Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
audience, for helping to make this happen.
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So now let's jump in.
Okay.
I realize that I have not really given a good recounting of why this
live free, ride free idea came about and what my own journey was here.
So, I'm just gonna take an opportunity in between my fascinating guests
to give you guys an bit of an update on what brought me here.
What's my own trajectory of self-actualization.
So the idea came for this web this website, this this podcast from
a trip to Yellowstone National Park in 2015, no, 14 when my.
Son Ian was still inside Iliana's abdomen, but we were taking Rowan, my oldest son,
who many of you know from the horse boy on this trip to see wolves in Yellowstone as
part of a project that he had going at the time called End Dangerous, about animals
that are both endangered and dangerous.
And we wanted to look at the reintroduction of wolves in
Yellowstone, amazing trip.
And we went in March and it was all snowed up.
So you can imagine how iconic it was to see the wolves against the snow and
to share this with one child born and really coming into the light because
Rowan was, you know, coming out of those years of, severe autism and
really into this total engagement with the world and another child unborn and
all of that adventure going through his mother, Hmm, excuse me, into him.
And it was in the course of walking a trail, I think we were actually
snowshoeing Eliana being very pregnant at the time where we came up with
this idea of talking to people who had lived self-actualize lives.
Because we had just run into a guy called Rick McIntyre, who
many of you may know, wrote.
Books about bestselling books, about the Wolfly introductions in Yellowstone.
And we had just met him and interviewed him sort of there on the side of the road.
And I was thinking, gosh, this is a guy who's really lived a
self-actualize life, and by the way, he's gonna be a guest on this show.
And I thought, yeah, but there's so many people out there doing this, and also
so many people out there just wondering how to live through their dreams and
manifest the reality that they want.
So that's where the idea for this podcast came.
And it took a few years for it to come to fruition, but now here it is.
And of course we're talking to all these incredible people who do all these
incredible things, some of whom are well known and some of whom are not.
But my story.
Alright, so that's where the idea came, but.
My own story is this.
I'll just sort of go through the biography really.
I was born in London in 1967 to two parents from Southern Africa.
My father's from Zimbabwe was then Rhodesia.
My mother is South African.
And it was an interesting family because it was one that sat really
at the crossroads of many cultures.
On my dad's side, we were Ashkenazi Jews originally from Lithuania,
who had immigrated to Africa.
On one side almost by, by mistake.
It goes the legend.
And on the other side by design.
On my, I'll return to that story in a minute 'cause it's funny.
On my mother's side, they'd been out there since I think the late
18th, very early 19th century.
Part English part, Scottish part Dutch ants.
And in the course of the few hundred years of living there, the family of
course spread out through society.
And we were kind of represented out there in southern Africa at kind of every
level from really, really poor there was a sort of poor white class right up to
sort of almost a blue blood class there.
And we also had a whole side of the family that, well still today is not
white, is, is of mixed race, which in South Africa they call colored.
And that's still an official designation.
That's not necessarily a racist term.
People refer to themselves that way.
And so we had family that were kind of.
The evil architects of apartheid.
We had family who were in jail because they were fighting against apartheid.
We had family who were not white, we had family who were Jewish, we
had family that were afri speaking.
We had family that were only English speaking.
And I grew up in this household in North London where my parents had
moved in the sixties with this kind of constant procession of all these
different characters coming through the house and afri cans often being spoken
in the house and everything on the walls, all the furniture and all the,
the artifacts and objects around those all being kind of Southern African.
So it's a weird bubble of this kind of culture within North London.
And there was a certain amount of back and forth to Africa as well.
So.
I grew up very much seeing these, as I said, crossroads of cultures.
And I was connected to them all.
I was part of them all, but I wasn't fully any one of those things.
And at a very young age that didn't matter.
When I hit my teens, I felt a great sense of needing to belong
and wishing that I could belong and not belonging really anywhere.
And it was, took me a while to see that that actually was a place of
power that, that crossroads of cultures allows you to take from each one what
is good, leave alone, what is not good.
And it means that while it's true, you don't quite belong anywhere,
you also sort of belong everywhere.
And if you think of yourself as a, as a, you know, citizen of the
planet, that's actually a very real position to be in rather than to
feel what I'm rooted in one culture.
But I was lucky enough to be connected to many different cultures.
Okay, so that was the Southern African side.
Then I also had this great love for horses.
It was kind of born into me and there'd been lots of cavalry officers
in the past, in the family, and sometimes it skips a generation.
A lot of you who are horsey listeners will know this, so my
parents are not horsey at all.
But I had a great aunt who, my mother's aunt, south African, again, who had
married into an English horsey family up in a place called Leicestershire, which is
about an hour and a half north of London.
And, she had re old retired horses.
And we used to go up and spend weekends frequently at that farm.
And I was just always to be found from the age of about three, just sitting
in the field talking to the horses.
And my parents were very, very urban, so they were not sympathetic to the idea that
maybe I would want to ride, but my great aunt said that, boy, he's gonna ride.
And my parents are like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna.
And they're like, no, he will.
You'll see.
So in the event she was right.
But before we get to that there was another aspect of my childhood, which
I think has helped to fuel this whole adventure, which is that I had this deep,
deep, deep craving and longing for nature.
My parents lived and still live in an area of London that is incredibly.
Urban, it's right in the middle.
It's called Islington.
It's quite a handsome area, but it's by no means, you know, connected to
nature as we would like to think of it.
Ideally, you know, open fields forest, no.
There's actually, oddly enough, quite a lot of wildlife in it,
urban foxes, that sort of thing.
But it's very built up and where I was sent to school was right in the middle
of the financial district of London.
So concrete, concrete, and more concrete.
So I had this burning desire to get out, to get into nature,
to get on horseback and.
At the same time I was drafted into a choir, a singing choir.
And the school that I went to, which is called, still exists
today, the City of London School.
It's an ancient school that was founded 600 years ago or so.
It provides the boys for both the Chapel Royal, which is the King's Chapel,
and the Temple, which is where the Knight's Temple were based in London.
It's the second oldest building in London.
And it's steeped in law.
The Magna Carter sits there, the tombs of the old Knights Temple, the Marshall
family that were there, you know, with the effigies of the Knights on top of them.
You think it sounds kind of Hogwarts ish, but it wasn't.
It was just.
All rather unpleasant and nasty and actually quite violent.
If you've read the Lord of the Flies where the boys in that story that from
a choir and they get stranded on a desert island and, you know, revert
to a not very nice way of treating each other, it was a bit like that.
And the reason was there wasn't a lot of really good adult supervision.
So between the school itself, which was in the heart of the sort of brutal financial
district in terms of the aesthetics, and then the school itself was quite brutal
because we were the last generation of boys to be regularly beaten at school.
And then the choir, which although on the face of it was all very,
very clean cut and lovely, there was lots of nasty violence behind the,
the scenes and this great longing to get out and get into nature.
I had a nervous breakdown.
And in this nervous breakdown, I was about, I was guess I was 11.
I couldn't get outta bed for about, ooh, three months or more, six months maybe.
And I was deeply upset and sort of unable to overwhelmed, unable to, to function.
And what got me out of bed was horses.
At that point my parents really listened to me and I said, look,
I think this would help me.
So that's how I ended up getting riding lessons.
And it was true.
It brought me out of bed and into the light and out into nature.
And it was literally as if a switch had been flicked.
I'd had all sorts of, you know, medical examinations and so on, and no one
could find the cause of, you know, why I had no energy and so on and so on.
But as soon as horses were brought into the picture, boom,
there I was writer's reign.
So that began my equestrian life, life
now I wanted a horse.
And that of course presented its own set of issues and challenges.
So the deal I made with my folks was that if I could raise the money, we could
get one and keep it at my aunt's farm, even though that was a couple of hours
north of London and I would just go up there every weekend and all holidays.
Just live that life and be there and be useful on the farm.
Because by then I was getting a bit bigger, a bit stronger, you
know, useful for shoveling poo and doing all the myriad, endless
chores that I needed around a farm.
So, I got a gig self, a sort of self-created gig.
So my sort of be beginning of entrepreneurship really.
I used to go it occurred to me that if I were to empty all the crap that
was in our neighbor's garages that they always wanted to get rid of, but
never could, and took it up to a local flea market in North London at a place
called Swiss Cottage, which doesn't exist anymore than a flea market there.
It's all become too gentrified now.
But back then in the late seventies, early eighties, it did, and
I could sell at the weekends.
All this old
kind of rubbish really at very, very cheap prices that eventually I could
make enough money to buy a horse.
So for two years, every weekend I sat in my own market stall aged
between 12 and 14, and I flogged as much gear as I could get out of all
the garages in the neighborhood.
