There are moments in life when the old version of you stops working, but the next version hasn’t arrived yet. A relationship ends, or a career changes direction. A long-held identity begins to crack. The things that once gave you certainty no longer fit, yet what comes next remains unclear. It’s uncomfortable, disorienting, and most people do everything they can to escape it.
According to my guest today, those in-between periods may be some of the most important moments of our lives.
Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Telfer McCognahay, founder of Ecotone Academy, whose work focuses on helping people navigate major life transitions and uncover the opportunities hidden within them.
Telfer believes that many of us spend years building our lives around what he calls a “provisional identity”: our job, accomplishments, social roles, relationships, or other labels we use to explain who we are. The problem is that these identities are often far more fragile than we realize. Growth often requires old stories, outdated coping mechanisms, and limiting identities to fall away so something more authentic can emerge.
In this fascinating conversation, we explore what happens when life places us in what Telfer calls an “ecotone”: a transition zone between who we have been and who we are becoming.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Telfer and I discuss:
- Why major life transitions, while uncomfortable, often create opportunities for profound personal growth
- The concept of the “provisional identity” and why so many people unknowingly build their lives around it
- Why the pain of being inauthentic eventually becomes greater than the risk of embarrassing yourself
- How unconscious patterns can quietly shape the course of your life
- Carl Jung’s insights on dreams, individuation, and psychological maturation
- Why meditation is less about achieving happiness and more about developing a relationship with your own mind
- The role of experimentation and real-world experiences in personal transformation
- Why belonging cannot be fully found through status, achievement, or external validation
- Telfer’s perspective that the only reliable, universal source of belonging is with the Earth, in wild places
- What it means to become, in his words, a creative agent of cultural renaissance
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Transcript
Ari: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint Podcast. I am very excited to introduce you guys to my good friend, Telfer, who I met recently down in Costa Rica. We quickly hit it off, became good buddies. We were playing soccer together. He’s like a soccer superstar. We had a great time playing him, me and my son, my nine-year-old boy. Then, apart from that, we started talking, and we realized we had all this great stuff to talk about. I really appreciate his mind. He’s got a very unique mind, which I think you’re going to hear in this conversation we have today.
He’s doing all sorts of really interesting, really novel, really unique stuff. It’s hard to even encapsulate in the description, but I’m going to do my best here. He’s the founder of Ecotone Academy, which is an ecosystem of cutting-edge education and experiential wisdom for powerful people eager to make the most of the evolutionary opportunities hidden in life’s major and minor transitions. He’s a wild mind guide, a doctor of divinity, and a doctor of Ayurveda, informed by internal family systems, heart math coherence, and the Animas Valley approach to eco-psychology. He’s also a former Division 1 athlete, soccer player.
His approach to psycho-spiritual wellness is rooted in the recognition that peak physical performance is intimately interwoven with mental dexterity, emotional intelligence, spiritual purpose, and a resilient sense of one’s authentic soul-level identity. Telfer, welcome to the podcast.
David Telfer McConaghay: Ari, great to be with you, my friend.
Ari: Yes. I’m glad we finally made this happen after a few months in limbo, talking about having you on the podcast. It’s finally coming together now. You are currently in the middle of the wilderness, in a tent in Nevada, in an undisclosed location in the forests of Nevada with your dog, Rigby, who is one of the coolest dogs I’ve ever met. Is he there? What’s up, Rigby? What’s up, buddy? You remember me?
Telfer: The man himself. Yes, I am in a super secret location in western Nevada, secret as so many sacred things are.
The Limits of Physical Optimization
Ari: Beautiful. Telfer, we’re going to talk about all sorts of interesting, weird, and wacky stuff. Why don’t you start out by giving people some insight into your origin story and how you came to do all this wacky stuff that we’re about to talk about?
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. I have been in a dance with existential anxiety and debilitating depression since I can remember, since I was at least six years old. Having often felt randomly abandoned on a strange and dangerous planet and trying to figure out, “Where do I fit? Do I belong? Where do I belong?” Family moving all over the place. Lots of tumult in those early years. It’s been this lifelong compulsion to try to make sense of myself, make sense of reality, and how those interact and interweave.
In my youth and teenage years, I found solace and release and peace in athletics. I had four varsity letters in high school and played Division 1 soccer. That was this outlet, this way to make sense of myself and have some sort of solid identity. As things do, things changed. A couple of significant injuries changed the course of that athletics career.
I came to realize quite quickly that all the work I was doing on diet and daily habits and exercise regimens and supplements and all the sort of biophysical optimization hit a limit if I wasn’t simultaneously training my mind, my emotional intelligence, my sense of spiritual purpose, and that soul level sense of who I truly am. Like we were talking about, just doing the biophysical piece, it’s leg day every day, but we’re never doing core or lats or arms or anything. That led me into this realm of the wild mind, and divinity, and internal family systems, and this desire to understand how, no matter how chaotic it feels internally, the cosmos still functions.
The planets are in their proper orbit, the moon is going through its phases, the seasons are in their ebb and flow, the trees are growing, the grass is green, and so there is some order to the cosmos, and so this desire to figure out how does that order also move through me and how can I organize my internal world in alignment with that external world to develop a greater sense of resilience, dexterity, dynamism, and to mostly, the goal is just to be more fully who I am and give the gifts that I’ve got to the world.
Ari: Why is your name Telfer? Where does the name Telfer come from, and why don’t you have a last name?
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. My full name is David Telfer McConaghay, and that name Telfer comes from my maternal Scottish lineage. It is something that I’ve grown into, and I love the name David. I used to be known as Veda Dave when I was doing mostly Ayurveda and Vedic astrology. However, Telfer, from that Scottish lineage, it’s an old nickname for a fierce warrior. That means iron piercer or iron worker. It turns out my ancestors were blacksmiths and iron workers, but if you go on Urban Dictionary, the definition of Telfer is one who destroys without malice.
When I stumbled upon that, it is one of those things that so much of my past and my life story clicked into place in retrospect. It’s one of those things that evokes what I would call my mythopoetic identity, where Ayurveda, Vedic astrology, internal family systems, these are all delivery systems. These are different ways that I share who I am with the world, but they are not who I am. If I do the experiment of what does it mean to be one who destroys without malice, well, I can express that standing in line at the grocery store or sitting in traffic or in a casual conversation.
What that means to me, I think of the butterfly is not mad at the chrysalis, but the chrysalis has to be destroyed if the butterfly is going to go out and butterfly. The little sprout holds no malice for the concrete, but it’s going to break through that concrete in order to become what it is growing into. That reverberates through my life as I understand what am I trying to do with myself? What am I here to help others do?
Well, it’s to destroy without any malice, to dismantle the old stories, the old identities, the coping mechanism, the ways of being that are no longer working, that are no longer relevant, and they’re reaching their expiration date. There’s a threshold there where the familiar is what has kept us alive to this point. When that’s starting to fall apart, and the next step isn’t clear, that’s terrifying. There’s some existential dread.
So often what I’ve seen in my own life and with others is in those transition moments, there’s the tendency to panic and freak out and, okay, this relationship which has been a defining feature of my identity for how many years, this relationship is ending, and now I don’t know who I am or what to do, so okay, here’s another partner, and get right into the next relationship where you’re going to repeat the same patterns over again just with a different person.
