THE LION TRACKER’S GUIDE TO LIFE
By Boyd Varty
“You can’t think your way to a calling. Finding what is uniquely yours requires more than rationality. You have to learn how your body speaks. You have to learn how you know what you know. You have to follow the inner tracks of your feelings, sensations and instincts, the integrity and truth that are deeper than ideas about what you should do. You have to learn to follow a deeper, wiser, wilder place within yourself.”
This is a book about purpose…
This book was recommended to me by a good friend at a time I most deeply needed to understand this message (and I think it’s what led me to finally put some of my work out in the world and finally finish this website).
‘The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life’ is a short, easy to read and illustrated book that follows lion tracker and coach Boyd Varty as he sets out into the South African wilderness with his friends in search of a lion. Through the course of their adventure together, Varty reveals to us how the ancient art of tracking can be applied to our own lives - and how by focusing on the details within our environments, tracking with our senses, and using our bodies to feel into what brings us to life, we can begin to discover our own unique purpose.
So much of the social conditioning of modern life blinds us from our true path, argues Varty. We have a tendency to live with our attention directed outwards and to focus on the social cues of our culture and ideas of other people. ‘We lose ourselves in shoulds…’ and consequently suffocate our own life-affirming potential. But if we can tap into what brings us alive and follow the cues and signs that lead us to that feeling, we can begin to track our own lives and be led towards why we are here:
‘No one can tell you what your track will be or how to know what calls you and brings you to life. That’s your work to do. But a great tracker can ask: How do you know you love something? How do you feel when you are fully expressing yourself? Learn that feeling and then start looking, not for the thing, but for the feeling. It’s there if you can tune yourself into it, if you can learn to see how the field of life is always speaking to you. Attention shapes the direction of the tracker’s life. We must turn our attention back to the wild self.’
It’s a brilliant, easy to grasp unpacking of the whole concept of ‘purpose’. If you’re at a cross-roads or unsure of the direction you’re going in, this is a book for you. And if the content intrigues you, you can also start by listening to a funny and fascinating conversation that the author, Boyd Varty, has with Tim Ferris that covers the basic principles in the book.