The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life 

by Boyd Varty   A book filled with life wisdom that’s told through the lens of tracking lions. It can be a super deep book about self discovery and finding meaning in pursuing your own path in life.  The renowned writer of the African wilderness Laurens van der Post said of the lion’s roar that “it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky.” The unbroken stream of life that animates all things is supremely intelligent, and nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it is.  Most large cats—tigers, leopards, jaguars—are solitary and inclined to avoid fighting, since even a small injury can be fatal. Lions are different, with a mane to defend their head and neck. It is suggested that they have evolved to be inclined toward conflict. To track is to discover that nature is alive and speaks a language all its own. To track is to travel the trail of an animal and weave yourself into the tapestry of its story. It is an art that lives inside us, a way of being in union with the natural world. In his presence the word “mastery” comes to mind. To me a master is anyone who can be themselves in any situation. Renias lives this definition. He has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time: a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.

• Save for what? Life is immediate. There is no future. If you have money, you spend. If you have food, you eat.

The journey out of that will begin NOT with the call but with the desire to hear the call. The desire itself has an energy. Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking but not seeing. The same men who had told me about falling asleep in their lives reported amazing things when they turned their attention back on and started to tune in and listen for a path back to life. The ancients call this essential knowledge. As trackers our part is to be awake. Our part is to listen. We want to hear the call. Tracking begins with wanting to track. Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death. Not that they would ever state this rank or hierarchy. In the bush this kind of order is not prescribed; it is born out of the honesty of the natural world. Nature doesn’t see status or wealth or social position. It cares only about presence, one’s ability to read the signs, navigate the terrain, and translate the language of the wilderness. Nature is the great equalizer. Renias was using his own steady energy to shape the outcome of the moment. He was using his own calm to keep Alex calm and to calm the leopard and show her their intention. To move fast and rush could have been misinterpreted as aggression, so in the tradition of the natural world and with his life as his guide, Renias spoke in the ancient language of the animal’s energy. He used his body language, his movement, and the tone of his voice to create and convey a feeling, not just to Alex, but to the leopard. In a situation in which things were happening incredibly fast, by being slow, Renias was able to create time.

• That’s how mentors should be made: not through titles or words but through actions.
• Ren always looks closer, he always asks why. He has a gift for examining the wallpaper of life.
  • The art of the way the tracker sees is the way he can look at the thing he has seen a thousand times and always see something new. Renias has been out in the bush every morning of his life. He is fifty-five years old. And each day he looks at it anew and asks “Why?”

Unseen, but felt. The intangible presence people long for. Wilderness is a space of relation, a place where the separation of language gives way to union.

• At that moment, I knew something very important was happening. I am a person who likes secrets, and I am a person who has felt that I can only truly know myself in forgotten places. I was meeting something long forgotten by our world, something in the track of wilderness. A stillness that at one time would have been the most natural state of our collective being. It is in these encounters that wilderness brings us closer to places in ourselves that often go unvisited in modern life.

Track awareness is how attuned you are to what is around you. It is recognizing a track when it appears. It is teaching yourself how to see what is important to you.   The idea that life is full of information. 

• “You must train yourself to see what you are looking for.” Part of why this isn’t as simple as it sounds is that it’s not rational. 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 inside yourself.

Track awareness is the ability to read the field of life with discernment and yet also know your inner landscape. Everything in the natural world knows how to be itself. Trees know how to greet the spring with buds, and bees are drawn naturally to flowers. Leopards from birth know they are keepers of solitude, while lions are made for the pride.

• We are a part of nature, and inside each of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it is meant to do. Inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here. Tracking is a function of directing attention, bringing our awareness back to this subtle inner trail of the wild self, and learning to see its path.
• Yet most of us have so much of the social conditioning of modern life that the track of the wild self has been lost. We live with our attention directed outward. We focus on the social cues of our culture. We look to others to define our path and value and purpose. We lose ourselves in shoulds. Shoulds are full of traps—traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself. No wild animal has ever participated in a should.
• What you know to do is deeper than that. 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 to 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.

