About / Meet Telfer

At home at the edge.

Telfer has spent his life in the borderlands, where one way of being ends and the next has not yet begun. He knows that liminal ground well enough to guide you through your own edge zone with calm, courage, compassion and curiosity.

Wild Mind Guide / Doctor of Divinity / Vedic Astrologer / Founder, Ecotone Academy / qathet, British Columbia

Telfer leaning over a table of trail maps and field guides
01

Meet Telfer / A short film

The story behind the work, in 90 seconds
02

The inner territory / Why Telfer does this work

Telfer standing at the rim of a volcano and looking into the crater
Telfer at the volcano's rim staring into the abyss.

A volcano offers a direct lesson: the ground beneath us is alive, and certainty is often only a temporary arrangement. That truth sits at the center of Telfer's work.

As a Wild Mind Guide, teacher, and architect of unmaking, he helps people recognize the intelligence within disruption and listen for the deeper life asking to emerge.

His work draws from ecopsychology, Internal Family Systems, Vedic Astrology, Ayurveda, yoga, dreamwork, and years of direct apprenticeship with the living world.

Read the full story on Ecotone ↗
03

Path and training / The long view

Telfer grew up with anxiety and depression and spent years searching for what actually helps. That search became his life’s work. He has studied Vedic Astrology since 2009, completed more than 4,000 hours of Ayurvedic training from 2014 to 2018, and has trained with the Animas Valley Institute to be a Wild Mind Guide since 2018. Along the way came IFS training, HeartMath certification and a Doctor of Divinity, earned with a dissertation on Internal Family Solar Systems. This original framework builds on Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems and reads the planets as archetypal parts of the psyche, orbiting the Self like the Sun.

Telfer served as faculty at Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula from 2019 to 2024 and has presented for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. He is the former President of the Colorado Ayurvedic Medical Association and former Event Director for Dr. Zach Bush. He produced and hosted four Colorado Ayurveda Conferences and four Journey Immersion retreats.

Today he lives in qathet, British Columbia, and runs Ecotone Academy, a school for people crossing the edge between an old story and a new one. In ecology, an ecotone is the place where two habitats meet: the edge where things fall apart and new life is most likely. Telfer helps people read their hardest seasons the same way, so they can make friends with change instead of fighting it. He also writes the Wild Mind Guide Substack.

His conviction is simple: you are part of a larger whole, and a whole made of parts. Health and happiness come naturally when all the parts are in harmony. His work guides people from the part they play to the whole they are.

Telfer, moved to tears, speaking at an Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula graduation in front of an altar and paintings of the goddess.
A tender moment at an Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula graduation

Training

  • Wild Mind Guide, trained by the Animas Valley Institute (2018 to present)
  • Doctor of Divinity, dissertation on Internal Family Solar Systems (2026)
  • IFS-informed practitioner (IFS Institute) since 2020
  • Ayurvedic Doctor-level certification (4,000+ hours, 2014 to 2018)
  • Vedic Astrology since 2009
  • HeartMath Certified Practitioner (2026)
  • 1,000+ hours of yoga teacher training (2009 to 2018)
  • Permaculture Design Certificate with Midwest Permaculture (2016)
  • Master’s degree in Metaphysics, thesis on “The Periodic Table of Ayurvedic Elements” (2018)

Credits

Internal Family Solar Systems is original work building on Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems. The nature-based soul work follows Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute.

Elsewhere

Instagram · Substack · YouTube · Media kit

Here for your own journey?

Start with the free Ecotone Assessment.

A short set of questions that returns a written reading of the terrain you are crossing, plus free entry to the Ecosystem, the Ecotone Academy community and library.

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