Efrat Shokef Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: That’s why we have so many near-death experiences —because we have such amazing modern medicine.

Efrat: Yes.

Rick: In the old days, most people who had NDEs would have just died.

Efrat: But I think we have those experiences not just because of modern medicine. I think we crave the reminder of who we are.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Today I’ll be speaking with Efrat Shokef, Ph.D. Efrat is a mother to three spiritually aware teens, a daughter, wife, sister, writer, teacher, cosmic journeyer, a shamanic energy healing practitioner, working primarily with children, teens, parents and families, and author of The Promise We Made: Three Universal Soul Promises We Made to Our Children, Near-Death Experience and the Parenting Teachings It Invites. Efrat was severely injured in a car crash and experienced a profound near-death experience when her three daughters were all still younger than four. Her journey of physical recovery, the integration of her NDE, and at the same time her inability to participate in the caretaking of her daughters sent her on a quest to the essence of motherhood. What makes us our children’s parent beyond the doing? Efrat believes that when parents know or remember that they are more than their physical bodies or their confused, wounded emotions, they can recognize the luminosity of their children. When we all accept that we are on a journey of growth, we can mirror the possibility of this earthly journey to the children in our lives. When we walk our essence and connect to who we are at our core, we can see that same luminosity in everyone, beyond gender, race, ethnicity, or age. Respecting all others, including our children – dependent humans, yet also powerful, experienced souls – becomes a way of life. In this conversation, Efrat and I cover a number of points: how we plan the life we are going to live before we are born, including choosing our parents; navigating parenting in a noisy, chaotic world; Efrat’s NDE, which included an out-of-body experience in which she encountered otherworldly beings who gave her a bird’s-eye view of the evolutionary value of earthly experiences; embracing death as a transition, not an extinction; the potential inaccuracy of channeled information and the importance of self-sufficiency; the existence of special souls throughout the world; the potential spiritual guidance in everyday events; dreaming a better world into being; and choosing compassionate paths for humanity. But especially, we talked about spiritual parenting, which is Efrat’s main focus. This included understanding children’s healing process, energetic communication between parents and children, understanding indigo and crystal children, supporting sensitive and autistic children, encouraging children’s belief in their superpowers, and the purpose of parenting and life alignment. Please remember that this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to help support it, visit our website, batgap.com. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Efrat Shokef as much as I did. Thank you. Welcome, Efrat. It’s good to be with you.

Efrat: Hi, Rick. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor.

Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s an honor to have you. I enjoyed your book. I listened to the whole thing, as I usually try to do with my guests, mostly while walking in the woods. And it was quite a harrowing story. Your car crash was so severe and your recovery so arduous, but you you were really heroic and the way you manage the whole thing. But before we get into that ,what’s your Ph.D. and what was your academic training?

Efrat: Social organizational psychology. I specialized in multicultural teams, multicultural group dynamics, stuff like that.

Rick: What do people who specialize in that actually do?

Efrat: Working in the corporate world from an organizational perspective. I was counseling multinational organizations from a research perspective because I was doing research on managing their multicultural teams. Bridging the differences, finding the global unified perspectives, those pieces that allow us to see each other as humans and then work together beyond the differences.

Rick: Well, that’s good. I have an old friend here in town named Tom Morgan, who’s been doing that professionally for years. He helps people not act like idiots when they go and interact with some people from another culture.

Efrat: Yeah, yeah good.

Rick: Okay.So there was an interesting precursor to your car accident, in which – I think this was like four days beforehand – you were in some gathering with some people and with your kids, and you had the thought, “I want to be their mother.”

Efrat: Yeah.

Rick: Which is kind of weird because you already were their mother, but it’s almost like a pre-cognition or premonition of something that was going to happen.

Efrat: Yeah, yeah. My toddler was in her daycare and the twins were still at home with me. They were Many had children my older daughter’s age. They were in daycare and we gathered in my house at that time to celebrate the twins’ first year. It was like the first birthday together. It was already 13 months and for me it was a celebration of managing this first year of being a mom to three little ones. You know, feeling  I’m okay. I’m starting to breathe and it was… A number of pieces are interesting, you know, in retrospect, for what happened there, but as a group facilitator it was very natural for me to invite the moms for sharing and I asked the other moms, please share what motherhood means to you. I wasn’t aware that I was actually outlining my quest, a quest that I would recognize much later when I was trying to define what makes me a mom when I’m unable to do all those defined actions. And I was last in the circle as a host and I had plenty I planned to say and be grateful to this amazing group of moms that was so helpful afterwards, after the car crash and I was unable to say word. Now i’m a talkative redhead. And I just couldn’t take a word, make a sound out of my mouth. And then all I managed to whisper was, I want to be their mother.

Rick: Interesting.

Efrat: And everyone was quiet. A good friend to sitting next to me was like, are you okay? What’s going on? And I had no idea what was going on or what I was saying. And, you know, babies were crawling around and the circle just started to get up and move and do things and I wrote it down. That’s it. And I returned to that piece only later when I started integrating what had happened. And you know, again, it’s so easy to see things in retrospect. I know it was a really deep prayer on my behalf, that whatever happens, whatever I’ve planned for my journey, I want to stay here for my daughters. That was the one motivation, the one thing that was important and is still the main motivation in my life. I want to be here for them.

Rick: Yeah. And this topic will come up during our conversation because one of the themes, one of the things you learned since then, is that we do plan out our life to some extent, right?

Efrat:Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, in many respects. We’ll talk about that more, but you must have somehow been subliminally aware of that intention, you know, that has now become so dominant in your life and at that point was maybe taken for granted.

Efrat: I never took motherhood for granted. I always knew that as soon as I would become a mom I would be total and just push everything aside. It wasn’t something that surprised anyone around me. But yeah, that piece of of premonition and that power it had on me it still has, in a good way, because you know, I unweaved any energetic binding it held, so I know it’s a good driving force for me, understanding that that’s part of my journey. It’s an integral part of who I am for them, who they are for me, we as a nuclear nuclear family, our shared journey walking together. I think that’s true for everyone. But for me, it’s a very prominent motivation.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, well let’s move right to the car crash. It was, you know, quite a watershed moment in your life. Tell us, give us an account of that day.

Efrat: Felt like a regular day as it started. My husband felt he needed to stay home to work, which was very good. So he stayed home, and it was the one week I was teaching at the time, because I was mostly home with my twins and I nursed the twins together, an amazing embracement I hold physically in my body as a memory. And my mom came to watch them and she was there with them for the morning. I took my toddler to her daycare which was in another village. We live in a area with small villages. It was a drive from one village to another, not a main road, and it was as if I had time. I usually didn’t spend time, you know, just sitting and talking to friends while leaving and I did and, and I was supposed to drive to the college where I was teaching at the time. What I remember is, it took me a long time to turn left into the main road out of the village.I was waiting for so long. There were lots of cars passing and then it was my turn and I could turn left, and as soon as I turned left I don’t remember anything but a sense of a boom. I did not see the other car coming. I did not feel my car spinning or anything. I did not feel the cars crashing. I just had a sense of the boom and I was out of my body in the most beautiful place there is. I learned what happened only afterwards.

Rick: Was it a head-on?

Efrat: It was head head-to-head. The other driver is a good friend now, which is another story. Or maybe it’s not another story, you know. It’s like I was waiting to turn left because it was a moment of us crashing. And when I met this woman years later, I felt such deep love, such soul love, that I know that that moment of us crashing into one another… I feel like she loves me so much at the soul level that she was willing to take responsibility for this crash happening and created in our literal earthly life so that I would get the kick that I needed to show up in those elements that I needed to show up for.

Rick: Yeah, let’s dwell on that for a second. I’ve actually heard this from a number of near-death experience people that major players in their lives have almost pre-arranged the interaction. Even if it’s something rather horrific, you know, like i’m gonna try to murder you or rape you or, in this case, nearly kill you in a car crash, and it’s almost like the conversation goes something like, “Well, I have to have this experience. Would you volunteer to have a head-on collision with me?” “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I love you too much. I couldn’t do that.” “No, please, I need this.” “All right, I’ll do it.” And, you hear that kind of explanation from people who’ve had these NDEs.

Efrat: Yeah, I think that along my life I was given opportunities to show up and possibly avoid this big car crash and near-death experience situation. But I did not show up. I was really, really afraid to show up and connect to all those abilities that I carry. And until I met her and felt that pure divine love that flows between us, I didn’t think that we would arrange something like this. But yes, I understand today that sometimes those who love us most are willing to help us reach and become what we plan to become and she helped me and then I helped her and we’re walking this journey together now. So it’s an amazing gift that I’ve received unintentionally. It was very hard for our environments, our people – we live in a close community – to even understand that it’s possible to be friends with someone who created such a mess in my life. But this mess was a big blessing for us, you know, again in retrospect.

Rick: Right. There’s a verse in Patanjali’s yoga sutras that goes haem dukkha managatam Which means avert the danger which has not yet come, and the idea is that maybe you could stub your toe instead of break your leg if you take certain measures to minimize the karma that you’re gonna have to go through.