And I did actually make enough money from this to buy a horse.
And the horse that I bought was a horse off the racetrack.
That's how you get cheap horses.
He was cheap and there was a reason he was cheap.
He was, he was, oh God, not very manageable.
And he scared the bejesus out of me, and I had to learn to ride well quite quickly.
I had been taking lessons of course, for a couple of years at this point,
but this was a whole other level.
And luckily for me, there was someone who could mentor me who was living on
the farm and she was a radiographer.
Who was also horsey who exchanged the, she was called Trudy and she exchanged living
in the farm cottage and doing the horses and other work through the week before
and after work in return for free rent.
And then I, at the weekend, the deal was, would take over the
chores when I came up, which I did.
And she was quite knowledgeable and she showed me how to retrain and
make manageable this extremely hot, unmanageable horse who actually taught me
so much that that was what set me on my professional track with horses because if
you can learn to manage a horse like this.
We do all kinds of crazy stuff but was also brilliantly talented in many ways.
If you could learn to handle a horse like this in the competition arena and
in, out in the hunt field, it's a big fox hunting area then you could kind
of train any horse, any other horse after this would be kind of easy.
So he really set me on my professional path, even though
I didn't know it at the time.
So that was sort of my boyhood of having these dreams and thinking how do I
possibly manifest my way out of being in the middle of the city, not having
access to nature, wishing that I could ride and be with horses wishing myself
into a, a more sensory, not just sensory friendly, but let's say sensory possible
environment and by hook and by crook.
Quite early in my life I manifested this.
And when I'm thinking back, remember where we started with my African
family constantly coming through.
I would hear all these different perspectives on life and I would see
how the people who were fighting against apartheid and who were the sort of
freedom fighters within the family were consistently gaining ground.
They were always further ahead each time one met them and the people who were
within the family who were more resistant to that were always losing ground.
And I realized quite early, oh, I see nature.
The world, the universe wants harmony injustice.
It doesn't last.
It can go on for quite a long time, but always the world is
gonna return to harmony if it can harmony as the natural state.
And somehow this really came into me, I think, through the constant arguments
and s that all these different sides of the family constantly brought.
'cause a lot of my non-white family too, by the way, they couldn't go to
university in and the good universities in South Africa 'cause of apartheid.
So they would come to the UK and do that, and of course they would stay with
us in our house in London and so on.
So I really did get all these different perspectives.
Okay.
And, and so that people could create their own realities if
they wanted to into the bargain.
There was also always this spiritual side where the earliest memories that
I've got are of walking in the garden.
I think I must have been.
Between three and five, somewhere there, maybe even younger, maybe.
No, it's hard.
It's hard to to tell.
But I'm very, very young and it's a sunlit garden and I'm up early on a summer
morning and none of the adults are awake.
So I'm walking in the garden and there are bees buzzing, there's
flowers growing outta the brick wall.
There's sun on the brick wall.
And somehow I can hear God talking through those bees and those flowers.
And the message is very reassuring.
The message is you are loved.
Every, everyone is love.
Everything is love.
And I had little reminders of this all the way through my boyhood.
I remember being in the school chapel.
Even though school was not nice, as I had talked about, there was this sign on
the on, on the wall of, of the chapel, as there often is in these things,
said, God is love and love is God.
And I remember having this deep resonant relationship with just that
little text on the wall of that chapel.
This is absolute truth.
Yes, this is truth.
God is love, and love is God.
And somehow even in the, the darkest time of that breakdown period, I never felt
abandoned by God or by the universal love.
It felt more like a descent into the underworld, like a journey into the
underworld that needed to be made in order to come out, into the light,
into another place, a better place.
And then I also frequently would have this recurring dream.
Of being in a place where there was threat and danger, even a sense of being
hunted and being able to manifest a doorway, a portal that took me immediate
and sometimes me and people I loved immediately out and away and into
this other dimension in which was pure safety, pure love, and this feeling
of great relief and joy and surprise, but also not surprise, this feeling
of, of, well, like a return home.
And, and this, this dream came up constantly through
my, through my childhood.
So all of these elements sort of came parallel.
And I remember too when I was about seven on a trip back to Africa, seeing
on my grandfather's farm, my grandfather was not particularly nice, man.
He was one of the.
People on the reactionary end of the family.
But there were lots and lots of people working on his farm and big cattle farm in
the compound where all the workers lived.
There was a witch doctor at work, what they called an in ganga.
And I remember seeing a healing happen at about seven years old.
A big ritual and the drums going all night and the people dancing all night
and the ang hands on the sick one.
And again, having this feeling of, oh, I see there are more ways to healing.
There are more ways to love than we might think.
And even though all the grownups were just like, oh, that's just
sort of superstition, that's just what these people do.
I could see that people were getting better.
Getting sick and getting better through this.
And it helped me to think, yes, you can look for alternatives
within the spirit world.
In fact, you should always look for alternatives within the spirit
world as much as you look for anything within the material world.
So all of these things sort of came together very much when I was a boy.
And then a lot of these family stories too from previous generations.
This idea of ancestry and ancestors.
So I, I had said that there was a funny story that on my father's side,
the people going to Africa one of them had ended up there by mistake.
It, the, the family law was that my great uncle Harry Shapiro, Herschel
Shapiro had actually run away from his wife Minnie in, lithuania and had
gotten on a boat to he wanted to go to the USA but it turned out he got
on the wrong boat and he ended up on a boat to Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
So he kind of went, oh, well, and learned English on the way down.
And when he arrived there, he realized that there was, what he'd heard, I
suppose, on the voyage about all the findings of the gold fields and the
diamond mines, which were all happening around that time in the late 19th century.
So he was thinking, well, maybe I could get up there and make my fortune.
But as he arrived in Africa, the poor war broke out and he found himself
drafted into the English army in Port Elizabeth, and he joined the Johannesburg
mounted rifles, even though it was a thousand miles from Johannesburg.
And there was, you know, no horses.
And he tramped up and down.
South Africa for two or three years without seeing a
shot fired, luckily for him.
And then ended up in Johannesburg where the mines were.
But of course, you know, they'd already already been taken over
by big, you know, corporations.
So he ended up getting a job in the kitchens as a butcher and his wife managed
to track him down and find him there.
So he was making a bit of money eventually by buying and selling
cattle as part of the butchery thing.
And then he ran away again up to the up to the newly formed at that point colony
of Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, and began to deal in cattle up there in this
sort of slightly wild west atmosphere.
Then his wife mini tracked him down again and he then capitulated and
they stayed to together and he.
Had a daughter, Frida, who was my grandmother my grandfather Robbie, who
married her, his parents had come out to Africa from also from Lithuania.
And their name was Schmid Ovitz.
And they changed their name when they got to German, Southwest Africa, what
is now Namibia, the young colony of German, Southwest Africa at that point.
'cause they were German speaking.
And they hoped to integrate more into the German society there.
So they changed their name to Isaacson.
The logic there, I don't see, I mean, fa berg or something, but Isaacson is like,
he go from one Jewish thing to another Jewish thing, and of course they found
that it was a bit too antisemitic there.
And so my grandfather, Robbie, in the 1920s went across to Rhodesia
and joined the company, the cattle auctioneering company that my great
uncle Harry had by then founded, sorry, great Greatuncle and married Frida.
And eventually took over that company and that was his life.
Cattle ranching and so on.
My, on my mother's side the family stories were very, very strong.
So on the Scottish side, we had cousins who had.
Ancestor cousins who had fought at the Battle of Aladdin, if any
of you know your Scottish history, we've been watching Outlander.
That was the big battle in which the British finally smashed up the
Scottish clans because they just couldn't deal with any more civil
wars happening on British soil.
They were trying to build the empire and they're like, okay, we've had enough.
Now, you know, there've been plenty of these uprisings.
We're gonna just really smack 'em.
And they did.
And they smashed the clans at Aladin.
And then there was something called the Highland Clearances where they
basically put them all on boats and sent them to either two the Americas
or Australia, which is why we have, you know, a lot of Scot's influence
in the, in Appalachia and, you know, Celtic influence in music there.
Also Irish settlers and of course out in Australia as well.
And in that battle our family with a Clark family, who were part of Clan
McPherson, who of course fought on the wrong side, fought on the Scottish side.
And McPherson himself didn't do so well after that.
But we had another cousin on the English side at the same time called
Judge Jeffries, who hanged all of our cousins on the Scottish side.
So again, it's this sort of weird dichotomy within the family ancestral
line of goodies and baddies and really knowing these stories.
And then that was the Scottish line on the English line.