Mentorship

• My ability never seemed to match his expectations. This is common between the father and the son, the dynamic making for an innate tension. This is why in native traditions, the mentor to the young man is never the father but a close male relative.
• I remember a whole summer in high school when Alex and I lived together in his small house. Mentorship in men is often a kind of transmission born of physical proximity; the teaching is not spoken but absorbed. For thousands of years, men danced and walked and moved together, taught each other the ways of nature. They slept under the stars and rested in the shade of old trees. They told stories and taught each other by being together, facing real danger together.

The trail was long and the whole time I was on it there was no thought of “me.” The “me” shifted into something much larger than myself. I was completely engaged and forgot about time and all of my own little neuroses. As I disappeared, I felt the flow of the animals and the trees, the birds and the silent presence of the clouds. In this unity everything became innately meaningful. Even my own presence in that moment was free from the past and the future. It was more than enough for me to simply be in the experience. I realized the whole purpose of my life was manifest not as some distant outcome but here, inside an infinite state of enoughness. Don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself. He begins to adopt the cadence of the track, and he picks up speed as he walks to match the lion’s steps. For Renias this is almost intuitive. He allows the intelligence of his body to mirror the movement of the lion, and in this way he enters a kind of resonance with the animal.

• Renias knows the instrument of the body as wild and natural and full of instinctual wisdom. He knows to think but also to feel. He uses the way his body feels moving on the track to feel the lion.
• As I watch Renias now I am struck by how disconnected we are from the body. Obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body. How its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy. How it can tell you if something is right for you or not by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body, the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be. Sometimes the body will have to get sick before we will listen to what it is saying to us.
• His mastery has transcended the step-by-step process and has harmonized and integrated him in the way you might drive a car without thinking about it. He is doing a lot of difficult things while appearing to do nothing.
• He is supremely confident. Rather than criticizing and tearing down, the voice inside him motivates and builds. It is what in the world of coaching we call supportive self-talk. “I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there,” he says.

Find the First Track The journey to transformation is a series of first tracks. I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

• “Track. Track. Track,” Ren has said to me at other times. I understood him to mean find the first track, then the next first track, then the one after that. He does not set out into the unlikely chance of finding a lion in the future. He works with what he has now, in the moment.
• Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.” In the bush and in life, we don’t get trails fully laid out. We get tremendous unknowns and, if we are lucky, first tracks. Then next first tracks.
• I couldn’t dial huge possibilities into small practical actions. I couldn’t trust that doing enough of what needed to be done today would, with time, render a path and an outcome that could be great. I had to learn to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed. You can’t skip past creating to the creation.
• I thought of all the people who had told me that when they knew exactly what they wanted to do, they would leave the soul-destroying thing that they were currently involved with. Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the “lion.” We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.
• What do you need?” He sat for a long moment, then, annoyed, looked at me and said, “I need to be alone for a while. I need some time completely alone. But then what?” “Don’t jump to then what,” I replied. “You have a first track. If you go and get some of what you need, you might get a second first track.”
• But the margins for error are small, and the way one behaves in a high-risk situation is critical. Yet for all of us a life with no sharp edges would be worse. The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger.
• The bush is a place where one must speak the language of presence; in this way it teaches you about yourself.

To him, time is not money. Productivity is not a reflection of his value. He considers treadmills ridiculous. When it’s time to work, he works. When it’s time to rest, he rests.   It’s hard to grasp the change in the quality of your consciousness until you have spent a few days and then weeks and then months in a wilderness. Seeing someone who simply doesn’t have the social programming you do is profound because it forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as “this is how I am” or “this is what you do” is not you at all but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story. You have been told what to be and want. This realization is immense as it is the beginning of a much deeper question about what we actually want.