Efrat: You know, I really relate to that and I think that’s part of what’s driving me also in my work with children today. Know that if we give them the tools to stay aligned to who they are then they will still go through the lessons and the journey they planned. But, again, it will be dipping their toe, not having to drown in stormy water because something has to get their attention. I questioned this a lot about myself as well. If I had grown up with spiritual tools and nourishment to my spiritual abilities could I have avoided this whole car crash, which turned out to be a blessing but I do ask that question. I look at my daughters and I look at the teens and children that I work with and, wow, they’re aligned to their selves and they know to discern what is theirs and what is not in a very chaotic, confused environment. So, I think we can go through our journey and unweave and experience everything, but without a lot of the unneeded human drama

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Efrat: we’ve made for ourselves.

Rick: I’m sure many of us imagine how we might have lived our teenage years, for instance, had we known then what we know now, you know? In my case, not doing a lot of things that were very destructive and that I probably had to spend years repairing, but in any case, obviously, if you’re a parent and you can instill those values in children at a young age, then hopefully they won’t go through such turbulent, destructive behaviors.

Efrat: Yeah, I think that if they need to go through it, for whatever reason, they will find a way to go through it.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Because that is part of what they set for their journey. But there are so many ways to learn the same lesson. There are easier ways and there are tougher ways.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And sometimes we need to go through the tough stuff, because it makes us more compassionate. It makes us understand others and be able to guide them when they go through something like that. But I think that we can… I will say it in a different way: Our reality and the reality in which we are raising children today is a very noisy one. Competition, horrible values, noise,

Rick: Social media

Efrat: Social media. I usually use the word confusion. Parents are confused because they don’t have their tribe or community or clarity on how to guide their children, and especially if their kids are spiritually aware ones and bring all kinds of gifts that they don’t know how to handle. So, obviously everything is more dramatic and the journeys are becoming much more complex. When we do manage to give the children tools from a very early age we make a difference and we help them stay aligned to who they are. And then managing school environments does not become easier, but it does not hurt them as much.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: We chose to homeschool, especially because of those reasons, because of understanding that even in a good school and with amazing teachers, humans that really, really care, they are just unable when they have so many kids in class with so many issues to deal with and it’s just impossible. So would my journey would have looked different if I was nourished the way I nourish my girls today and nourish other kids? Maybe. But I did need my friend from the car crash to give me this gift of stopping my life and building it from the start in a new way.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I want to get back to your near-death experience in a second, but I was just reminded that just this past week Australia passed a law that children under the age of 16 can’t be on social media. They’re not allowed to have access to it. There must be some kind of youth revolt going on in Australia right now. But what do you think of that?

Efrat: I think that’s very healthy. I don’t think that’s very realistic because…

Rick: They’ll find ways around it, probably.

Efrat: They find ways around it, and parents fall into it as well. So they give their kids the phone. My girls were in a school when phones were not allowed until the eighth grade. And most parents kept that agreement. And those kids who did have phones, they had stupid little phones that don’t have any internet connection. But then the kids would take their parents’ phones at home and would see stuff and be exposed. I think sometimes guiding kids on how to use social media well is healthier than taking it away from them. But if you take it away from the parents as well as the kids, that would work really well. [Laughter]

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Efrat: Okay.

Rick: So back to your near-death experience. So there was this boom and obviously you didn’t even know you’d been in an accident because all of a sudden you’re in another realm. So let’s spend some time describing that experience.

Efrat: I was unaware I had a car crash. I was unaware I was out of my body. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening down there or my daughters or anything. I was just embraced in the most beautiful space there is. At first I felt I was flowing forward. And at some point I noticed I was not floating forward alone. There were other beings, human figures that were floating forward with me. No interaction between us, but it was like a stream flow of humans. In retrospect, I understood that these were all souls that died, ended their journey, and were returning home.

Rick: Would there be any logic? Was it that those were Israelis, fellow Israelis, or could they have been from all over the world?

Efrat: No, no, no. All over the world.

Rick: I see. Okay.

Efrat: Yeah, I couldn’t pinpoint any shared characteristic other than the moment of floating forward.

Rick: Right.

Efrat: And at some point, other beings, some of them a human figure, some of them a more luminous long figure, one also an orb. All kinds of beings were floating forward towards us.

Rick: Like a welcoming committee.

Efrat: No one was welcoming myself, but they were welcoming the others that were floating forward with me. A really beautiful picture of embrace, of energetic embrace. The familiarity of some of those was very, very noticed, and those floating forward with me were just happy to float forward. But at some point I reached this invisible barrier. I was not able to float forward with the others. And others were coming and welcomed and going forward. And I was just there. I didn’t mind because it was all so luminous and beautiful. And I felt like love was bubbling into my cells. You know, it wasn’t my physical form, but I still feel it in my physical form.

Rick: Even now you feel it.

Efrat: Yeah, whenever I share this story, I can feel it. Or sit in meditation and connect to that feeling. I feel it in myself. It was being accepted, totally accepted, completely accepted, loved, just as I am. There were no faults, there was nothing wrong, no thoughts of “I should do this, I should do that,” just this deep, deep, deep stillness and feeling I am whole. I was hearing a bit of music far away. It was all just serene and amazing, amazing. I am willing to die daily as long as I come back to be my daughters’ mother as long as they need me. At some point a figure came towards me. It looked like my grandfather. I leave it open because whether it was my grandfather or was it my higher guidance? I recognize today after working and evolving and learning a lot of things I recognize the frequency and I know it is a frequency of my higher guidance, but I saw it as my grandfather. And there was this telepathic communication of love, that everything was okay. A really warm welcome, but he was coming towards me and we were not crossing that barrier. And from that point on he invited me – and we were just there – to this really large, white shimmering balcony. I don’t know how to describe it – if the balcony was floating above earth, or whether earth was spinning below the balcony doesn’t matter. I was shown a lot of human interactions – beautiful, sad, little details, broader perspectives, a lot of things with children and how we raise them. I didn’t understand at the time how that’s related to me, but it felt like a few days. There was so much information about what humanity is about and in the essence of humanity and the challenges of humanity. And I just absorbed it all. I wasn’t in any awareness or cognitive mental ability to analyze what I saw. I just absorbed it and I was given explanations and at some point he just said, okay, it’s your time to go back, go back. And I didn’t even have a chance to say wait, this is so beautiful here. Why do I have to go back? [Laughter] I wasn’t asked, and I think I knew within me that I wasn’t to stay where I was. And I was just floating backwards and there was another boom because I fell into my very fatally injured body. From that point on I was coming in and out of my body. It was impossible to stay in my physical pain – painful bleeding, injured body. I saw a fire come at the front of the car and the fire people putting it down. But before that I wasn’t still in any awareness that there was a car crash and something happened. I was just going in and out, in and out .

Rick: And every time you went out did you go back to that heavenly area?

Efrat: No, no, I didn’t go back to that heavenly area. I was just floating above.

Rick: Losing consciousness , oh floating above your body. Okay.

Efrat: Yeah, like an out-of-body experience, right? Very close to my body. I returned to that dimension later when I was in the ICU already. And there was this really, really nice guy that did not see the car crash happen, but stopped and, he’s a neighbor here, and the paramedics told him, talk to her, talk to her, talk to her. And he was really concerned – he saw the bases of the click connect [child’s car seat] in the back seat so he was really concerned that there were babies in the car that flew out of the car.

Rick: He saw baby seats in the back seat.

Efrat: Yeah, just a base of the click connect.

Rick: I see. Yeah, the seats were not there just a base. So he was really concerned and he kept asking me were there any babies with you, were there any babies with you?

Efrat: And I was I felt like I was answering his question but he didn’t hear anything. My eyes were rolling. I was barely breathing. Then at some point I guess I just came back into my body for a few seconds or a moment and I said, No babies were with me. I was very clear. I gave him my husband’s name. They have the same name. I gave him my home phone number and I told him to call and tell him to come over here. It was really close by. And then I just drifted away. And at that point I was already not really floating above, in and above, I was just back into some luminous space of love. There was no additional guidance at that moment. Just floating. Later when I was in the ICU I went back but it was to the same visions that I was already experiencing, my near-death experience. That’s my understanding. I was repeating those experiences within me and coming in and out, experiencing more. That’s my understanding of what happened. There was no really new piece that happened during those days. Yeah, in my body, out of my body, in my body, out of my body, repeating, until they reduced the anesthesia and brought me back out. Accepting, smiling… I was in a lot of pain and we had to learn how to manage the pain killers at that stage but the reflection I received from others was like, You’re accepting things that just happened to you. You’re supposed to be mad. You’re supposed to be depressed. And it wasn’t that I was joyful, but I was relaxed in a deep knowing that was beyond me.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Now I can understand but I didn’t understand at the time.

Rick: One reads in your book that your intestines were ripped into multiple pieces and you had all these broken bones.

Efrat: Yeah, they had to open a stoma. That’s the thing. That was a piece that really, really surprised them.

Rick: The stoma was like a little portal in your abdomen. Is that what that is?

Efrat: It’s a portal in the abdomen where everything goes out into exchangeable bags.

Rick: Right.