The practice, the discipline, is to become comfortable in that liminal space and to deepen into it. The question, how comfortable can you become with that discomfort in order to let the in-between work on you, and you have this great evolutionary opportunity to take a step into an even more authentic way of being as opposed to staying stuck in the same cycle, which is going to bring even more chaos the next time it falls apart, right?
Ari: I want to go back to your university days as an athlete. You were saying that you met the limit of what all the physical optimization could do for you. That led you to go more in the direction of the psychological, the spiritual, the psychospiritual. Talk to me about that. What was it exactly that you were encountering, and how did it lead you towards the psychospiritual domain?
Telfer: The major event was an injury. I tore my left hip flexor, and that basically called an end to my soccer career. The aspirations of going pro just fizzled, disappeared overnight. When the relative stability of my sense of self and my identity were tied up with being a Division 1 soccer player at George Washington University, and that’s who I am, and all of a sudden that collapses, there’s this floating feeling and this sense of, wait, wait, wait, everything I thought I knew about myself, if it’s that flimsy, wow, there’s got to be some more solid ground beneath me.
It was in recovering from that injury that someone suggested I go take a yoga class. I was very skeptical of this at first, but that same friend convinced me, “There’s pretty girls in yoga classes, you should go.” Very quickly, I cared less about that than, wait, if I’d been doing this practice the whole time, yes, the physical practice, but also the form of mental focus, the breathing, the deep somatic experiencing, I would have never gotten this injury.
Recognizing that this injury was creeping slowly along over years, and looking back, I could see, “Oh, there was a little hint, there was a little hint,” but so often, life tries to wake you up with a little, “Hey, hey, hey.” All of a sudden, I’m into yoga and meditation and studying Buddhism, and had some beginner’s luck in meditation, where I went into this extremely expanded state and got to see my life from the 10,000-foot view. I graduated in 2008 as a English major with minors in creative writing and music theory. There weren’t a lot of jobs out there.
I ended up at an ashram in Northern California. That’s where I then discovered Ayurveda. They put me in the kitchen working with an Ayurvedic chef in the garden, learning permaculture, and then the Vedic astrology. This is what I’d been searching for my whole life, this coherent system that, on a more mythopoetic, metaphorical level, explained how all of creation functions. It’s the oldest wisdom tradition we have in the world. It’s this nature-based way of well-being and understanding reality that covers from the soil to the mind to the cosmos.
It was very satisfying. It was in that moment, it was like, “Oh, I can throw my whole life into this and never get bored. I will never reach the end of it. This is an infinite conversation that I can engage in.” Then, in that process, as I went deeper into becoming an Ayurvedic doctor and studying herbalism and the daily habits and circadian rhythms and all that, once again found that my physical health is quite strong.
I can pretty much do what I want on a physical level, but there’s that limiting factor of if I am in a depressive funk, I don’t have the motivation or the inspiration to do my daily practices or get out and exercise. If I don’t really know who I am, then I don’t know how to contribute to the world, and now I’m struggling financially, and now I’m not eating well. All these factors are all parts of one coherent system. If they’re not all being tended to in their dynamic dance, then it all falls apart, doesn’t it?
Ari: Within this psycho-spiritual landscape that you’re describing, that you’re alluding to, how would you help listeners to this conceptualize the worldview, conceptualize the paradigm? What is this all about? What are the key components of this psycho-spiritual worldview that you’re describing here?
Psychological Maturation & Authenticity
Telfer: Yes, that’s a great question and another one of those infinite conversations that we can dive into. There’s a couple angles on it. One that I’ll just set on the shelf for now is the physics and metaphysics, the geometric functioning of how the subtle stuff of consciousness densifies into 3D material reality. There’s a bunch of really fun, both ancient wisdom supported by modern Nobel Prize-winning physics and archetypal geometry. We can nerd out about that for hours. Just knowing that that’s the architectural foundation of what we do, what it really looks like, what we’re really doing is engaged in the process of maturation.
What I see, again, in myself, in people I work with, in society as a whole, is we not only have a dire lack of wise elders guiding the society– We see our elders in Congress, in leadership positions, and not the greatest wisdom, not exactly philosopher-kings. Are they? The issue with having wise elders is you first need nurturing, generative adults. In so many ways, I see so many of us caught in this pathological adolescent identity where even as we become, biologically, adults and elders, the psycho-spiritual orientation is of the adolescent. Sex, money, power seems to be the driving force.
Biologically, nature will evolve us up until adolescence, up until puberty. Yes, there’s obviously a spectrum of care and nurturance that can make a difference in those early years. Basically, nature will take us up to puberty. At that point, there needs to be conscious, personal, and cultural intervention to allow us to mature into our whole selves and move through the world in service of soul. There’s this thing that happens as we’re developing where when we’re young and coming into our teenage years, our primary orientation is acceptance. We want and need to be accepted.
That’s on the level of survival. If we are disowned by our family, we will die. If we’re shunned and exiled by our community, we will die. Throughout all human history, exile is death.
Ari: Worse than death.
Telfer: Worse than death. It is the worst possible punishment to be exiled from the community. There’s this really strong evolutionary impulse to be, first and foremost, accepted. Once we’re accepted, then we want to be as authentic as possible. The example I give is all my friends have Ninja Turtle backpacks. I need a Ninja Turtle backpack, but I’m going to get the Leonardo backpack because I like Leonardo best, and my friend has Donatello or Michelangelo. That’s where I need to be accepted, and then I’m going to be as authentic as possible.
The evolution from the adolescent to the adult is, in many ways, summarized as the flipping of those priorities so that we want to be as accepted as possible while being fully authentic. Once we are fully adults and more or less self-sufficient, I can feed and dress myself and be okay, that’s when the pain of being inauthentic becomes greater than the risk of embarrassing myself or being exiled from one group of friends. The truth is that full authenticity is going to find you your tribe.
It’s only when you’re being your full, weird, wonderful self that you’re going to find your actual people that you vibe with. The obstacle to that is there are these parts of ourselves that have evolved to protect us from the potential for embarrassment or rejection or all these very scary survival-threatening experiences. These, again, are wonderful, well-intentioned aspects of our psyche where if you’re a little boy who just loves to dance, but Dad says, “Boys don’t dance,” your survival depends on sending that part of you that loves to dance into exile.
Then, as you become an adult, that part wants to express itself and is probably holding superpowers for you, but instead, it becomes kryptonite because it’s pulling the whole system out of order. It’s like, if your psyche is an equilateral triangle, but you take one of the points of that triangle and send it 20 yards over here, then every single angle in the triangle has to adapt, the lines get stretched, and you no longer have an equilateral triangle.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work
A big part of what we do in Ecotone Academy is first to map the parts as they exist to create a coherent map of the different aspects of your psyche and what roles they’re playing, what jobs they’re doing, are they happy in that role, what’s their relationship with the other parts. Do we have a nice tetrahedron? Do we have some other weird, distorted polyhedron of parts? That’s mostly what is happening.
Once we have that map, then we can start to befriend, get to know the different parts, and negotiate with them and say, “Hey, little boy that likes to dance, would you like to come closer into the system and bring some of your genius?” “Okay, yes, maybe, but I’m afraid of the inner critic part, the internalized father part.” “Okay, well, internalized father part, would you be willing? Would it be safe enough?” This is where we do what we call experimental threshold crossings. One of my favorite stories, I was working with one of my best friends from college.
