attune to yourself
your body sends you signals
trust your sensations
I’m in the middle of listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast where Tim interviews Boyd Varty, author of The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life.
Varty grew up in South Africa on Londolozi Game Reserve. He grew up learning how to track the wild animals and runs a safari and retreat company.
The trackers who taught Varty have been honing this skill for lifetimes — it’s an ancient trade passed on from generation to generation.
Attuning to nature and to the inner experience is as old as humanity itself. It’s innate to our DNA, part of how we are wired to survive in a world where dangers can comes from animals and the elements.
Varty described the experience of first learning how to track animals in the wild. The tracker would tell him to report what he saw as he walked down a path. Over repeated attempts, with the tracker’s guidance, he began to look at his surroundings differently and was able to see more information.
The lesson he learned from these early experiences extended beyond tracking animals. What he realized was that
there is information in your life, if you are looking for a transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it.
The information available to us includes what and who we are drawn to, the activities we enjoy, and the subjects we are called to explore. If we look and listen, we can obtain information on what work to do, where to live, who to include in our circles.
It’s refreshing to hear two men who admit to trying to stay away from “woo” concepts acknowledging the fundamentals of intuition and the truth of knowledge.
We live in a culture that tells us to look outside ourselves for the information we seek. But the truth is that the most valuable knowledge is already within us.
Our lives are always speaking to us. Our bodies are always speaking to us. This is so fundamental that we have language that speaks to this.
Expressions such as “gut instinct” speak to the intelligence of the body’s sensations. Modern science has reinforced that there is truth to these idioms by showing that your guts is your body’s “second brain” — it has its own nervous system and transmits signals to the rest of your body.
We shouldn’t have to teach ourselves how to attune to the information life offers us.
We come into this world with high levels of attunement to ourselves and others. Look at babies and children — they are open. In many ways they are like animals; they pick up on subtle moods of the people around them. They reflect the energy of those in their environment. Your dog and your baby both sense danger even when there is no visible sign of it in the vicinity.
The problem is that most of us are taught not to listen to these signals. Over time, we are conditioned to believe that the signals mean something different than what our inner knowing tells us.
We are taught to ignore intuition, to override instinct, to gaslight ourselves.
We are taught how to not trust ourselves.
Our culture even pathologies people who are highly attuned, calling them “highly sensitive people” — as if that’s a disease.
It’s not a disease or a defect. It’s our natural state.
The journey of awakening is a journey of relearning the self-trust and self-knowing we had as children.
It’s a journey of teaching ourselves to open to our own experience, to attune to the messages that life is giving us, to come into the knowledge that we already have.
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