Efrat: It’s a version of a diaper.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Eventually they told me and they were shocked that I was just relaxed. I thought, You saved my life. I will deal with this. I didn’t care about it. I think that was a piece, based on the physician’s experience, that was really troubling to many people. I understand why it would be troubling but my reaction was, This is something I can live with, I’m here and I’m alive and that’s all that mattered. Eventually I healed enough for that to be closed [the stoma] and I don’t have to deal with it daily, but I know a lot of people that do deal with it daily and they have a full life.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Nobody knows. This is something I would often feel – that, oh, if people knew that there are so many people with this condition, they would be so patient and would help others who experience this transition. Sometimes the system doesn’t work and this help is needed. And we are fortunate to have such amazing modern medicine. That saved my life.

Rick: Sure. I mean that’s why we have so many near-death experiences – that we have such amazing modern medicine. You know in the old days most people who have end of ease would have just died but now they come back through cardiac resuscitation and different various things and they have all these marvelous experiences to report to us.

Efrat: Yeah, but I think we have those experiences not just, you know, because of modern medicine. I think we crave them as society.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: We crave the reminder of who we are. It’s like when you hear… I know what my story does to people. It’s a reminder of the real, it’s real, it really happened. It’s not about believing anymore that something is beyond us, it’s about knowing it myself.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: There’s so many of us with not just near-death experiences, but all kinds of experiences like in meditations, and that receive that inner confirmation. And life changes after you get this confirmation because you can’t be just human. We are here to live a human life but it’s about embracing our spirituality into our human life and not just playing free wheel and doing whatever we want and getting confused.

Rick: No for sure. I read quite a few NDE books before I started this show, not knowing I was going to start this show, but I just found them fascinating. I had already been meditating for many years, so I had that kind of receptivity. But NDEs have always fascinated me because… I said this last week. Last week I interviewed a guy who has stage 4 cancer. And one point I brought up that I feel like our understanding of what happens after we die has a big effect on how we live. I mean, if you think you’re going to hell or heaven or you think it’s going to be totally lights out and you’re going to utterly cease to exist, all those different perspectives might really influence how you conduct your life. And I know NDE people, people like James Von Praag and Betty Eadie and various others – they say, “I’m not afraid of dying at all. Kind of looking forward to it. I’ll enjoy my life as long as it lasts, but when I die, I know it’s going to be fine.” But you know, there are other people. I just saw a movie last night that had Raymond Burr in it, who used to play Perry Mason on TV. And I remember hearing a story about when he was on his deathbed, he was so utterly terrified of death that he tried to continue sitting up rather than lying down because he thought it would prevent him from dying or something. Now I think with your understanding of what death is, and many of the people who are listening to this show, that seems kind of absurd and unfortunate because it’s not really something to be so terrified of. It’s just a transition which could really be quite beautiful for people.

Efrat: It’s a beautiful transition and it can be a beautiful transition, and actually, it’s going home. It’s going to where we are back to our essence, It’s ending a journey But we are disconnected from that piece of life and death, that cycle, that rhythmic cycle. We’re disconnected from it in so many elements of our life. Not just our own death but then all people go to houses and they die in hospital instead of at home and there’s so many aspects of death that we have mistreated. I’m not sure if I’m using all the politically correct words. I apologize for that. But it’s when death is a really beautiful birth of a soul returning back to its essence, letting go of the heavy journey. But for many people it is sad. They’re so disconnected from who they are, from their essence, from their luminosity, from the cycle of life and death in nature, in everything, that it’s very, very hard. I agree with those who had NDEs. I am willing to die daily and I visit those realms again and again and again using shamanic journey and using meditations. It is possible for many people to experience it in a different way.

Rick: Yeah, like you just said, you don’t have to have an NDE. In fact, I hope I don’t have one because it’s kind of like playing Russian roulette. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. But, with practices – you know, shamanic journeying, meditation, etc. – you can have basically the same experience.

Efrat: Yes.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat:  Yeah, the same experience, just as powerful, opening up to it and remembering who you are and that you are more. I think the point, what I find, is that it teaches us what happens about the afterlife and that there is a lot beyond our human existence. But I also find that it’s really important that we bring it down back to earth because we are here. I always ask myself, what does it teach me not about the afterlife, but what does it teach me about, as you said earlier, about how I want to live, how I want to interact with people, how I want to walk my mission and be very grounded in my spirituality?

Rick: Yeah, good. I want to ask you more about that experience when you were standing on some kind of balcony with your supposed grandfather and overseeing vignettes on earth of large and small dramas. Can you give us some more details about that? What kind of little scenarios were you being shown?

Efrat: I can give you general details.

Rick: Were there big ones like, you know, future of humanity kind of stuff?

Efrat: I can give you general details. I’m constantly guided not to share the little details of what I’ve seen. I did not see the future of humanity. I was seeing scenes of reality from different cultures, different groups, interactions of parents and children, interactions in classroom, interactions among groups of children, interactions around adults. I was seeing a lot of human confusion. I was given numerous examples of human confusion, how this confusion is created by often very good intentions. So, that would be a general description. I apologize that I can’t get into the details, but this is a guidance that I’m constantly receiving.

Rick: Don’t go into those details. Well, just out of curiosity, why do you think you received that guidance to not go into the details? Would it be like you’d be telling people stuff they’re supposed to figure out on their own and they’re not supposed to be told or something?

Efrat: Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’ve never questioned the guidance I receive. [Laughs] As long as, you know, it makes sense. It just always makes sense to me not to go into the details. I think people catch up on some examples and then say this is how things are, and this is this and that. It’s like when people channel information – this is something I personally choose to avoid because I learned that if I channel a piece of information, people catch on to it and it’s like: But wait, self-reference for a second! Do you know who gave me this information? And this information has come through me and maybe I colored it a little bit because of my life experience and how I say things and where I come from. And so I really avoid those pieces.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: I would share. I love sharing tools. I love sharing case studies. I love sharing ways of questions of how to look at things. But I do my best not to channel information. The most channeled pieces that I share are the mystical healing stories that I have on my website, and I also share in the book at the beginning of each chapter. It’s like that. I see them and I share them as they are and I’m trusting that people would get the energy that they need out of them.

Rick: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. My most popular interview is with a channeler and I noticed that on various YouTube channels, channelers and healers are very popular. But it’s almost like people want someone who’s going to do it for them, you know, who’s going to tell them something rather than give them the tools to discover it or learn it themselves. It’s like that saying, you know, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”

Efrat: Exactly, exactly. And with children I notice – it’s amazing, because when they know how to connect within and listen to their own knowings and trust themselves, they gain experience and they connect to their guidance and they have always someone to consult from within. So then they don’t have to rely on what other people say. And our society teaches us to be passive, passive consumers of information, but that does not bring us to what we are. We’re all co-creators or we all have the potential to be co-creators if we show up. I love teaching kids how to do that because they have it anyway. You know, it’s more like pushing their button of remembering and often it’s not even remembering. It’s a button of confirmation. Like what they’re doing is right. The younger they are the easier it is because they’re not confused yet.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And then they know for themselves and they don’t need to go to someone else to channel information. Now some people who channel are amazing but most things go through them, through our human perceptions. You can’t avoid that. We can’t presume we’re clean. I don’t presume that about myself and there are very few people – I have met such people, but very few – that I would trust the information that they would channel. But I have an open root myself and everyone can have their own open root if they’re willing to learn, and it’s not that difficult.

Rick: Sure. So what you’re saying essentially is that the information can get distorted as it passes through an imperfect mind-body system, which we all have. And therefore, it shouldn’t be given some kind of absolute significance or, you know, veracity. But I think that’s also true of everything we ourselves learn or cognize. It’s always good to take yourself with a grain of salt, you know? Because some people are so damn sure of their opinions that they’re willing to kill for them. And, you know, if we all could take ourselves a little bit less seriously it might be an easier world to live in.

Efrat: And question, question everything and maybe today I know something. I know what I experienced in my near this experience. I know how it affected me. But I don’t expect other parents to take what I experienced into their life the way I experienced it. It is for them to figure out how it plays in their family. What is their journey? It’s easier when someone tells you what to do, you know.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: It’s easier but that distracts us from our own paths and we all know every human being, every child has the potential, the ability, to know their own signs and walk their journey in joy, in ease. It’s a lot of work to get there because we’re starting often in a confused spot. But it is possible. Look at your journey and what you’ve been through and what you’ve become. And my journey and so many others that you interview, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: People find that essence, that core, and follow it.

Rick: Yeah, very important. I think one of the problems with cults and the reason there have been so many toxic cults is that people abdicate their self-reliance, you know, their own judgment, their own common sense, and confer it upon the teacher. Instead, I heard from a friend who was at a particular retreat center run by someone I would characterize as a cult leader, and any kind of initiative or creativity was strongly discouraged. Like, she was working in the kitchen and she was like, “Hey, what if we make this kind of salad dressing?” “Don’t make any decisions. The leader makes all the decisions.” And she ended up having a medical crisis and they weren’t able to deal with her responsibly because the leader had to make the decisions. So anyway, I’m going off on a bit of a tangent, but I think if there were a greater emphasis and appreciation for self-referral, self-reliance, then we wouldn’t have so many unfortunate cult situations. Which is not to say that we can’t honor and respect and learn from teachers, but the teacher obviously has the obligation to allow his students to do their own thinking and not be like little children who have to be told everything and can’t do anything independently. And perhaps this will segue us into how you teach children.

