The Pathway to Peace, Hope, and True Love: A Spiritual Journey

By Betsy Orman

Betsy Orman, M.S., educator, counselor, peacemaker, and health pioneer shares her forty years of unforgettable experiences working in the field of spiritual development, transformative learning, leadership training and family and parenting education. Her personal memoir examines her challenges growing up in a dysfunctional home where at sixteen she left to seek for a world of goodness she always believed existed.

After a three-year search living an ascetic lifestyle in mountains, this former atheist is profoundly and directly touched by a living God. He tells Betsy she cannot run from evil but must go back into the world to fight for the good society God intends to create. In doing so she meets two of the most influential spiritual leaders of all time and joins forces with their international community. Thus, the adventure of a lifetime begins.

Betsy works to facilitate the training of thousands of leaders, in the field of religion, science, culture, education, politics, healing and parenting. Her work extends from pioneering the natural health movement to helping tear down the walls of communism around the world. She is later called to help strengthen and rebuild families and to redesign an education system that promotes true love, peace, and happiness for all.

Betsy’s transformation from a lonely broken-hearted teenager to a confident, educated, and articulate spiritual leader and peacemaker is an inspiring journey toward enlightenment. She is fueled by a vision of what’s possible when we all work together in harmony and invites you to join her on the pathway to peace, hope, and true love in you own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Betsy Orman
• Release date: Mar 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005771225

Betsy Orman

Betsy Orman, M.S. is an educator, peacemaker, lobbyist, writer, and mentor who has worked in the field of spiritual transformation and education for over forty years. Growing up in Los Angeles, California where the focus was on external, material happiness spurred her to seek for deeper universal truths. She studied how to build a bridge between living an authentic spiritual life while facing the practical realties of day-to-day survival. Betsy’s work in peacemaking took her to many areas of the world. This allowed her the unique opportunity to help educate thousands of leaders, young and old. She could provide them with a new and hopeful vison of what the world can become if we can unite as one global family.Her challenging childhood in an abusive home, taught her the importance of educating parents with tools for creating families of true love where peace could dwell. This has been the focus of much of her life’s work. Betsy believes that peace in the world starts with peace at the dinner table, but first and foremost creating peace between our mind and hearts.As a college professor, Betsy currently lives with her husband of forty years in rural Mississippi where they invest their time in the education of new leadership for the future. The most challenging yet meaningful experience in her life was giving birth to and raising twins. They now provide her with endless laughter, inspiration, and joy and together with her husband the loving family she always believed could be possible.

Book preview

The Pathway to Peace,

Hope, and True Love

A Spiritual Journey

Betsy Orman, M.S.

The Pathway to Peace, Hope, and True Love:

A Spiritual Journey

Copyright © 2022 by Betsy Orman, M.S.

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher/author, or her descendants, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-0-578-38259-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022903830

Cover Design by Bill Van Nimwegen

Contents

Introduction

1 – The Search

2 – Rebirth

3 – Leaving the Womb

4 – The Ginseng Tea Lady

5 – Gaining Spiritual Help

6 – Finding True Love

7 – Fighting for Freedom

8 – Hometown Providence

9 – The American Family Coalition

10 – The Transformation of Academia

11 – Pathway to Peace, Hope, and True Love

Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

Fearless pioneer and adventurer, educator, and spiritual counselor, parenting, and human rights activist, loving wife and mother, cancer and polio survivor, and extraordinary woman of faith only briefly describes Betsy Orman.

This honest and compelling memoir examines how Betsy was able to win over many seemingly impossible challenges to gain victories in her lifelong battle to perfect her own love, while working to transform the hearts of humanity. Through her many spiritual experiences, a living God she had never known as a child touched, healed, and began guiding her life. He taught Betsy how to overcome her difficult upbringing, then called her to help with his critical work of teaching mankind how to become one peaceful global family.

Her experiences working under the guidance and tutelage of two of the greatest spiritual leaders of all time inspired her work in the education of presidents and political leaders, academics and scientists, religious and spiritual leaders, parents and families, college and high school students, and the most marginalized populations of refugees from throughout the world. She learned how to transform any difficult situation, despite obstacles or persecution, and then taught a curriculum for success to train future leaders how to do the same.

Betsy traveled throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe helping organize conferences for peace, and helped train historical enemies how to overcome their differences and work together. As a weekly newspaper columnist, she inspired readers with her spiritual guidance, mother’s heart, and invaluable wisdom.

Through this book, you will come to understand the vision and inspiration behind her faith, her achievements, and her continued hopes for humankind. Also, why after an eight-year battle with breast cancer, she continues to be unstoppable in her efforts to create one peaceful global family living together in harmony.

Betsy is the greatest of possibility thinkers and, even when others say it can’t be done now, while working from her bed, unable to walk, she will find a way to accomplish her goals. May her story give you the strength to keep fighting the good fight and the inspiration to overcome the impossible, because that is what Betsy has given to me throughout my life.

Edy Iversen, Ambassador for Peace

Paris, France

Back to Contents

1 – The Search

I crouched on the floor in the corner of my bedroom, my hands clasped over my head. I was curled up in the smallest ball, trying to protect myself from the sting of the strap as it repeatedly whipped against my body. The evil look in my father’s eyes was one I now recognize as total possession. It was very scary, especially for a little girl. He had just come home from work, and my mother told him to come in and beat me. I asked myself over and over, Why? I never knew what I had done during the day that made her so angry. With a child’s mind I could only question, Do my parents hate me? Why would any mother tell her husband, just coming home from a hard and frustrating day at work, to greet his children with a beating? And what kind of father would do such a thing?

