Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of the trusted psychic and medium directory, BestPsychicDirectory.com.
In 2001, Melissa and I attended a workshop on psychic and mediumistic abilities presented by a medium named Gordon Smith from Scotland. I didn’t intend to discover any profound ability in myself, but I was curious to see what other beginners might do. The $40 workshop was presented at the First Spiritualist Church of Quincy, Massachusetts, on a Wednesday evening. About forty people attended.
My father passed in 1997, so this was about four years into my investigation into life after death. By this time, I had met several psychics and mediums, already had my first past-life regression and life-between-lives regression, and was having new experiences involving guided meditation, animal communication, spirit artistry, and energy healing.
A few mediums I met were members of spiritualist churches, so they invited Melissa and me to participate in several of their workshops. Often, these churches would sponsor a medium from other parts of the world (usually England), which meant paying for their travel and giving them a place to stay (usually in another medium’s home) in exchange for the medium teaching workshops and offering public demonstrations of their ability.
Gordon Smith was quite popular in the UK. He was known as The Psychic Barber. The pastor of the First Spiritualist Church of Quincy (Massachusetts) was a medium and spirit artist named Rita Berkowitz. Because I had gotten to know her, she invited Melissa and me to experience Gordon’s workshop at her church. It was a six-hour round trip to attend, but I hoped it would be worth it.
Gordon Smith tested our abilities through several workshop experiments. First, he paired every attendee with a stranger so that partners knew nothing about one another. Gordon then gave us an exercise in which we attempted to learn something about a stranger (our workshop partner) by absorbing information through their aura.