There were four brothers who went out from a village called Luxton, which is, you can
see it on a sign off the M five if you're driving in southwest England in Somerset.
The Luxton brothers and L-O-X-T-O-N four brothers went out from the
village of Luxton, same name, and went to make their fortunes.
And this was during this depression, which happened in England after
the Napoleonic Wars where the old wartime economy had crashed.
And, you know, things were not looking so good for a lot of people.
So out they went, three, went to South Africa, one went to Australia, and there
is to this day a town of Luxton in South Africa and a town of Luxton in Australia.
So they were busy guys.
They got involved in things and, you know, became adventurous and business people.
And one of them, another great, great uncle Henry Lockton
did an interesting thing.
He went north of the Orange River, which at that time was the northern boundary
between like civilized land and the great.
African hinterland of, you know, danger and mystery beyond.
And at the time there was something happening called the Umani.
And the Umani, some people call it Dani, was the explosion of the Zulu Empire in
which the Zulus kind of went on a massive, you know, killing spree across Southern
Africa, subjugating all the other tribes.
They could find a bit like, you know, the Huns and the Mongols when they
exploded out very, very war-like people.
Very, very organized.
And the British wanted to keep the Zulus and the sort of all these tribes
who are being displaced outta the British zone, south of the Orange River.
So there were a bunch of escaped slaves of mixed race.
They were called the carass, the bastard, literally meaning bastards.
The qua and some other related groups who were of mixed race and they, they
had run away from the British and Dutch Cape Colony and created their own sort
of free mount mounted on horseback, but sort of iCal raiding cultures along the
North Bank of the Orange, orange River.
And the British made a deal with them and said, look, you guys can operate
up here and you can live on these fertile islands in the Orange River
'cause it's desert on either side.
And we'll kind of leave you alone, provided you kind of act as a buffer
zone, like a military buffer zone between the farming areas south
of that and the great beyond.
And that deal was struck.
These groups, Greek was busted, runners were organized.
Militarily under the leadership of what we call caps, literally
captains AFRI speaking, but not white.
And my great-great uncle Henry fell in love with the daughter of one of these
bastard captains, a woman called Anna Boy.
And he stayed up there and had children with her.
And of course that meant he was, and that side of the family
was then forever cut off this.
Remember this is 150 years ago from the white side of the family further south.
But what he did was quite clever.
He managed to get a deal brokered.
Between the Cape government, basically directly with Queen Victoria through
official channels for his family to retain that land along those islands
in the Orange River in perpetuity.
And to this day, the Luxton family still farm cattle and wine in that
area and are non-white to this day.
And under apartheid they resist it.
Managed to resist every, every attempt to move them because under apartheid,
all the good areas were taken for whites and all the not so good areas.
That's where the non-whites were shunted into.
And, they managed to hold onto it because of this old ratified deed.
And in fact, the apartheid government even tried to get my family there to
reclassify themselves as white so that they would, that the government wouldn't
lose face by letting them stay there.
But my family on that side said, no, no, we are colored
and we're gonna stay colored.
We're not gonna be white.
We're not white.
And they managed to hold on and survive just through like sheer grit.
Why is all this important?
Because all this informs the next point in my life.
So, I school, I take a year off.
I travel, I work I spend a lot of time in the states and I get into training
horses in the states in my year off.
I go to university in York and England and I study history.
And I started with archeology and I then I go to history.
And while I'm at university, I pay my way by riding horses on movie sets.
I, we have a, a family friend who's a stunt man and he managed to get me
a union card and I used to manage to make enough money to pay my rent and
travel by working on these movie sets.
And if any of you have seen the film, Willow that you'll
see me quite a lot in that one.
Hanging out in various backgrounds of battle scenes riding horses around, but
many films from the mid late eighties and TV stuff with horseback horses.
Alright.
And I'm in Africa quite a lot through each summer.
Just traveling, just traveling, hitchhiking around, experiencing
it while I'm down there.
Aged 19.
'cause I went to university quite young.
I I, I finished school at 17, went up to university at 18, I'm 19 and
I'm in one of my summer travels.
I'm in Africa and I hitchhiked from Zimbabwe across into Botswana.
I got cousins in Botswana and my cousin Frank meets me at the sort
of road head where I've come in.
And at that time, the, it was before the big diamond thing
really took off in Botswana.
So it was still very, very, very, very remote and poor.
And just donkey carts and, you know, people really.
Living at survival level and he was pioneering out there.
My cousin, Frank Taylor, something called Agroforestry, which is now
a thing, but no one had heard of it then Dry Land Agroforestry.
And he was finding groups of bushman hunter gatherers who'd
been displaced usually by more aggressive cattle owning tribes.
And all the game had been shot out and all the wild foods had been,
you know, take eaten by cattle.
And these people were destitute and he got into put up fences and then inside
those fences, plant the wild foods that normally they would've gathered.
And he started finding a market for these.
If you've ever seen the product Devil's Claw, which people use for
arthritis a lot, my cousin Frank Taylor was the first person to get
that onto the international market.
And so he's a very, very Christian man.
And quite, quite dour, quite scary, big tall, lean rangey, pissing
blue eyes, sort of, you know, dude.
And when he picked me up and he was driving me out to his place on
that trip, he said, where in your spiritual journey are you Rupert?
And it was the first time anyone had asked me that.
And what was weird is I'd had a, a dream just not so long before that
in, in the dream I'd met the devil.
And the devil was this man playing a violin, standing on a hillside and had
sort of let me know that there were choices to be made and in the world.
And I'd said.
Okay, well, I dunno where I am in my spiritual journey, Frank, but if it's
any use, I, I had this dream, the, you know, not so long ago and he said,
ah, yes, ah, yes you are, you're going to be tested sort of thing, you know?
And when, if you get tested and you want to go towards the light, you can
always expect resistance from the dark.
And this is normal and, you know, but just pay attention to this.
And so I thought, well that's interesting, isn't it?
You know, no one I know back in England, you know, ever talks like that.
And okay, didn't think much more of it.
Go back to university graduate.
And then afterwards I'm like, well, what do I want to do?
I thought, well, what I really wanna do is write.
I always loved stories, always loved storytelling.
I guess that's something I left out was I'd always been an avid reader and
I'd started experimenting with writing and storytelling in my mid-teens.
And.
I through university, put out a, wrote a, a group of short stories and
found, and they never got published, but I found an agent in London who
was actually interested in them.
And he said, look, you know, if you were to take a bit more of a
perfectionist approach and actually edit these things properly, you know,
they're kind of publishable, so you know, you should think about this.
So I thought, well, maybe I, I'd like to write.
And all my friends at that point were going off into corporate jobs many
of them in banking and immediately starting to make a lot of money.
I didn't do that.
I, I went out to North America again to horse train and to see if I could
begin to establish myself as a writer.
And I was also in love.
I was deeply in love with a girl from Canada who, we'd had an idyllic time
for one year, and then through various events had broken up and she dumped
and well, she dumped me once and then we got 'em back together again.
And then I went out to North America largely to follow her,
and it was all completely crazy.
I had no work and work permit, no nothing.
And I, but I had, you know, connections in the horse world.
So I went out, started training horses in Virginia and then ended
up going up to Toronto where she was hoping that she would sort of
take me back and that somehow I'd sort of become a writer in this.
And it was winter and she said, no, actually I'm dumping you.
And so I'm like, oh, okay.
Well I guess I, I have a choice.
I can either go back to England or I can see I can take the adventure.
And I had this gut feeling.
Rupert take the adventure.
You should take the adventure.
No.
No matter how difficult it is.
As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm an autism dad and we have
a whole career before this podcast in helping people with neurodivergence,
either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
Are you a parent?
Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
I really didn't know what to do.
So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
Temple Grandin.
And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
approach, it's called Movement Method.
You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
The important thing is to begin.
Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
Grandin and see what results can follow.
Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
com Sign up as a gold member.
Take the online movement method course.
It's in 40 countries.
Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
So I did and I survived by snow shoveling and working on construction
sites and finding whatever under the table work I could.
And I managed to find shelter to live in an old museum, a private museum
where the guy who ran it let me sleep under a glass case full of sea turtle
skulls on a bed roll for a while.
And I managed to kind of survive my way through that winter.
And then at the same time I began to write and place my first published
articles in magazines, which I'd sent, sent off to editors and.
Managed to get them published.
Stuff about horses, stuff about travel, stuff, about experiences in Africa.
And I thought, wow, actually, I guess I could do this.
So I then moved up to, from Toronto up to Montreal and managed to
find a gig as a window cleaner.
And that actually paid not so bad money and we were living in abandoned
buildings and squatting in abandoned warehouses so we could survive by then.
Had a group of friends.
