As a young girl growing up in São Paulo in southern Brazil, Jurema Silva was exposed to an eclectic blend of spirituality that went beyond the borders of her family’s Catholic Church parish. Yes, on Sunday millions of Brazilians attended mass, but during the week, on Wednesday nights and Friday nights, centers focused on spiritualism and African religions helped the locals explore their gifts of intuition and mediumship.
The openness of her society to myriad forms of spirituality allowed Jurema to feel comfortable connecting with her family lineage of mediums, even though it wasn’t spoken about or advertised. As a young teenager, Jurema’s mom pulled her out of Bible School and supported her personal research into the supernatural. Jurema’s older sister introduced her to books that assisted her personal exploration.
That curious young girl matured into the Jurema Silva that we now know as a naturally gifted psychic/medium, spiritual counselor, inspirational speaker and guided energy healer practitioner, who supports the personal growth of Minnesotans and people throughout the world. She will be one of three keynote speakers at the 2018 Psychic & Healing Symposium on February 24 at Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center, speaking on “The Learning Path: Managing Negativity, Boosting Your Good Vibes, Amplifying Your Intuition.”
We spoke with Jurema to learn more about this hidden treasure within our midst.
How would you describe who you are and what you offer the world?
I am a psychic, a medium, and I am also a healer, and what I bring to the world is my ancient knowledge of healing and also my education on spirituality. I consider myself a woman of the Universe. I learned so much about many religions and also about human behavior and human pain and suffering, the challenges that we go through when we are living in physical form on this planet here.
I offer the insights of my spiritual connection with people, such as solutions for the challenges they face. It’s a healing session actually, not as much of a divination session.
You talk about helping to relieve suffering and say that a lot of people are living with suffering. Tell me a little more about that.
The main reason that we reincarnate, and keep reincarnating, is because we suffer. It’s pain and suffering, those things we cannot release. We cannot move forward because of fear.
Most people act as if they are blind to the purpose they are here as human beings. It is hard for them to find their purpose and they don’t ask, “Why the heck am I here? What’s my purpose?” The reality of the purpose of a human being is not to work for decades and raise children. You’ve got to have a purpose, and society brings a lot of fear and negativity to our lives, and that causes even more pain and suffering. We don’t talk about the pain, what we are going through and the challenges we face, because we are not supposed to. We are supposed to keep everything to ourselves.
If somebody wants to find their purpose, but they don’t have a clue where to begin, what do you recommend?
That’s a very good question. It’s the question that most of my clients really wanted to know, even if they don’t ask me. Everyone, from very young children to my clients in their eighties and nineties, ask, “What’s my purpose here?” The purpose of your life here is to learn and to give, to share your wisdom, really.
It doesn’t matter if you are sharing your knowledge and wisdom within the family by helping and educating your children, or if your purpose is to excel in your job or become a healer. I consider a healer to be a doctor, a nurse, a caregiver, a caretaker, social worker, a psychologist, a professor, a teacher, a writer, a painter, an artist, a musician, a dancer. All those people came to enhance and transform other people’s lives. That’s the purpose. I ask my clients and students, “What are doing to help others, to enhance others with your own knowledge, with your capability, with your empathy? What are you doing to help others in need?” That’s the purpose, really, of us being here.
Your website states that “Jurema guides us to the path of peace, harmony, and confidence by assuring we are not and will never be alone in our divine and yet mysterious life journey.” Can you elaborate on what this means?
Yes. Let’s take an example. Let’s say there is a war, and on both sides there are soldiers and captains and commanders. A battalion will not send one soldier to fight alone. It is the same thing with us. It doesn’t matter if you believe in a divine light, a Christhead, Buddha, God — it doesn’t matter what you truly believe. We were not sent back here to this planet alone. We were sent with a battalion of angels, of mentors, spirit guides. Catholics, for example, believe in saints. Yeah, they are here. They are always helping us.
What most people don’t do is to ask for help. We are being helped and influenced daily by the spirit world and what we forget to do is to ask them for help. We keep everything to ourselves, and we feel like it is a burden to ask God for help. In reality, He sends all of those guides and mentors and angels to help us, and they don’t mind helping at all. To the contrary, that’s a part of their spiritual evolution.
On February 24, you will speak at the Psychic & Healing Symposium on “The Learning Path: Managing Negativity, Boosting Your Good Vibes, and Amplifying Your Intuition.” What are the key lessons all of us can learn to create a more uplifting life for ourselves?
This is a very popular topic everywhere I speak. Everyone wants to know what to do about negativity — and they end up finding out that negativity starts with their own selves. We live and we grow up in a society that is very negative from the beginning. It’s coming from our parents, the parents of our parents, because that negativity is passed on.
It’s almost like society unconsciously wants us to fail. The news is negative, the weather is negative, everything around us is very negative. What I’m trying to teach in my lectures is for the person to be alive, that negativity comes from within, and that it is rooted in our society. The key is being able to perceive the negativity from within and also the negativity around them: in work, at home, school, just by going out into society to shop. There is negativity everywhere. The lesson is how you repel it and how you learn how to identify it and change your vibration to a positive one, instead of reacting to negativity.
