Hi, I’m Janel!

I’m a recovering Peacemaker!!

I know from my primal trauma healing, that was gestated to be a peacemaker. I was the third baby with a 5 and 7-year-old sibling.  My mom got to stay home with me.

I was the baby who was going “to make everyone happy.”  I gave it a good effort and I failed miserably. A lot.

After age forty I had pretty much resigned that position, though it wasn’t going over well.  I also began to take astrology seriously. I’ve had multiple astrology readings since then.

I met Daniel Giamario founder of the Shamanic Astrology Mystery School in 2002 and it is my favorite. Freedom Tobias, an Ayurvedic astrology is a father in my film and did a reading for me.

My chart showed that peacemaker thing.   I learned I had an aspect in my chart that meant I could never hurt anyone.  Not deliberately. The problem was an aspect that meant I would I attract conflict.  What a relief it was to learn this, and how to maneuver through that finally. It coincided with doing a two-year intensive craniosacral based birth trauma healing program. When I told Freedom that I had a degree in conflict resolution, he laughed a big belly laugh, and said, “Of course, you do!” 

I find little difference between my creator spirit and my spirit for making peace. I want to make the world a better place: not only beautiful externally, but to create internally beautiful, happy, peaceful humans. How else can we create the world we want?

As long as I can remember I’ve felt other’s pain. I had a near-death experience at birth, at age fourteen, and then the biggie at age 22. Supporting my fourth child in 2000, while I was also learning craniosacral therapy opened me up to remember and see that I was sensitive as a child.  It lead me to seeing and embracing my gifts - one being the ability to communicate with babies, animals, and souls in the womb. Relatives from the other side always come to help me when I do craniosacral therapy.

I then spent my adult life doing both art and protecting rights of children - first, as a traditionally trained therapist, and then as project director in community, organizational, and state systems reform.

Sadly, I failed a lot too at protecting children, even my own children, from abusive systems, and from my struggle to make a living as a single mother, and from step-fathers. My life as a mother has defined my journey to what is the most important to me - stopping the abuse of the soul coming in at birth. Healing the disruption of the mother-baby and to #fundmothering as worthy work.

I had a pretty good 50-60s childhood by all standards, after they brought me home from the hospital, a baby too wounded to even cry - from birth trauma. I got mislabeled, “good baby” and “good girl”, when I really needed them to see that I was hurt. That I literally had experienced that birth they kept telling others about. I did. My birth. My birth is actually recorded in my nervous system in my limbic brain, my implicit, unconscious, preverbal, emotional brain. So is yours.

They being mom, but my dad was there too, one of 4% of men in the room at birth in 1956. I was number three, and my mom got to stay home with me. I was breastfed for a year when she got the “Asian flu” and her milk dried up. Whaaaah. I slept in a bed by her, like all five of my siblings, until the next one came. I enjoyed my pre-school years with my mother, playing and making things. I was always making something.

I experienced culture shock when I went to kindergarten. People were mean, and that “can’t hurt others” thing and my sensitivity made it hard. I *felt* others’ pain too. My family was loud, my older sister despised me and she fought with my dad. My family used humor to balm and to hurt. I had to shut down or be funny. I didn’t like bullies. Bullies always trigger my stuff. At home I used my humor to be the family clown and create diversions. My first calling was to help and defend others - and my issue of not able to help myself became clear early. I brought home an abused classmate in kindergarten. She was being physically abused.

Art
In third grade I drew a photo from an advertisement in a magazine to win the chance to get an art degree. My mother was surprised to learn I had done this by myself when I received a nice reply in the mail.

The letter said that my drawing was very good, and that I should contact them again when I was sixteen.

By the time I got to high school I had forgotten about it. I was taking art classes and spending every afternoon possible after school - between job at the dime store and working with my dad in his electrical and insulation businesses - in the art room doing pottery. The janitor started coming by to check on me - kick me out - before locking up.

Then I got a great gig in my junior year working as an aide to a clinical psychologist at the Veteran’s Hospital that was solely mental health, 1974. I worked afternoons 12:30-4:30 with him and I went to school in the morning. I worked there through the year after high school graduation.

My boss, Thomas F. Linde, PhD, had cerebral palsy and I did most physical things, like run his groups, administer the MMPI, (The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a psychological test that assesses personality traits and psychopathology. It has 567 questions!) Dr. Linde was that “one person” who made the biggest impact on me when I was in that most impressionable stage of life.