We were all doing this together since the nineties.
Lots of rock and roll, lots of partying, lots of sex, drugs,
and rock and roll and getting by.
I found out while I was doing this about a story that was unfolding
in Northern Quebec where the Cree Indians were under threat of having.
An area the size of France, of that land, the size of Quebec alone is
the size of Western Europe, right?
An area the size of France flooded in order to create hydropower was a
government company called Hydro Quebec was gonna do this to sell that electricity
to New York and the New England states.
And the threat to the people up there was existential.
It was basically that would've been kind of the end of them.
And they were still people that lived really traditionally hunting
caribou and moose trapping beaver fur, trapping also trapping for
meat and living under canvas in tps.
Even in the midst of the winter and Northern Canada, the winters, I mean,
you might think, you know, winter, but until you've been up there, it's
just like, it's a whole other thing.
And I got wind of the story.
That the Cree Indians had actually had a previous run in, back in
the seventies with Hydro Quebec.
And although they'd lost, they'd been given a, a big government
settlement and they were clever.
They'd used this money partly to send a lot of their kids away
to law school so that 'cause they knew it would happen again.
And so that now it had happened again.
They had a whole bunch of lawyers who were Cree and who were busy fighting this.
I said, this is a fascinating story.
And it was all over all the papers in Canada all the time 'cause it was
a, a big like Native Canadian versus, you know, the establishment story.
And I realized that nobody back in the UK or Europe at all was.
Reporting on this.
But it was huge because if, if the thing went through, it was gonna
cause the volume of water was gonna, cause that was being shifted, it
was gonna cause the earth's crust to shift and that was gonna release.
All these scientists were saying massive amounts of mercury from the bedrock
that would not just poison everything up there, but poison everything, you
know, downstream of there, including, you know, water in New England
and the Great Lakes and all this.
So I managed to get up there to that area and I published the story and that's an
easy thing to say, but when you are a homeless window cleaner, to publish a
story in a big national paper is not easy.
What happened was I called a big national newspaper in the uk, the
independent on site, the Sunday Independent, and I said, look.
If you don't know me, I'd like to get up there and do this story for you.
And they said, we do indeed not know you.
But it is an interesting story if you can bring something back that's publishable.
Let's see.
So I had to take a punt on it, and it's incredibly expensive
to get up into these areas.
Me and a, a friend, a photographer friend went up.
It's not just once you're up there, you have to get like planes into these areas.
There's, there's no roads, you know, and snowmobiles and stuff.
Like, I don't have this money, but I managed to contact the tribal
council and say, look, you know, I would like to try to get this,
you know, into the British press.
I can't guarantee that I'll publish it, but you know, would you help me have a go?
And they, they did.
And when me and my friend Ryan arrived up there and we were living,
you know, in the winter in Montreal, which is damn cold in all our
winter gear, and they looked at us.
They said, where's your winter gear?
And we're like, well, we're wearing it.
And they just laughed at us, took us off, kitted us out with caribou, skin
parkers, moose skin, mittens, you know, halfway up the arm and moose
skin boots up to the top of the thigh.
And then you get on these snowmobiles and out you go really fast.
And the wind chill factor, it's like even, even you've only got this much
of your skin exposed because you've got goggles and you've got balaclava.
It's like someone takes a hot knife and just puts it to you there.
Incredibly cold.
And we managed you know, we were allowed to see, privileged to see this life,
this traditional life, really unchanged.
People were using snowmobiles and people were using rifles, but people were
living off the forest, under canvas in their tribal system and holding
to their culture and holding to the ecology and looking after the ecology.
Not just for themselves, but for us because they were protecting us from
all getting poisoned with Mercury.
And I managed to get a story back to the UK and I got it published
and that was my breakthrough.
It also, let me see something about manifestation because although
all the odds were against the Cree winning this land claim,
they won.
They managed to persuade New York and all of the states that were gonna buy this
hydropower to not buy it in advance and the government shut the project down.
It was an extraordinary landmark win.
And it made me realize, oh my gosh, you really can win against the odds like that.
Okay, so I end up back in England because, you know, there's only
so long you can exist as an under the table homeless window cleaner.
And by then I'd had my first thing published.
So I went back and I began to.
Work on newspapers and magazines.
And I ended up co-founding a very short-lived magazine about
ecology and hunting together.
It's called International Field Sports and Conservation, or IFC.
And, but it was operational for a couple of years and we managed to get national
distribution and I got to see what it was like to actually run, edit, sell the
advertising, bootstrap up something that could go like international news agents
and you know, you could buy it wherever.
And we had to do everything.
We had to write the copy, sell the advertising, design everything up
for the printers, get it to the printers, learn about color offset
printing, blah, blah, blah, blah, bu raise the money from issue to issue.
And although in the end it did fold after, but it only folded
after about two years and it.
Again, made me realize that you can do these things.
And of course, I was at the same time still always horse training on the side.
Right about the time that it folded, I got a job to go and
write a guidebook to South Africa.
And at the time, that was just when South Africa, this is 1992.
This is just when South Africa did the changeover finally
from apartheid to Black rule.
And everyone had been boycotting traveling there for, you know, decades and now
suddenly it was gonna open up to tourism.
So get out there and write the first guidebook.
So I, so I did for a guidebook company called Kagan who don't exist anymore, but
who did really beautifully illustrated guides and similar to the Lonely Planet.
Or rough guides, but much more beautifully produced and with
more of an emphasis on culture.
And I went out and basically lived in my car in South Africa and Namibia
for about a year and a half or a year.
Yeah.
Year, year and a half.
And of course I spent a lot of time in Africa before,
so that's why I got the job.
I knew the place quite well.
But this was different 'cause I had to see it in real detail.
And of course the guy book job itself didn't pay enough to fully live on.
So I, because I'd published this first big story, I managed to get
journalistic assignments to go out and cover, you know, the changeover
of apartheid into, into Black Rule.
And it was an incredibly violent year in Africa.
And I'd never had any bad experiences in Africa, even when
I was hitchhiking around before.
And I'd run into, you know.
Armed areas where there was civil war going on.
And even when I was very young at seven, you know, we'd been out there
during the, the War of Independence but it hadn't really touched us except
having to go around in, you know, armored, armored convoys and things.
But this year it did, oh my gosh, did it?
I got several direct assaults on my life in a really short period of time, in
about a six week period, I had about as many really violent episodes in which
I either had to fight, plead, hide, or run or take a massive beating, not
knowing if I was gonna be killed or not.
And I didn't know what post-traumatic stress disorder was back then.
But when I had completed that year and came back to England to write the
thing up and deliver it, I was just jumpy as all hell and getting all
these weird viral diseases and like colds all the time and flus and things.
And I never got that.
I was always like so robust and you know, having fights with my girlfriend and
getting into fights in pubs and things like that, stuff, I just never did.
All classic symptoms of PTSD.
Fortunately for me, at the time I was riding semi-professionally for
a, so I always had this parallel track with horse training for
a lady outside London eventing.
And so of course what I was doing was I was getting up from the.
A place in London that I was renting, getting on my bicycle, this is most
days, cycling across London to Paddington Station through all the traffic and
then getting on a train, going out into the countryside, cycling again
out to the farm, saddling up, being with the horses, being out in nature
with the horses, then going home.
What I didn't know then was what I was doing is I was filling myself with
something called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which you get when
you move and problem solve, and it creates new neural pathways and oxytocin, the feel
good and communication healing hormone by being with the horses all the time.
So, slowly I healed from the PTSD of all these, i, i, I really violent
incidents, you know, had a guy climb through the, my window with a kitchen
knife in his hand, and you know, what followed there was not nice and so on.
So, I.
Recovered.
And although I didn't quite know why, there's a little part of me that
clocked it and went, just hold onto this knowledge, but I didn't quite know why.
And I'd also had a really, another really interesting spiritual experience out in
Africa that year where I'd been on Table Mountain and I had gotten a fever and been
delirious and had this revelation back to the God is love, love is God thing.
I'd remembered that up on Table Mountain.
And then I realized, oh well if that's true and that is true
then, and if everything is God, then everything must be love.
So the shirt that I'm wearing, the, the, the, the cotton fibers of it
must be actually made of love matter.
Must be love.
And even the, even the car, the metal of the car that I'm driving and the fuel
that's running it, which is made from fossil forests, is actually all love.
So everything is love.
And this base faith.
Had also, I think, kept me going through this time of great fear that I'd undergone
out there that in, in that violent year.
I then got another job right after that to go and do a guidebook in India.
And India, as anyone knows, who's ever spent a long time out there, because
when you go write a guidebook, you've got to really immerse yourself in
those, you're out there for a long time.