Efrat: How I teach children… I love working with children because they’re so amazing. They’re so evolved and they’re so spiritual. They’re so wise. They are my teachers.

Rick: All of them?

Efrat: All of them. Even children that I would look from the side and think, “Oh my god, this is like a big mess” and they’re behaving horribly and whatever in my opinion, in my view. They are coming with an invitation. There is always a reason for why a child behaves the way he does and they offer us as parents triggers. And if we don’t respond the trigger will get bigger. And if we don’t respond the trigger will get bigger because they came here to walk a shared journey and they need us to show up for that, for what they need from us to create the conditions. I work with children first through their parents because I found along the way that if the parents are not really into finding their own essence and are not willing to take responsibility and work with their stuff then they will not be able to support their child. In shamanic terms, for example, we sometimes retrieve a soul part, which is another way of reactivating a dormant piece of energy and restoring flow. If we bring a soul part back to a child and return a creative vibe, sensitivity, some kind of unique joy, whatever comes back – these are always positive qualities that return to us. But the parents are going to keep yelling at that child. They’re just going to push that piece away or block that energy again. So without the parents it’s impossible to work with children. So that’s my first orientation. That’s also why I wrote the book for parents and all the guidance I give through my website – a lot of free resources – are for the parents. But then I guide the parents how to work with children. I’m offering a lot of tools, energetic tools, like how to visualize a light wash, how to use your breathing. People are not even aware of such basic tools of breathing, how to anchor in the ground, how to be present, how to expand. This is an interesting piece with a lot of kids. The children that come to me and the teens that come to me are always all spiritually aware. Which means that they are able to float out of their body, search other dimensions. They they bring information. They constantly go in and out. So being here grounded in their human activity is often really challenging for them no matter what issue brings them to me. So we teach them for example how to expand, how to intentionally expand, how to intentionally go on a shamanic journey, so they get enough of that connection with other dimensions that they need and then they don’t have to be floating at school or find those moments where they disconnect because they’re present and they learn how to expand, they learn how to ground. So it’s a lot of very, very simple energetic, meditative tools. Locally I have a group of – now I would refer to all of them as teens, but we started with them as children – moms and and their daughters, all friends of my daughters. We used to meet once a week. We now meet here and there and we do a journey together and we practice together. And with the teens among them, which they are young adults some of them, I also practice really profound shamanic interventions, teaching them all kinds of tools. They’re all little born shamans able to embrace their own inner knowing. And it’s amazing to witness them from the side and hear their moms’ stories about how they face society and conflict and all kinds of situations staying constantly centered because they have the tools to connect. So, various levels of work with children.

Rick: Do you do some of this remotely like on zoom?

Efrat: I do a lot of work privately on zoom with parents and sometimes also with their children, but not in a group setting. The group setting is local. But I do guide other shamanic practitioners or energy healers that want to create such groups on how to create their own groups. So that they would have that in their communities.

Rick: That’s good to know because I’ve run into at the moment three situations where a young person has some kind of beautiful gift. Perhaps they see auras or they see subtle beings or as if they have access to higher dimensions, but in this dimension their life isn’t going so well, you know. They just can’t handle it, can’t deal, can’t behave properly, etc.

Efrat: Yeah, I guess in those kind of situations I often guide parents – those who approach me about such situations are usually the parents, sometimes it would be a grandmother or a teacher that somehow found out about me and sends an email about how do I guide? Especially teens. There’s so many books – not a lot of good books for teens, but there are some good books also for teens about psychic abilities.

Rick: Kind of written for teens who have psychic abilities?

Efrat: Yes. Yes. I don’t want to pronounce her name wrong and I can send you the name later, If that okay, if that is helpful.

Rick: Yeah, I’d like that.

Efrat: There are a number of books for psychic teens. I think is the name of one of them is Psychic Teen. There are also a lot of amazing books for adults that teens can already read.

Rick: Sure.

Efrat: Providing that is one tool that is really helpful because then they can read on their own. There are a lot of tools and it’s a trustworthy… we do the self-referencing and give a trustworthy source, and I’ll just tell them; Okay, find books. And another thing is finding an energy healer, a shamanic practitioner, someone in the community they can actually be connected with and that can help them understand what they’re experiencing. And I think the most important piece is usually just making it normal, having them understand that a lot of people have those experiences and that they are not strange in any way. Another piece which is really important for teens, I think, is also having them understand that when they know things, it doesn’t mean that they created a situation. They’re just tapped into the field.

Rick: Right, like if they know that somebody’s gonna die in an accident or something, it doesn’t mean they caused the accident.

Efrat: Yes, yes. And during that phase of being a teen, it’s like with puberty, the soul starts to scream, I want to be myself! I want to be who I am. And then it’s very conflicting with social demands at that age. And all kinds of abilities come. Sometimes it’s not even going to be their dominant ability later on in life. But it comes. And they know things like someone is going to die in a car crash. I had those experiences as a teen. It was really, really scary. That’s part of why I closed that door. Now I understand it’s just a matter of I was tapping into the energetic field, that was it. And so I was knowing things about other people, which you can learn also how to block. This I know now, but I felt responsible. It was really, really scary. Every teen that I work with at some point has those knowings and needs to learn how to deal with them. So even just giving the confirmation: It’s not you, you’re tapping into the field, there is energy. What you’re seeing is real, what you’re experiencing. That type of reassurance and connections with people that can guide. And they’re everywhere. We’re fortunate to be living in times where everywhere, even in countries that we don’t think there are spiritual, energetic awareness, there is. I know from the type of clients that I receive everywhere. So just connect, connect to those people and then they would have the ability to guide.

Rick: Yeah, I like that point. I’ve done a bit of traveling, some of it to countries where you would expect to find such people, such as India and the Philippines and places like that, but I also spent three months in Iran and I met some very impressive people there. it was kind of a crazy place, but there are really special people everywhere.

Efrat: There are special people everywhere. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people, even in the countries that we look from the side and say, oh what’s going on there, including mine. There are luminous humans with high frequencies, high vibrations, knowing people everywhere, everywhere. It’s not always easy to find them in some places and we have this global community. But I’m always happy to refer people to local connections that I have if I can. And there are many others I think that can connect others as well.

Rick: Yeah I’ve heard you say and I’ve heard others say that children choose their parents. And obviously, you know, if you hear that, your immediate thought is, Why are they going to choose to be born in Somalia, you know, or Gaza or to an alcoholic father, or a sexually abusive father, or an emotionally unavailable mother, or all kinds of rough situations that people are born in. How would you respond to those questions?

Efrat: I think that choice in challenging circumstances can stem from different type of reasons. The extreme reason, which is not common, is because the soul or being actually wants to experience that very violent, inappropriate situation. And it’s very, very uncommon.

Rick: Why would they want that?

Efrat: To be able to assist others later.

Rick: Not even later in this life, necessarily, but in some life, they need to have that toolkit.

Efrat: In their toolkit .When we experience something, our understanding deepens in profound ways. But that is very, very uncommon. Most souls would not choose to experience any type of sexual violation or that sort of stuff.

Rick: Could you say there might be a karmic thing where someone had violated children sexually and therefore they need to be on the other side of that experience in order to balance the karma or learn the lesson or something?

Efrat: Rarely.

Rick: Okay.

Efrat: Rarely, rarely. I think that what really happens is that a lot of souls and beings, it’s more true for souls and beings that are coming, but there is a choice. The choice is not always just about my own journey as a soul. Soul is a very complex concept. But as I saw, it’s not just about my journey. It’s often about the journey of souls that I’m related to or a soul group or coming back to a family line that I’ve visited before in order to offer healing, in order to expand something, in order to bring resolution to something. There are so many reasons. And then we compromise and we know we would go to a family that is maybe partially functioning or will be challenging for us because of that soul connection. And then there is also that piece of us choosing the potential. I notice it a lot with the spiritually aware children. They’re so trusting as essence, before incarnating or anything. They’re trusting. So they’re trusting that they would offer the invitation to the parents and the parents would just show up and become what they can be and everything will be smooth. But then they come to earth and they find that those parents that they trusted at the essence level are not walking their potential. And not just that they are not walking their potential, that they’ve been so wounded in this lifetime or recreated and enlarged, increased the wounding that they brought from other lifetimes. So instead of solving things until those kids came the trouble became bigger, and then they have very confused parents and those parents are not showing up to that potential that they [the children] hoped for and then things escalate and a child that maybe asked to play a little bit with their power becomes a bully. In a lot of situations it’s not a choice to become a bully but a choice to experiment with the effect of power. And you can experiment with the effect of power in many ways. And then other aspects that go into those decisions. And it is something that souls are as if aware when making those choices, but they’re not aware. Most of those even incarnating again and again and again, to my experience, to my understanding, don’t really understand how harsh human life can become. And even I look at a lot of families that I worked with – amazing choices in parents and they show up and they do their best, but they’re also living in a society and they have to earn a living so they have to send their kids to school. They don’t have the privilege like I do. I was working from home so I could shift into homeschooling. Many countries don’t even allow homeschooling So the kids go to school and things get confused because that soul-human-child team is struggling between being who they are and doing their journey. And then also adjusting and being like others. And for many, especially again those spiritually aware ones, being like others is not… they didn’t come here to be like others. So it’s an inner conflict. But if the parents show up and become their essence, then they can better guide their children. But it’s a really complex weaving – the tapestry that most souls are living is very different from the one they imagined, hoped, planned for. And what we can do is in between try to decrease the gap. And every little decrease that brings the parent or the child to walk a little bit more of themselves is a huge win because it ripples to everyone around. Energetically, it’s an energetic communication. I hope I’m making sense.