She was in a dysfunctional relationship and stuck, and knew she had some bigger purpose, but wasn’t doing it. We made a map of her psyche and the relationship of all these parts. The experiments that we had her doing were around her femininity, the princess part of herself. The first thing she did, she went out and bought a new outfit that just made her feel sexy. That was the first experiment. The next one, she jumped into doing figure modeling. She went to an art class and sat naked in front of a room full of people. That went really well. Then she went and got into burlesque.
She’s doing these sexy performances. Then she got into aerial silks and dancing. There was this progression. These experimental thresholds that she crossed. “Is this okay? Okay, yes, that actually went really well. Is this okay?” Waking up the superpowers that then once those parts were all online and back in harmony with the whole system, she realized, “Oh my God, this is a dysfunctional, emotionally abusive relationship. I’ve got more dignity than this. This princess doesn’t deserve to be spoken to that way. I’m out of here.”
It also woke up the prince or warrior part of her, where she’s like, “Oh my God, I’ve got this passion. Now I’m going to go get a master’s degree from UC Berkeley,” and now is working in psychedelic policy law. That’s just such a simple thing as having a map of the psyche. “Hey, what about this one part of you that–” When I first asked her about it, her response was, “I’m not a princess. I don’t have a princess part. My sister’s the princess.” You can see, in the childhood family system, she had totally exiled the princess part because it wasn’t acceptable.
Her sister got all the princess attention, and she just wanted to go along to get along. She’s super chill and whatever. It’s cool. That’s just one example of how that process can work.
Carl Jung & Enantiodromia
Ari: This is something that we haven’t talked about in person. I’m curious since I know one of the things that we’re going to get to later is about dreams and about Carl Jung. I know that you have at least some familiarity with Carl Jung and probably a very deep familiarity. There’s a concept of his, and this is something I learned a long time ago. Actually, I don’t know if I told you, but I went to a PhD program in clinical psychology, the only one in the country that specializes in depth psychology in the Jungian tradition.
This is Pacifica Graduate Institute near Santa Barbara. Joseph Campbell’s personal library was actually on my campus there, which was pretty cool to go and see his personal books and look at his notes and stuff like that. There’s a concept I learned a long time ago from Carl Jung that didn’t really sit with me. It didn’t stick with me, I should say, at the time. I recently came back to it, and now I’m obsessed with it. It’s called enantiodromia. Are you familiar with that?
Telfer: That word isn’t ringing a bell at the moment. Tell me.
Ari: The origin of it is Greek, and it comes from Heraclitus. Enantiodromia, it’s like in chemistry, if you’ve heard of enantiomers. It’s basically like things that are the same but opposite.
Basically, the principle here is that it was Jung noticing that when a person tried intentionally to become something, more of this thing, more of whatever particular trait, and became very identified with it, egoically, that over time, that thing would tend to morph into its opposite, or that the psyche has this balancing effect where if you move it too much in the other direction, it counterbalances with the opposite pull, and that builds in the shadow, and eventually, pulls you in that direction without your awareness.
There’s all sorts of really interesting examples of this. One example could be someone who is protesting. This also happens at a group level. Individual and group level. Someone who’s protesting against war. They say, “I’m all for peace,” but then in the process, they become angry and intolerant and violent. It’s like, “Wait, what are you protesting again?” Another example is, let’s say someone desires to become enlightened to transcend the ego, but in the process, builds this gigantic spiritual ego and becomes very identified with the idea that they are enlightened, that other people are asleep, and they’re awake, and they’re up here, and the other people are down there.
All of a sudden, they’ve built this gigantic ego that’s invisible to them because they have crafted this identity as an enlightened person. There’s many, many other examples that we could talk about of this, but one of the things that interests me about this, when it comes to human psychology and our personalities, our ways of being, it’s almost like we can’t do things directly.
You can’t just say, “I want to become happier, and so I’m going to choose to make myself happier. I want to become enlightened, and so I’m going to choose to make myself more enlightened. I want to become wise. I want to become virtuous, and so I’m just going to choose to just make myself wise.” There’s a process of life, of events that have to unfold in order for a person to become wise, in order for a person to begin to transcend the ego. These are not things that can just be pursued directly.
You have to create the conditions of life experiences to go through in order to become those things. Do you know what I mean here?
Telfer: Oh, absolutely, and I love this. My little brain is just sparking off with so many associations to riff off of this. The first thing, it makes me think, the nature of reality is to spiral and to spin. Everything at every scale, each individual red blood cell spinning, your blood is flowing through your veins and arteries in a vortex. The planets are spiraling around the sun as it zooms through space. Everything at every level of creation is spinning. Isn’t that the way that we approach a center of gravity where, okay, there’s some longing, there’s some horizon that we’re reaching towards.
Maybe I’d even be able to name it. Perhaps better that we can’t name it, but there’s this sense of some sort of wisdom or experience that we’re being gravitationally pulled towards, and how do we go about it? Circling the drain of it. We come close, oh, and then centrifugal force sends us far away, and then a little closer, and like that. I think about this all the time, and it goes back to a yoga concept about who is the doer? We think we’re doing something here, but who is really doing it? There’s this whole framework for bhakti yoga and all that.
There’s this revelation that we can’t actually do much. In order to heal a wound, I don’t know how to heal a wound. Even a doctor can’t really describe how a wound heals. All we know how to do is create the circumstances in which the healing is most likely. Put some Neosporin and a bandage on it and wait patiently. The same with going to sleep. Very few people that I’m aware of can just say, “Okay, I’m going to sleep.” That’s not really a thing. All we can do is create the circumstances in which it is most likely to happen and then wait patiently.
In the I Ching, there’s one of the hexagrams that’s known as skillful waiting. It’s this patient, calm, quiet attention, both at ease and alert. That’s a lot. When I’m talking about maturation or gaining wisdom or working with these parts, to go at that princess part really directly, and I actually learned this—this was one of my early case studies—was I came at it too directly. That’s what brought up all the protectors like, “No, not that,” and really wanted to block it. Whereas if I had circled the drain a little bit, there’s a more gentle approach. As I’m saying that, I think of– yes, go ahead.
Ari: That’s exactly what made me think of this is the example of your friend. Was it from university, the girl-
Telfer: Yes.
Ari: -that you described? What was interesting about that story to me is it wasn’t pursued directly. It wasn’t just an intellectual knowledge of, “Okay, I know that I have this part and that part, and therefore, I’m going to just choose to be more of this way.” There was an act of putting herself through these experiences to explore. Is something crossing the threshold, experiential threshold, or something like that?
Telfer: Experimental threshold crossings.
Ari: Yes. Those experimental threshold crossings are basically how you can go about– As I see it, they’re a method for creating the conditions to actually have the experience that you’re looking to develop or more embody or integrate these different parts of you, rather than just trying to make it about an intellectual act.
Telfer: Absolutely. The tendency of the intellect is to want to arrive at an answer. “Okay, I’ve got a question. Who am I? Okay, I’ve got an answer. I’m Telfer, wild mind guy, destroyer without malice.” Even that I hold lightly because the answer to a question is the end of a conversation. There are no fixed endpoints. What’s the starting or endpoint of a sphere? There isn’t one. What we’re more interested in than answers is responses. We go out and, yes, do these experiments and check it out.
