This episode started before we even hit record. My guest, Efrat Livny, was already mid-thought, mid-wisdom, mid-life philosophy — and honestly, that felt exactly right. Because that’s who Efrat is. She doesn’t wait for permission to show up fully.

Efrat is an artist, healer, serial entrepreneur, traveler, teacher, and an elder with a PhD in the School of Life — someone who has lived enough life to stop pretending it should look a certain way. She’s a longtime mentor and friend, and someone who has shaped the way I think about community, collaboration, and what it really means to be in service without burning yourself to the ground.

I didn’t know exactly where this conversation would go. I trusted it would be good. It was more than that.

A Life Built in Layers

Efrat came to the United States from Israel in 1983 — not by choice, but by circumstance. Her then-husband was completing a postdoc, and she arrived, as she put it, “kicking and screaming,” assuming she’d be here for a short time. Forty-three years later, her grandchildren were born here, and Madison, Wisconsin, is home.

But her path was never linear. She spent years in academia, working as an information professional in the field of biotechnology — connecting dots, bridging disciplines, making meaning out of complexity. It was work she was genuinely good at. And yet, at 40, something cracked open.

Her mother had died at 42. Somewhere deep in her body, Efrat had quietly assumed she wouldn’t live past that either. When she began to realize that might not be true — that this might actually be the middle of her life, not the end — she sat herself down and asked a question that changed everything: Are the choices I’ve made really my own?

The answer was a clear no. So she left. The marriage. The university job. The identity she’d been handed. With only the proceeds from an apartment in Jerusalem to sustain her for two years, she gave herself permission to not know — to just try things she loved. She gardened. She worked in a restaurant. She apprenticed with a seamstress. And then, in one quiet moment, the word massage floated through her mind. She’d never considered it. She followed it anyway.

That was the first time she let her intuition fully lead. It would not be the last.

Threshold, COVID & Learning to Let Go

Over the years, Efrat built a thriving bodywork practice, trained in a modality called Zero Balancing, and eventually became a teacher. She opened a community healing space in Madison called Threshold, a beautifully renovated old garage that became a hub for practitioners, musicians, and healers. It was, by many accounts, ahead of its time.

COVID closed it. And unlike many practitioners who reopened once restrictions lifted, Efrat never did.

It took her nearly five years to fully make peace with that. But she got there. And what she says now is worth sitting with: “It also took so much out of me. And I will never, never do anything that is going to ask me that much.”

That’s not defeat. That’s wisdom.

Going for Life — Not Fighting for It

A few years after leaving the university, Efrat was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Her prognosis was poor.

She didn’t fight it. She went toward life instead.

“I decided to go for life — not to fight for life — but to go for life.”

She gathered a healing circle. She orchestrated her own recovery. She made a quiet deal with herself — and maybe with something larger — that if she was going to be here, she was going to actually be here. Twenty-five years later, she is.

That experience reoriented everything. Her relationship to time. To work. To how much of herself she’s willing to give. It also gave her a framework she carries into every collaboration, every relationship, every conversation: where can I add myself in a way that serves and sustains?

The Donkey-Donkey Principle

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to.

Efrat learned this concept through Zero Balancing, a body-based healing modality she studied and later taught. It comes from the founder, Dr. Fritz Smith, who observed that donkeys, when resting under a heavy burden, will lean into each other, not leaning on each other, but finding the exact point of shared support where both animals are equally held.

That’s the donkey-donkey lean. And Efrat teaches it as a principle for life.

It’s not about perfect balance. It’s about finding the zero point, the place where forces neutralize, where you’re neither over-giving nor under-receiving, where collaboration actually sustains both people. She describes it as a constant calibration, not a fixed position. You lean in a little, then a little less, then a little more — until something settles.

For women entrepreneurs especially, the over-givers, the service-driven, the ones who confuse depletion with devotion, this is a radical reframe. You are not meant to hold everything alone. And you are not meant to collapse under the weight of someone else’s needs either. The goal is the lean that holds you both.

Presence, Peonies & Leaning Into Life

On her way to our recording, Efrat noticed a peony in her garden, just beginning to open. She stopped. She went back a few steps in the wrong direction. She leaned down and looked. She took a photo.

Shortly after she arrived, her daughter, four hours away, sent her a picture of the first peony opening in her own garden.

That moment, the noticing, the pausing, the leaning in, is how Efrat does life. Not with a plan. With attention. With delight. She calls it the lean: letting life get your attention, following what pulls you, and trusting that showing up open-handed is more powerful than showing up over-prepared.

For anyone who has ever burned out trying to get things just right, this lands differently. Presence isn’t a productivity hack. It’s the whole point.

On Elders, Community & What Comes Next

Efrat is in her 70s and describes herself as past the need to hustle, past the transactional phase of entrepreneurship, and fully in what she calls the opportunity phase — looking around and asking: where can I add myself to something that’s already doing the right thing?

She’s thinking a lot about women coming together across generations. About what becomes possible when women who have accumulated wisdom, skills, and perspective stop operating in silos and start pooling their knowing. About what it means to build community that radiates outward — not just supporting individual businesses, but creating a collective force.

She doesn’t have all the answers yet. She’s sitting with a heartbreak right now, something she hoped to be part of that didn’t unfold the way she imagined. And she’s practicing what she preaches: staying open-hearted, trusting the river will flow, and not forcing the direction.

She’s heading to Spain next to visit her 17-year-old granddaughter, Talia — the grace meter, she calls her. The living proof that ancestral patterns can be broken. That you can be the first in your lineage to do something differently.

That, to me, is legacy.

Some topics we cover:

• How Efrat’s unexpected immigration from Israel to the U.S. shaped her relationship to belonging, rootedness, and building a life far from home
• What made her walk away from academia, her marriage, and everything familiar at 40 — and what finally gave her permission to do it
• The story behind Threshold, her ahead-of-its-time community healing space in Madison, and what COVID taught her about letting go
• How a cancer diagnosis at 49 completely reoriented her relationship to life, work, and how much of herself she’s willing to give
• The donkey-donkey principle from Zero Balancing — and why it’s one of the most practical frameworks for collaboration, relationships, and avoiding burnout
• Why presence and attention are the most radical acts of self-care — and how something as small as a peony can bring you back to both
• What it means to be an elder in the entrepreneurial space, and how women can pool their wisdom to create collective impact
• Why a broken heart might actually be the most open heart — and how to keep going when something you hoped for doesn’t unfold the way you imagined