangerous, their whole energy changed. And they were constantly adapting themselves to that moment. And there was this very deep sense that our wellbeing was tied to each other. You know, there's this idea in Africa of Ubuntu, or I am because of you. And it's, it's a deep psychological state of relationality. You know, somehow my wellbeing is deeply tied to your well being. And they expanded that to all of the animals around them too. And, you know, I remember I was once out with Renius, who was this incredible Shangan tracker. And we came across a huge elephant bull. And the bull got a fright because the wind changed and we were suddenly too close to him. And he turned and he threw his ears forward and he walked towards us, which an elephant will sometimes do. And he looked at us sort of down his tusks. And for a moment Reynias stood just until the bull stopped. And then as he stopped, he turned and he walked away. And then he stopped again. And then he said to me afterwards, you know, Boyd, I want to show that animal that we respect him and we want to give him his space. And there was just something Renius was Like that all the time. He was. He was just in a state of deep respect with the world around him. And when you're tracking, you're in a dialogue with the natural world. Birds are calling, and that language is telling you something. The ground is telling you a story. The freshness of the tracks and the way that the tracks are laid down are telling you cadence and movement of the animals. It's almost like as you follow the tracks, you can feel the animal. A monkey starts to alarm, and that tells you that that animal is even closer. And then a starts to call, and it's all speaking to you. And I think that it was just that type of relationality that really affected me. And in a consumer culture, you know, the individual self is disconnected from the greater whole. And as a result of that, the search for meaning is reduced to how am I doing in comparison to everyone else? And there's this, like, comparative dynamic that. That you live inside of in a consumeristic culture, whereas out there, you're in relation all the time. And it's just a different. It's literally a different psychological state.

One of the things that is sort of standing out to me is this notion of power through presence and this sort of, how am I doing in relationship to you versus compared to you? Which is those are two very different modalities, you know, two very different ways of being. And the return to this sense of how am I doing in relationship to you? I think is something that's very salvaging to our nature, both internally as an individual and from a community's perspective.

And what will keep you out of your own presence, which is the natural world. The natural world is a wordless environment. So immediately it pulls you out of the verbal mind, and then it's more of a feeling state. So if an animal is aggressive towards you, you feel it more in your own body as opposed to, say, think it. So it's like it's speaking to you in the way it moves. The things that will keep us out of presence are trauma. So when we take something that happened in the past and we're now interjecting it over every moment, you know, I was betrayed once. Is this person going to betray me? Becomes the frame we look through. I was in extreme danger once. Am I in extreme danger now? So the trauma, putting the past onto the present moment. Roles is another thing that really keeps us out of presence. You know, even with the Shanghai trackers, what I watched with them is they were constantly changing roles. There was no one who was saying, I am the Leader of this group, I am the one who's going to make the decisions as a team. They were constantly adjusting. Who's good at this type of following, who's good at bird language, who's good. And so in the more work we are able to do to weed out the things that froze us in the past and the more in tune with the moment we are, more able we are to let go of our role. I think that the definition of a functional family is everyone in the family changes roles regularly and dysfunction is the rigidity of being stuck in a role. I am the provider, and therefore that's all I can ever do. And so I think of that presence as access to the moment. And, you know, there are times when, you know, when you find an animal, the way you have to deal with it has to be live and different. If it, you know, if it's at a distance and it gets up and it looks at you and it puts its head down, you know, immediately you want to start to give it space. If it advances on you aggressively, you need to stand your ground. And as you're watching it, you know, if a lion charges you and it charges up close to you and it's bristling and it's growling in front of you, you have to watch its body and be extremely aggressive at first. And then if you see a slight relaxation in the body, you drop the pressure off to say, I see you relaxing, I'm relaxing too. And in order to do that, you have to be reacting moment to moment with what that animal is telling you. And so it's another way that nature pulls you into the presence.

