Track Your Life with Boyd Varty

The expedition begins with Alex van den Heever - close friend, seasoned wildlife tracker and founder of the Tracker Academy. We want to understand how closely the Bushmen people are still living in tune with nature. We want to find out what skills have been lost and what still survive. We want to understand whether the ancient hunting skills associated with the art of tracking are still being taught.

-- The Tracker Academy was established to preserve the indigenous knowledge of wildlife tracking.

(0.44) Alex van Heerden, Renias Mhlongo and the Tracker Academy

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

A good story will set you apart in almost any setting.

When I was working as a safari guide, I would notice that a story could always shift the group's energetic momentum towards you, which is important when you are guiding. More than being a momentum shifter, a well-crafted story could, in the right moment, be profoundly transcendent.

If you cultivate your capacity as a storyteller, you cultivate your life. If you are becoming a storyteller, you're working on your life as much as you're working in it. Stepping back to work on, and develop, the multiple stories that make up your life is important work. It will radically leverage your life and your impact in almost any setting.

Humans are narrative creatures. This has been true since the first people told stories around the fire. When you become a master of narrative, you become a world maker.

(5:35) David Rattray, South African Historian, and the story that set him apart

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

If you have begun the journey of becoming a Story Hunter, you have become a character who finds characters, switched on your attention, learnt to see with the right kind of eyes, become someone who can create context. You are now ready to touch the core of what makes the story elevated. I call it the personal collective.

There is a strangely universal truth that the more in touch you are with your own unique personal essence, the more what you have to say becomes universally meaningful. The most private things are the most universal things.

Any type of trying to be commercially successful or thinking about the end user while you work will kill an artist's freedom. Yet if you are a storyteller, you want the story to be listener friendly. I always think about how a listener could put their own story into my stories. This is not a rule but rather an orientation. Like a compass, I point personal story towards a subtextual, universal story. A story always has an archetypal core.

Londolozi - https://boydvarty.com/retreats/visit-londolozi/

(3.30) The Tsalala pride

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

There is a deep chasm between the making of art and the experiencing of it. When I am in that chasm - a solitary path - I know I must face the resistance in the now, knowing what it can give in the future.

Are you willing to do what it takes to be creative? Art is experienced by the public, in the public. But in most cases it is created in crushing solitude. At some point, if you are to produce good work, you will need to be alone in a room for a long time. Within those days there will be beautiful flow. But mostly there will be a kind of self consciousness, at times even a self hatred, of procrastination - a dull judging solitude. It is always a profound challenge to be alone long enough to create something of quality. I certainly know this as a writer.

As a Story Hunter you must have the courage to be alone enough to make your art.

(03:15) David Foster Wallace - chasm of art

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

As a Story Hunter, I have found that remote places are often the natural habitat of wild characters.

Finding characters in life is becoming harder, as life becomes more homogenized. Characters almost always have found their own uniqueness and a path to express it. They seem to fit what they’re doing - they know what lights them up. They know what they have to offer. And almost always, they know how to live in a way that is unique to them.

Characters almost always have a different worldview, and they are often world class in an unusual field. When you spend time with a character who has mastered a state, your own sense of what is truly possible is expanded.

Characters help you imagine a world of possibility for yourself.

(5:40) Losing an arm to a crocodile

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

Being lost is part of being found.

In this episode, I share my experience of being lost, tracking lions with group of guests on a Track Your Life retreat.

Stories are layered with meaning. Meaning is almost always a constellation of thoughts and beliefs that weave into a story - and retreat participants were pulled into an unfolding co-created story, making meaning out of the experience. They had learnt a basic universal lesson: there is always something unfolding as it should.

I learnt a lot during those few hours of being lost. In particular, I had learnt that nothing bad ever happened to a storyhunter.

-The Track your Life Retreat is an extraordinary experience of self discovery. Find out more: https://trackyourlife.co.za/

(02:06) Lost in lion country

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Visit Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

If the truth is stranger than fiction, then the art of storytelling is not to make something up, but rather to really see what is there. Reality, if you look close enough, is almost always hilarious.

Storytelling is about providing context and meaning. It's a discipline of attention, a way of helping others understand the world around them.

(02:04) Barry, the Buffalo

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

If you are to become a storyhunter you must live stories. You must find a way to say yes to life beyond the known.

Seek out people and places that resonate with things you're naturally curious about. Curiosity will pull you into unknown circles. If you can be in those spaces, adventures will emerge.

Make friends with people who will pull your life into stories. Say yes to something you normally wouldn’t. There is a story across town, if you can learn to say yes to life.

(02:32) The Rift Valley

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa. Visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

A person who can tell a story is gifted with the ability to help people understand and feel. A truly brilliant storyteller is structuring awareness - they are an instrument for meaning. This is why storytelling - an ancient shamanic art - is magic.

This podcast series emerged out of a time when I had retreated back into the wild african bushveld, after three years of almost endless travel. I wanted to disappear for a while. I have come to think of anonymity as one of life’s deepest gifts. Almost instinctively, after a period of time, I found myself chasing stories again.

This is how I became a Story Hunter.

(3:34) Martha Beck: Creative people bounce

Online Courses:

Discover Boyd's books:

Come to Africa - visit Londolozi

Join Boyd’s community:

Links:

• Uncover the track of your life through Boyd's online guided retreat- Track Your Life.
• Discover Boyd's books
• Experience Africa. Immerse your senses and awaken your spirit on a Londolozi Safari
• Dr Martha Beck

https://boydvarty.com/world-village/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/