It’s just part of being in conversation with ourselves, with the world, is, “Yes, I’m going to go and crawl into the empty space in a hollowed-out tree and lay there for 10 minutes and just see what happens. What’s it like to crawl into that dank, cool space and be confined? Interesting.” “Oh, I’m terrified of public speaking. Okay, well, maybe I’ll do the experiment of recording my voice and listening to it back. Just me. Then I might go do karaoke.” It might go terribly. There is such thing as an authentic failure. I sign up for a karaoke.
When it comes, they’re calling my name, I sneak out the back door. Great. Authentic failure, but part of a conversation. There’s no endpoint. You’re exactly right. It’s just creating the circumstances in which we can gain more information. It’s like adding pixels to your screen that you can see the resolution as it is, but it might be fuzzy—funny too—but as we add more pixels and be in that conversation for longer, the resolution becomes clear. All of a sudden, you’re living your life in HD.
The Western Trap of Meditation
Ari: I’m curious if you want to riff off this one. I suspect it’ll trigger some thoughts in your mind, just based on the conversations we’ve had. There’s an interesting aspect of intentionality at play here. I heard an interesting distinction recently. You have these studies about Tibetan monks who meditate, and Western scientists go, and they study them, and they put them in brain scanners, and they see this part of the brain that’s associated with happiness and contentment is larger, and therefore, the monks are happier because of meditation.
The Western mind hears this and gets this information, this research, and the Western mind who wants to be happy, the person over here who’s like, “Well, I want to be happier, so I guess I should meditate so that I can be happier.” There’s a really interesting, subtle dynamic at play there that’s almost invisible and certainly was invisible to me for a long time, because I was that Westerner who was doing things when I got into meditation in my, I don’t know, when I was 19 or 20 for the first time.
Telfer: Same. Right there with you.
Ari: It was about I want to access more happiness, I want to access more equanimity, I want to access supernatural powers, psychic abilities, and all kinds of seeing people’s auras, and who doesn’t want that shit? There’s an interesting, subtle aspect of this, which is that the monks don’t meditate because they want to selfishly be happy. They’re meditating for different reasons. They’re meditating as a generative function. They’re meditating because they’re trying to offer value to the world. They’re meditating and cultivating altruism to try to pray and ease suffering, bring happiness, bring contentment to all sentient beings of the world.
It is an inherently unselfish, altruistic intention underneath that action. Now the Westerner is taking this information about the monk’s contentment and saying, “Well, I want to selfishly be happier, so I need to start meditating.” What do you think of that subtle aspect of there’s the action, which, on the surface, looks the same, but underneath that action is the person’s intention? How does that tie into the work that you do?
The Danger of Dream Interpretation
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. Context is everything. For me, my understanding, meditation is really the process of befriending your own mind. As you go deeper into that process, you discover, “Well, what are the limits of my mind? Is it in my body? Okay, yes, but it’s not just that. Is it outside of me? Yes, but it’s not just that.” This is the great revelation from the sages throughout time is there isn’t actually a difference between you and the all that is. In that process of meditating, the equanimity comes from being in one’s own center of gravity.
Then whatever sensory stimulation, thoughts, emotions, senses, are all just coming into orbit, doing a couple laps, and then leaving again. That’s the impermanent nature of reality. To just be with that, and everything is spinning, but if I’m at the center of gravity, it’s eerily calm at the eye of the tornado. When I’m there, I can be a compassionate witness to all that comes in. Somebody comes in and talking shit to me, “Oh, okay, you must be having a hard day.” Somebody comes in love bombing me, “Oh, okay, that’s nice,” and off it goes.
It is a classic trap where, at some point on the path, the practice becomes the obstacle. The modality that is taking you in the direction of your longing is the obstacle on the path. Like you said, the self-enlightenment seekers who get all caught up in their own enlightenment. I was just reading James Hillman today. He’s got a book called The Dream and the Underworld. He’s going into his talk about–
Ari: James Hillman was very deeply connected to my university.
Telfer: At Pacifica?
Ari: Yes.
Telfer: James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, circling back to these paired opposites. One of the pitfalls of doing doing dreamcraft is to conflate the waking ego with the dream ego, when these are really like shadow paired opposites of one another. So often, I have a powerful dream, I go on ChatGPT, I say, “Hey, what does this dream mean?” It spits me out, pulling from Jung, probably, and all sorts of mythological traditions and the dream dictionary, and “Oh, there was a dog. A dog in your dream means this.” I don’t subscribe to that, but if it’s helpful, more power to you.
However, the risk in that is the dream realm, the underworld is really the context of that, is to dismantle the ego, to interrupt waking ego thought patterns and beliefs, and reorganize the psyche as it digests all the lived experience and stimuli that we’re bringing into the night realm. To go and interpret a dream and have a question about the dream and get an answer has the tendency to inflate the ego further. Even going into a dream, I was like, “Okay, I am every character in the dream.
It’s all me.” Yes, that’s true, but then it’s like, “Okay, well, I’m the superhero of the dream, and I’m the villain of the dream, and I’m going to integrate all of these into my waking ego.” What does that do but remove them from their context in the dream realm, which is its own autonomous realm? Takes them out of that context, brings them into the waking realm, and inflates the ego. Now I just have more characters that identify who I am. Hillman is warning against this, to be very careful to recognize that you are not having a dream.
You, the waking Ari, are not having a dream. You are a visitor into the underworld, the realm of dreams, and the dream is having you. When you’re in that dream, you are subject to it. You are not a subject possessing the object of a dream. You are a subject of the dream. You are immersed in it and at its mercy in so many ways. That is the context that we want to get curious about the elements of the dream. It offers a completely radically different understanding of what dreams mean and their significance, and their scope of meaning and potential impact on your life.
Ari: Big picture, connect everything that you just said about dreams to the meta theory of your approach in the sense of what the goal is, in your words, is maturation of the individual. Let’s go maybe deeper into these two pieces, deeper into what maturation means and how this ties into dreams and the dream world. If that makes sense to you, and if my question doesn’t immediately resonate with you, then feel free to reframe that how you want.
Telfer: No, I love it. We can riff. I trust our minds to bounce off each other in interesting ways. Someone wiser than myself, probably accredited to many people throughout time, said something like the mark of a mature intelligence is to be able to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time.
Ari: I just learned the term for this, by the way, Janusian thinking.
Telfer: Janusian.
Ari: Yes, Janusian for the–
Telfer: G-E-N–
Ari: J-A-N-U-S.
Telfer: Oh, like Janus?
Ari: Yes, Janus.
Telfer: The myth of your two faces.
Ari: Exactly.
Telfer: I love that word. All right. Can you, as your whole self, your mythopoetic, capital S, Soul-infused self, hold your waking ego and your underworld, shadowy dream ego at the same time, and hold them both lightly as ongoing responses in a eons-long conversation? Can you have the wherewithal within a dream to remember that the fearsome ogre that is pursuing you and is going to consume you, even as you’re running away, but your legs feel like they’re stuck in mud?
Can you remember in that moment that the ogre has some benevolent intent, that the ogre has some information for you, and to turn and face the ogre and be curious, “Hey, my friend, what are you looking for?” Then suffer what may. Going back to the monks meditating, there’s nothing right, wrong, good, bad. It’s all just stimuli. It’s all just experience grist for the mill of consciousness.
