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THE
ALHAMBRA INSTITUTE
Alexia and Stephen Rish, own and operate The Alhambra
Institute, whose headquarters are at 78 W. Chicago
Street in Downtown Coldwater Michigan. The Alhambra
Institute also has a second location at 940 Monroe
Street in West Dearborn, Michigan. Alhambra, is
Alexia’s spirit guide. Alhambra first spoke
to Alexia when she was four years old and has
been guiding Alexia since then. Hearing Alhambra’s
voice coincided with Alexia’s first psychic
vision. Alexia says about Alhambra, “Alhambra
has always been an honest, and patient, guide,
teacher, and at times a parent. I trust Alhambra’s
wisdom.”
Alexia grew up with Alhambra constantly at her
side, telling her what people were going to say
before they said it, showing her visions about
future events, and telling her what would happen
if she did this or that. And, when she did this
or that, how to get herself out of the problems
that she created by not listening to his guidance.
Alexia says about Alhambra, “The most fun
that I had with Alhambra when I was a child, was
when he would tell me stories about my long distance
future and at what ages things would happen to
me. As a child, and even eventually as a young
adult, his tales about my future seemed so science
fiction compared to the life that I had at the
time, that it didn’t seem like what he
was telling me could ever be. But, over time,
things have unfolded just as he had foretold.”
In 1980, when Alexia was going through divorce,
and supporting herself, four children, and a cat
named Frank, she realized that times could be
very difficult if she didn’t make the right
choices in her new life as a single parent. She
asked Alhambra to guide her to make the right
decisions. A few months after the divorce was
final, Alhambra told Alexia to go and sign up
for guitar lessons. Alexia, was stunned by his
request, considering that she had very little
money, and hardly any time, but trusting in Alhambra
as she did, she did what he requested and signed
up at a local music shop. She bought a guitar,
and began the task of learning how to play it,
wondering all the while, what Alhambra had up
his sleeve. At the same time, Alhambra told Alexia
to get out and join a group so that she could
meet new people and make new friends. Having grown
up extremely psychically sensitive, and curious
about metaphysics, she began searching for people
who had the same interest.
A few weeks into her new hobby, strumming the
guitar, which seemed to be all that she could
do with it, Alhambra told her to go out and buy
a crystal ball. Alexia balked at this request,
having just put out money for a guitar and lessons,
she felt that Alhambra was being frivolous and
insensitive to her financial situation. He told
her to do it anyway. Which she set out immediately
to do, being that he never misled her. Once the
crystal ball and stand, was sitting in the middle
of the kitchen table, with Alexia staring into
it, and the cat sitting on the other side of it,
also staring into it, and four children standing
around wondering what this new development meant
for their future, Alhambra told Alexia that within
three weeks someone would ask her to read the
crystal ball for them and if she did, her life
would be changed forever, and if she did not,
she would continue in her present situation, which
was bleak, forevermore.
For the next three weeks, Alexia continued trying
to fulfill his other request of finding people
to spend time with, and was keeping her eyes and
ears open for an opportunity to contact like minded
people. At the same time, she was waiting for
each and every conversation to turn into the question;
“will you read the crystal ball for me?”.
It happened two weeks later. Alexia was still
trying to master the lesson of chords, and as
she sat next to her Russian guitar teacher, completely
absorbed in twisting and stretching her fingers
against the guitar strings, her teacher said;
“Do you know of a psychic?”. Alexia
froze with fingers poised above the strings. Seconds
passed as Alexia weighed Alhambra’s words.
Did she want to reveal to her Russian mentor that
she was a psychic and have her life changed forever
as Alhambra had foretold a few weeks hence, or
did she want to go on strumming as though she’d
never heard the teachers plea. The thought of
life continuing in it’s current vein was
unacceptable to her so she sat back in her chair
and gazed into the eyes of the old entertainer,
and said; “I am a psychic”, where
upon, the teacher asked her to come and read for
her and a few friends.
As it turned out, the guitar teacher belonged
to an Edgar Cayce study group. Alexia was familiar
with Edgar Cayce, having read a book about him,
but didn’t know there were study groups.
She agreed to read the crystal ball for the group.