Rick: No, you are. I’m thinking about it as you’re speaking. I’m thinking about examples also as you’re speaking, like I interviewed this guy named Christian Sundberg, whom you may have heard of, who at a fairly late age, like 29 or something, suddenly remembered his whole existence prior to birth. And he remembered this whole sequence where he had chosen to take birth as a human being because he was so impressed with some soul he met on the other side who had recently come from earth and they seemed so luminous and wise from what they’ve learned. And then once he was in the womb, he thought, “Oh my God, what did I sign up for?” And he claims that he aborted himself. And then they gave him another chance after a whole lot of preparation and he almost did it again, but then he went through with it. But I’ve heard other stories like that where people, you know, they choose to incarnate on earth and then they think, “Whoa, this place is a lot rougher than I anticipated. Get me out of here.”

Efrat: Just even in the really positive, nourishing, soft scenario, just being a huge soul, being evolved, wise, knowing, and you have to be in that warm womb stuck in a low body for some time. Some join the human baby, the fetus, earlier, some join a little later. You’re stuck there. And then you have to go through the birth tunnel in order to be birthed. You really need to want to be here, in order just to go through that phase, even in the good scenarios, you know, when everything is just fine and the mom is loving and relaxed and nourishing. It’s very hard to be relaxed when you have another kid at home or when you’re living a hectic life. And it’s a difficult process. It’s a really huge choice of each of us to come here. We come here for a reason. And the learnings, the gifts that we bring ourselves, Earth, other planets, and get from them, you know, it’s a mutual communication and gifting and interaction. It’s huge, it’s really, really significant. But you really need to want to come here. And I don’t think any of us understand when we, you know, we plan a journey and it’s all going to be fine. And then life, reality, human life. And even when we walk consciously aware and become choice makers and commit and surrender to our journey, there is confusion around us. And it’s a difficult, challenging, blessed, also blessed, but challenging journey.

Rick: Yeah. It’s kind of like you think, oh, it would be awesome to climb Mount Everest. And then you’re at 20,000 feet in a snowstorm, and you think, “What did I do this for?”

Efrat: But then you reach the top, or you even don’t reach the top, you reach almost like the cap that is closest, or whatever you manage to. And you go back down, and you take a deep breath and say, “Oh, I learned this and this and this and this. This climb was worth it.”

Rick: Yeah. I’ve heard it said, you know… A teacher of mine once said, “The angels are jealous of humans.” They’re kind of wanting to sign up to have the human experience because there’s such evolutionary potential here. You know, it might be a difficult lesson, a difficult schoolhouse, but it’s one that has tremendous evolutionary value and potential.

Efrat: I agree with the evolutionary potential when we show up for the journey, because a lot of souls and humans are going through life and not doing here what they came here to do.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Lost in the confusion. I’ve never met an angel or [found] high guidance in beings that were envious of us. I often feel that they don’t understand how challenging and confusing it can be here. They’re very compassionate, they’re very understanding, they’re very supportive. I don’t think they want to exchange places.

Rick: Yeah, you can have it, right?

Efrat: But I believe others may have experienced these interactions and received such messages.

Rick: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I know in my own case, I was born into a difficult family. My father was very traumatized by World War II and he was an alcoholic and verbally abusive. My mother ended up trying to commit suicide three times and spent most of my adolescence in and out of mental hospitals. And then it kind of dawned on me at the age of about 18 that spirituality was a thing, and I learned to meditate and things started getting a lot better. But, you know, I look back to the years prior to that and I think, “Boy, was I lost.” But I felt like there was a kind of a seed planted from prior to my birth. When I finally heard the word “enlightenment” – somebody was reading a book – and it was like a bell going off, and I thought, “Whoa, that’s a thing. I need that.” Whereas, you know, somebody else might not have had any reaction to hearing it. So, I just say that to illustrate that we might come in with the best of intentions, hoping to make great strides spiritually, but the world can be extremely overshadowing and challenging and it’s so easy to get lost in confusion and self-destructive behaviors. I consider it a blessing and a kind of grace of God that I was kind of saved from continuing in that vein. And perhaps it is because of some kind of past life immersion in spiritual practices and so on that it woke up again, finally, at a certain point.

Efrat: I think we never know what is a detour and what is something that we needed to experience because it later built something within us.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And I also think – I know for myself at least -that I set posts. Like I have signs on my path. Okay. This is where you’re supposed to be. This is a person you’re supposed to meet at a certain point. Like you say “I heard the word enlightenment” and that started the whole… opened a new door for you to find your way because you had that potential, because it was part of what you came here to do. So I think we all have those signs posted on our ways and it’s just a matter if we listen to them and pay attention to them. And sometimes it’s not about any deep meaning but just the sign saying okay, you’re guided now. Start trusting what you know and set on your journey. I think we also have a big gap. I don’t know why this is coming up, but it’s between what we perceive to be spiritual, what we perceive to be success, what we perceive to be the way to express an idea. So we follow that along life. Sometimes that’s the guidance we receive from our parents, family, community – to be something specific. And again, what we are here to do is something that may be much simpler or in a completely different direction, but we dismiss it because it’s not who we are or who we’re supposed to be. A lot of attentiveness, a lot of attentiveness. I actually relate to it in my book, The Promise We Made. There’s a second promise talking about allowing… When it hit me that I don’t give that to my daughters, it was really striking and then I needed to practice it myself. Just opening that door for them to be able to listen to themselves, because they knew how to listen. And they would close their eyes or they would gaze and they would play quietly or write something or draw when they were really little. They were listening to their knowing. I could really trust them, but I needed to not create a schedule and not make sure they’re busy all the time. And that was very hard because I was sitting on the sofa, I was not functioning. Other people were doing things for a long time until I became active again. And it was communicating to others who thought they [the children] needed to be busy! You need to have a full schedule, play dates! It’s going to the playground. No. It was just fine not doing anything. When we’re attentive again, we’re less prone to losing our path. And then hearing those sounds – like the word somebody else reads in a book and knowing this word has a meaning for you or for me. It requires a lot of trust, you know. Trusting: Oh, that really is meaningful and I’m going for it. And I think it also requires saying yes [laughs]. Saying yes, you know. Saying yes to showing up, saying yes to exploring something that maybe seemed really unrelated to your life at the time, but was calling you. So I always encourage the children I work with and the teens to trust what they know and explore and explore. And some of the things they’re going find out are not theirs, but they will not know if they don’t try. And they know what to try and what not to try. It’s pretty amazing to look at them from the side because they have this really deep inner knowing. But saying yes! I wouldn’t have written a book if I hadn’t said yes to something crazy. English is not my first language. I’ve never written a book. I wrote academic papers and chapters. I didn’t write a book. Stories. But I did!

Rick: Yeah. Well, you speak good English. I would hardly have known that it wasn’t your first language.

Efrat: I make a lot of mistakes and my vocabulary is lacking and that’s what it is.

Rick: Just out of curiosity, as a case in point, this thought occurred to me. So, you know, my parents were well educated, intelligent people, but, you know, kind of messed up, as I said. So, you know, let’s say that you had lived in my town when I was a kid, and I was five or six years old, my parents were perhaps late 20s, early 30s, and you know, they had thought, “Oh, let’s have Ephrat work with us and see what she can do to help us or to help, you know, our poor little son who still wets his bed and whatnot.” And what kind of intervention would you have done? What would you have done, given my family situation as I described it?

Efrat: I would start working with your father because post trauma from war is usually a symptom of soul loss and it’s very difficult to live life fully if you had those really innocent, knowing, trusting, creative, happy pieces of yourself…

Rick: He was a professional artist, yeah.

Efrat: …lost in war. And it happens in war because souls know they’re not here to kill anyone.

Rick: Right.

Efrat: And situations of war are really, really, really difficult and there is tremendous soul loss. And you can’t heal soul loss immediately after the trauma happens, but as things come down and it’s safe for those pieces to return or to be reactivated, there are energetic interventions that can reawaken those pieces, sometimes at once and sometimes one by one, depending on the situation. But that’s where I would have started. I would have started trying to help your father regain back his life, because as he would regain back his life and feel safe, you as a child would have felt safe as well. Same true to your mom. Finding her core, finding out what’s important for her. And then we could have- (or at the same time ) given them tools (if I would be working like I work with families) given them tools to share with you – on breathing, on relaxing before going to sleep, and so forth. Let’s say nothing worked. They’re becoming their core selves and everything feels… But you’re still wetting the bed and you’re still very anxious and you’re still having whatever issues you’re having, like many children do. Then we can go and work with the child themselves if the child gives permission. I ask permission even from two-year-olds and one-year-olds. I have ways of confirming I can actually work with them at the literal physical level and soul level. But let’s say you’re saying yes, I’m willing to look at my energy field. Then we could check: What happened to you? Why is it hard for you to be in a physical body and have proper physical functioning? And there are numerous reasons that are related to soul. Past lifetimes or, you know, it’s not exactly past but other lifetimes. And there are reasons that are related to the alignment of our various energy layers and there are reasons that happen for things that happened at birth. And all kinds of contracts sitting on the family lines. There are so many reasons. And there is no one storyline, [for example] If a child wets in bed, this is the reason. Every child has their own reason and their whole family situation. But then I choose to work with the children only after I know the parents are able to hold space for the child to truly heal. And there are always a lot of lifestyle changes within each family based on what she’s able to carry – from nutritional changes to cutting out activities, changing activities, becoming choice makers of who you spend your time with and so forth. I guess if that’s like using your example of a process, that would be the process.