• You are your outlook, and that outlook is not universal. It was given to you.
• I notice it, attend to it, and then drop back into a gentle ease with myself. I understand only in the contrast that the mad momentum of endless doing and its symptomatic emptiness is not how we are meant to live.
• In complete solitude, we are not a concept of ourselves; we are ourselves.
• St. Francis who said, “Wherever you go, preach the gospel; when necessary use words.” Depicted as the only Christian saint looking down to the earth rather than upward to God,

“This lion is listening,” says Alex. The forepaws left a deep mark in the soil as the lion had lifted his head, which hangs forward above the shoulders. The weight of the head traveling above the shoulders caused the forepaws to sink into the sand.

• It’s hard to know when the lesson is to persist and when the lesson is to let it go.
• I think of all the angst I have felt between choices. I’ve been paralyzed by options and the idea that there is a single right way. Ren is more Zen; for him the only choice is the one he has made. He knows any choice will set something in motion. This is the magic of the bush and life. You use your intention, take action, and let go. The bush teaches us that the lesson is more about discovery than being correct. On the trail there is not one way; the only mistake is to not make any choice. As it is in life.

The geometry of the lion’s track as he powered up the bank is beautiful. An imprint of his essential presence in the world. A fleeting mark of wildness made all the more beautiful by the way it will fade back into untouched earth. Somewhere deep within a voice whispers, “I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.” The wild self knows what you were meant to do. The wild self is whispering. Renias moves into a deeper state of this power through presence. He isn’t trying to do anything. By being himself, free from roles, rules, obligations, he is in a state of complete naturalness. Lao Tzu said in his ancient text the Tao Te Ching, “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” I suspect he was pointing to this state of completeness, when one is absolutely present in life. The mastery is that there is no trying.

• One ventures off the edge of the map here. There is no prescribed route, yet we know this place when we see it. We can feel it in great dancers and innovators and athletes. Yogis have spoken about it for thousands of years. It is as if Renias can feel what wants to happen. He is so deeply in the now that it contains all time.
• My whole life I have been afflicted and blessed with a sense that there is a way in which life delivers us to a place ordered by some intelligence beyond our own.

Moments of Decision that Alter Your Life

• I have often wished I could track back to those moments and ask those men, “Why did you do it? How do we know our destiny when we see it? How do we learn to track our life path?” The wild self is wise in a different way. Surely this is the deepest truth of a tracker.
  • Answer these questions in your own life so your loved ones have them. 

• The men I admired made choices against all convention and rationale. They followed something deep within. They tracked what called and opened new trails of transformation.

“Langota xiendla yini? Look, what’s it doing? ” This is a very Shangaan way of making a statement with a question. Instead of saying Look what’s happening! the Shangaan language is more of an invitation than a directive. Look. What’s going on?

• I once asked a great spiritual teacher if she had had a guru. She looked at me for a long moment and said, “My teacher was the desert and in the desert, everything is as it is.”
• The natural world, like a great Zen roshi, is profoundly impartial. It meets life as it is without judgments or assumptions or wishes for something different. It is at one with itself.

Synchronicity 

• There is an intelligence that runs through things. To be a tracker is to be aligned with that intelligence. Carl Jung referred to “synchronicity” as a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life. The place in space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human self in a moment of meaning specific to you.
• It is a kind of glimpse into an order and meaning that runs beneath the face of reality; life winking at you. I suspect the wild part of you is at one with nature by being at one with the nature inside you. If you can unite these two aspects of nature, your own purpose is aligned with a greater purpose.
• If this intelligence runs through all things, why not me? Who would I be at my most natural? How does a body heal or a person fall in love or a soldier make a choice to give up his life to save another’s? In the moment with no social conditioning, who am I?
• Can we, with the eyes of a tracker, see deeply into life and our own being and recognize a trail of intricately connected happenstance on which we know to move forward toward a new, more connected experience of life?
• Open your focus. Any place you don’t find a track is not wasted, but part of refining where to look.

Trackers try things. 