On the way to her first public performance of
her psychic talents, she asked Alhambra what she
was supposed to do with the crystal ball, and
Alhambra told her to gaze into it and tell the
person what she saw. She set her crystal ball
on the stand, in the middle of the table where
she was to read, one by one, the group of ladies
that had assembled for the evening. As each one
came in and sat in the chair opposite her, she
gazed into the crystal in front of her and amazed
them with her psychic talent, but beyond that,
she was amazed herself at the activity that she
waswitnessing in the crystal ball in front of
her. She had
seen visions in her head all of her life, and
her dreams were crystal clear, but she had never
seen them inside of a crystal before. And, Alhambra’s
voice, always in her head before tonight, seemed
to be coming through her vocal cords, interpreting
the pictures and symbols that appeared in the
ball. It seemed all of a sudden that she was the
tool that Alhambra was using to guide the person
sitting in front of her.
At the end of the evening, the ladies complimented
her on her gift, and she went home, stunned at
what she had just experienced.
When next she studied with her guitar teacher,
the woman asked her to join this Edgar Cayce study
group, and Alhambra told her to go ahead, and
that someone in the group would offer to work
with her doing psychic readings for people and
that she should accept the invitation.
After a few months of meetings, a man in the
group offered to work with Alexia, as Alhambra
had foretold, and she agreed. They began inviting
people to come
and have readings with Alexia at this man’s
house. A few weeks later, two women from the group
offered to help, and before long these few people
had formed a small group interested in talking
to Alhambra and finding out all that he had to
teach, and what he had to say to them.
While all this was going on, and unknown to
Alexia, Stephen was also just getting started
in the metaphysical realm. He had just run into
an old friend, and while visiting with this old
friend he happened to see a book sitting on his
friends coffee table. The name of the book was
The Seth Material. He leafed through it, found
it interesting and asked his friend if he might
read it. He read it, liked it, and found another
book by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa which further wetted
his metaphysical appetite.
A few months later, a friend of Stephen’s,
told him about Alexia and asked him if he would
like to come and meet her, at which time Stephen
agreed. The friend
was one of the women that Alexia had met at the
Edgar Cayce study group, and who was attending
meetings where Alexia channeled Alhambra for the
group.
At this time in Stephen’s life, he was working
in a funeral home, and he was always on call to
help out, so although he had scheduled nights
off, they were subject to constant interruption.
A few weeks before Stephen was able to join one
of the groups regular meetings, Alexia saw Stephen
in her crystal ball, and wondered who he was.
A few weeks before Stephen heard about Alexia,
he had a dream in which he heard the name Alexia.
The night of the meeting, in which Alexia and
Stephen would meet for the first time, neither
had any reason to suspect that two universes were
about to collide. That each were about to meet
that very special person that they had both been
looking for, and who would change their life forever.
Alexia was seated when Stephen entered the room.
He was wearing a black suit, because he had just
come from his job at the funeral home. Alexia
looked up at Stephen as the introductions were
being made, and recognized him as the man that
she had seen in her crystal ball only a few days
before, and at that exact moment, Alhambra said
to her; “This is the man you are going to
marry”. Alexia was taken back by the news
and she says about the moment; “I was once
again stunned by his prophecy, and unprepared
for the
emotion that welled up inside me. I told Alhambra
that I didn’t want to get married, having
just been through a divorce, and didn’t
like not having the choice of picking my own mate,
but he calmed he down and reassured me
that everything would be okay, as he did often
during those strange times.”
Stephen joined the regular Monday night meetings
as often as he could, and after the meetings the
group would go out for coffee and exclaim about
the exciting news that Alhambra was delivering
to them through
Alexia.
Alhambra taught the group about karma, and the
metaphysical philosophy, and told the group that
they would begin to write a monthly publication
and that it
would be called The Psychic Digest. Alhambra guided
the group into starting The Alhambra Institute,
and told them to learn how to read from Alexia,
and begin to do psychic readings to generate income
for the group, and
that the group had a wonderful future ahead of
it, but that the group had to learn to pull together
as a team. He told the group that in their lifetimes,
the world
that they knew would come to an end, and that
they would have to begin anew. It would fall upon
this group to start a new world.
The group, now known as Friends of Alhambra,
began to grow. More people joined, and studied
with Alexia and Alhambra. All the while, Alexia
and
Stephen became friends, and spent time together
delivering copies of The Psychic Digest, to drugstores
and book stores around town and talking about
what they were learning from Alhambra.
Alhambra encouraged the group to start a library
of metaphysical books, that has since grown into
a huge lending library with over ten thousand
books on all
metaphysical subjects and beyond.