Rick: Yeah. And then if there’s alcoholism involved or other things like that do you bring in or encourage Alcoholics Anonymous or bring in other therapists or modalities?

Efrat: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It never contradicts other modalities. Locally I have a psychiatrist I work with together, a psychologist that we work with together with families, an acupuncturist that works with women trying to conceive – I sometimes intervene to help her because she does energy work herself. Globally I refer people to find people in their environments. I don’t know the people. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it always comes together with things. Energy doesn’t solve anything unless we work things also with the individual. But in terms of post trauma, PTSD, trauma of war, often once soul pieces, soul fragments, start returning back, and there is a healing of the trauma by embracing those positive pieces of life, then drinking, using drugs, all kinds of negative consequences of escaping are decreasing.

Rick: Yeah. There must be so much of that in Israel, considering everything Israel and the Jews have been through. You know Thomas Hubel, do you know Thomas? He does this kind of collective trauma healing work and stuff. But boy, it seems like to me it must be like a powder keg over there in terms of the tension of all the hostile parties in such close proximity. And, you know, missiles coming in from Lebanon and Gaza and every place, and vice versa going the other direction. It just must be nerve-wracking. And people must be really on kind of a high stress level perpetually, fight and flight all the time.

Efrat: Yeah, I think that everyone in this geographical area, not just Jewish or Israelis, [but] Muslim and Christian, everyone within Israel, like Arab Israelis or – each of them define themselves differently – and those living in the West Bank and definitely those in Gaza or in Lebanon. Stress levels are very, very high for everyone, depending – some more, depending on the situation, and some less. There is a lot of soul loss because the very basic sense of security has been lost.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And it’s in the energetic sphere. And in my community we try to cultivate, both for the adults and the little ones, a subjective sense of safety, not in terms of acting as if it is safe because it’s not as if safe, but finding that inner trust that as a soul we’re all safe and that we are guarded. The confusion to me is sad because when people experience a loss and when people don’t know what to trust, their belief systems are more fragile and their trusting in other humans becomes more fragile. So the situation is horrible for everyone and I almost have tears in my eyes because it is so painful what’s happening here. But then what’s painful for me also is that people are losing the trust in one another. I know Palestinian friends and it is hard for us to communicate. Although they know exactly what I believe and how supportive I am of their right to have a country and have their life and have all kids play joyfully and not worry about food, shelter or anything. They know exactly but it is because as soon as we have a threat we go into survival mode, all of us. Doesn’t matter how aware or conscious we are. I’m happy to have a community. I know a lot of people who are in efforts to keep their frequency and vibration high and that are insisting on keeping their trust in our human ability to see each other as equals. And it’s not easy with everything going on. There are a lot of people – a lot of Israelis, a lot of Arabs, a lot of Palestinians – that are holding this vision. In the shamanic practice we often talk about dreaming a world into being. I assume you’re familiar with this practice of creating an energetic ripple by dreaming the possible. So we practice dreaming the possible and we try not to anchor it in a way that one person sees it this way or another way but anchor just those qualities of children just having a good life and having the options of being who they are like in a general perspective. potential, this possible – using dreaming. Especially when the leadership is so deeply confused. I often ask myself, and my daughters ask the same: Why did we ask to be born here? I don’t have that answer yet. I just know I had to be born here. I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I went through a lot of times of conflict, [like] when the bus before the bus that I took to school would bomb, I would go on the next one – I would somehow miss that bus. But I would go in the next one and I would arrive safely to school and the bus after would bomb as well.

Rick: Wow.

Efrat:  Terrorist attacks. And a lot of things have happened to me that I was like, wow, I was really, really guarded. But I I grew up in that multicultural, beautiful city of Jerusalem that belongs to everyone and no one at the same time. One day maybe, you know, when I leave I will understand why I chose to come here. But I think there are people like myself and like you, holding a vision of different humanity, of a kind, compassionate humanity everywhere. And we trust.

Rick: Yeah, you know, a lot of spiritual people for a long time have been prophesying that we’re going to have some kind of Age of Enlightenment or New Age or Golden Age or whatever you want to call it. Even ancient cultures going back a couple thousand years have prophesied some such thing eventually coming to pass. And you know, a lot of people feel like, well, maybe we’re getting close to it now, but then there’s also this notion these days that perhaps we have to go through a collective dark night of the soul, you know, before we can get to that. And maybe we’re entering into that now more than ever. And you know, you can think of other times it seemed like a collective dark night of the soul, like the world wars and the Middle Ages and so on, but then we didn’t have a golden age after those. But anyway, with everything you’ve experienced and thought about, do you have any thoughts on those ideas?

Efrat: I don’t think we need to go through the collective dark night of the soul. In this geographical area, I think we are repeating old paradigms, old contracts, old ways of inefficient resolution. I think there is a lot of fear of moving forward, and this fear of moving forward makes the leadership and a lot of other humans hold onto hatred, choose killing, think land is more important than human life. And I think that on the broad perspective of what’s happening, it’s good that things are rising and opening, but a lot of what’s happening here was not necessary. None of it needed to happen if there was a different choice in resolution.

Rick: You can probably say that about every war and every concentration camp and every genocide and everything that has ever happened – there could have been a better way, you know.

Efrat: Yeah, but there’s so much fear of showing up and becoming that people are pulling back and letting the fear lead. Now think about people like yourself and so many people you interview – and I know this is true for me – it is so hard to say yes and to show up again and again and again. And practice – it’s hard work to practice and stay aligned and not let the confusion go into me. You know, I had a near-death experience, but I needed to integrate that near-death experience, and I share that process in my book, The Promise We Made. It was an integration process. I needed to understand what it means. I needed to bring it into my life. It’s not an easy journey. It’s a lot of choices to surrender and as you surrender you have less free will because you can’t be confused anymore. So you look around and we are both fortunate to know a lot of people who are making this choice and are somewhere in their journey of choosing to become, to be who they can be, that essence of compassionate, loving, being, soul. But there’s so many others who are not choosing that. And, uh, are we more? Or are they more? I don’t know. I’m not counting. I’m just looking at things and I don’t think we needed to go through this and I don’t think we need to go through wars any longer. I think we need to find ways to overcome our fear I think we are on the way to that. I see how many… my sample is not representative… Those children that I meet, those families that I meet, I’m really fortunate and blessed and I’m grateful to meet such amazing humans and sometimes their situations are so, so difficult. But they are choosing to do what they can in their abilities and that’s always amazing to me. So I choose to focus my energy on that and I think that these are the leaders of our future. This is a type of quality and energy that I hope will lead the future of humanity. I think we’ve been confused enough.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: We’ve been confused enough. It’s not about being confused again and going through some storms so that we would understand. It’s about taking the deep breath and just becoming choice makers, navigating our path and our journey as we can. We are really sophisticated beings. All of us have the capability to be the essence, the pure essence that we all are. And we all are. Again I’m saying this is how I experience it because of my experience of my near-death experience. It doesn’t matter who you were and what you did. All the beings that I saw were embraced. They were all welcome to home. Maybe later somebody sat with them – I did not see this happening – sat with them and said, “This was better, this you might need to repeat.” But the embrace was very, very clear. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened here even those confused, horrible souls that did such horrible acts on October 7th and beyond, and in other places. Even they are gonna be given another chance, because they too have a pure essence potential within them. And it’s really hard for us to seize that and accept that, especially with what’s going on here, but that’s how I see it. Now, how do they raise their children? How do we change the dynamics here, one by one?

Rick: Yeah. I like that quote from Jesus as he was being nailed to the cross, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” You know? I mean, nobody wants to be a monster in their heart of hearts, in their essence, and everyone really is the same pure being in their essence. We all are that. But, you know, the blinding darkness of ignorance, to quote a Sanskrit phrase, is just so blinding, so overwhelming that we get lost in it.

Efrat: Yeah, we get lost. But we also live in a time that there’s so much information available.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: Well, a really confused soul may have one of your interviews pop up when they open YouTube, for example.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And that’s a point of choice.

Rick: They’re looking for a YouTube on how to make bombs ,instead they find Buddha at the Gas Pump! [Laughing]

Efrat: But I think sometimes these strings are pulled and there is something in front of you and you can say, “Okay, I’ll see what it is,” or you can ignore it, but that’s an invitation.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: We get those types of invitations all the time and I think when we spend that ripple of energy and that hope that… It’s like my hope for this conversation that we are having, that it will reach whoever needs for it to, even if it’s a sentence I said or a sentence you said, because sometimes that’s all you need in order to take that deep breath and say, “Okay, I’m shifting something in my life. I want to become who I can be.” rYeah, there’s an Indian saying, “For the wise, only an indication is necessary.” And I like that. I tend to read cosmic significance into things as I go through my life. You know, why did this person show up? Or, you know, why did that bird fly across my path? Not that I really ask that about birds, but I just sort of see that…

Efrat: But you should!

