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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/
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/
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/
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/
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/
Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Once in the far north of Kruger national park's pafuri area I found a clear pool of spring water rising out the earth.
I think to know wild water in these times is the kind of thing we have forgotten to even know we want. The way it runs into you full of the codes of the minerals and plants of that place……wild water is full of information that attunes your body with its energy.
I'm going to talk in a very shamanic way about how to get to know a river.
I might say it like this
This was running through my head as the pickup swung through the foothills and climbed the escarpment. As the crow flies the mountains were only 90 km from where I had lived in the tree but by car it was a circuitous 180 km winding drive that took you from 300 meters lowlands up to about 1600 m on the edge of south africa's high plateau.
My destination was my friend's bungalow, a beautiful mountain cabin with no lights and streams full of trout that flowed past it .The landscape around the house is a rugged kind of african Scottish highlands. High ridged terrain with deep vegetative gorges. Unusual birds, eland and mountain reedbuck….and a silence in which a leopard that was never seen slipped past.
That first night in the bungalow the man did not sleep. He was between this world and the next.
Eventually I rose well before dawn, drank a cup of coffee and set off with my friend through the freezing dark for the highest peak.
The summit at dawn was icy with a whipping wind and a thick fog so that one could not see how the land fell to the east calling to the water.
The man came down from that communion with the high peak with stiff legs found a cold mountain pool to swim in.
I tell you these things in these ways as a remedy. I don’t mean to be flowery or poetic but in my time with native people I started to think of the relationship with all things as an exchange of an unseen aliveness. A connected story….like the story of all water… in which you weave yourself into the web of other currents of life. A river, a mountain, a friend.
I could tell you that on the night of the day we submitted we drove up a steep hill with a bag full of beers to watch the sunset.
Leaving that hillside at dusk the man saw a flash of eyes in the headlights.
4-0 out.
Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
Connect with Boyd Varty:
Find out more about Londolozi
Followed a rhino bull, but he led me in circles. I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that a rhino was trying to shake me off his tail. To add to the confusion there were also tracks of a female rhino from the night before.
If the rhino was my nemesis then he was my sacred enemy. The difficulty he was providing was causing untold growth in my tracking ability.
Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
Connect with Boyd Varty:
Find out more about Londolozi
Journal entry.
The best time to be in the leadwood forest is in the creamy light of a full moon.
In my days as a safari guide I would wait for the third or fourth day of a safari. I would wait for the hysteria to see animals to subside and then take people to the forest.
The poet david whyte talks about the conversational nature of life. The idea that your life will never be exactly how you planned it to be but equally it will never be exactly the way life wanted it. for all our living days we are in a co-created experience with living…..some of our agency….mixed with life or god, or whatever you call its plan.
As dawn breaks in the forest a dark bull nyala lifts his head out of long brown winter grass to look at me.
A hyena is the perfect embodiment of opportunism.
Im developing a strange technique for this podcast. What I do is go to a place like the leadwood forest.
Opening myself to a different way of knowing. It's like I'm trawling through the feeling of the place and each feeling is full of invisible codes that later when I sit down with my notebook will start to come out as memories, encounters, stories and insights.
You see like those hyena calls in the forest this morning took me to an image of the hyena. In my mind's eye I saw his slanted body loping away with the leg of a giraffe held across his jaws and a look of glee on his face.
This idea makes me think of the hundreds of people I coached who have started having huge transformations when they started to ask clearly without agenda or attachment for what they want.
I think of how early on in my own journey this idea was totally foreighn to me.
“Will you move over for me? I need more space” could not sound more silly to me now but at the time it was the silly beginning to much big wants and asks that I was going to allow myself. It was a breakthrough to something new. A first step I could build on
What will keep you out of asking for what you want?
If you think i'm being trite well then try it.
Will you walk with me
Pay attention to where you can just ask……..notice where you cant…….notice where you don’t because you assume you know what the answer will be.
Track this like a tracker Something calls me to the forest as a sacred site……im there at dawn on a particular day to hear a hyena call……..this sets me thinking about how my life changed when I just started asking clearly …….transmitted via this podcast to you…….now you pick up the thread and see where it takes you this week.
Take action…….ask clearly for what you want and please report back.
4-0 out.
Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
Connect with Boyd Varty:
Find out more about Londolozi
Journal entry.
Tracks of huge pride of lions cut off a beautiful white sandy road onto a game path.
I was not planning on tracking but this is life in the wild. This is life as a tracker you must let yourself create with the moment.
Then a herd of zebras followed the elephants cutting the hard ground on top of where lions padded past.
