Podcast Highlight: Debra Silverman
As a spiritual aspirant part way through my own journey I realized there was an overlap of healing and self-understanding that was happening in parallel to my unlearning and unbecoming.
Its a curious thing how every spiritual seeker finds the same set of books, retreats, teachers, and guides along our journey to help with our rebirth.
Enter Debra Silverman, psychologist and astrologer who has spent her life (as she describes in the interview) helping people fall in love with themselves, their life, and each other.
Debra wrote The Missing Element: Inspiring Compassion for the Human Condition.
This book opens up with a warning alarm, reverberating through the dense fog of humanity asking us to "Wake Up!" The earth is in crisis, humanity is in crisis and Debra reminds the reader that we are both the problem and the solution.
For anyone invested in self development, part of our work here is to understand our elemental composition, cultivate each one, and find solutions to bring the ourselves and the world back into alignment and harmony--as best we can, all things considered.
What are the Four Elements?
Water, Air, Earth, and Fire.
In our interview Debra breaks down the different characteristics of each element, their positive and negative manifestations and how most of us have one element that is not as dominant as the other three.
Apparently I have almost no fire, which was really surprising to me as a Latina.
This is partly because I've been conditioned to believe all Latina's are born super spicy and culture lore tells us we salsa straight out of our mother's womb with a bad attitude and confidence for days.
I do love to salsa, but if I'm being honest with myself I do have a strong inclination for the softness of peaceful environments (earth), the silence of my own company--writing and creating (air), and the warmth of the Earth beneath my feet in the ocean (water). Healing and feeling, instead of at some night club, dancing (fire) the night away or at a literal hot fire coal retreat.
It is clear that my missing element is fire and armed with this knowledge I am finding ways cultivate the element of fire that feels authentic to my core personality traits (without making unnecessary drama or dramatic changes, as Debra says fire can sometimes do) and bring myself into a balance.
Her book is also a means for moving ourselves from a victimized state of being into an empowered position.
Where we accept that we decided to incarnate here, in this world, as this person, with this family, this personality, and these life experiences.
Debra says "it's a volunteer position." Once we accept that, it opens us up to the possibility that maybe everything that has occurred to us is useful, inspiring, and exactly what we needed in order to evolve and awaken.
As an astrologist, Debra talks about how reading and digesting our natal charts gives us tools and information to understand ourselves better, so that we can interact kindly with ourselves and not try to squelch our shadow sides or the things that make us quirky and unique.
Gaining this level of self-understanding is paramount to living harmoniously with ourselves, from a place of deep acceptance so that you can fall in love with yourself.
But more importantly; Debra says, “when you gain understanding of your chart, you can look around your ecosystem and create compassionate understanding for the people in your life, by seeing them with a fresh set of eyes and an open heart to love and accept them as they are.”
