Boyd Varty (@boyd_varty) is the founder of Track Your Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. He is a lion tracker, storyteller, and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions, tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose-driven, meaningful life and to discover their most authentic, essential self. 

Boyd is a TED speaker, the author of Cathedral of the Wild and The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, and the host of the Track Your Life podcast. Using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation, Boyd has taught his philosophy of “Tracking Your Life” to companies and individuals all over the world.

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Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.

SHOW NOTES & LINKS

Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Boyd Varty:

Website | Twitter | Instagram

Featured Projects

Boyd’s Last Appearance on This Show

Tracking, Bush Craft, and Persistence Hunting

Places and Wild Contexts

Practical Carry-Overs from Wild to City

Books

Movies and TV Shows

Animals

People

TIMESTAMPS

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:01:59] Boyd returns.
• [00:03:14] Elite firefighting unit: Boyd’s French Foreign Legionnaire predecessor.
• [00:04:27] The paper mache lion incident and Lucky’s dramatic exit.
• [00:08:07] Firefighting drill disaster: When 50/50 failed spectacularly.
• [00:09:58] Leadership lesson: Bringing energy down when chaos climbs.
• [00:11:52] Story hunting and the natural world as meaning machine.
• [00:17:16] Uncle JV: Wildlife filmmaker with a dangerous drama meter.
• [00:19:10] Camera bearing adventures: Elephants, hyenas, and the red mist.
• [00:22:30] Zambia expeditions: Crocodiles, dead elephants, and shovel oars.
• [00:25:48] Orienting toward safety: Building capability versus childhood overwhelm.
• [00:29:11] Wilderness retreat lessons: Wordlessness and natural state.
• [00:31:40] The Londolozi time war: Tech detox and parasympathetic shifts.
• [00:39:49] Mystical animal encounters: Lions, southern boubous, and synchronicity.
• [00:43:11] Re-enchantment: Nature’s desire to help us heal.
• [00:45:25] Following non-rational energy and forays into wordlessness.
• [00:52:31] Diana Chapman’s Whole-Body Yes and avoiding the simmering six.
• [00:58:04] Toby Pheasant and the great black mamba escape.
• [01:06:09] Training for persistence hunting using Bushman Great Dance wisdom.
• [01:09:23] The desert as storehouse: Abundance psychology in action.
• [01:11:23] Persistence hunt mechanics: Heat, time, and the animal’s energy transfer.
• [01:15:04] Running into ceremony: 47 degrees and letting the body know.
• [01:21:31] The kudu gives itself: Profound respect at the edge of survival.
• [01:27:22] Seeking the wild man: Access to the full spectrum of presence.
• [01:29:20] Context and discernment: Armor in cities, openness in wild spaces.
• [01:34:55] Men need men: Collective exploration around the fire.
• [01:37:40] Relationship as practice: Moving from romantic myth to active work.
• [01:40:15] Dick jokes and raft building: The indirect work that does heavy lifting.
• [01:45:43] Lunch the baboon: Hand lotion, bloody handprints, and royal delays.
• [01:55:43] Living amongst the animals: Warthog intelligence and leopard relationships.
• [01:57:27] Parting thoughts.

MORE BOYD VARTY QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“The natural world is not just where meaning constellates. It is meaning in some fundamental way.”

— Boyd Varty

“I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where her take on the natural world is that it’s a wordless environment. If you look at the animals, they don’t have verbal minds. You don’t see them thinking past and future. You don’t see lions lying there thinking, ‘Oh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday; we can’t trust her going forward.’ If you can go into wordlessness, then very quickly people start going into oneness. The key thing I have found now is get people to be quiet, get them into more wordlessness, create an opportunity for them to interact and receive lessons from the natural world, and then things rapidly start to happen.”

— Boyd Varty

“I think people need to be re-enchanted. One of the things that we’re afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be that woo woo, just to see a leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a marula tree and to feel like, ‘God, this is the beauty of it,’ and to have that affect you in some profound way. I’ve just seen so much of it now. I’m a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.”

— Boyd Varty

“All roads in personal transformation lead to the information inside you. You actually know it’s in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards.”

— Boyd Varty

“To [The Bushmen], the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There’s no sense of needing to hold or store because it’s an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.”

— Boyd Varty

“It’s not just a random baboon, but it’s like, ‘That’s Lunch.’ And it’s not just a random leopard, but we know this leopard. She allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her, and that’s a very, very deep and beautiful way to live.”

— Boyd Varty

“The natural world is a story machine. It’s a meaning machine. It’s a symbolic machine.”

— Boyd Varty

“If you start saying, ‘I want to go out into the local park; I want to go out into my garden and I have a specific question,’ and you write that question down and you start asking, specifically nature, ‘Could you help me answer that question?’ It’s almost like a Zen koan. You’re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers. Then what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.”

— Boyd Varty

“Often when I say to people, ‘Stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun set, watching it go from stars to stars.’”

— Boyd Varty

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Want to hear Boyd’s first appearance on the show? Listen to our original conversation in which we discussed the origins of Londolozi Game Reserve, the ancient lineage of Shangaan trackers, living 40 days and 40 nights in a tree, crocodile attacks, the killer bee story, tracking as a philosophy for life, and much more.