Rick:  Every little thing is somehow meaningful. It’s like, I remember a Carlos Castaneda story where he and his teacher were having some conversation and the tea kettle started to boil and his teacher said, “The tea kettle agrees!” You know? It’s like somehow everything is pregnant with meaning. Not that you should drive yourself crazy trying to interpret every little bug that lands on you or something, but there is cosmic intelligence orchestrating everything. And we just sent out a newsletter, maybe I could find a copy of it. I’m going to do that very quickly. It had a real nice quote from Lao Tzu, I believe. Hang on a second here, come on…

Efrat: I don’t think we – while you’re looking – I’ll say that I don’t think we need to interpret every little sign we’re given, but signs are there to confirm that we are on the path. Don’t get into, you know ,overthinking about what’s the meaning of the sign. Then we can breathe into it and just say. “Oh okay, so I’m on the path.”

Rick: Yeah. Here’s the quote.

Efrat: I find it really important, especially if you talk about birds, that people don’t look for what the bird means to others but just trust what they know about the signs they see.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: It’s hard to teach that to teens who are constantly on their phones. Say: Okay, don’t search it. Don’t go to Google. Just take a deep breath and ask yourself, What does the sign means to me? Some of them embrace it, and some of them Google and then go to check what it means for them.

Rick: Yeah, Google is old-fashioned. I use AI. But anyway, here’s a quote. It’s from Lao Tzu. “Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” But being in accord with the way things are- that one really struck me. Kind of not feeling, “Oh, this shouldn’t be happening.” It is happening, so therefore it should be. Now, what is the implication of it?

Efrat: Yeah, what is the implication? How do we want to interpret it? How do we want to react? Do we want to react? Do we have to react?

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: And how, if it’s a significant event, then what do I need to do in order to take that event and become a better person?

Rick: Yeah. I mean, look at your car accident. You could have spent the rest of your life saying, “Oh, poor me. I had this bad car accident. Instead it’s completely turned your life around, opened up a huge world of possibilities.

Efrat: Yeah, it did turn my life around, but it did require, as I said earlier, a lot of saying yes. Right. Because things were really, really challenging. And it’s not, you know, that I became this enlightened person. I’m not! I’m still working on it! But it was one step at a time and asking questions and finding what drives me and connecting to myself. And it did gift me with a lot of time for myself so I could rest and I could journey and I could drift into those realms that I visited. But I needed to understand them. I did not come with a spiritual language. So I did not have that carpet to stand on, that foundation of understanding what was happening. I did not read one near-death experience book before I realized this is what happened to me. Only then I started reading and searching and also trying to figure out what does it mean. And some of the books just share the story as an enlightenment. Some books have in between the lines also the process of integration, of showing that it doesn’t just happen. You need to take it. So I think that’s true for every life event. We get an invitation and it’s what we do with it. And so far i’ve been saying mostly yes, and I hope to continue to do that, to imagine, to manage to say yes to what this whole story brings to my life, to my family life. But it’s not an instant… I think we all – in terms of what we talked before, about being a very passive society – we want things to happen to us. And magic happens, magic exists. But sometimes we work really, really hard to be able to learn how to listen to it, learn how to trust our intuition, learn to be open for that magic to actually manifest. And it’s still magical when it happens.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a great quote from a British explorer and mountaineer named Murray. I forget what his first name was. But it’s about taking initiative, and then when you take some initiative all kinds of opportunities and you know so-called coincidences, and things start to happen that wouldn’t happen had you not taken initiative and started the ball rolling.

Efrat: And sometimes the initiative is just about showing up, right? The third promise, like in The Promise We Made, my book, beyond sharing my near-death experience, the car crash, everything that happened, the integration process, I share three promises. I feel we all made to our children universal soul promises and the third promise – I was really surprised when it came down and it took me time to understand it – but I named it the the emotion of love. And what I realized is that when a parent – in terms of the mutual shared journey with children – when a when a parent wakes up and realizes that there is something to do, before they take action, before they do interventions, before they do all kinds of sessions in order to clear their energy field and become who they are, before they change lifestyle, before anything, just that awareness. Already sense that energetic communication to the children, saying, Okay, I got it. ‘m seeing you’re inviting me to something and I’m going to try. Now if that parent won’t do anything about it, that energetic communication it’s going to go away, but as long as there is their efforts, even those small first steps of a parent understanding – they want to find their center and become the potential that their child chose – the child gets that communication. Now the children are born knowing truth. They know who they are. They know exactly what they want. They are born attentive. They’re able to hear their messages and know their signs and they are set to connect to earth, bring in their spirit and do a process of becoming the co-creators we all come here to become. So as soon as that energetic communication is already sent, then that child can stay true to who they are. They can stay true to what they know for themselves and be patient while their parent is on that journey, in the motion. In my experience what I noticed was – I call them soul moments but I’m sure there might be other terms – distinct moments when I was aligned to my truths. I felt the joy I felt in my near-death experience in other dimensions. I felt aligned. I felt I was who I am. It was little pieces of confirmation and it could be about big decisions but it was often about very, very little elements of not taking that extra bite. It’s an example I give in my book. I think it’s a very powerful example. We sit with the food on our plate and do we take that extra bite that we don’t need to take in? And when we learn to notice when we reach that extra bite and we don’t need to take it in, then we start to be attentive. And there are small, precise moments. And when we have those precise moments and we’re aligned to our truth, these small moments of just trying, exploring as parents, create a legitimacy for our kids, the souls they are, the beings that they are – and there are very evolved beings among them – to stay true to what they came here to do. It helps them navigate those first years of being really, really dependent on us because it communicates there is an effort. It’s a really powerful energetic message that as soon as people show up, something shifts.

Rick: You’ve referred a number of times to really evolved children and, you know, you’ve heard these terms “indigo children” or “star seeds” and different terms like that. Do you feel like there’s a batch of really evolved kids being born these days, more so than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago? Is it like some kind of influx taking place of highly evolved souls?

Efrat: I think it’s constantly growing. Constantly growing. I think we don’t have labels for many of them. We use “star seeds” for so many types of evolved souls that are coming to help and contribute to the processes of Earth and and elevating our consciousness. But there are many types of being among them. I try to avoid those labelings because then it’s really helpful for us as adults to say, oh, these are the characteristics of an indigo child or a crystal child or this and this. And this is why it helps us understand why we’re different or why we experience something differently. But as parents looking and observing the various types of children coming, just accept them and love them as who they are and observe their needs and become the parents they need and create the condition that your child needs. Yes, a lot of them are very evolved souls. A lot of them have never incarnated on earth and being here is very, very difficult for them. They are overwhelmed. They don’t know what they signed up for. And going through those years of being dependent is a key, whether they’re going to manage to fulfill their missions here or not.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a question. A lot of times people listen to conversations like this and they think, “Well, how do you know this?” Like you just said, a lot of them, this is their first incarnation on Earth, and I can hear people thinking, “How does she know that?” You know? And I myself, I’m always saying things that I can ask myself, “Well, how do I really know that?” Is it just a belief? Is it somehow derived from my meditation experiences or whatever? Or have I just built a belief system around what makes sense to me that involves reincarnation and all kinds of other things that I have no really concrete proof for?

Efrat: So, I can’t prove it. This is not something I can prove.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: But when I meet those kids in my work and I connect to their energy field, their energy field is very different and there are all kinds of energy fields. It’s not just what we usually see for a soul that has incarnated many times, and it can be more luminous or less luminous or they carry information. Sometimes the resolution that they need takes place in other planets. So we see those beings. And it’s not just me, it’s a lot of my colleagues as well.

Rick: Right.

Efrat: I know I’m not the only one seeing those different essences. Now you can say it’s a shamanic journey, that every traveling to other dimensions is a fruit of our imagination. So we can be skeptic whether it’s true or not true. This is what I experience in my healing sessions with many children being born today. Young ones very young ones showing characteristics I’ve never seen before, sharing information I’ve never heard before. So this is what I am seeing in my type of work. But if I’ll say something beyond that: Regardless who that soul is, regardless who that being is, or where they come from, our shared intention is to have them all fulfill their journey. And to fulfill their journey, they need to be human. And I said earlier, I believe in grounded spirituality. The most spiritual thing to do is to be who you are. And our role as the parents is as significant adults to others. It’s often not the parents, it’s other significant adults, like grandparents, like teachers, like an aunt and uncle, like a librarian – they’re really important people that guide those sensitive children, those quiet children, on how to be living a human experience, grounded, not about floating and soaring and escaping their human reality, which we all do because being human is really difficult, but by embracing this journey fully. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a star seed, if it’s an indigo child, if it’s a being that never incarnated before, or a really, really wise, luminous, spiritual soul. They all need those conditions. They all need for us to be kind and compassionate and open the door for them to become who they can. And they each need something different. That’s why they choose different parents and different conditions.

