Senior Citizens

Growing better as you grow older

by Rebekah Hickman

UltraMind ESP System Instructor

The Silva techniques certainly have kept me on my feet and feeling good and feeling happy all these years.

A psychic friend of mine introduced me to Silva. She came to town to visit me one day and told me about the course. We didn't have a Silva instructor in Charleston, West Virginia, at the time, but an instructor who was traveling around teaching Silva courses came to Charleston. My friend said, "This is a real good course. I took it twenty years ago and it changed my life."

I had been to a lot of workshops, and I thought, "This is one that will be exciting for a couple of weeks, then I'll forget all about it and will have spent my money for nothing."

I asked my friend how much it costs and how long it took to do it. When she told me I said, "No, I don't have the money or the time to do that." Those are the standard excuses for folks who don't want to take the course. She said, "You've got the time, and I've got the money." She literally dragged me to that course, sat me down, and handed out the money to pay for it.

I thought, "This must be really something, that she would do this," because she didn't have much money. I was sort of in awe that she did this.

She had taken it twenty years before and it changed her life. In November of 1987 it did the same for me, and I will always thank her for it.

Heart surgery

I had just gone through a heart operation, just two or three months earlier. I'd had a devastating experience with that. I started looking at my life and wondering what I had done. I knew enough to know that I was behind it somehow, but I didn't know how to do anything about it.

I was a sort of a Type A personality, and I knew I had to make some changes because I wasn't going to live with the fear that I might have another heart attack.

Most of my life was anything but boring. I have always been very, very active and into everything. I had a very happy childhood, very good and loving parents. My mother was a school teacher from the age of sixteen. I was born sort of "late in life" so I kind of had it easy and had a lot of fun.

My father was a butcher and he had a kind of Silva attitude too. It was during the depression, times were getting pretty bad, but my father always said that he wasn't poor. He wasn't worried about it. I never grew up with any great worries or fears.

So when that heart attack hit me, it hit with a bang because I'd never been afraid of anything at any time in my life.

I went to college, even though we were in the depression, and was an average student. At that time, in the 1930s, they really needed students in the colleges, so they encouraged me and helped me along. Now you have to fight to get into college.

I didn't care too much for teaching, which is what I majored in, so I ended up getting married, I settled down to being a housewife, and raised three children. I waited about fifteen years before I went back to work.

I found out that I was more of a social worker than a teacher. I wanted to help the underdog, to work on something that had meaning, where I could solve problems. I went to work at child welfare and worked with children who were in trouble. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Next I moved to juvenile court and worked with delinquents and foster care and adoption and all those things. I also loved that job.

After working at a job for a while, I would take time off to be with my children and help them. Then I'd go back to work. I was offered a job with mental health. That was a fun job; they were all fun, because I was helping people.

The next job was at a private psychiatric hospital. That was really fun because I got to work with all the patients, doing craft work, explaining things to them, taking them on field trips. I ended up working there twenty years.

The hospital administrator said, "I don't know what you're doing, but I think you are doing good because it is making the patients happy and that is all that matters."

Does life end at 65?

This web site developed and maintained for the Ecumenical Society of Psy by Avlis Publishing

Copyrigh by Avlis Publishing and the Ecumenical Society of Psy