I thought I was just being a child, filled with energy and life, but they seemed to want me dead. Especially, I recall my father once trying to suffocate me with a pillow, and me taking a bottle of aspirin to try to end my life. No one even knew it happened. I had no one with whom to share the pain and the loneliness, no one who I thought would understand.  

As a mother now, I still cannot comprehend what any young child could do that would cause a parent to unceasingly, year after year, abuse that child, call them names, degrade them, and make them feel worthless. I remember the words they used to try to destroy my spirit, such as idiot, birdbrain, stupid, bastard, and slut. This kind of mean and negative language flowed daily out of the mouth of a middle-class Jewish father whom the world seemed to respect. Yet, behind closed doors I could barely endure his presence. One minute there was peace, and without warning there would be abuse. We never knew when he would go into a rage. Crawling up off the floor, crying from the pain, I vowed never to be defeated by this man or this woman. I would never allow my parents to win in their efforts to destroy me. I knew that as soon as I could, I would leave, and at sixteen years of age I did. 

I began to search deeply for the reasons why my parents had been so cruel. I had always asked questions when watching the news. I would weep over the TV coverage of murders and killings. For this, I would be sent to my room with the admonishment, Get out of my sight or Don’t cry, or I will give you something to cry about. Probably because of my own suffering, I was sensitive to the suffering of others in the world—to the meanness and to the loneliness of people. I sought to find and create goodness, but where was it? I wondered if I was born only to suffer. Nothing in the world made sense. Without God or any real form of truth or religious training in my upbringing, I didn’t know where to begin to find the answers about life and its purpose.

Often, I would break up fights at school as children stood on either side of me, egging on more violence or laughing as someone was being hurt. I would yell at them, Why are you so cruel? Even though I lived in the world, I felt I was not part of it. It was never a place I belonged to or felt at home in, especially in the home of my parents. My brother and twin sister lived with us, but we each led our own separate lives, trying to survive without inciting any rage in our parents. Many times, we fought against each other, isolated in our own pain, not even knowing what the other was feeling, thinking, or experiencing.   

When I was a teenager, by some miracle of fate the most beautiful-hearted young couple moved into the apartment upstairs from where we lived. The woman was a teacher, and her husband was a dental student. They could sense something was going on in my house and allowed me a place to run to whenever I needed to escape from my parents’ abuse.  I would spend every hour away from my home with them. This teacher invested in me and showered me with kindness. On my sixteenth birthday her mother gave me a moving out party, as she had been told by her daughter I had to get away. That was the impetus I needed, and I began making plans to leave home. 

One week after my birthday, I went to get something to eat in the kitchen. My mother pulled the food out of my hands and said, You’re not paying for this food; you cannot eat. I had been working, supporting myself as much as possible, since I was twelve-years-old. Now she wanted me to pay to live in a house where I was not welcomed or loved. All the years of suffering, of being battered and beaten, all the resentment and anger they had poured into me finally came out. I turned around to my mother and struck her on the back with my fist as hard as I could. I knew that would be the day I would leave and never come home, and it was. I also knew my father would literally kill me if I was there when he got back from work. Soon, my sister and brother decided to leave as well, and we all moved out.

As a parent now and looking back, I can see that their beating me may have been the way they thought children should be disciplined. However, children being raised in the sixties were unlikely to submit to blind obedience. My generation consisted of seekers who needed a reason to do something. Hypocrisy and lack of integrity were the things we could see right through.  Our whole generation was sensitive to what was lacking in the world.  We seemed to be born to create something different, a more humane society. It was common to feel a level of discontent and frustration with the lack of transparency in the lives of our parents. They encouraged us to build the material world, and we wanted to create a world of goodness, kindness, and peace.  We were called hippies, but really, we were searchers and truth seekers. 

Living with my parents, I felt so alone in my thinking. I didn’t realize until much later in life that many of my peers felt the same way about their lives and purpose. Leaving home, I learned that my parents, in relation to other parents, seemed above average.  I met so many young people whose parents fought with each other. Mine didn’t. My parents seemed to hate us, but at least loved each other. Other people’s parents drank; mine never did. My father worked every day and supported the family, but some came from single-parent homes in which the mother was left unsupported, and the children never saw their father. It was a wake-up call to realize that all families had problems, and many of my peers were suffering in deeper and even more profound situations than I was. 

A few years after we all moved out of our house, my mother died of cancer. I shamefully remember the funeral, feeling no sense of loss or tears. Other people cried, and I wondered why they were crying over this mean and abusive parent. At the funeral, my father said, You are the reason your mother died. You killed her!

I had enrolled in college and was working and living in an apartment, but after hearing those words, nothing had any meaning for me. Why was I going to school? There would never be anything I could do to please my parents. My father had also said to me, Don’t depend upon me; I will not be there for you and Don’t worry about anyone else; just watch out for yourself. I decided that I would become someone who no longer needed anyone, so that I no longer could get hurt. I knew I had to find someplace to go where I could be alone and depend upon no one. I sold everything I owned, moved out of my apartment, and got on a plane for Hawaii. I thought it would be a place where I could just be surrounded by nature, which I felt certainly would not be as