It's super interesting because I've never had any experiences like what you're talking about outside of, you know, encounters with a couple bears here and there, and elk and caribou and stuff like that, but not through a tracking lens, just encountering them in nature. But as you're describing this, what I am getting a real clear sense of is a very similar way to how I facilitate when I'm working with men, which is really shocking. A little bit, you know, like, really tuning into the moment of, like, how is he responding to that question? How is he responding to the area that I'm guiding him in? And, and I would say that 95 to 98% of what I'm really tuning into is non verbal. And so can you, can you talk a little bit about this, like, framework that seems to be emerging?

Oh, my goodness, I'm so glad you said that. A hundred percent. I would Say that that is the second. Well, I would say that's the first language and speaking is the second language. And part of what happened to me is when I started facilitating with people who had extreme trauma, I was just kind of blown away by how in tune I was with them because I had spent my whole life watching animals. And so as what you're describing is like as you hug the person, you feel the texture of their body, you feel the feeling in your own body, you watch how they move as you start to bring certain questions to the force. And it's all there, it's all there at a, a wild language, a language that we all innately know. And it's a language of energy. If you walk up to a lion, it is talking to you without saying a word the entire time you're around it, by the way the head moves, by how it positions its ears, by a subtle tightening in the body, by a look in its eyes, all of that stuff. And if you learn to read that it is communicating energy to you, I think that that's exact. And if you want to be with that energy, you need to have a level of personal presence to be able to feel it and sense it. And you need to be able to be out of your mind and agenda of like, this has got to go here because it's happening live. And it's the capacity to be with it that is really the art form. So that makes total sense. And the same when I started going into journey spaces where people were using plant medicines, it was a hundred percent occurring at a more archetypal level, a level of energy of the way the body was positioned, the way that people need to hold each other or create space for themselves. It's a primal primates language for sure. As someone who facilitates, what happens when you're a tracker is kind of we could go walk down a path together. And if we were in the African bush, I'm going to see more tracks than you because I've taught myself what I'm looking for in the facilitation space. When you've done it a lot, you, you know what you're looking for and you know kind of what means what. And you, it's like you've seen these tracks enough to know, okay, that's a shutting down energy. So now that's rage starting to come up, that's old grief, that's a wounding in the father and not knowing how to place yourself with men, that's a wounding in the mother and feeling like I need to get away like you've categorized because you've watched it enough and you know the places. So it's almost 100% contiguous with the art form of tracking, reading energy in facilitation.

So let's sort of creep up on this. And then I, I have some very sort of specific questions I wanted to sort of close out with. How does one track a lion? What are.

Like, what are some of the, what are some of the core foundational pieces of what goes into track tracking? Because I think it's such an interesting metaphor, framework for the, the healing that we're talking about. But what goes into that? Like, what did you have to learn in terms of what to look for? And, yeah, maybe I'll just hand it over to you and kind of get that.