India will change you because.
It's incredibly spiritual and at the same time it's really brutal.
People are just horrible to each other.
And at the same time it's so sublime and the spirituality is actually very pure.
It's both at the same time.
It makes you really have to become comfortable with ambiguity that things
are both dark and light together.
And that is useful because that is just sort of how life is.
It's just pumped through a really amplified lens when you're out there.
And I came back from India and got another job in Africa.
It was while doing this other guidebook that I began to hear a story about the.
A group of Bushmen, Kalahari, sun bushmen, hunting and gathering peoples who had
been in South Africa under apartheid and had been kicked out of a national park.
What's now the second biggest national park in South Africa, the
Halal Khari National Park on the border of Botswana and Namibia.
They'd been kicked out in the seventies when the park had been created and been
living by the side of the road ever since.
And what was interesting was the bushmen were a big part of my family
mythology in that my that great, great uncle I told you about before,
who'd gone north of the Orange River.
He had spent a lot of time interacting with the Coi Sun and.
My grandfather, who was a journalist had also spent quite
a lot of time up there with them.
And everyone who'd gone up there had in the family had
always sort of reported back.
These are just the purest people.
These are the best people in the world.
They, they, they don't make war.
They're like a sort of, almost like an elusive fairy folk.
And there was always this sort of mythology about these people.
And part of that mythology was that there were none of them left in South Africa.
They'd all been wiped out at the end of the 19th century.
And you know, if you wanted to find those people, you had to go up to very
remote parts of Botswana or Namibia much deeper into the Kalahari desert.
Well, it turned out that no, there were actually bushmen living in.
South Africa all along, they'd just been displaced, but a very,
very small group of them had left just literally an extended family.
Around that time too, I ran into my first group of Sun Bushmen up in Namibia.
Literally, I'd, I'd found out where to go.
I'd finally been able to get my hands on a four by four, and they're very
expensive and driven out to this place called in Eastern Namibia and
parked under a big bear Bab tree and two Bushman had walked out of the
thickets and one of them spoke English.
A guy called Benjamin and he said, yeah, you know, I can absolutely introduce
you into the culture a little bit.
You've made it all this way.
And I had my first taste of that life, of that hunting and gathering
life that still exists up there.
And seeing how functional those people are with each other.
No chiefs gender equality children have a voice.
They're hunters, but they have a deep ecological sense and the
entire culture based around healing.
Healing and conflict resolution.
Because if you're hunting and gathering in an area where you're not the top
predator, if you fragment as a group, if, if, if conflict within the group
gets beyond a certain point, then the highness is gonna get you all.
So you actually have to stick together.
So you have a, a healer who sits at a shaman, healer who
sits at the middle of the.
Culture whose job it is to kind of constantly resolve conflict,
not just heal physical ailments.
And this is regarded as incredibly important.
And I, I remember thinking, gosh, if this is how humans actually are, 'cause
this is the oldest culture on the planet, then that's actually a really
good advertisement for our species.
And it means that all of that stuff that we think of as normal human
behavior like war or organized violence or that sort of thing, it's not
actually, it's an aberration, which is why we, why we know it's wrong.
That's why we bother with having a justice system.
And it seems to have all come in quite recently, like the last 10,000 years with
the domestication of plants and, you know, animals, agriculture and owning stuff
and overpopulation and all these things.
And it's driven us nuts, but it's not who we really are.
And right at that time that that happened, and I found out that this group of
bushmen in South Africa still existed.
This group of bushmen in South Africa instituted a land claim very
similar to the one in Canada that I'd followed, where they said we
would like our land back, please.
We were kicked out of that national park under apartheid,
and they managed to find a lawyer.
And I found out about this and the journalist in me just went, oh my
gosh, you have to follow this story.
And then the personal side of me said, Yar ru, and this is where your non-white
family used to operate and still do.
I bet you there's a family connection to this story.
So I dug a little further and I found out that the bushman up
there were actually being opposed.
Their land claim by another non-white group who said, we were also
displaced from this area and we, you know, why should they get the land?
We want the land.
And you know, there was a, there's a kind of a conflict going on between these two
groups who'd been displaced and of course the national park was having none of it.
I found out of course, that the second group were cousins of mine and then
I found out that many of them had married into the group of bushmen and
that therefore I was cousins in law, cousin-in-law to this group of bushmen.
So I went to find them and
found their camp by the side of the road, sat with them, talked with them, and
was immediately just taken in as family.
Now this group had been displaced.
So I talked about a very beautiful life up there in Namibia with those
bushmen that I'd run into up there.
But down here in South Africa, it was not like that.
Because they'd been displaced and victimized and
predated upon in every way, and alcohol and drugs and all of that had crept in.
This was the antithesis.
Yet there was still something really gentle and beautiful
and wounded about this group.
And what they said to me is, Ru we've lost our healers.
We lost our healing tradition when we lost the land.
And we are now, we, it, it, it's almost pointless us getting the
land back if we, if we don't, you know, recover our healing tradition
because we'll just destroy ourselves.
It's quite wise.
And at the time I was going then between there and deeper Kalahari
to write a book about these cultures, which eventually became a work called
The Healing Land, which was published here and in the US the healing Land.
And in the course of this, I became initiated into more and
more into this healing tradition.
And I got to see things that just bogle the mind hunting magic in
which the animal is brought to you shapeshifting in which the healer
turns themselves into a leopard.
Cancer's being pulled out of people's bodies.
I, I, I saw all this, it's all recounted in that book, and I'm not the only one.
I mean many anyone who's spent any time, you know, in a, in a culture like that,
they've all got their stories of this.
And what you realize is that these kinds of miracles are actually the norm in
human society, in, in true human society that's living in nature, that's living
the old way, that's living close to animals and plants we're supposed to live
in, you know, constant connection and relationship with up to about 300 species.
In, in really supportive groups in which the predators are
outside of the human thing.
And the predator is never your fellow man.
And now we've replaced that with no relationship with any other
species unless we're lucky enough to live on farms or whatever.
And the only, the predator is always our fellow man.
Now this sends us completely crazy.
So I follow the land claim
and I help the group in South Africa to connect with the healers by their
own request to connect with the healers up in Botswana and Namibia.
In fact, the group in South Africa, the, they're called.
Asked, said, war Ru.
You know, you're a journalist, you've gotta get us to the West
so we can tell our story there.
You've gotta get us to the United Nations and you've gotta connect
us with these healers up there.
Oh, and you, it was your mother and your mother's stories about
Africa, which largely kept Africa alive in your heart, even when you
were a boy growing up in London.
So you have to get, get your mother and bring her out here.
When we got to see the healers to dance for the land to be returned,
and you gotta get us to the un.
And remember that thing I talked about about adventure Sometimes
when an adventures in front of you and you feel this, pull in
your solar plexus in your throat.
I'd felt it in in Canada that time.
I'd felt it many times on the back of a horse going into a dangerous situation.
I'd felt it.
When you must, you must take the adventure in front of you,
even though you're scared.
And so I said, okay, I'll, I'll try.
And I had no idea how to do any of these things because
they all cost a lot of money.
I didn't, you know, to hire, set up expeditions to hire vehicles
to get a load of people up into Botswana or get someone to the un.
How anesthesia that and what do you even do when you're at the UN and
get these people from Africa to, you know, to, okay, okay, I'll try.
So I did and I founded a nonprofit called the Indigenous Land Rights
Fund, and we raised some money to
begin to.
Create a fund to bring a group from South Africa, a group from Botswana
over to America and get to the un.
But while that was in the very early stages of development, my mum did come
out and the bushman stripped her naked.
She was such a sport on the sand dunes in the area in South Africa.
Covered her with a sacred pollen called Mao.
And then we sang songs to her and honored her.
And then we went up into Botswana.
And by then I had, I had forged a relationship with a heer called Besa.
And those of you who know my book about Rowan, my son autistic son,
know that his middle name is Besa.
And I'd heard stories about Bess.
All over the Kalahari.
And when I finally met him living under a thorn tree in Western Botswana, near a
settlement called Hansi this man saw me got up from where he was sitting went.
There are two, be
two two.
And he pointed himself.
He went, oh, Besa, old Besa.
You Klein Besa, little besa.
So I was always little Besa in the Kalahari.
And those of you who know my website, the Long Ride Home website, know that
we have a program on there called Little Besa about how to bring everyday
Shamanism into and healing into your life.
And that's why it's called that because that was the name I was given and Besa
was the one who showed me Shapeshifting.
Besa was the one who showed me a lot of the more extreme healing techniques
and the Bushman in South Africa.
When they heard that I found Besa, they said this, man, this is the man we need.