So, the first key is to identify and become aware of the negativity and then work on yourself to rise above it?
Exactly! You rise above it. The life of anybody will be so much better if there is a constant wave of positive feelings and thoughts. Even if the person is in the midst of a challenge, you have got to turn around and see the result of the challenge as a positive experience. Everything is an experience here as human beings. If we like our own experience or not, if it’s traumatizing, if it’s tough, or not, it is an experience for your own learning, for your own growth, and you’ve got to turn that into a positive. That’s what is very hard for all of us here. We are constantly negative. We wake up in the morning and we are already negative. We don’t appreciate our faces in the morning, for example. We are our own worst critics.
In reality, most people are perfect. We walk, we breathe, we move our legs, we move our fingers and arms, we use our brains to work, we are intelligent, we can breathe, we can see, we can talk, we can smile. So, we are in the perfect physical state and we forget to appreciate that every time we wake up in the morning. We are breathing, we are walking, we are thinking. That’s already a blessing and that’s already very positive. To the contrary, we torture ourselves because of our image.
Do you have a sense from a universal perspective that perhaps all of this negativity that’s built into our culture is here to propel us to move beyond it, so it’s here for a reason?
Absolutely. It’s a challenge and it has everything to do with ego. We keep going around in this vicious cycle of reincarnation because of ego. We don’t seem to learn, and thousands of years pass by and we keep repeating the same mistakes — until we learn to release negativity, and be at peace with our own self and realize, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m built of energy. I’m a spirit. This is very temporary. This is just a school.” We will continue reincarnating until we learn.
What matters is for you to advance, work above this negativity within your own self. Meditation and yoga are so popular now because people are getting mentally sick with the stress, the depression, the anxiety, and the negative society.
What will people experience at your talk at the Psychic Symposium?
I am a very funny speaker. I bring the public into my lectures, asking them questions and kind of a pushing them around to encourage them to speak up. I want to hear their own experiences. For example, in this lecture coming up, I’m going to give them examples of negativity by using their own body, by using a muscle testing, kinesiology. If there is time, I’m going to use a group to help explore negativity and positive energy to help to realize what is going on with themselves and society. It’s going to be a very exciting, fun talk.
What were you like as a child? Did you have a lot of intuitive insights?
My first experience, when I was probably 4 or 5 years of age, was seeing this image in front of me of a very bony, skinny man with a very warm, nice smile. He was always around the house or in my bedroom, especially at night, communicating with me through my mind. I shared that experience with my mother. I told her twice, three, four times, I don’t know, probably ten times, and she was wondering, wait a minute, she is seeing this image very often.
So she asked me to describe this man. I described to her the very skinny, bony man with a big brown robe, and he had a cord around his robe, and he wore leather sandals. My mother actually thought at first that it was Jesus, because she is still very Catholic. When I mentioned the birds flying around, animals that were lying blissfully around him, and some birds on his shoulders, she realized that I was seeing St. Francis of Assisi. She told me who he was, but I had no idea who the saint was. But her reaction to that was to buy a huge statue of St. Francis of Assisi and have it at home. She still has it. She is 86 years old, and she lights a candle every Tuesday for him because she believes that he protects me, I guess.
That was my first experience. I wasn’t sharing that experience with others, and my mother didn’t share it so much with the family, because events like that within the family were very common in Brazil, but at that time you didn’t advertise so much. It wasn’t a big deal, especially on my mother’s family side, because there are some mediums there. It runs in the family. So, my mother didn’t have to advertise. It was something special that she appreciated, but it was not like, “Oh, my God! My daughter has a problem!” No. It wasn’t like that at all. It actually was very smooth.
She actually knew that you were continuing the lineage in your family, right?
Yes. I was born and raised Catholic and my parents were very strict Catholic parents, so they didn’t talk much about that, but they knew that there are other members of the family with a special gift like what I had.
And, have you had a connection with St. Francis since then?
Always, it never ends. He is my mentor. That’s not something that I advertise. I don’t advertise my ascended masters, my mentors or my spirit guides in detail because it is not about my ego and my gift and capability of connecting with notable figures. My mission here is to help others, that’s the most important thing. I’m a messenger and I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m doing what God asked me to do. So, it does not matter, really, who is behind me helping me.
When did you have your first experience with seeing somebody from the other side?
Oh, I was probably 10 or 11, maybe before, but I don’t remember the exact time when I received messages from a person to give to a friend in school. That was my first time. I remember that clearly, it was her grandmother who passed away. I would say it was not even a year since she passed, and she came with a message to give to my little friend.
How did your friend respond?
She started crying, because the message was correct. I described this old lady standing next to me on my right. That was my first experience seeing, meeting, giving a message to somebody.
Psychics and mediums I have interviewed have said that at some point in school you become ridiculed for being different. Did you withhold some of your intuitive abilities as you were growing up?