Well, the first thing is that all tracking begins with becoming extremely comfortable with not knowing. You know, when you set out in the morning to go and find tracks, you're walking into a wilderness the size of Switzerland. You have no idea what you're gonna find. You don't know what the mood of that animal is. You don't know if you even find tracks. And, and it's important, like, what trackers are able to do is to go without knowing. If you arrive at a place in your life where you wanna make change. The paradox of searching is that if you knew what you were searching for, you wouldn't be searching. And men, in our culture, it is, we are told from the moment we arrive that not knowing is not an option. You gotta know. But if you want to start to transform yourself into a different expression of yourself, or you arrive at a juncture where you feel stuck, you're looking for something new, the first thing that you're going to have to say is, I don't know exactly how to do this. I don't know what I'm tracking yet. So the first movement of tracking is, I don't know, go out into the wild, but. But don't know, but with attention. And there's actually something amazing when you finally arrive at the place and say, like, you know what? I don't know, but I want to know. You wake up in your own life because you have to switch your attention back on. I say that, you know, as men, falling asleep in our life is almost archetypal through our life. Periodically we will fall asleep and if we find ourselves asleep and suddenly say, you know, I, I can't believe this is my life. I don't know where this is going. I don't know, our attention switches back on and so much of tracking is the discipline of attention. It's amazing what happens when we're actually paying attention. So that's the first thing. The next thing that you will have to do if you go out into the wilderness is you will have to develop your track awareness. Now, track awareness is what I was saying to you. Like we walked out of this idea when I was a kid. They would reni us this. The man who mentored me would send me down a path and he would say to me, come back and tell me what tracks you see. I walk down the path, I come back, I say, I can see where a herd of impala walked here. Said to me, go look again. And I would look more closely and this time I would see much more. I would see where an owl had swooped down during the night and you could see where its wing attached and I could see where a small rodent had run across the road. And every time I walked down that path, as I attuned my eyes more and became more skilled, there was more information. And that idea in personal transformation and coaching spaces is radical. There is information, you just have to teach yourself to see it. And so what I would say to, to people or men at a, at a moment of transition is you are looking to attune to a different track. It's non rational. It's deeper than what you should do or have to do. And I want you to pay attention to things that make you feel energetically expansive. I want you to notice what your body naturally moves towards. I want you to get in touch with your curiosity because you will be naturally curious about things that are essential to you. I want you to feel where you lose time. I want you to literally notice who makes you lean forward in your chair. Start to pay attention to what energizes you because that is going to be telling you about your track. So develop your track awareness. Non rational knowing. Then I would say work with the first track. You can imagine you find a lion's track. This is where Renius used to say to me, I don't know where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. And what he meant, all I need is a first track and then a next first track and then a next first track. And in a wilderness the size of Switzerland, where you look up and you got 360 degrees of wilderness around you, all he needs is that first track and then that next first track and then that next first track. And so when we're in transformational spaces, Joseph Campbell had that Saying that if you can see your whole life laid out ahead of you, it's not your life normally. If we've been willing to be in the unknown, start to develop our track awareness, we don't get the whole avenue. We just get the next thing we know to do. One step every day towards what makes you feel a little more essential, a little more energized, a little more. That's a yes to me. When we do that consistently over time, it starts to take us somewhere. So I say to people a lot, if you want to make consistent change, you don't have to blow your life up. You have to make daily small changes. First tracks. Then if you start to do those well, you get into what I would call the following state. And it's beautiful to watch. Trackers in the following state. They start to move fast on the track. Their eye is taking in these subtle scuff marks. They're vectoring to trees up ahead of them, getting a sense of the. The direction that animal is walking. They're tuned into bird language. Everything is talking to them. And they're in a kind of a generative energy state of play almost. They're playing in their craft, in their skill. If the track cuts to the right, one tracker will click and put his finger down and say, I'm on it. If it cuts to the left, the next guy will be on it. And there's this. It's just the most incredible concentrated flow state. When you really tracking well, it's like you reading a complicated book. It's that same level of concentration and as sort of like you're in the story now, constant creative response to what is happening. And that means you're also. Things are going to go wrong and you're just adapting. So normally, you know, if you've let go of a known duck identity and you're looking for a new identity, part of it is like, you have to get creative with that journey. Things are going to go wrong. It's not going to happen how you thought it was going to happen. So you just, you're attuning and playing in the creation of your new life as opposed to having to know and get it right. You know, it's a very light generative awareness. If you are tracking, you will 100% lose the track. And it's important to know that because you, like, you let go of that job, you let go of that relationship. I'm making some changes. I don't know. This guy said first tracks. Okay. You know, and then suddenly you lose the Track. It's important to know that midway through a transformation or on a track, losing the track is going to happen. And when the trackers lose the track, they do an interesting thing. They will go back to where they last had a clear track. You might say, when was I last on track? Who was I with? What was I doing? Where did I feel most energized? What was speaking to me? The other thing they'll do is they give themselves the room to discover and they'll just move up ahead, checking open ground, check that game path, send someone down to that dry river bed, just give themselves the freedom to discover, which is a game. We don't give ourselves that. I would say never track alone. So as much as possible, get other trackers around you for their skill. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you start to make changes, you got to be careful who's around you, because if people around you are afraid of making change, they're going to sell you their fears. So it's helpful to get other people around you who believe, like, okay, we can do this, we're going to find this animal. And if you start to put all of those things together, the really amazing thing is the energy state that you're going to be in is being hyper committed to finding that animal. But actually the finding, it becomes secondary to, to the just being here on the track. And I mean, you stop, you, you fall into the realms of cliches here about it's, you know, it's not the destination, it's the journey. But when you're tracking and when you're like really living into your own transformation, the act of being in the transformation should be so engaging that you let go of the ideal of where I should get to. And, and so that is some of how tracking tracks a little bit life. And what's funny is, like men in particular, we understand tracking. We track our bank accounts, we track how our businesses are going, we track, you know, we track what's going on in the world around us. We get it. And I'm just saying that you actually in you is a tracker that knows how to follow the track of your own life. If you just give it a bit of attention intuitively, you will find, that's my track. That's my track. That's, for me, the one thing that I will say is that you just remember that the, the culture we live in is nonstop presenting you with a series of ideals about what it means to be a success, to be a man. And in some ways, part of this transformation is to let go of those ideals out there and just live a little closer in here on the track of what energizes you and notice what happens when you attend to that.