We've heard about him too.
This is the man we need to dance for us to help us restore our own
healing tradition and secure the land.
So up we went and we held the healing.
And
it was a real anticlimax.
I'd been at, I'd been at healings where there'd been high drama, you
know, healers bleeding from the mouth, from the eyes, from, you know, as they
pulled sickness out of people and diving into the fire and swallowing coals and
nothing like this.
In fact, Bea turned up drunk dance for maybe it's all done through
Dance the ceiling for maybe
hour and a half.
And then that was it.
And then the next day we had to drive out and I said to Avi Kpa, who was the,
the sort of representative of the Bushman and the land claim for South Africa.
Do you think, do you think it was worth coming?
Do you, do you think it?
And he, he looked at me, he said, Rupert Besa showed up drunk because I'm a drunk.
He was showing me what I need to change in myself to make this happen.
And he said, Rupert, a year from today, I'm going to sit down with the president
of South Africa and I'm going to sign the land claim for half the National Park
would've been the largest land claim in African history
a year and a day.
It was off by one day a year and a day after that conversation, he did indeed sit
down with the president of South Africa, Tavo and Becky at the time, and he signed
the largest land claim in African history,
manifestation, self-actualization.
On the way back from that healing in Botswana to South Africa, we camped in
a canyon on the Namibian border that had been part of the Kani land ancestrally.
And at four in the morning I was seeping in the back of a pickup truck.
I woke up fault, upright and saw what looked like a little white,
whirlwind, little white wind going like that across the canyon floor.
And instinctively I thought, oh, that's death.
And I just went back to sleep again.
At the morning fire making coffee.
The lady who I was doing a lot of that work with Belinda, she
said, did you see that thing at about four o'clock this morning?
And I said, yeah.
I said, what do you think it was?
She said, well, I think it was death.
What do you think?
I was like, yeah, I think it's death too.
And then David Ropa comes along and says did you guys see that
thing at four in the morning?
And we both said, yeah, what do you think it was?
Do you, was it death?
And he said, well, almost.
And he said it was a departing soul.
'cause this is where we used to, this is where we used to bury our dead in
the answer before we lost all this land.
And that's a, that's a soul returning from where we live now, to here.
When we get back to the village, we will find that somebody has died.
And indeed, when we got back to the village.
A whole day to drive.
Later we found that somebody had drive, I had in Indeed died.
So I got a real window on these parallel worlds and fields of consciousness
and realities that exist altogether.
And right about that time, as the bushmen in South Africa became
successful with their land claim, a bigger threat to a larger group
of bushmen up in Botswana happened.
Whether Botswana government with DeBeers Diamonds decided to kick
another group off their land in order to make way for diamond mines.
And this was the point at which they, they then said, could you help us too?
And this was the point at which we decided, okay, this UN thing, we
need to see if we can make that.
Okay, so how to get this delegation of Sun Bushman, hunter gatherers
have no power, no power at all, who are being put in jail and tortured.
This is up in Botswana.
If they go up against the government in any way
and me, this freelance journalist with no backing private funds, I
have no organization behind me, no big newspaper, no nothing.
I'm just a freelancer.
What to do?
As you may know, if you've been following my work, we are also horsey folk here.
And we have been training horses for many, many years in the manner of
the old classical dressage masters.
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If you'd like to learn to train your horse in the manner of the old masters and
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Well, I published this book, the Healing Land.
So I thought by this point, so I thought, okay, maybe I could
use that as a bit of a platform.
So I.
Go to a big independent bookstore in the US and I say, can I do a book talk?
And they say, yeah.
And I think, well, maybe, you know, so this costs me about 500 bucks
that I don't really have to put on.
And by now I'm also a new parent and
five people show up to my talk.
Okay.
Then I find that there's an actual department in the United Nations a
sort of private group attached to the United Nations that have their,
they have their office in the United Nations Tower in New York who deal
with exactly this type of issue.
So I contact them and they give me a.
An audience and I walk into this boardroom and I've got RO in my, I
don't know it at the time, but autistic child in a baby Bjorn around my neck.
And I make a case.
I tell them what's going on and they say, yeah, yeah, we know, we know.
We know that they're all being kicked off their land in the Kalahari.
There's nothing we can do about it.
You have no power, you have no clout.
So you know, hippie like you, no way is that anything gonna work.
And they laugh at me and they kick me out.
They kick me out of the office
like, okay, what do I do now?
Right about then is when autism comes into my life, like a hurricane, like a tsunami,
and I'm just beginning to.
Come to grips with what this is gonna mean for me.
And I'm driving, living in Austin, Texas by now, driving to a therapy appointment,
early therapy appointment with my son, wondering, panicking, what am I gonna do?
What am I gonna do?
Autism.
And I get a phone call.
And the phone call is from someone who says, you don't know who I am.
But a friend of mine was at that
talk that you did at that bookstore, and they've talked to me and I've
researched what you were talking about and I believe that this is
indeed something worth backing.
And I'm, tell me what your budget is that you need.
So I told, told her, she, she said, I'm gonna give you a third of it.
And when you go out to raise money, tell everybody that.
I and my organization are backing this, and you'll probably
get the rest of the money.
I'd never met or heard, heard of this person ever before.
And I did, and we raised the money and in, in, you know, most people's
fundraising terms, it wasn't a lot, it was about a a hundred thousand, which
was to hopefully cover not just bringing a group of bushmen to the USA, but also
helping them begin a, a legal process.
But the legal process in Botswana was gonna have to be in their own high court.
And because this area that they were, had been kicked out from,
had actually been given to them under British rule in perpetuity.
So, and it had been written into the constitution of.
The Botswana government, so they Botswana government.
Now were going against their own constitution.
But the judge in this case was gonna be, of course, a cousin of the president.
So what would you know?
And all with the billions and billions of Debi DARS behind them.
So what to do?
Well, we did everything.
I managed to make contact with a group called Journey to the Heart, who ran
something called the Gathering of the Shamans every year in California,
healers from all over the world.
And I managed to get that group to formally invite the bushmen over and
raise some money also to be part of their, you know, against part of their travel.
And then partly through the same organization, we managed to make
contact with an organization called Artists for Amnesty, which was the like
Hollywood Wing of Amnesty International.
And they got behind it.
And we managed to get by hook and by crook.
Dave Matthews, those of you who were around during the nineties may remember
that Dave Matthews was the kind of the big singer-songwriter of that era.
Don't hear about him anymore.
But he was huge back then.
Him and Jackson Brown to host a party in Hollywood for the Bushman.
And this went out to news outlets and so on.
And it was a, you know, big do, we got the Bushman over, we're in California,
and then we go around after this.
We go and do everything we can.
We, we, the Bushman, a lot of them ride, ride really well hunt
kudo off horses with spears.
So I took them fox hunting with there's, there's, there's packs
of hounds in California and on the east coast in America.
And, you know, you get lots of like high powered lawyers and people
like that out with these hunts.
So I thought maybe if I take them there, they can network.
And they did.
And they picked, they of course rode incredibly well.
Everyone was, you know, impressed.
And then next thing you know, we have some lawyers coming forward saying,
Hey, I'll represent you pro bono.
And we then went from there across to the Navajo reservation.
We thought we'd go from the west coast to the east coast, Navajo reservations
on the way and the Hopi reservation to talk to groups of Native Americans
to talk about, well what do you do with the land when you've got it back?
There are, you know, gonna be their own sets of challenges then.
So, we are camping in Canyon Dee, which is the second biggest canyon
in the USA after the Grand Canyon in Arizona on the Navajo reservation.
And we're talking with the Navajo about, you know, land stewardship and
how it all works for them and so on.
While we're camping, a medicine man shows up and he says, Hey,
I hear you guys are here to get the land back for these people.
Would you like me to do a ceremony, a sweat healing for that?
And we said, yeah, of course.
So we do, and we do these rounds of prayers for the return of the land.
And at the end of it, the healer says, has anyone else got anything that they wanna.
Asked for healing for, and I said, yeah, my son's just been diagnosed
with autism and he's, it's really severe and I don't know what to do.
So we do a round of prayers for that, and as we're cooling down after the sweat, the
healer comes to me and says, do you hunt?
I said, yeah, yeah, I do, but maybe not in a way that you're familiar with.
And he said, yeah, well, that's not important, he said, but I'm just getting
it loud and clear from the spirit world that you have to stop and it's somehow
connected with your son's autism.
And I thought, of course, of course, this thing that I love doing, fox
hunting was such a huge part of my life.
And it was one of the great early loves.
And even though it was so morally ambiguous it's such a madly beautiful,
pagan dangerous, incredible thing to do.
