Book notes: The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty

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The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Author

Synopsis:

“Somewhere deep inside, you know what your gift, purpose, and mission are. Boyd Varty, a lion tracker and life coach, reveals how the wisdom from the ancient art of tracking can teach you how to recognize these essential ingredients in a meaningful life.

Know how to navigate, don’t worry about the destination, and stay alert. These are just a few of the strategies that contribute to both successful lion tracking and a life of fulfillment. When we join Boyd Varty and his two friends tracking lions, we are immersed in the South African bush, and, although we learn some of the skills required for actual tracking, the takeaways are the strategies that can be applied to our everyday lives. Trackers learn how to use all of their senses to read the environment and enter into a state of “greater aliveness”. When we learn to find and follow our inner tracks, we learn to see what is deeply important to us. In the same way the trip in the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a vehicle to examine how to live out our values, the story of this one-day adventure—with danger and suspense along the way—uses the ancient art of tracking to convey profound lessons on how to live a purposeful, meaningful life of greater harmony.” -Audible

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Opening thoughts:

I picked up this book because the author was recently featured on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast, and he seemed to have a really interesting story. Tim highly recommended his book as it is one of the small handful of books he puts in his guest bedroom, but also mentioned it was a short read. I’ve been doing mostly fiction books this year because they’re much easier to write summaries/notes on, but this book didn’t seem too daunting since it seemed like half autobiography, half personal development.

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Key notes:

• Inside of you is a wild part of you that knows what your gift, mission, and purpose are
  • That part of you is wild and elusive. It cannot be captured as it is always evolving
  • To live on its trail, you must become a tracker

Chapter 1: The Call

• Tracking and coming back to life requires wanting to track 
• The unknown is a discipline of wildness, and wildness is a relationship with aliveness
  • Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death

Chapter 2: Track Awareness

• Mentors should be made, not through titles or words, but through actions, guiding another through extreme stakes creates a bond that is rare in modern life
• There is a low-lying depression and anxiety plaguing modern life
  • A symptom of an undiagnosed homesickness to feel a belonging to the greater ecosystem and know ourselves in relation rather than in isolation
• He feels like he could only truly know himself and forgotten places
  • There is a stillness that he believes used to be a natural part of our collective being
• Everything in the natural world knows how to be itself
  • Inside of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it’s meant to do
  • Tracking is a function of directing attention, bringing our awareness back to the subtle, inner trail of the wild self

Chapter 3: The Tracks of the Father

• Don’t try to be someone. Rather, find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself
• The track of the father is to find him within you. To find what he gave you and what he didn’t give you. You must use both sides
  • The medicine of the transformation is innately built into this relationship

Chapter 4: The First Track

• 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 

“I don’t know where we’re going, but I know exactly how to get there”

• In the bush, and in life, you don’t get trails fully laid out. You get tremendous unknowns, and if you’re lucky, a first track, and a next first track
  • Joseph Campbell said “if you can see your whole life path laid out, then it’s not your life path“
• Learn to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed
  • You can’t skip past creating to the creation
• Invest in the discovery, not the outcome
• You are your outlook, and that outlook is not universal. It was given to you

Chapter 5: Restoration

• The only choice is the one you have made
  • Any choice will set something in motion. You use your intention, take action, and let go
• The bush teaches us that the lesson is more about discovery than being correct

Chapter 6: Losing the Track

• Carl Yung referred to synchronicity as a simultaneous co-arising of something in our outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life

Reader’s note: It seems like the recurring theme or idea that I’m getting from this book is that when you are in the wild and connected to nature, you can more easily discover your true self, which is your self. And then, being more aligned with your true inner wild self allows, you to feel more connected to the outer wild world

• We have to decide in our own lives what we want to be a tracker of
• Accept that losing the track is part of tracking
  • Go back to the last clear track, there’s information there. Walk ahead and open your focus
  • Any place you don’t find a track is not wasted, but part of refining where to look
  • Flow for a while on your best guess, alert and always looking
• Coaching is just a kind of inner tracking
  • The first question often asked by a coach is, “how did that make you feel?”
    • If not good, then stop doing it. The core of coaching has a powerful central premise: your beliefs about life are not reality
      • A coach asks you to question your own deeply held beliefs
• In nature, we learned that we are all connected, even if we have forgotten that kind of belonging

Chapter 7: Bateleur in the Sky

• The deepest lessons must be lived

Chapter 8: Remains of the Feast

• One of the great dangers of life is living without danger
  • Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering
  • Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage
• True giving gives in every direction
• Modern Society has become the thing that isolates us

“People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive” – Joseph Campbell

Chapter 9: Entering the Zone

• A person who is living in their 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
• An authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism
  • There’s nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them

Chapter 10: The Hippo Tunnels

• To live as a tracker is how we take responsibility for transforming the planet

Epilogue

• A person who tracks down an authentic life opens up possibilities for themselves and the world around them

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Closing thoughts:

I really enjoyed this book. A big part of why I think this is a solid read is because it’s fairly short (about 3hrs in audio form), but also has very concise and impactful takeaways. But maybe more than that, it has one central takeaway that connects the entire book which makes it much easier to remember what the author’s main message is.

I can see why Tim Ferriss highly recommends this book. It’s short, impactful, and actionable. And it really makes you think differently in such a short period of time using the narrative of the author’s own life and career as an animal tracker.

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One Takeaway / Putting into practice:

My favorite takeaway from the book has to be:

• Accept that losing the track is part of tracking

I think this is an important reminder that goes hand in hand with the larger, main point of the book, which is that it’s all about the transformation that comes from being in the process. When we embrace our true, inner-self as a “tracker”, we start to see the importance of the journey, not the destination. And within that journey is the inevitable “getting lost” or “losing the track.”

To me, this is saying that just because you might feel lost along the path, doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. Tracking is all about losing the track once in a while, and figuring out how to get back on the track, and the growth that comes from losing the track.

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Nutshell:

How to live a purposeful, meaningful life of greater harmony through becoming a tracker of your inner, true self.

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Similar books:

• The Path Made Clear by Oprah Winfrey
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
• Endure by Cameron Hanes
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

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Rating:

4.5/5

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