I hand wrote his dictations since his speech was challenging. He was also an artist and did abstracts on the Etchasketch. I transferred a couple of them to large canvas. I also presented his paper at the Iowa Psychological meetings in 1974. Harry Harlow, PhD, the famous and infamous researcher of maternal attachment was the keynote speaker. He sat with us during the cocktail hour.

Looking back, this is when the paths of art, mother-baby, and birth psychology all came together. And, it’s been quite a journey riding those two horses with one ass. My mentor of twelve years, David Chamberlain’s book, “The Mind of Your Newborn Baby'‘ was published in 1985. I wouldn’t meet him until the fall of 2002.

Later after all means of funding my non-GS VA job were exhausted, I got a job in a day care where I could take my baby son. Then I drove a school bus at age 20. At 21 I got a job at a news shopper where I learned to do graphic art layout for weekly ads. We literally did “cut ‘n’ paste” on blue graph paper using exacto knives to cut and wax to paste.

A friend of my dad worked there and was leaving. She recruited me knowing that I was an accomplished seamstress. I had even made a pair of maternity blue jeans with gold top-stitching - unheard of. I started sewing early and made my first pants and jacket at age ten. By high school I was sewing all of my own clothes - and did my own professional suits years later.

Apparently, being a seamstress, was transferable skills for doing visual and graphic arts. A year and a half and a second baby later, I started college as an art major. I had bought a kiln and was finally going to be a potter! College was really hard with two small children, work study, and a part-time job or two (nursing home and disco). Being an art student was impossible. In my sophomore year I switched to Psychology and minored in art.

I have always rode both those horses - with one butt, as the Hungarian saying goes. And I rode those two wild horses of mothering and professional career.

Birth Trauma and Doodling.

From childhood beyond, through institutional and domestic violence I always found my calm and my way with creative endeavors: dance, comedy, writing, master seamstress, quilting, clay, graphic design, realism portraiture ... and, always doodling. Working with people, in systems, the work is never done. I always had a sewing, crochet, or art project going that I could finish. Hold up, admire, and see the beauty.

But wow, in my profession and personal relationships, did I get tired of conflict and chaos following me, regardless of my best efforts. Most of the chaos was because I simply was not willing nor capable of doing what the system demands over what is right for people, children especially.

Leaving my work in system reform in 1999 in a rabblerousing trail of whistleblowing glory, and then training in infant massage and craniosacral therapy, I thought I was going to work with moms and babies “to keep them out of the system in the first place.” What a surprise to learn that I needed to heal my experience of BEING born and GIVING birth. I began my own journey of healing my birth as a baby, and as mother giving birth, and my study of birth psychology and attachment healing. Always doodling.

I always doodled during meetings and while on phone - and then as a morning meditation, and even during divorce depositions. If I was doodling I was paying attention. If I wasn’t doodling, but looked engaged with you, I probably wasn’t. But I might be mentally adding up the cost of the worthless meeting in wages and thinking about how many shoes, meals, or car repairs could have been paid for that would literally help children and their mothers.

As I did my independent film, The Other Side of the Glass: a birth film for and about men, from 2008-13, I realized that I STILL reeeaally wanted to BE an artist, and go back to my roots and merge art and psychology. I had taken a graduate class in art therapy at Truman State - just as the degree was ending due to the professor’s retirement. 1984. They were not continuing the program.

I moved to Washington DC after I finished the film in 2013, and I was in art heaven. For a few years I would go frequently to the Smithsonian art galleries and I was happy to be in that painful place of yearning to DO my art and being profoundly stuck. I have so many interests in art. I kept praying for, “What is MY art? That thing I can not not do!? Instead of having the urge and going to the art supply store and buying new supplies for a new medium - and that being the fix.

Meanwhile, by 2016, I was doodling away while supporting my daughter in her last year of art school in DC in a very surprising, yet not, opportunity for her to deal with her childhood experience of witnessing her father abuse me. Yes, it did show up big time, when she decided to do her senior thesis, “In the Wake of Trauma”, on her experience of witnessing me be abused by her father.

One day she said to me, “Wow, mom. Those are amazing.” I genuinely said, “Really?” She said, “Yeeessss!” Since she was an art major in a prestigious art school, I had to believe her!! Later, in my Airbnb in DC, people would rave about my pen and ink doodles, and barely see my portraiture - which was my big dream.

I am playing in ink, oil, gouache, and watercolor. I am seeking environmentally friendly mediums. I am exploring multi-media processes with my Soul Portraits, such as collage and ceramics, stained glass, and printing on fabric. I invite your inquiries to play together.

I live creatively and calmly in the chaos in Washington DC.

My Treasured Art

By two of MY grandsons

Client Portraits + Fabric

Oh, I do looooove fabric!