And I actually, you know, used to write for the equestrian press and go round
with these different hunts and hunt and.
Of course this is gonna be taken from me.
Of course I must give this up.
Makes perfect sense.
So I said, okay, okay, I'll do it.
I'll do it.
And
I had to tell a friend of mine who was the head of the masters of
Fox Sounds Association in America about this because he and I were
working quite closely together.
And when I did tell him, he said, oh, Ruper, I knew you'd always turn on us.
You're bloody hippie.
You know, you, you always, you know, I knew you'd turn into an antique.
I said, look, it's got nothing to do with that.
It's just a personal decision.
It's based, you know, outta this weird shamanic thing.
I dunno what to tell you.
And as I'm having this conversation with him on the phone, this
is, I was briefly back home.
It was at night.
The sitting on my porch, the porch light threw out a.
Light into my front field.
And as I'm talking to him, a fox comes walking outta the dark into that porch
light, and about 25 feet away from me just stops and just starts barking, going,
well, I'm on the phone, this guy, I put the phone up like
this and say, can you hear that?
And he's like, yes.
I'm like, well, that's what's going on.
When I'm having this conversation with you.
He's like, okay, well maybe, maybe something, something
is going on, as you say.
So, and one of, one of the things that the Bushman had really taught
me was always, always, always look for what wildlife is showing you.
When wildlife shows up in your path, it's the ancestors talking
to you that keep your ears open.
Ask what are you here to tell me?
And this is an important thing.
Okay.
All right.
So we get now to the East Coast and we get to the un.
Finally, we find ourselves there in the United Nations and we testify before
Congress for the Human Rights Commissions.
And uh uh, we do all these things.
But what really makes a difference is that we get to the State Department.
And when we walk into the State Department, what is weird is there's
pictures on the wall blown up, pictures of the wall indigenous
peoples and among them are portraits of my friends in South Africa, some
of whom are on this delegation.
'cause it's half Bushman from Botswana, half from South Africa.
What are the odds of that?
And we walk into an office, we're shown to an office, and the guy
who's dealing with us in the State Department is Apache Indian.
He says, I grew up on the reservation.
I know exactly what's going on with you.
And right in front of us, he picks up the telephone calls the land
minister in Botswana and says, I've got four guys sitting in here
in my office saying they've been tortured, you know, for protesting
illegal evictions from their land.
You're supposed to be an ally of ours.
What's going on?
And that was something that began the game change.
Well, it wasn't the end of the road by any means, but it pushed us over the line.
And that was through that happened through the help of an organization
called First Nations Development Institute, run by an amazing woman
called Rebecca Adamson who, whose Lumbee Indian and who helped us massively.
It was her contacts that got us there for the next two to three years.
We just kept it up.
We managed to get through artists for amnesty.
The Bushman invited to back across to to California to to be at the premier of the
Blood Diamond movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Morgan Freeman is there and so on.
And we're protesting outside the DeBeers Diamonds Shop in Fifth Avenue in New York.
And we're doing everything we can and we are, we're protesting in London as
well through an amazing organization there called Survival International.
And we're helping the lawyer and helping to raise money.
Interestingly, through the Fox hunting world, it was the fox hunting world
that really came out and donated money for the lawyers, for the Bushman.
And there are many, many little sub stories to be told in this.
But suffice to say that these lawyers began to go out.
To Botswana, which is where the new land claim is being fought,
which is an even bigger area at stake than the South African one,
rather similar to the one in Quebec.
It's the size of a European country.
It's about the size of Belgium or Switzerland.
This area called the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Only about 3,500 people living in it.
And the Botswana government saying, we've got to displace you all to
make di way for diamond mines.
No way.
I mean, we could say, look, there's lots of people in Belgium and Switzerland,
millions of people and they have mines and no one needs to be displaced.
The Bushman Aren even asking for money.
They just don't wanna be kicked off their land.
And eventually we managed to get, I managed to get again through artists
for amnesty, invited to a get together of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Rome.
And there are.
In the room.
It's Mical Gorbachev, it's Sting, it's Bob Geldoff.
It's even though they're not laureates lek, Jose Ramos Ter from
East Timor, all these amazing people.
Bishop Tutu, Desmond Tutu.
And they hear me out and they write a joint letter to the Botswana government
saying, let these people alone.
And then I also managed to get Gloria Steinem, who's the sort of godmother
of feminism in, in the USA and Abby Disney, who's Walt Disney's granddaughter
and Warren Buffet's daughter-in-law.
It all came in through us amnesty to come out on a safari to
Botswana, to this disputed area.
And while we are there with the Bushman, the Botswana government come in with
troops armed and, and they kick us out.
It's a big international embarrassment 'cause these are big
cheeses that they've done this to.
And
then finally kept the court cases going on the court cases going on court
cases going on about 2005, early 2006.
The prosecutor on behalf of the government in Botswana does
something monumentally stupid.
He has an indiscretion with the wife of the judge.
And suddenly, just despite the fact that they're all cousins at, in the
same noble family, suddenly it becomes personal and the judge rules in favor
of the bushman against all odds.
Now I realized what was happening with these lawyers that was go
going out to Botswana, was that the.
Lawyers were briefing the community, and the community were then going
and relaying this to their healers.
And the healers were going into the spirit world and getting a series of instructions
there and coming from the ancestors and coming back out and briefing the community
who were then briefing the lawyers.
And what we kept getting from the healers was keep hanging on,
keep hanging on, keep hanging on.
Something unexpected will happen.
Well, something unexpected did happen, and the Bushman won the
largest land claim in African history.
Again, I didn't even expect to win.
When people were asking me, Rupert, why are you devoting
so much of your life to this?
What happens if you don't win?
Like your, your, your ego will collapse?
And, you know, and I was like, you, you've got me completely wrong.
I'm in it for the crack.
I'm in it for the adventure.
I will give it my best shot.
But.
I'm in it because the adventure has called me.
The ancestors have called me.
If it doesn't work out well, how lucky and fortunate and privileged was I
to be part of an adventure like this?
But I have a gut feeling that we will be successful.
And indeed it happened.
And I was lying on my couch in Texas, exhausted from a series of autism
tantrums, still at the early stages of wondering what to do, but beginning
to find my way with that a bit.
And I got a call from the BBC in London saying, can we have a comment?
And I'm like, on what?
And they said, well, you've won.
I said, we've won.
What?
They said, you know, the Bushman case, you're involved.
You know, can we have a statement from you?
I'm like, yeah, the statement is beep beep.
You know, bleep, bleep, bleep.
Just 'cause I was so surprised
and that did not conclude my journey in the Kalahari.
But this, my focus at that point then could shift completely to my
son whose autism was so severe, nonverbal, incontinent, tantruming.
Now I tried all the orthodox therapies, they didn't work.
So the journalist in me said, well, you know what you don't know, which
is, you dunno what to do here.
You need mentorship, someone to show you.
None of these therapists that you reaching out to seem to
really know what they're doing.
If there's going to be a mentor who's that mentor, what
qualities must that mentor have?
And I thought, well, that mentor needs to be autistic, adult
autistic who started life in the same place as my son, incontinent,
tantrumming, that sort of thing.
Self-harming, unable to make friends nonverbal and has somehow made it.
Who's that person?
And I realized actually that person exists.
That's Dr.
Temple Grandin.
She's a well-known autistic author, a neuroscientist and professor
of animal scientists, and.
Why don't I contact her?
'cause she was nonverbal, wiping her poo on the wall, age three, and
they were gonna institutionalize her, but she found her way.
How did she find her way?
So I asked her for an interview and I went up and talked to her.
And when I went into her office, she was stemming and doing, you
know, the repetitive movements and behaviors and like really autistic.
And I'll say, oh my gosh, you can be like that and still be like totally successful.
And so I said, how does my son become you?
And she said, Rupert, do three things.
Follow the child, follow their interests, follow what
upsets them, and avoid that and follow what makes them happy.
And go with that.
Follow their, follow them physically so that you can observe what they
get into, follow them intellectually, check out their obsessions and
just go down those rabbit holes.
Do your stuff outside as much as you can.
'cause there's no bad sensory triggers in nature.
'cause that's where our organism is supposed to be.
And your sun, like most people on the spectrum, has a oversensitive
nervous system that's triggering his amygdala all the time.
His fight, flight, freeze, they filling himself with cor, him
with cortisol stress hormone.
So he can't learn.
He's unreachable, but in nature, this will be less.
And let him move.
Don't confine him to desks, chairs, therapy rooms.
Do your stuff out in nature where he can move because he's a pri,
he's, he's a kinetic learner.
Kinesthetic learner.
Whew.
That made sense.