To be able to hold that neutrality, to be your own center of gravity, allowing whatever phenomena arise in the waking world and the underworld to just be and be in your orbit, whether it’s Mercury taking a lot of really close laps or Pluto way out doing this weird diagonal thing, okay, all just part of the ongoing conversation. Does that make sense?
Ari: Yes
Telfer: I feel like there’s another part of that question.
Ari: Tell me the goal of maturation. Let’s get back to that and how dreams and dream work fits into that, ties into that.
Telfer: One of the things that Carl Jung says about dreams is he also warns against interpretation, at least too quickly, because he’s basically saying dreams are their own response. The meaning of the dream is the living fact of the dream. I feel similarly about what’s the goal of maturation. One of my teachers, Bill Plotkin, founder of the Animas Valley Institute, talks about becoming a creative agent of cultural renaissance.
Ari: Hmm, I love that.
Telfer: Recognizing that, collectively on a planetary level, we’re in an ecotone. The old systems are not working the way they used to. They’re not serving their function, if they ever did, but there was something like homeostasis equilibrium at certain places in the world.
Ari: I feel like this probably more than any other moment in human history has to be the moment where that is the most true, where that transition from old systems breaking and new ones having to emerge is happening much more rapidly than it ever did in past during those transitions.
Telfer: I think that’s true. As a millennial, I was born in 1986. It was my junior high that AOL Instant Messenger became a thing. Facebook was created my freshman year of college. I’m one of the first 5,000 people on Facebook, because you had to have the .edu address to be on it at first. I feel this in my own life. I remember analog life, but no one born after me, after us– Everybody’s born into this digital AI realm. This is this threshold moment in human history where all the old systems are breaking down, the power structures, the resource management, it’s all crumbling.
This is this moment where we need a renaissance of artisans and revolutionaries, and not revolutionaries getting violent in the streets, although sometimes that’s part of it. We also need creative resistance and protest and dismantling of the old systems. As Buckminster Fuller says, you don’t change things by fighting the old system; you do it by creating a new way of doing things that makes the old way obsolete. That, to me, is the value of maturation so that we can be both responsible and generative and generous and able to take care of ourselves and each other.
Thinking about the archetype of a benevolent king who is generous and holds decision-making power, but does it in this wise way that takes care of the whole community. Also, we need the playfulness of a wild child who just wants to go out and climb trees and wants to swim in wild rivers just because it feels good and don’t need to think about it. Just want to breathe clean air and climb this tree. We need all of these components. Again, this is a major part of what we’re doing in Ecotone Academy.
This is the wild mind work, is to cultivate these four facets of wholeness. What I’m describing there is the nature-based map of the human psyche. Assigning archetypes to the four directions on a map. That north direction is that nurturing, generative adult, the benevolent king. On the opposite side of the spectrum in the south is that wild child, that natural-born earthling, like, “I’m an animal born on this planet. I’ve got this body, and look at all the cool things it does.”
Then to the east is this transcendent sense, the cosmic joke, the fool, the wise elder, and the divine child are the same. You put a daycare center and an old folks home and hilarity ensues. Everybody’s really close to birth or death, and it’s all the cosmic joke. There’s that transcendent function, the shadow side of which is escapism, avoidance, the bliss head. Then back in the west, we’ve got the underworld, the muse, the mystery, the dream realm where it’s dark and shadowy, and we don’t really know where we are. It’s Luke Skywalker entering the cave where he encounters Vader and decapitates him.
Oh, it’s his face under the mask. That’s the west. These counterbalancing forces. Again, none is better or worse. What we want is dexterity. We want to be able to move smoothly. When it’s time for this north heart to come up, great, take the lead and we can move smoothly between them. That’s what healthy, mature, wholeness looks like. That is the psychospiritual set of tools that we need to navigate this personal and collective ecotone that we’re in.
Ari: Did you define ecotone earlier?
What is an "Ecotone"?
Telfer: Ah, I will be happy to. That word ecotone in nature describes areas where two ecosystems meet. It’s an edge zone where the forest meets a prairie, for example, or a river meets ocean. Generally speaking, these are the most biodiverse areas on the planet. A major principle in permaculture is to maximize edge zones because they’re fertile and things just want to grow there. You go to where a river meets ocean, and there are species that exist there that don’t exist anywhere else on the planet because of this mixing and this transition space.
It’s also dangerous. That vibrancy of life also invites predators and sharks. If you’re an antelope galloping through the prairie, there might be a lion hiding behind the tree just in the forest. This is a really useful metaphor for what happens in human lives where we approach these ecotones, these thresholds, these one-way portals that we have to go through. Going from single to married, that’s a portal. Going from a man to a father, that’s a one-way portal. No matter what happens, you can only go one way through that portal. It changes you.
It’s exciting and beautiful and literally like new life springing up. There’s all this potential and some pitfalls. It’s terrifying and overwhelming. Who are you going to be? Parts of you are dying and new parts need to arise, but they’re not visible yet. That’ll shake up your snow globe, won’t it? It’s in these moments that having these tools and having the vocabulary to be able to speak the language allows you to participate in the conversation because that conversation between you and your soul and the larger evolutionary momentum happening within your karmic trajectory and on the planet at this time, that conversation is happening whether you are consciously participating in it or not.
This is one of Carl Jung’s great quotations where he says, if you do not make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.
Ari: Yes, indeed. How does Jung’s concept of individuation fit into this model? How would you distinguish your concept of maturation from that?
Telfer: That’s a really good question.
Ari: My read on it based on what you’re describing is– and certainly you have many different ways of talking about this landscape, but in a way, they almost seem like synonyms to me. It seems like you’re pointing to the same thing.
Telfer: In so many ways. One of the paradoxes that we play with is– The foundational meditation practice is called spacecraft, which is the art and science of literally crafting the shape of space within and around you. We use toroidal fields as that universal governing structure of creation at every scale. Your heart generates this electromagnetic field that spirals up all the way around, creates this flowing bubble around you. Organizing that energy field, consciously working with it, has a bunch of powerful impacts.
If we understand that every single atom is a toroidal field, every cell in your body has its own toroidal field. You as an individual have a toroidal field. The planet has a toroidal field. The solar system has a toroidal field. The galaxy, its toroidal field’s all the way out and all the way down. If the cosmos on a metaphorical, mythopoetic, potentially astrophysics level, but TBD, is organized as a set of nested spheres, it’s just a tiny sphere in the middle of a bigger one, and a bigger one organized in toroidal fields all the way up and down, then the center of any sphere is the center of every sphere.
This is where all wisdom traditions, I’ve talked about go internally, find your center, do a centering practice, and that is the access point to the peace and stillness and contentment, but also the most expansive wisdom. How did these ancient sages who had no microscopes, they didn’t do autopsies, but yet they knew about red blood cells and all the different organs and this intimate knowledge, just like they knew about the personalities of the planets and all this subtle mystical information.
If you get to the center of your own sphere, you’re now at the center of every sphere, and you can zoom out and zoom down as you choose. Now, the paradox of that, and coming around to the individuation, is to recognize that your individual bubble, your ego bubble, is a valid boundary condition. There actually is something like inside and outside. There is a difference between me and you. Yes, we are all one in the grand cosmic soup of spiritual unity, that’s true, but also on a lived experiential level, there is a difference.