• The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, confirmation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track.
• Alex and Renias call this “the path of not here.” No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.

Coaching

• I have learned, is just a kind of inner tracking. And it often begins when people have lost the track. It is learning a different way of moving out of a lost or stuck place. In its simplest form, coaching begins by asking a person, “How does that make you feel?”
• “Terrible,” they often reply, and then the coach says, “Well, then don’t do it.” This seemingly ridiculous statement can cause seismic shifts in people. We have become so unnatural and patterned and socialized that some of us don’t even know what feels good or bad. We operate on autopilot. We are in our lives, but we are not alive.
• The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: your beliefs about life are not reality. A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.
• I am astounded by the simplicity of this. Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.
• When you say this to people, they either get it or they scream back at you. “You can’t do that! You can’t just do what you want!” Often, they fear that if they had the freedom to do what they wanted, they would end up on a beach somewhere, wallowing in excess and frivolity. They might for a while, but if they kept tracking, something deeper would start to express itself. When I see people actually track the desire in themselves, so often what they find is a desire to serve or be creative or share themselves in some way.
• I have come to learn that losing the track is not the end of the trail, but rather a space of preparation. The whole process is contained here as a pure potentiality. Prepare yourself to hear the call, invite the unknown, look for the first track, tune in to the instrument of the body, and learn to see the track amidst many that brings you to life.

Meeting a Mentor 

• What I remember most about meeting her was that she articulated something I had intuited but didn’t have the language for. 
• “The restoration of the planet will come out of a profound shift in human consciousness,” she said. “And that journey begins in the healing of individuals. Nothing is more healing than the realization and expression of your gifts. That’s what I do. I help people find their gifts.”
• The moment felt orchestrated by some divine force—the outer landscape and my inner path suddenly infusing each other with meaning. The restoration of the planet begins in people, the restoration of the planet begins in you, whispered the wild self.
• It’s a rare thing to have an encounter with your destiny, but as a tracker I had learned that it doesn’t have to be. To live as a tracker is to know your track when it passes you. I knew mine when I saw it. I knew the truth of Martha’s words, the feeling of expansion in my body.
• In the East there is a term for the way one can merge with a teacher, called “darshan.” It refers to absorbing the teacher’s spiritual energy and embodying it for yourself.
• A transmission has taken place. Not something that can be learned in books, but a way of being, a way of thinking and moving and seeing, that can occur only with time and presence. In truth it is the only way to learn. Often Renias can’t tell you why he does something. He gets lost trying to explain. The deepest lessons must be lived.

Look for what’s not yet realized 

• If something is all you have ever known, you mistakenly believe that’s just how it is. Perhaps this is the greatest danger, that we don’t even recognize another way.
• I had to look for what was there that was not yet realized. Through the eyes of a tracker I saw a wilderness in each person waiting to be brought back to life.
• If one person could become more natural, then that was a naturalness for everyone. In nature we learn that we are all connected even if we have forgotten that kind of belonging. The implications of this are profound. If it is true that we are one great being, then inside each of us is the chance for a different world.

  As a safari guide I had been taught not to anthropomorphize. The clinical eye of the scientific observer should not project human characteristics onto the animals. What isolation not to see our trickery in the jackal or the courage of a mother in a lioness around her cubs. As a tracker I wanted to take off the eyes of the superior impartial observer so the animals could inhabit me. I wanted to step toward kinship, not science. The wild self, the part that is in touch with instinct and needs and purpose, the part that can feel shades of emotion and is natural, is like that. It must be awakened, followed, listened for—tracked.

• Renias can awaken the mundane with his sheer inner openness. This ease is something I have often contemplated in my time with him, as it is something I have not seen in many people. I believe it has something to do with the fact that for trackers, no two days are the same. Once Alex took Renias on his first-ever plane trip from South Africa to London. The entire flight Renias refused to watch movies. Rather he stared at the sky map intently, watching the flight path of the plane. Upon landing ten hours later, he turned to Alex and, supremely content, declared, “Alex, if we need to walk home, I know the way.”

