Past Lives of the Rich and Famous by Sylvia Browne

Author:Sylvia Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Betty Ford

The remarkable woman we knew as Betty Ford, former First Lady of the United States and founder of the Betty Ford Center for alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation, completed her thirty-ninth and final incarnation on July 8, 2011. Some of the qualities for which she was best known—overcoming obstacles, helping others to overcome those same obstacles, and unapologetically maintaining her own strong identity while married to a powerful man—were qualities that had taken root in her soul several lifetimes ago.

She was called Valentina in eighteenth-century Russia, and was the oldest of three children born to an abusive bully of a father, who made and sold black-market vodka. Valentina’s mother was a timid, dependent woman, too afraid of her husband to protect the children from his abuse. Theirs was an oppressive, joyless household. From the time the children were very small, their mother, at their father’s insistence, gave them sips of vodka to calm them down or make them sleep, while their mother drank to “calm her nerves.” Ironically, the only sober person in the family was the father, who saw alcohol as a way to make an enormous amount of illegal money and to exhibit weakness that he could exploit in those who abused it. He wasn’t about to relinquish his sense of superiority over his wife, children, and customers by indulging in his own product.

Valentina was left to her own devices to find what joy this world had to offer. She found that joy in her passion for reading and in her extraordinary gift for ballet, which was discovered quite by accident. At the age of five, on a trip to the doctor with her mother, she had stopped to look in the window of a storefront, where a ballet class was in progress. Enthralled, Valentina began duplicating the movements she was watching and doing it with such remarkable grace and accuracy that the instructor came outside to meet her and invite her to join the class. To her and her mother’s surprise, her father approved of the classes—not because he was interested in what Valentina wanted but because he knew that a truly gifted ballerina might someday bring a lot of money into the household.

Valentina was indeed a gifted ballerina, and by the time she was in her mid-teens she had become a featured performer in the Bolshoi Ballet. She had also become as addicted to alcohol as her mother and her two brothers were, but her brilliant talent, discipline, and determination kept the addiction from interfering with her performances. At her father’s insistence, she gave him what he believed was her entire salary every month. He had no idea that she was setting aside some money for a “rainy day,” which came along less than a year after she’d joined the Bolshoi.

She arrived home one night to find that her father had severely beaten her eight-year-old brother and badly injured her ten-year-old brother when he had tried to intervene. Her mother had hid, sobbing, in a toolshed.

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