There’s me, there’s my inner experience, and then there’s the whole rest of the world on the other side of my bubble. This, I think, is one way to understand the process of maturation is when we’re infants, when we’re little kids, we don’t really have that bubble. Little kids are still connected to that unified field, and there’s not that differentiation. Child and mother are the same being for a long time. Then we get to be six or seven, and we start to develop that ego, and we start to do that differentiation and understand, “Okay, I’m different.
I have likes and needs and preferences that are different than this person’s over here.” The goal or endpoint, not that there is such a thing, of the maturation process would be to come back around to recognize that essential unity that you had as an infant while also holding the differentiation. That’s that two ideas at the same time, or ideally, three or four ideas. We get into archetypal geometry, we need tetrahedra, which is a four-pointed pyramid. That’s really the ideal that we’re getting towards, but to hold both of those at the same time.
Yes, we are one, but also there’s a differentiation, and I have boundaries, and it’s a selectively permeable boundary. If you come in at just the right angle, great, you made it into the ecosystem. Like the space shuttle trying to come back to earth, coming too shallow, you bounce off the atmosphere. Coming too high, you’re getting burnt up before you hit the surface. If you want to be friends– This is what happens, right? We meet someone and we don’t know exactly consciously why, but that person’s vibe is coming in at just the right angle to come into one another’s orbit.
Ari: I remember the first time we started talking when we met back in, I think it was December or January, and you were describing ecotone. I’m vaguely remembering a description of this work that you’re doing as grounding the individual in the larger context. Tell me about that. How did you describe that relationship? I think that overlaps with your concept of maturation as well.
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. Almost touched on this before, but what comes to mind is the differentiation between an authentic identity and a delivery system. This, for me, is the difference between the vertical plane and the horizontal plane, where the delivery system is what I’m doing, how I’m interacting with the world, the actions I’m taking, the words I’m speaking, whatever that looks like. If I don’t have a clear vertical pole, then that spin on the horizontal plane, I’m like a wobbly top. I’m just being spun in circles. Sex, money, power, sex, money, power, food, sleep, food, sleep, food, sleep, and getting caught in satisfying these desires.
Whereas, if I have that vertical orientation, and I know where my north star is, I know where I’m going, and I also know where I’m from. I’m rooted. I am a tree with roots in the ground. I’m not just the concept of a tree in general. I am this tree in this ecosystem providing a home to this bird and that squirrel. The specificity of that is the starting point for an authentic identity, because how do I know what gifts are mine to give until I know where I am, where I’m rooted, what kind of being am I?
Only then can I look around in 360 degrees around me and say, “Oh, I have these acorns. I can just drop them as a gift to my environment.” That is just the natural, inevitable expression of who I authentically am. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Ayurveda or IFS or holding the door for someone. That’s that one piece of knowing who you are and where you belong. Of course, humans, we’re nomadic. I especially have had this lifelong search for where physically do I belong on the planet. I’ve had a variety of experiences that have shown me I need to simplify that and just go to, I belong on the planet.
Ari: I was going to say that’s the only reasonable answer in this day and age because we all have this status anxiety that we live with through our lives, which is this chronic uncertainty of not feeling belongingness, but this uncertainty of– The context for understanding that idea is that in the ancestral way of human life, we’re in a tribe and we are known by other people, and we know the other people of this tribe or this small community. We know where we stand in relationship to them and who we are and who we’re expected to be and who they are, and so on.
Everybody has their role and there’s a lot of clarity. Now, in this modern world we live in, we don’t have that community. We don’t know who we are in relationship to everybody else that we’re meeting and encountering. This term status anxiety was created out of that. It’s this trying to figure out who we are in relationship to the people around us. Because we no longer have a tribe and we no longer have a place and a culture and set of values, shared values and practices and traditions, for most of us coming out of the Western world these days.
All of that belongingness to a particular place and to a particular people has largely disintegrated for the most part for people like us and lots of people– Lots of modern humans these days. The only reasonable answer that you can come to is that you are a creature of the earth, that you belong to the whole earth, and maybe there is no particular group or place that you belong to within that. You just belong to the whole earth. There’s something that is very difficult in coming to that realization.
I think it entails a lot of sadness and suffering and grief and isolation and loneliness, but there’s also something really beautiful in arriving at that. One of the things we were talking about just before we started recording this call is you are in the middle of the wilderness right now and then soon you’re going to go someplace else and you’re going to see friends there. I gave you an invitation to come stay at my house. I have extra bedrooms here in my place and you’re welcome there. We were just down in Costa Rica hanging out there. It’s opening up this whole new realm of belonging to all the places and all the people.
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. Just snaps to everything you just said and goes back at various points in my life, recognizing the frailty of the identity that I had constructed to establish some temporary sense of belonging, what Bill Plotkin calls the provisional identity. “I don’t really know who I am, but, hey, I’m a soccer player and people know me as that and that feels pretty good. That feels authentic enough. I’ll go with that.” Then it gets shattered because life does that. Then, “Now I know myself as a member of the yoga community, and I’m the guy in the yoga community that does Ayurveda.
I’ll be Ayurveda Dave. Great, okay, that feels good enough.” Then that gets shattered for whatever reason. It’s totally understandable that I love that term status anxiety, and it explains so much of mostly Western human behavior these days where without that inborn and entrained and attuned sense of belonging to a piece of land, to the more-than-human world in that place, to your family, community, all that, without that, it’s no wonder that we identify with a sports team or a job. My title at my job is my identity. It makes total sense. It’s totally understandable, and it’s fragile.
Eventually, the nature of life, life, too, will destroy without malice. I’m not mad at you for being a CEO, but now it’s time to find a deeper bedrock. Over the years, over and over and over again, as you say, it’s humbling because in order to get to that more authentic identity, you have to have the provisional identities torn down. There’s a big difference between having it ripped from your hands and being proactive about, “Hey, we’re going to renovate this house. Let’s do a controlled implosion and clear the field and dig a deeper hole so we can build a taller tower.”
There’s a really big difference between those two. The only reliable universal source of belonging that I’ve found is with the earth in wild places where that sense of having been randomly abandoned on a strange and dangerous planet dissolves as I fall to my knees in love with this planet, recognizing that all the elements that compose that world are also composing me. Quick aside, pointing to my master’s thesis called The Periodic Table of Ayurvedic Elements, weaving together modern biophysics with our most ancient wisdom.
A bunch of fun, showing how literally, physically, all the stuff out there is the same stuff in here, and recognizing that I am inseparably, intimately, interwoven within the web of all beings and cannot be otherwise. That is profoundly humbling and also expansive and inspiring and stabilizing, so that even when a precious relationship has just ended, there’s a career transition happening, all that, just go to the land and put my feet in the river and watch the stars pass by overhead and the innate order of the cosmos.
I’m reminded that that order is also flowing through me and chaos is part of that order. We evolve through these alternating bouts of chaos and order and what makes good music interesting, but distortion. The start of a song sets a nice melody, okay, and then you go to the B section and it deviates and troubles it and gets weird. It’s then so satisfying when it resolves back to the harmonic. When it comes back to that harmonic, it’s not just back where it was, but it comes with greater complexity and depth and significance because it has deviated.
Again, just like the only solid reference point I’ve found is in the natural world, and that’s the root of how I take care of myself and how I like to help other people find that same sense of belonging to themselves, in their world, and to the planet as a whole.
Reconnecting with Nature & Tensegrity
Ari: There’s something that is– in what you’re describing, it’s not just an important point, it’s almost the key realization that one needs to have. It’s fundamentally spiritual in nature, but the thing about this connection to the world around you, to nature, I don’t think it can be arrived at intellectually. It has to be a felt sense. I was just reading some of Arne Næss’s work.