So often we dichotomize between big-picture thinkers and details people. What Native Americans used to call “eagle vision” and “mouse vision.” Trackers embody both ways of seeing. They move seamlessly between these two states. There is no fat in nature. Everything exists on the limits of its necessary entropy. The lions rest when it’s time to rest, bond at times to bond, kill when it’s time to kill, fight when it’s time to fight. As a pride they are a unit with superb role clarity and discipline.

• As blades of lightning smash down and the thunder goes nuclear, I have lain in bed thinking the lions are out there in the storm. There is no coming home to shelter. That is wildness.

Lions

• Lions are most dangerous on two occasions: when they have cubs and when they have meat.
• When I was a young man, my father instructed me in how to handle a lion that was mauling a man. “Run in close,” he said. “A lion will ignore you if it’s mauling someone. Run in close and try to put the barrel of your rifle right against the lion and try to shoot it off the person being mauled.”
• His body conveyed with absolute clarity how dangerous he was. His eyes bore into my soul looking for weakness.

I am walking in a vision. I am walking in a dream. I am tracking. I am awake. I know that one of the great dangers of my life would be to live without danger. In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply. People help each other grow through shared endeavor. I am traveling miles beyond where I could go alone.

• Deep inside, we want to belong. This remains true today, but maybe for the first time in human history, modern society—the dominant culture—has become the thing that isolates us. If you could track your way out of the burdens of modern life and create an existence that is much more an expression of who you are, then your own life could become a living mythology. One that could inspire others.

Inside me I hear the wild self whisper, Live it into reality. “The miracle is not walking on the water; the miracle is walking on the earth,” said the teacher Thích Nhất Hanh. “The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself.” We are one field of life dancing in many forms. Joseph Campbell: “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.” Invite in your old friends you fear… self-doubt, 

• Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt. I have learned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a teacher of humility. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track.

You who have longed for and felt called to make a different world. You who have suffered the illnesses of society. You who have risen to the top and found it empty. You with a desire to serve. You who have felt called to nature and to the creatures of the earth. You are the tracker.

• We are now at an inflection point. We must leave the safety of the village and venture out onto the trail of something wild and uncertain and as yet undefined. We must live on that trail, propelled forward by a set of clues only you will recognize by the aliveness they bring out in you. You must teach yourself to see your track! You are here to live. Your life can be the beginning of a great change; and it must be.
• A person who is living in the authentic wild self becomes a transformer. Not by what they do, but by the very realness of their life that asks others to switch on. In these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism.
• Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply on your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them.

  It is the magic hour. The light is now “the light that makes everything beautiful,” as the Shangaan call it. We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life. But out here, how flimsy we are, with no boundaries between us and nature. 

• What a wonderful teacher of how to live. In the face of fear is also something like awe. Then after the awe, humility. Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power. I give up the importance of my life to instead become a part of life. Guided by the intelligence of the nature within me as it also unfolds all around me. This is an alignment with a deeper purpose, the feeling of being both great and small at the same time.
• It’s time for us to track from a different center. As our first act of activism, we should track down outer lives that more closely reflect our inner values. We should reimagine our own lives into more meaningful expressions. This is a part of the great restoration that will begin in the life of individuals. To live as a tracker is how we take responsibility for transforming the planet.
• The magic of the wild self is that each of us is guided in our own unique way, and yet together the process charts a new way of living for us all.
• For me, this work has been the culmination of a dream: all of my favorite things woven together. We didn’t go out and get these jobs; we created them out of following the inner trail. We kept making our lives as trackers.

  You track your authentic life and uncover its meaning, it will catalyze other possibilities for living, and what’s important to you will immediately change. Meaning doesn’t want more; when you’re in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough. From that place of enough, you act in service, because that’s what feeds you. It’s a lot of individuals going on that journey of discovery that will create transformation. Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don’t know where it’s going, play with it.