Now I must follow as a shadow tracker…..to follow these lions I must become a student of vagaries, a follower of faint impulses and weak imprints…..i must drift through the terrain every reactive… ever alert…..moving on invisible lines that those tawny creators may have taken through the thick terrain. Anticipating
If I want to see each track or be sure I'm on their trail I will make myself crazy.
The shadow trackers energy is that of drifting….as if in a world between worlds…..noticing…..moving with attention…..but with the world in a soft focus around you.
I tell you this now awakeners because that unexpected lion trail was teaching me how to follow the trail of my own shadow.
It's your most unsocialized primal desires. There is biting and talking without asking.
But your shadow denied will run parts of you with unconscious force until you can meet it as a friend. I say this now cause we are in the time of shadow….and we must work in ourselves to work in the world.
Shadow tracking… is for if you want to get to know yourself more deeply.
Notice the people who make you most mad and uncomfortable. They are holding your shadow.
That which we repress bursts out at strange times or runs our lives without us knowing.
Do not try to understand the shadow. Do not try to identify it outright. Not like a shadow tracker drift in the half land where it lives. Become aware of it.
Ask yourself……that person I can't bear why ?……they are narcissistic, loud, self centred. What are they holding so you don’t have to.
That’s the part of you that is repressed.
As you drift towards the guarded outlines of your shadow with this soft eyed attention you will find themes.
Oh shadow tracking is not an exact science it’s a kind of background attention on actions and intentions and thoughts and reactions.
Maybe you just had a conversations with your boss….or your partner…….you find yourself after the account running an enraged conversation in your head with them…..about how they don’t fucking get it.
Work is the shadow is to balance yourself in real goodness. The awareness of what lives in you and the choice in how to consciously be with that all.
I exit the thick terraine after about thirty minutes of shadow tracking…..below me is a dry river bed where thick riversand covers the ground….i use the sand to cut back onto the tracks….the entire pride crossing the dry water course and suddenly I am back on their trail with absolute clarity. Now I follow the imprint of toes and lobed pads across beautiful terrain.
Every day the wild is my teacher.
Slowly I walk back to my land rover watching my shadow beside me
4-0 out.
Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
Connect with Boyd Varty:
Find out more about Londolozi
Journal entry.
Plaque rock is a beautiful dome of granite that sits logged deep into the river bank.
The rock is warm in the late evening having absorbed the sun's heat and if you lay with your back on it will share that warmth with you. the whole rock feels alive. Like it has its own intelligence. Like the rock itself is a living presence.
As I sit there on a winter's day I am the centre of a small universe that spins around it.
There's something you don’t do enough of….basking
My grandfather who I never met used to sit on this rock.
My grandfather flew planes in the second world war. From north africa him and a rogue captain called hayward would fly to warsaw to drop supplies for the polish resistance.
After the war my grandfather took up lion hunting as a way to keep himself feeling alive.
Only later when I came to understand trauma did it occur to me that the lion hunting was a common behaviour for someone with severe combat experience and ptsd. The need to seek out dangerous extremes to try and get the sound back on in your life.
When my grandfather died suddenly at 54 the war was long over. Hayward loaded my 15 year old father in a plane and flew him from Johannesburg to the place where I now sat in the wild . flying over the rock hayward ever the renegade opened the window and tipped my grandfather's ashes out into the river.
When I was born my mother named me craig…..I cried and cried until the shangaans people told my mother I was crying for my ancestral name. they started calling me body and I became a quiet child.
As I sit here this morning I can look down across the pool at the base of the rock to the second ridge where a plague with my grandfather's name on it….a name that is also my name. boyd varty it reads he loved the bushveld.
I'm telling you this because your ancestry makes you close to your infinity and your mortality.
When I am here I intuit some deep transformation in my own life that seems to be happening on a grander scale in the world.
My grandfather was a lion hunter. I am a lion tracker..
We were both in love with the wild.
As a hunter he was intictual as a healer so am i.
In the men in my family for so long there was steel with no feeling .I am coming to respect both.
Why am I saying all this from some forgotten rock in south africa …..and what does it have to do with you.
For starters you are the chain in ancestral life…..whatever you came from you can be the start of a transformation for generations to come.
Who knows the power of one authentic life. Life is full of platformless heros.
I'm on this expedition on pure intuition.
Imagine we were planted here… those of us with that intuition to awakening like sleeper seeds waiting to bloom.
If you're listening to this you are either stone cold right now… in which case i'm probably just going to annoy you over time and congrats you made it this far ……or you're on fire. something in you is saying yes.
I don’t mean to sound wafty….but im okay with it for a moment because I know that certainly the intuition has to lead to action.
That’s what i'm trying to do.
4-0 out.
Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
Connect with Boyd Varty:
Find out more about Londolozi
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