I had to because of society. At the same time, I was blessed to grow up in a country where Christianity was, what’s the word, synchronized with African and spiritual religions, so I was not judged so much for having my gifts. Of course, I did not advertise and I didn’t use it all the time in public or with strangers or even friends and family. But I was blessed to be born in a country that is a lot more open society than the United States of America. In Brazil, at least when I was growing up there, people were going to a Catholic church for a mass every Sunday morning, but on Wednesday nights, Friday nights, they were in a temple or a spiritual center.
So, growing up in Brazil involved a great mix of feelings. You grew up Catholic, but you have a gift of intuition and what do you do with it? That’s what is still happening, I believe, for a lot of Brazilians. What do you do with your gift?
What led you to begin doing what you are doing now full time?
When I was 5 years old I told my parents that I wanted to become a neurosurgeon, and they looked at each other and I obviously figured out that there were no funds for that. Financially, they could not afford to send me to medical school, so I decided to become a reporter, a journalist, to write and travel all over the world interviewing people.
The main reason was because I was turning my back on my gifts. I didn’t really believe that I was gifted. I didn’t think it was for myself. Yeah, there are great mediums and psychics in Brazil, but that was not for me. Yeah, I have cousins and aunties who are mediums, but that’s not for me. I needed to figure out who I was, what I was here for, and the challenge was for me to go out there and interview somebody new every day. That’s what I really wanted, so I just turned my back on my gifts. I tried to ignore them for many decades.
What led you to choose the way of living that you have now?
Trauma, first of all. A terrible experience that I had years ago made me feel…it’s hard to explain, but I’m going to use those words…feel like the layers of my own self were coming apart. The layers were peeling off of me. It’s almost like a veil came off — and there was so much pain. Then I started seeing the world in a totally different way. I start seeing people’s vibrations, people’s feelings of happiness and joy, and pain and suffering, and all the issues that we human beings go through. The vibrations and the energy were around everywhere.
I was seeing and sensing a lot more after I experienced this trauma, and the messages were so much clearer. The main message was to turn around and fulfill my mission, which I already knew since when I was a very young child,. That’s what I did. I closed a half million dollar business that I owned here in Minnesota to become a professional psychic and medium.
What insights can you share related to what we’re now experiencing on this planet?
Transformation. It feels like it is a huge storm that we are experiencing. Remember after a strong summer storm, after the dark clouds go away and the sun comes back out, that the birds are singing again, and the animals are out. It’s almost like we need this storm, spiritually, to shake things up, for a shift of energy to ascend the consciousness of the planet of human beings to a positive and harmonious level, for us to start respecting ourselves and respecting each other and respecting the planet again.
This planet is a home for us and it’s just so perfect and so beautiful, and we have totally disrespected it, and disrespected the inhabitants of the planet, so we need to go through this shift of energy, this huge storm, to be able to see the clarity ahead and have the awareness of what we are doing to ourselves, and to others and to the planet. It is very normal for humanity to go through those shakeups and shifts of energy. It’s happened before.
So, this is basically a shakeup, a big storm, and then the sun will come out and we will be singing again?
Yes. We might not see that in our lifetime, but it will happen, because we don’t have the notion of infinite. We human beings don’t know what infinite is. Only God does. So there is no rush to get to where we are going. We will get there over time. It might take hundreds of years, but we will get there, and it’s okay as long as we ride through the storm, through this shift, with a positive mind. As long as we consistently learn from our own experiences and release ego, we will get there.
For the people who are being shaken up internally during this time, what message do you have for them on how to respond to this chaos?
The healers are feeling this shift a lot. There are a lot of people, I think, who are literally losing their minds, because they can’t handle what is going on.
Most people cannot accept what they perceive because it is contrary to what they believe. Nobody listens to other human beings anymore. It is not a matter of whether you accept other people’s opinions and beliefs, it is just a matter of sitting down and listening. We are in constant resistance to what is out there.
We have got to fight with love. We’ve got to sit down and listen, and re-educate ourselves to understand that there are other people who don’t think like us. That’s why it is difficult for both sides of the coin to sit down and listen and be in the middle. “Hey, we are part of the same coin, we just have two sides. This is not two coins with totally different figures. No. This is the same coin. We just have to sit down, calm down, and listen.” There is a lot of resistance to doing that now. We cannot express our opinion because the other person is going to get hurt. The person that is hurt resists against the opinion of the other, so it is a mess. We are losing ground here and it is very hard. It makes the energy hard to navigate through. There is too much of resistance from both sides.
What final message would you like to leave with our readers on walking this journey that we’re on right now?
First of all, we have to exercise patience, self-love and respect. Human beings are more and more isolated from their own selves and from society. I see more and more people disconnect from themselves and disconnect from others. We need to come together and work together. We are spirits. What we aim for is union and love, and that’s not happening.
We need to exercise love and union. That’s very important. From union comes peace. From union comes resolution. From sitting together and expressing yourself — and I’m not just talking about the world, this could be at home, too, with your spouse and with your children — comes resolution, and that’s peace, that’s love, that’s care. I wish that every single human being will just have some patience and express love for others, and union. That’s what we are missing right now.