Telfer: I don’t know Arne Næss.
Ari: A famous Scandinavian philosopher from the 1970s who wrote about deep ecology. This is basically a worldview and it’s an ecological worldview that is very much what you’re describing here. All of this ties– I’m fascinated with it because it ties directly into all of the work that I’ve been developing for years now and writing about for the last two-and-a-half years in my new book, which is top secret for the time being, basically on a worldview that comes out of this connection with nature.
The thing is, and the big barrier to everything that you just described there, is that the whole of Western civilization, as a result of many different forces from religion to the scientific revolution, has essentially created a cultural mythology that has entirely disconnected us from nature and the natural world, that has elevated humans above the animals. We are not an animal. We think we’re something else and that animals are beneath us and animals are resources for us to use to our own benefit. We have things like factory farming where we go and torture God knows how many hundreds of millions or billions of animals.
Telfer: Billions.
Ari: I think it’s billions, yes, of animals every year just to consume them. Who gives a shit about their well-being and their suffering? Where we look at the natural world from the perspective of things to be extracted to create value for humans. We created this whole anthropocentric worldview where the entire world is our oyster. It revolves around humans. We are fundamentally disconnected from nature. The universe is this random, chaotic, scary place, and we’re not a part of it. We’re above it and we need to use our cleverness and our intelligence to conquer it and to control it and to extract from it and to lord over it.
This goes all the way down even to– This is the crazy thing that I’m only putting together recently and connecting all these dots in this way. Not only do we do this to the outside world of nature, but now we have literally internalized this worldview to our own bodies. We distrust our own biology and imagine that we need to take chemicals made by some industry to control chemicals in our own body.
That we’ve been convinced into a narrative that we have chemicals in our body that our body produces that serve important roles in our body that are bad, and that are out to get us, and that we need to take a drug to keep it in the optimal range so it doesn’t get us. This is how disconnected we are from nature, is we have literally disconnected ourselves even from our own bodies. We have made our own bodies something that we need to control and submit to our will. Given how deep this disconnection from nature is, how do you systematize people undoing all of that?
Telfer: Again, just really well said, and elucidated, and framed. That word you used just at the end is key. It’s systems, and systems thinking. Understanding that, yes, I am whole unto myself, but I am just one whole part of a larger whole. I think all the symptoms you’re describing of that this idea of meditation is the answer to happiness, and methylene blue is the answer to health. It’s not a conversation. These chemical fertilizers are the answer to agriculture. It’s this desire for a fixed, controlled environment. It’s antisocial, is really what it is. It’s ultimately, on a global scale, the behavior of a pathological adolescent.
In an adolescent, that’s part of the development, is that raw egotism. Teenagers think the world revolves around them, that they know everything, that their parents are dumb, they don’t know anything. It’s an appropriate phase of development. It’s one of the paradigmatic views that I carry is that as a species, we’re going through a collective adolescence where, in our childhood, mother provided everything we need. Mother Earth, food everywhere, abundant, just children playing in the garden.
Over the past 1,000, 2,000 years, we’ve been in this adolescent phase where we’re stealing money out of her wallet, calling her a bitch, and causing chaos in the household, and doing whatever we want, driving drunk. Doing what crazy teenagers do. The transition that’s being asked of us at this time is a level of maturation. Using male psychology as the example, going from Mother Earth to Lover Earth, and to work on our Oedipus complex where you want to kill the father and fuck the mother. Am I allowed to swear? Anyway.
Ari: Some people are probably pissed off at it. Whatever. They’ll get over it.
Telfer: It’s part of making the point. There’s a bunch of research about how people who swear actually are healthier in a lot of ways because you get that intensity of expression out. Anyway.
Ari: However, you need to rationalize it.
Telfer: Yes. [laughter] Leftover from my rebellious teenage days. The transition from mother to lover is mother to child is a vertical relationship, top down, whereas lover is a horizontal relationship. There’s a give and take. There’s a conversation. “Hey, I can offer this, and in return, I need to receive this.” There’s this exchange. It’s a horizontal relationship between equals. That, as you say, is where we’re missing this idea that we are somehow outside the natural order. Bringing it back to systems thinking, recognizing that, yes, I am one part of a larger ecosystem.
Buckminster Fuller described the dynamic function of systems in the science of tensegrity. That word tensegrity is a portmanteau of the words tension and integrity. Basically, the simplest way to describe it is the phrase islands of compression floating in a sea of tension. Take the human body, for example. The bones are compressive elements, islands of compression, which are floating in the sea of tension created by the fascial network, muscles, ligaments. Thank goodness that your spinal column isn’t like a stack of bricks relying on the downward compression of gravity to keep it stable, because if it were, then one little horizontal push and the whole building collapses.
Instead, there are this web of tension holding these compressive elements, not touching each other, but holding the whole system sturdy. That’s what allows us amazing dexterity and outsized strength-to-weight ratios. We can carry multiple times our own body weight. We don’t just come flying apart in zero-gravity environments. Tensegrity describes how systems function at every scale, from the cellular to the musculoskeletal to cosmic. I’ve coined the term astrotensegrity. We’ve got biotensegrity. That’s a well-known term taught most prominently by Tom Myers, who does Anatomy Trains.
Ari: He’s the OG fascia guy.
Telfer: Yes, exactly. Tensegrity is a huge part of his work. He talks about biotensegrity. We can look at astrology as astrotensegrity. How do these changing geometric relationships impact the structure and function of life at any given point in space? Then we’ve got psychotensegrity. Your mind, your psyche is also a system composed of constituent parts which are in geometric relationships with one another. As we started out talking about, pull the equilateral triangle over here, no longer an equilateral triangle. How can we harmonize those systems?
It is that recognition of the essential similarity of structure and function at every scale of creation that allows me to be humbled at being just one little node in this vast, complex system, but also have the dignity that, yes, I am whole unto myself. All the same functions and elements that make up every aspect of creation are fully present within me. Wow, doesn’t that make me powerful, and honorable, and a dignified participant in a larger conversation?
Getting back to humans have attempted to remove ourselves from that conversation. Entrusting the larger arc of history, my hope is that we’re just at a moment where as rebellious teenagers, we as a species have run away from home. We’re 14 and we ran away from home because mom’s just being so terrible. We’ll come full circle.
The Threshold Test & Next Steps
Ari: Telfer, tell me– I have maybe a couple more questions for you. Tell me about the threshold test and first step for listeners. The last thing that I want to ask you is basically to put all of this together and just lay out the map of the work you do, the work you think people should be doing, and who it’s for, and who should join you in this work?
Telfer: Beautiful. Thank you for that. The starting place is something I’ve created called the threshold test. This is a 108-question self-diagnostic in the spirit of a Myers-Briggs sort of test, except it’s rooted in eco-psychology and the five phases of the journey of soul initiation. It takes 15, 20 minutes. It’s free. It’s just the experience of going through it is provocative and profound. I would recommend that people have their journal with them as they go through. It’s a series of statements, and you rank 0 through 10 how relevant or accurately it describes you. It brings up a lot.