I said, well anyway, look, if that's resulted in you, let me try that.
So I went home and I did, and those of you who know my story know
that that resulted in me following him to a horse called Betsy.
Him becoming verbal on that horse and me realizing that it was in certain rhythms
that he was verbal and that those rhythms, if I produced them, I got more speech.
And we lived in the saddle together for three or four years and I was so broke.
And
he became verbal, literate and numerate
in about 18 months.
And then I thought, okay, is it just him or is it other children too?
So I started throwing unofficial play dates on the farm for other
kids on the spectrum, and they started having the same result.
And then I had to homeschool him because the local school, the special
ed department was, was not good.
And I thought, well, if I can use these rhythms.
Feed in information on the horse.
What about off the horse?
So what about on my shoulders?
What about on a yoga ball?
What about on a swing?
What about on play equipment?
And I did that and it worked, and then I got curious and I went to
neuroscientists and said, please, can you explain why it's working?
And I got a similar explanation from quite a few saying, yeah,
what's happening is you're creating oxytocin through hip rocking rhythmic.
Hip rocking oxytocin is a feel-good hormone that's calming down this
oversensitive nervous system, but it's also a communication
hormone makes us communicate.
Oh, and it's switching off the amygdala, telling it to stop
producing cortisol, which is giving you access to the intellect.
And then because the kid is moving and problem solving all the time,
that creates neuroplasticity.
That creates a, a, a protein in the brain called brain derived
neurotrophic factor BDNF.
That's basically like miracle growth for the brain.
And in these billions of brain cells that are being produced are
these ones of particular interest called perkin cells that among many
other things, govern social skills.
So you're taking a kid with autom auto, Greek word for the self
selfism, filling him with a,
a soothing to the nervous system communication hormone
for someone who doesn't want to communicate.
They're now fooled with a communication hormone and social skills brain cells.
You're gonna see change.
And we went, oh my gosh, yes you can.
That means we can replicate this.
So we began teaching people how to do this with horses and that
became something called a horse Boy method and do this without horses.
And that became movement method.
And then how to train the horse, how to do this as its own
therapy for adults with trauma.
Remember back to when I'd had all that PTSD and I'd been out in Africa and I'd
been out with those horses and it had all sort of gone away that had never left me.
Now I understood the neuroscience and I realized, yeah, we could pair up
veterans, first responders, adult artists, people who've suffered abuse and help
them to train the horses like this.
And sure enough, it turned out to be its own therapy, and that's
called Tachin, T-A-K-H-I-N, equine integration, these three programs.
And in the course of this, I had to learn a lot of dressage, so we ended up
teaching a lot of dressage as well, and running this from this ranch in Texas.
Meanwhile, that word tahin, T-A-K-H-I-N, it's actually a Mongolian word.
It means the wild horse, the PKIs horse who was never domesticated.
It means honored one or revered one.
I always liked that word 'cause I felt that as a rider, as someone who
works with horses, I like the idea of honoring the horse's wild nature.
And those of you know my story know that I also did something rather crazy having
seen that my son had this amazing response to the horse and having this background
in this shamanic healing with the bushman, I wondered if there was a place that
combined these two things on earth.
And so, yeah, that's Mongolia gut feeling again.
That sent that, that pull at the solar plexus.
Gotta go there.
So I did
and I wrote a book about it called the Horse Boy,
and made a documentary about it called The Horse Boy.
And this is back in we, we put out the first
little proposal about maybe doing it when YouTube was very young in 2005.
We made the journey in 2007
and it went viral.
It's one of the first things that ever went viral.
I think the ancestors were at work and
a book deal resulted that was big enough to not just fund the expedition
and make the movie, but also to, for us to open up a therapy center doing
horse boy method and movement method.
And that book, the Horse Boy, if you've read it or if you've seen the film,
you'll know that we ended up at the end of it with the reindeer people
in Southern Siberia where it borders.
On the steps in Northern Mongolia and the healer of the reindeer people ghost.
Two days after doing the healings on Rowan Rome did his first intentional
poop and cleaned himself, which was like watching England win the World Cup.
And he said to me, you have to do three more journeys to confirm it.
So in 2008, I went back out to the Bushman and Besa
came and healed my son.
But we had to do it in Namibia because after we had helped the Bushman win
the land claim in 2006, I and a group of 16 journalists and human rights
workers had been banned from Botswana.
Can't go back.
It's like winning an award.
So we had to get, we had to do it in the neighboring country,
Namibia, and get a passport organized for Besa who lived under a tree.
Can imagine how.
That was not a straightforward process so that he could come across into Botswana.
Into Namibia, sorry, and heal his namesake, my son, Rowan Besa Isaacson.
And he did, along with another legendary healer called from the Quai
Bushman in Namibia, a beautiful man and his friend, we, his three healers
collaborated on, on my son over three days.
And then the year after that, we were in the Daintree rainforest in Queensland
with a cuckoo langi shaman from the Aboriginal Kuku Langi people there.
And the year after that on the Navajo Reservation, remember we'd
been there before, that's where I'd with the Bushman, where I'd
been made to give up hunting the.
At the end of each of these healings, there was a massive leap forward.
And I tell that story in a book called The Long Ride Home.
And now here I sit talking to you.
My son is now 23.
He is independent.
He just came out of the bath in the other room there.
He travels all over by himself.
He has his own house, his own car, couple of jobs.
He's doing very well.
He's got two younger siblings now, Ian and Freya, who
are both a source of great annoyance and a source of great joy to him
just as all siblings should be.
And we continue to do this work now in about 40 countries.
Serving, I can't count how many families through these methods and also the
parallel horse training, and I still write books and make films and so on.
So that's a sort of potted version of my story of self-actualization.
I think what really comes out for me with it is that what really
makes self-actualization happen is when it's about service.
Somehow
the horses brought me out of my depression as a child and brought me into nature,
and I had to earn my way to them
running that market stall and stuff.
They really also served, served me so generously and, and have ever since.
And then I got involved in service with the first Dec Cree and then with the
Bushman, and then of course with autism.
And I think many of you can probably trace parallels in your own lives.
That service seems to be at the key here.
So I want to leave you with this, and some of you have heard me say this before.
There can be no real happiness, I think, unless one is in service to
a community, to one's community.
And that is how we're wired because we're hunter gatherers.
We're supposed to be constantly looking out for each other.
In our current society, we've been told we need to be in competition with
each other, and it brings us misery.
However, if you are in service, it is exhausting.
There's no question it's exhausting.
So how do you not burn out?
Well, the people that you serve, or the planet, if you're serving the
planet, acts as a shamanic prism for your dreams, because if your dreams are
put into the service of the dreams of people more vulnerable than yourself,
then your own dreams start to come true.
And this is done because this will stop you from burning out.
This is what will allow you to keep getting up day after day.
Year after year to do the work.
And in my position as an autism dad, I can never, never stop.
In fact, even beyond the grave, I have to set up structures for Roman.
And so I, I can't burn out.
I can't fail.
But my dreams of horses and riding and living free and riding free
are tied up in service to him and people like him.
And also to some degree with human rights and the ecological offshoots of
human rights, indigenous rights, it.
So here's the deal, guys.
If you put your dreams.
Into the service of the dreams of people more vulnerable than yourself, then
your dreams will start to come true.
You may have forgotten what your dreams are, and you may have pushed
them away because a lot of us have this experience is a dream.
Life comes along, goes, takes a big pool over it, and then stomps on it and
buries it, and it breaks our hearts.
But actually, the dream didn't go anywhere.
It just got fertilized and and planted, and now it requires moisture,
blood, sweat, tears, and up it comes.
So what I want to leave you with my friends is what are your dreams?
Just this question, what are your dreams?
And if you have forgotten, you've pushed them away.
Just asking yourself the question is enough, because then you'll push
your subconscious and in an unguarded moment, 36 hours or so after you ask
yourself that question, you'll be sitting in traffic with your mind
wandering or on the loo, and it will go bubble bubble ping, and you'll
go, oh, yes, that was it, that dream.
And then almost immediately you'll push it away again, you, but I can't have it.
But actually this time you can.
The rules are different if you've, in fact, you must.
In fact, you will.
That's the contract with God.
That's the contract with the universe.
If you put that dream out there and you say very clearly that you want
to put that dream, you will put that dream into the service of the dreams of
people more vulnerable than yourself,
then I look forward to hearing your feedback, particularly a year maybe
after watching this or listening to this and telling me how those
dreams are starting to come true.
So what are your dreams?
You listening right now.
You watching right now, what are your dreams?
What are your dreams?
And that my friends, is all I've got till next time.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
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In the meantime, remember, live free.
Ride free.