I think it's so powerful because over the last decade, when I've been working with men, I've been trying to hone the way that I present a path towards things like purpose or forgiveness. Because for so many men, the notion of, well, how do I forgive myself for that infidelity or for that pain that I cause, or how do I forgive the other person that may have betrayed me or wronged me, and our rational predilection is almost towards, like, I need an immediate answer, I need a right now and. And I don't want to live the question of what might it look like to forgive. And I think the sort of formula or framework that you just outlined is such a beautiful example of what it can look like to sneak up on forgiveness, to sneak up on purpose, you know, to kind of find our way and to have permission for it to unfold rather than be something that we, that we, you know, immediately find or dig it out of the ground. It's like, no, you're going to have to do some following, some searching, and you're going to have to be on that path maybe for longer than you'd like. I think the unknown element that we often struggle with is how fucking long is this going to take for me to heal, for me to find this purpose, for me to forgive that person? I'm trying to be mindful of time. Is there anything that you wanted to say on that? Because I have two other questions that I'd be remiss to miss.

No, but because there is a call in the path of the tracker too, just to build on what you're saying. There is a call and it says that, know, let go of being perfect and take up the role of the track. Find the track of your life. And if you really are following it, really following it day to day, with attention, with awareness, facing being in the wilderness, facing the unknowns of living as someone who wants to actually be attuned to what really speaks to you day to day, there is no end to that track. So let go of that. It is a. It is a way of living that. And you get this when you're around trackers. They live to follow. They live to be on that track and they love it. And there's a. I think there's a powerful call in there for men like we. There ain't no Destination here, when you really start to live in the joy of moment to moment presence. What. What calls me forth and what is life asking of me? And if I pay enough attention, if every moment, I will know that.

Yeah, so, so beautifully said. And I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense for my own life because I think in many ways I've almost rarely known the destination that I'm going. People ask me all the time, like, well, how did you know to start your company? How'd you know to do this work? How'd you know to make this decision or that? I'm like, honestly, most of the time it wasn't clear. I was just following this intuition. I was following this, this gut intelligence. I was pursuing something. And I don't know where the end goal of that is going to lead me. I mean, it led me from, you know, my home in Northern Alberta to Vancouver, bc, to out to, you know, Manhattan, to upstate New York. And, you know, now we're going to go back west somewhere. And so I think it's interesting what you're saying because it's almost like following this track in some ways. What am I trying to say? It presents a journey that we can go on in our life rather than having our life being. Trying to like, mold into this cold, calculated, okay, well, I do this and then I do that and it's all mapped out for me. And then I retire at 65, and then I go on the cruises and then at some point I'll wear diapers and die. You know, it's like, well, that sounds. That sounds terrible. You know, that sounds soul crushing.

And you know, what I would say to that is like, you cannot underestimate the challenge of living on the track of your own life. It is a wild thing to find your track and then say, like, I'm going after this.

It's terrifying.

