Founder Beth Green

Beth Green, the founder of the Spiritual Activist Movement, was born with an unusually high level of awareness and has dedicated her life to the alleviation of suffering on the planet. She went through a long phase of social and political activism, followed by a spiritual awakening. Since then she has been a spiritual activist.

For more information on Beth’s life as a social and political activist (as Beth Ingber 1954-1978) and spiritual activist (as Beth Ingber-Irvin and Beth Green 1980-present), read on below.

For more information on Beth’s life as a spiritual teacher, writer, counselor and consultant (1980 – present), click here.

Highlights of Beth’s Journey as an Activist

The First Step: Social Activism and the Outer Revolution

Believing that social change was the key to the alleviation of suffering, Beth became an activist in 1954 at age 9, when she began to protest social injustice. At the age of 16, in 1961, she wrote a letter to the New York Times about the threat of atomic annihilation. The letter captured the attention of the international peace movement and shortly thereafter she joined 13 other students to march in front of the White House to ban the bomb. With her picture on the front page of the New York Times, Beth was expelled from Smith College, where she had been a scholarship student. This was a defining moment in her life. She had chosen to participate in the march despite the school’s warnings that she would be punished, and it has been a hallmark of Beth’s life that she feels compelled to do the right thing, whatever the personal consequences. Throughout her career as an activist, Beth would be arrested three times, beaten by the police, harassed by the FBI and in physical danger many times.

In 1965, Beth began to work full time for the anti-Vietnam War movement, and in 1967, she worked for the National Conference for New Politics, whose purpose was to bring together the protest movement so as to have a greater collective impact. Delegates included anti-war activists, migrant workers, Black Panthers and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke at the organization’s convention.

In 1968, Beth enrolled in Brooklyn College to complete her education; her sole purpose was to study history so as to know how to change it. Although a hotbed of organizing activity, the student movement itself reflected discrimination against women, and, therefore, Beth started a women’s group in the early days of the emerging feminist movement. Repeatedly she took the role of organizer and outreach leader to connect people to form alliances, calling upon her ability to help people find their commonality and bring them together around larger social issues.

In 1970, Beth began a fellowship at Cornell University, where she was a graduate student in Latin American History. During that summer, she traveled to Chile and Brazil, invited by participants in the social revolution occurring under President Allende and meeting with activists against the Brazilian military dictation. This was not her only international travel. In the course of her early life before and after Cornell, she travelled to nations in the West Indies and Europe to connect to their movements for social change, and she spoke about women’s and worker’s rights in locations such as Liverpool and Mexico City. She also gained knowledge and experience from meeting activists from many nations who were gathered in the United States at the time.

Haunted by the continuing War in Vietnam, in 1972 Beth left Cornell, where she was on full fellowship, and gave up the opportunity to complete a Ph. D. program. Instead she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she was in the leadership of a small underground newspaper and workplace organizing group called Modern Times. There, she worked in factories and in the phone company to help reach and support workers.  As part of Modern Times, Beth actively participated with the independent truckers strike in Akron, Ohio, and she helped truckers make their case to the larger population and assisted wives in organizing and gaining access to food stamps to keep their families going during their hard times.

That same year, Beth met Selma James and was inspired to join the Wages for Housework Campaign, which was in its infancy in the United States. Always aware of the domination of the movement by men, Beth embraced Wages for Housework as a campaign to empower women, which, in turn, empowers all people, and she moved to Los Angeles in 1974 to found the West Coast campaign, which quickly grew in strength and visibility. The Wages for Housework movement has transformed the way people perceive and value women and their work “inside” the home and planted the seeds for a later decision by the United Nations to measure and value unwaged work in national GDP statistics. Based out of Los Angeles, Beth recruited many different kinds of women – welfare mothers, the mentally ill, lesbians, black women, prostitutes, women of many ages and social backgrounds – to see their common purpose to improve their conditions by banding together around a shared goal.

Beth has always intuitively understood the need for oneness, and she has often fought the divisiveness within the movement. In The Social Factory in 1974, she wrote, “Our international solidarity is neither based on moral-ism nor restricted to words. We are beginning to understand the implications of an international perspective because we have no other way to understand our local situation. We are beginning to organize internationally because we have no other way to win.”

It is this spirit that she brings to the Spiritual Activist Movement—the understanding that our solidarity is the only thing that will allow us to make the revolution within and overcome the domination of the ego.

Step Two: Spiritual Activism & The Inner Revolution

In 1978 Beth found herself burnt out and alienated from the leadership of the Wages for Housework movement she had worked so hard to found, and she left the ranks of political activism. In 1978 she had a spiritual awakening and reconnected to her mystical nature, which she had experienced as a child. In 1980 she had a full-blown intuitive awakening. At that moment she discovered her immense spiritual power and suddenly realized that the revolution needed to move inward. She understood that the real problem of human suffering is the state of human consciousness, and that was the beginning of her spiritual activism.

While becoming an intuitive counselor and consultant in 1980, working with individuals and families, Beth was guided to address the collective nature of human consciousness and the collective nature of human solutions. For that reason, in 1983 she founded The Stream, where groups of people sought to not only help themselves, but to become part of the collective to heal the collective.

Always a spiritual activist, in August 1993 Beth found a vehicle to integrate  her passion for activism and spiritual teaching by founding the Spiritual Activist Movement. At that time, she wrote an earlier version of the Spiritual Activist Statement of Commitment that circulated the globe, uniting people under the principle of oneness, the belief that through love and awareness we could solve our problems (which was a precursor to the practice of mutual support) and the understanding that we need to embrace the present: that our experience is the fertilizer for new growth. The international awareness of the movement was remarkable given it preceded the popularity of the Internet.

In 1994, Anne Gillis of Memphis, Gary Herbertson of  Earth Day International  and Beth came together to form Partners for Planetary Recovery. It was Gary’s idea to encourage the formulation of a new 12-step program. The group asked Beth to draft the written program of Twelve Steps for Planetary Recovery. While Partners for Planetary Recovery disbanded, the program is still valid today. You can find more information here.

In 2010, Beth felt called to re-ignite the Spiritual Activist Movement, which is where we stand today. The movement’s principles, which are universal and timeless, continue to support the evolution of human consciousness and are helping us to co-create the world we have always wanted.

To find out more about Beth Green, her recent writings and her  media and public appearances, click here. In addition to being an activist and spiritual teacher, she is the author of four books, the latest of which is Living with Reality: A Book of Wisdom. The draft is available free via download by clicking here. Her other books are Memoirs of the New Age, The Autobiography of Mary Magdalene, Sacred Union: The Healing of God and God’s Little Aphorisms. For more on Beth’s books, click here.

Classically trained as a pianist, Beth is also a composer. Her CDs are “The Gift of Peace,” ”A Soul’s Journey” and “In the Mist.” More information on all of Beth’s music can be found by clicking here.

Beth is also the creator of the LifeForce Inner Workout, a mind-body-spirit program conducted daily over the Internet to help us increase our energy and relaxation and connect us to the creative force that brought us into being. For more information on LifeForce or to try it out, click here.

Beth has offered dozens of workshops and teachings t”o help transform human consciousness. More information on the Living with Reality workshop, which is one approach to becoming a spiritual activist and a powerful program for overcoming the domination of the ego, can be found here.

If you are interested in booking Beth for a talk, workshop or LifeForce demonstration in  your area, please contact Christine Benton at christine[at]bentoncg.com.