Then it shares a whole detailed collection of results and feedback that emphasizes your brilliance, where you’re operating at full capacity, and then where some of the blind spots are, the secret obstacles that are obstructing your path, and also helps you identify where on that stage of soul initiation you are. That’s a great starting place just to get you some feedback, some orientation into this model and some healthy reflections. Even if that’s as far as you go, I know that it will help illuminate different aspects of your journey.
From there, would love to have a conversation with you, dear listener, about the results of that test. What I’m always interested in is what is the shortest path to the most courageous conversation we can possibly have? No fluff, the small talk. “Hey, how’s it going? Okay, how’s your soul today?” That test gives us a really good jumping-off point for that. Then, Ecotone Academy–
Ari: I love that, by the way. I feel like I’m very much that way and you’re very much that way. I feel like that’s why we instantly hit it off is because it’s just cool to meet somebody that you can instantly go to that level with.
Telfer: Yes, and still come back to the surface and tell a dirty joke, but–
Ari: Yes, there was lots of that.
Telfer: Yes. In breath, out breath, right? Again, what we want is–
Ari: I would tell some of the stories about the things we laughed at here [laughter] at the cafe one day. Probably not appropriate for this podcast.
Telfer: That’s for the paid subscribers only, right? Again, what we want, we don’t want just strength or just flexibility. We want dexterity. We want both, flowing between all of it. In terms of Ecotone Academy, it is an ecosystem. There’s eight different programs, pre-recorded educational content, which you won’t find anywhere else. You can ask ChatGPT all you want and you will not find this paradigm and this worldview collected in this coherent way. We meet once a week in the council. Then throughout the year, we go through the different crafts.
The core of the curriculum is the four crafts, which are spacecraft, which is these meditative experiments in subtle self-awareness. We’ve got timecraft, which is diving into the true nature of time. What is time? How does it work? What are the different types of time? How can you choose what type of time to experience at any given moment according to your chosen purpose? We’ve got mindcraft, which is a lot of what we’ve been talking about today.
A modality called internal family solar systems and all of the geometry of consciousness that we’ve been going into, including IFS and NVC and all these different modalities, but diving into this mythopoetic identity development and nature-based identity structures. Then starting next week, we have dreamcraft, which is using your dreams as the access point to illuminate the defining themes of your waking life. It’s a powerful jumping-off point for internal parts work.
Again, waking up these dormant superpowers that you have, checking out some of the more interesting obstacles in your path, and getting guidance on small and large decisions coming up. As Freud said, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. As Jung said, if you do not make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. We’re using dreams to get into that unconscious realm, bring what is in shadow up into shade, and allow you to take significant steps in the direction of that more authentic identity where you’re still accepted enough. We will accept you.
There’s no way– You can be as weird as you want in Ecotone, and it’s to be celebrated. You’ll be accepted enough while leaning into that more authentic identity.
Ari: Telfer, it is always such a pleasure to be in your presence, to have conversations with you. As I told you before when we last talked in Costa Rica, I really enjoy your mind. I enjoy the way you think. I enjoy the way you see things. It gets me thinking in new ways, which I’m very much in appreciation and gratitude for. This conversation is no different. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your insights, your way of seeing things with my audience. I hope that people will be interested in going deeper with you and exploring further.
Where specifically should they go? Do you want to send them to a particular link to go to do this questionnaire? Then tell listeners again what happens after that. They can actually get on a call with you personally?
Telfer: Yes, absolutely. First of all, thank you, Ari. What a joy. [Spanish language]. Such a joy to let our minds bounce off each other. Really fun and interesting. As you see, everything you say sets off a bunch of fireworks in my mind. Really a joy to go back and forth with you here. My website is ecotone.academy. All the information is there. If you want to go straight to the threshold test, it’s threshold.ecotone.academy. You can find me on YouTube as Telfer Wild Mind Guide. You can find me on Instagram at Telfer.Wild Mind Guide.
Ari: Make it simple. Where’s the one place that people should go to do this questionnaire?
Telfer: Ecotone.academy.
Ari: Ecotone.academy, and then they can take this questionnaire.
Telfer: There’s a big yellow button at the top that says take the threshold test.
Ari: We’re going to simplify for everyone. Go to ecotone.academy. Ignore all the other places that you can find Telfer.
Telfer: Oh, I made it more complex than it needed to be? Oh, that’s so crazy.
Ari: Exactly. I’ve learned over the years you’ve got to simplify. Just give people one clear direction, and that’s the best way of doing things. Ecotone.academy, and then click the big yellow button.
Telfer: Big yellow button at the top.
Ari: Take the questionnaire, and then afterwards, they can actually get on a call with you personally. Do they have to pay for that? Is it free? How long is it? What are the deeds?
Telfer: There is a requested fee for that initial conversation, but for our friends of the Energy Blueprint, if you use the Code Blueprint, I’ll waive the fee. It’s usually $47 for a half hour to go over those results.
Ari: You may want to reconsider this. I don’t know how many takers you’re going to get, but it may consume a lot of your time. You’ll have to figure. I’ll leave you to solve that.
Telfer: Let’s say the first 20 people. We’ll say it’s good for the first 20 people and get in there. Then I’ll see how [crosstalk].
Ari: Then after that, $47 maybe.
Telfer: Yes, exactly. Again, if you’re interested, Dreamcraft starts June 15th. I’m not sure when exactly this will publish, but the very absolute last day to sign up will be June 18th, Thursday.
Ari: We’re on June 10th right now. I’m going to do my best to get this to my team right away so they can turn it around and release it this Saturday, which is, what is that? June–
Telfer: 13th.
Ari: 13th. It opens the 15th, and then sign up. The last day to enter is June 18th. Is that right?
Telfer: Yes, exactly. The remedy for complexity is simplicity. At Ayurveda, we treat with opposite qualities. If something’s super complex, simple, simple. Being in transition is complex, whether it’s a major or minor shift. Again, relationships, jobs. A lot of times it’s spiritual emergency, spiritual emergence. All of a sudden, a revelation hits you. It’s like, “Oh, the way I’ve been living my life is no longer viable.” If you’ve got that sense, even on a really subtle nagging level, life is only going to get louder. If you’ve got that sense, if you’re navigating any sort of shift or transition, Egotone is specifically potent for you.
Ari: Telfer, thank you again for coming on. This was an absolutely lovely conversation. It was a pleasure. I wish you amazing luck and good fortune with your upcoming launch. I hope it’s a huge success for you and for everybody who joins you in this launch. I’m interested to check it out myself. I may be in there-
Telfer: Let’s do it.
Ari: -going through this with you because I love what you’re doing. I think it’s very unique. As I said, I love the way your mind works. I’m interested to go deeper into this with you and learn more from you. Thank you again. I look forward to our next conversation. I know that we have lots more to talk about. I’m sure there will be more conversations in the future.
Telfer: Always. Always. Thank you so much, my friend. What a joy to be with you. Thanks, everybody
Show Notes
00:00 – Introduction & Telfer’s Background
01:23 – The Limits of Physical Optimization
16:00 – Psychological Maturation & Authenticity
21:02 – Internal Family Systems & Parts Work
25:00 – Carl Jung & Enantiodromia
35:40 – The Western Trap of Meditation
38:24 – The Danger of Dream Interpretation
53:15 – What is an “Ecotone”?
1:06:12 – Reconnecting with Nature & Tensegrity
1:24:00 – The Threshold Test & Next Steps
Links
Register for Telfer’s event at https://www.ecotone.academy/
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