In 1982, Alexia’s daughter found an ad for
a psychic in the newspaper. It seemed that a local
radio station wanted a psychic to go on the radio.
Alexia answered the ad and the group found itself
going on the radio on May 27 , 1982. Stephen,
who had radio training in the thw past, and who
had worked as a disc jockey on local radio stations,
found himself in the producers chair, andbefore
long in the co-host seat. The program was called
“Ask Alexia” and it was a live, psychic
advice call in show. The program featured other
members of the
group offering astrological information and nutritional
segments.
As time passed and the group expanded it’s
selection of services, all of the original people,
except for Alexia and Stephen left the group to
pursue other interest and new people joined up.
However, the group was beginning to become big
enough to move out of the man’s house that
Alexia began her career in, but too small still
to move into a commercial building, so
Alexia and Stephen who had grown very close, began
to look for a house of their own to live in and
work out of.
In August 1983, Alhambra told Alexia that she
was going to move to a house on Nona Street in
Dearborn. Later that day, Stephen called and said
that there was a house for rent down the street
from his Grandmother’s house on Nona Street.
Alexia agreed to go and look at it. It didn’t
look like much on the outside, but Alexia knew
that Alhambra wanted her to move into it, so she
accepted her fate and papers were signed and they
moved in together in the little white house on
Nona Street. The next April, Alexia and Stephen
were married.
The house was big enough to do psychic readings
in one room, run the business out of an attached
garage turned into an office, hold meetings in
the living room, and raise a family at the same
time. Life was happy, life was good for the Rishes.
Over the next three and a half years, The Alhambra
Institute continued to grow in the little house
on Nona Street. More and more people wanted to
come and
study with Alexia and have readings with Alexia
and Stephen. They continued to print more and
more copies of The Psychic Digest, and the radio
program was a hit. At the end of 1985, Alexia
finally began to complain to Alhambra that the
house had grown too small to accommodate the large
crowds that they were attracting. Alexia began
to put on psychic fairs in rented buildings and
using rented public rooms for classes and lectures
in an effort to get some of the crowd out of the
house. Finally she told Alhambra that if he didn’t
find
a commercial building to put the business in,
that she’d stop teaching and reading altogether.
A few months later, a man called her from one
of the buildings that she had been renting for
various activities and offered
to rent it to her full time. It seemed that he
wanted to retire and stop renting out his building
to people. Alexia and Stephen jumped at the chance
to have a place to put The Alhambra Institute,
which seemed to be taking on
a life of it’s own, and on March 31 , 1987,
The st Alhambra Institute moved out of the house
on Nona Street in Dearborn to Monroe Street in
West Dearborn,
Michigan. At first, the place seemed so huge to
everyone. The group barely had enough furniture
to fill the place, and it looked like a small
business in a big
building.
Up until this point, the group had been doing
psychic readings and classes, but sold very little
merchandise. Their new building was sectioned
off to create a
classroom, a psychic reading area, and a store,
where little by little they filled it up with
metaphysically inclined merchandise.
Over the years, The Alhambra Institute has increased
it’s membership, given away millions of
copies of The Psychic Digest, done thousands of
radio programs, and hundreds of psychic fairs.
Just recently, in October 2004, after eighteen
years in it’s current location at 940 Monroe
Street in Dearborn Michigan, The Alhambra Institute
bought it’s very own commercial building
at 78 W. Chicago Street, in beautiful Downtown
Coldwater Michigan, which it has named it’s
headquarters.
Both locations offer metaphysical supplies,
and merchandise, including crystals, stones, incense,
candles, books, vitamins and health foods. They
both
also offer one of a kind rock formations and jewelry.
At both locations you may also receive a psychic
reading, in person, by phone or e-mail, and astrology
charts. The Alhambra Institute offers discounts
to Members.
Membership is $50.00 for two years and includes
discounted prices for merchandise, readings, and
classes.
The Psychic Digest, published monthly, offers
horoscopes for each sign, the wisdom of Alhambra
and his predictions for the future, as well as
a Calendar of
Events for both locations. A yearly subscription
is $18.00.
However, The Alhambra Institute’s foremost
job is to teach people how to “see”
for themselves and prepare for the future. The
Alhambra Institute offers classes that teach people
how to survive their earth journey, spiritually,
physically, mentally, and emotionally. And, it
sells survival supplies for the times ahead. |