It's terrifying. And the whole, you know, Joseph Campbell, everyone used to quote this thing that Joseph Campbell had, which was follow your bliss, you know, and they miss the rest of the quote, which is, follow your bliss. You might not be respected, but at least you will be in your own life. And it's kind of an important addition to the quote because, like, if you're willing to follow this thing, it means you are. You're out on an edge. There's no structure. Life's not telling you who to be. It's not coming at you every day. You are going at it. Other people don't understand it for a long time. Other people might think you're lost is that there's a singular kind of courage and knowing and following it. And if you do follow it through the disrespect that no one knows what you're doing, you do come into your own life. But it's a fricking courageous path. This is not like, I think I'm just going to, like, follow my. Live my best life. This is an edge. And anytime you're on an edge, you're closer to something wild.

Yes. I was going to mock the word manifest there. So I feel like that's the new rage. It's just manifest. I'm manifesting this life. It's like, oh, no, you can't. Like, you would never track a lion or find a sense of purpose by just sitting in one place. I'm just going to manifest, pull it towards me. It's like, no, no, you have to be in pursuit of it in some way. I mean, maybe you can manifest certain things. But anyway, I have to ask you two questions. One, how do you think about, or how do you merge or find a sense of balance between the wild or the primal and the domestic as a man? Because I think this is something that a lot of men are grappling with. And maybe you don't necessarily have an answer for it, but it seems like you kind of live in some ways this very wild life, but then also find yourself in spaces where there is quote unquote, domestication right there, city life and whatnot. And so how do you find a balance between those two things or merge those two things?

Yeah, you know, people ask me a lot, well, how do you. How do you do when you come to the cities and you're in New York and you're in LA and you're in. And for me, what I say to them is, when I am living on the track of my life, and for me, that has been storytelling, coaching, guiding, working in ceremonial spaces. When I'm on that, I'm in my wildness because it's a wild thing to find what really calls you forth and follow it. I can be in the middle of New York City, and if I'm following that thing inside of me, I'm still connected with my wildness. So that's. That's one side of the coin. And then I think. I think that the other side is. I'm good about getting into solitude. I've learned myself. I'm. I need time alone in nature, and whenever that is, I need 10 days somewhere, which I know is very difficult for most people. But what I would say to a lot of men that I speak to is like, what are the consequences of not going and getting the solitude you need? Every man needs solitude. And my argument is that if you, if you can talk to your wife, you can talk to your family to work out how to get yourself some of that, you will have more to give. There's like a paradox. Like if I'm away, I'm not going to be helping and giving with the family. And I'm saying if you're away, you charge yourself up and you bring a lot back to give. And the same for the feminine, like, go and charge up. You got to work out how to do that. Otherwise you do just get mired in the daily of it. And I think that we lose those archetypal energies that refresh us. So I would say get into nature, find ways to be still. Find ways to be tangibly engaged in things, literally cut wood, carry water that it regrounds us. Get comfortable with being alone in wild places and find your track and follow it. Because then you doesn't matter. You can be in the suburbs of Westchester. If you're on the track of your life, you are connected to something wild.

Beautifully said. And I feel like that's probably a good place for us to end. I had a couple other questions, but I don't want to make you late for anything after this. I mean, I had. I had dozens of questions, to be honest, that I had written out.

We'll have to do it again.

Yeah, we will have to do a part two for sure. I'd be honored to do that. Boyd, where can people find more about you and your work and sort of follow along with your journey?

Absolutely. Boydvarty.com has got all the information. My most recent book is Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. It's a real simple book. I've written two books and I just really love that one. I think it's. It captures it all. So those are two options. Boydvarty.com and then I did a podcast while I was living. I went and lived in a tree for 40 days and 40 nights in solitude in the wild. And that is the track your life podcast with Boyd Varti. And I think it's on all the platforms.

Outstanding. Well, we'll have all the links to that in the show notes so people can go and check that out. Boyd, I appreciate you being here, team. You're tuning into this man it forward Share this conversation far and wide. I'm sure that this is one of those conversations that there's many people in your life that maybe you want to listen to it with or alongside and have some discourse around. So man the podcast forward, share it with somebody. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. Take care of.