Rick: Yeah, because of the kind of people I interview, I’ve talked to a lot of people who were very sensitive as children. In some cases, could see angels or had auras or, you know, different subtle stuff like that. And some of them assume that everyone sees things that way and they learn soon enough that that is not the case. And often when they would talk about their experiences to their parents or others, they would be told that it was their imagination or there was something wrong with them or whatever, so they shut it down or just refused, you know, wouldn’t talk about it anymore. But, you know, what you’re doing in terms of normalizing and accepting and acknowledging these kinds of kids is great. Why should we all have to shut it down and go through crazy teenage years in order to maybe eventually rediscover it later on? It would be nice to just kind of keep the ball rolling from start to finish in life and have this kind of way of functioning become the norm, which I think it easily could be. You mentioned other planets. Maybe there are planets in which highly enlightened people are the norm. And, yeah, be nice to think that. And why not this one? It could happen. We could change it. Not in a snap of the fingers, but over time.

Efrat: Over time, one by one. I was a kid like that. And I know many children who are like that and, at least locally, the peer groups that they have – a group was my daughters’ – and all the teens and children that I work with – they have a group they relate to. There are other children and teens that they know who see energies, who experience all kind of experiences they do. That’s very powerful. And I know that’s true also for others that I know who are leading such groups. So it’s both normalizing it in terms of within the family and usually a sensitive child, a child with all kinds of abilities, one of their parents has those abilities as well, but they shut it down.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: But when they have also the peer group… And that’s where I think books are really important, and stories. And there are many spiritual aspects in children. In middle grade books today you can find them weaved in all kinds of places. It’s becoming less un-norm or not normal, and there is information. So, yeah, I’m hoping that I am contributing my bit of quantum to this ripple of opening up. There are many like me around the world, and that’s the intention.

Rick: And there’s a lot of cool stuff in the popular culture, like, you know, become a Jedi Master or become a wizard or whatever. The children get these stories that, you know, we can have these so-called magical abilities. And…

Efrat: Yeah, I think that’s amazing, and just think how many kids relate to those superpowers. But we need to also be really careful that we don’t attribute superpowers to characters existing only in movies and books and actually confirm to our children that their abilities are superpowers because every child has superpowers. And as young children and until like five or six, they’re really into it, many of them – not all of them. Some carry it along into their teen years but some of them start to get confused and rational and go to school and [learn] mental processes and they lose not only the belief in the super human characteristics, but also the belief in their own superpower.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: So it’s a delicate like process of nourishing those connections to heroes that carry superpowers but also finding that reflection of where do you have your superpower as well? Maybe it’s different and maybe it’s not seen and maybe we don’t know what it is, but it’s there because they all have it.

Rick: Yeah, I have a friend who has a sensitive child like that and he came home from school one day and said, “Mommy, my teacher told me there’s no such thing as dragons.” And I actually made a video for the kid and sent it down about how there is such a thing as dragons. And, you know, they don’t exist on the gross plane. They perhaps exist in other dimensions and whatnot. And that’s why they’re in all the cultures around the world. In fact, next week, I’m going to interview a lady who this is her whole focus, talking about all the different other kinds of life, non-human life, that exist in various dimensions and how many humans are actually hybrids of some elf or something and human, not through necessarily interbreeding but through some kind of mind meld with some such entity. Anyway, that should be a bit of a stretch for some people, but I think it’s fun. I’m listening to her books right now.

Efrat: Yeah, I think it’s an important thing to be aware of and not to be afraid of.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: But if I go back to your example of that kid and dragons, that’s how kids lose their belief in the themselves. That’s how they lose that connection because someone with no bad intentions tells them that what they know is not real. And those dragons are real for that child. And maybe that’s the guidance, maybe that’s what they see in their visioning, maybe that’s their energetic communication, we never know. So, never dismiss anything that kids say. It’s like, just nourish whatever they know for themselves, even if it’s something I’m not familiar with.

Rick: Sure. And that’s not to say that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the the Easter Bunny are all real, but that also doesn’t mean that all kinds of other things aren’t real, you know, that are part of our folklore, perhaps, or at least in some kind of distorted form have come down through the ages.

Efrat: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah. One final point that I have a note written down here. I interviewed a woman a couple months ago who has an autistic daughter, Melinda Edwards. And she felt and feels that autistic children are special in a way, that they’re some kind of harbingers of some higher consciousness, but they just haven’t really learned to, or they’re not wired well, to function in our society or on this planet or whatever. In fact, Mindy is going to be interviewed by Tami Simon, of Sounds True, pretty soon, about that topic. And another friend who has a nice level of spiritual awakening, but who discovered that she is neurodivergent – she’s of course a grown adult – is going to be interviewed by Sounds True. But what do you think about autism, neurodivergence, things like that in children and perhaps also in adults, even adults who are highly spiritual? Do you have reflections or insights or anything about that?

Efrat: They’re definitely offering us a different way of viewing the world and of how thought processes work, how communication works. And yes, based on, again, my limited sample, not representative, the children on the spectrum that I was honored to work with, they all came from far away. And their challenges…

Rick: Came from far away means?

Efrat: Other planets. Other planets. Far away. But for some, the challenges were challenges of adjusting to how human life is, in terms of the way of communicating, in terms of processing information. Some of them – like I’m thinking of specific situations – some of them were about being overwhelmed from so much information because they catch so much information at the same time. It’s like they have so many more receptors, so it’s overwhelming. And some of them are actually bringing, offering a type of – and again, this is generalizing, this is not my specialty, but I have worked with many on the spectrum – they offer us a different type of healing. They absorb energies. They’re communicating just in a different way. So they’re avoiding what we would accept to be a common way of human communication, or they have their challenges – again, each child and their challenges – but they’re very, very evolved luminous beings offering us a very advanced level of healing. And they absorb and release it out. And they are a vessel. I don’t think that’s always healthy for them because they may need guidance on how to be a vessel for healing, how to absorb somebody else’s energy and then transfer it out and not have it stuck in them. Some of them know how to do it, some of them don’t. So again, I like to avoid generalizing, but they’re definitely a blessing to humanity. And they’re offering us teachings and lessons that others don’t.

Rick: That’s a great, great answer. I’m glad I brought it up. And when you say they came from other planets, you’re not implying that they came in spaceships necessarily, but they incarnated here.

Efrat: They incarnated here. Right. Yes, yes, yes. They incarnated here with an intention also for themselves, for learning, experiencing. It’s not just about bringing gifts, it’s also about their own experience of humanity and what they can learn here about different types information processes, communication, perspectives.

Rick: Nice. Great. Well, we’ve gone on a couple hours and probably should wrap it up, but I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and getting to know you better. I’ll be linking to your website and, you know, people can find out what you’re up to there, sign up for things, whatever, get in touch with you. But is there anything that you’d like to say in closing that you want to make sure that people hear that you haven’t had a chance to say?

Efrat: I think I’ve got the stage to say a lot of what I think. My website, my name, efratshokef.com, you can find the information about my book The Promise We Made, a lot of free resources, a lot of articles, and also a contact page to contact me with any question or anything that comes up. And just, I guess, my message to everyone is my hope and my dreaming that we find our essence and we become the humans, the kind, compassionate, loving humans that we can. That would be so nice to live that and not just dream it.

Rick: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your contribution to making that a reality. You know, there’s a team of people around the world, loosely affiliated and unbeknownst to one another for the most part who are all moving this thing along and helping to bring about a better world.

Efrat: Yeah, yeah. And we’re everywhere. Many, many, many, many, many.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat: So each one of us does our little thing and we create the ripple that is needed.

Rick: Which is hope for optimism, you know, because I’ve heard people say, “Well, I don’t want to have children because of climate change,” and you know, things like that. But I think we need all the evolved souls we can get to help transform the world, including climate change and every other problem that besets us.

Efrat: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there’s so many wanting to come to Earth.

Rick: Yeah.

Efrat:  Earth can handle it.

Rick: Yeah. And, you know, I don’t want to drag this on too much, but if you are a spiritually conscious person and aspiring to higher development and all that stuff, you know, there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which says, if you’re really a righteous soul, then you might be reborn in a well-educated, affluent family, but then it says if you’re really worthy, you will be born in a family of yogis, although it says, “Such a life as this, such a birth as this is much more difficult to attain.” So, you know, if people are yogis, if they’re spiritual aspirants in any tradition, you have an opportunity to bring in really evolved souls who in turn will make a great contribution to the world. So, don’t feel like you’re contributing to overpopulation or something. Who am I to talk? We didn’t have children. [Laughs] But anyway, I think it’s a special time in the world, and as you said, there are many highly evolved souls wishing to be born.

Efrat: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, again, people know if they are here to be biological parents or adoptive parents or significant adults, and others do not have children because their mission is about something else and it’s all okay as long as it’s aligned to what we wanted for our journey.

Rick: Right. Great. All right, well, thank you, that’s a good note to end on.

Efrat: Thank you, thank you very much.

Rick: Oh yes, thank you and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one. Visit the website to check out signing up for the mailing list and the AI chat bot and anything else that happens to interest you there. And visit Efrat’s website as well. It’s efratshokef.com, right?

Efrat: Yes.

Rick: Okay, good. And if it’s hard to spell that, I’ll be linking to it from your page on BatGap.

Efrat: Great. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Rick: Alrighty. [Music]