Some part of you always knows what you seek.
I support you to connect to that knowing.
The “some part of you always knows” - what is IT, you ask?
We all feel it. We talk to it. Pray to it. We run from it. We ignore and seek it. We sense it. Feel it. We resist it. Chase it. Yearn for it. Name it.
That knowing is what some call your Higher Self, Soul, God, Creator, or just Consciousness. Some call it Intelligence.
“How ever you relate to it, whatever created me, whatever created you, I’m not going to put a name on it. I wouldn’t dare. But, whatever created us, is pretty frigging intelligent. You couldn’t remake this. It’s magical. Whatever it is, it’s genius. “”
Your Genius is what I call your Soul - that part of you who always remembers who you are and why you are here.
“Pain, pleasure, and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.”
I am the author of Chapter 5: "It's the Baby's Birth" in this anthology, "Womb to Thrive." ~
I am the author of Chapter 5: "It's the Baby's Birth" in this anthology, "Womb to Thrive." ~
Janel Mirendah
I am an artist and an early primal - conception through infancy - trauma therapist, and filmmaker. I have created a process to support you to connect your Higher Intelligence (soul) and Primal Self (your preconception through first year of life self) with your Adult Self, your prefrontal neocortex brain.
Portraits on this site by Mariah Miranda Photo
“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind. ”
I have integrated my craniosacral-based birth (conception through infancy) trauma therapy with my art to create a process that gives you a tool to gently explore and easily access your earliest trauma, and to then rewire your nervous system.
My Soul Portraits take you from the pain/fear to the joy/love that your primal brain can integrate.
Whatever is going on today is rooted in your early energetic body-mind-soul. I help you connect to that knowing. I transcribe the message from your Inner Prenate/baby Self, your Inner Physician, into a visual work of art I call your Soul Portrait. It flies under the radar of your adult brain in symbols, sensation, and emotion that your early self knows.
““We tend to think our spirit is in our body, but in reality, our body is in our spirit.” ”
“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and accepting love back into our hearts.”
WHY YOU ARE HERE? Do you want to understand your pain? To feel seen, wanted, felt, heard, Valued?
Start with my coloring book (coming late 2022), The Conscious Baby: A Therapeutic Coloring Book for Creating Peace Within and in the World
Want to go deeper? Invest in your personal Soul Portrait process to go the root of your issue … to remember your journey, your reason for coming here. It’s like nothing you’ve experienced. Read more.
ARE YOU TIRED OF DEALING WITH THE CHRONIC TRAUMATIZATION IN OUR MODERN CULTURE?
Check out my Calm in the Chaos: A Therapeutic Coloring Book for Living with C-PTSD here or below.
““To call it a film or even a documentary does not really represent the scope of your offering. It is more a manifesto on the origins of, and influences on, parenting and family life from the very beginning. In a way, it is a stand-alone early parenting course. It is the most inclusive and balanced mother/father/baby film I have seen. This is rare because few actually get the true significance and importance of father’s influence on the baby’s gestation, birth and breastfeeding experience, as well as on the mother.”
“I felt the “coming into being” very strongly. It’s incredible. So much in there, I’m sure that it will take me a while to process each segment. I appreciate the pictures of the progress, because I could “see” the base of my last 40 years just in the first one or two images.”
Calm in the Chaos: A Therapeutic Coloring Book for Living with C-PTSD
is a five-part coloring and meditation art book series featuring never-before-seen, one-of-a-kind abstract "intuitive souls portraits."
by Janel Mirendah, Artist and birth attachment therapist.
“When something great calls to us to do, and we become scared, immobilized, or in pain (PTSD), it’s always our wounding seeking to be loved. We find our gifts in the shadow of our wounds when we love ourself. Those gifts are in our earliest, preverbal, primal self.”
Soul Portrait?
What? How?
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
My Soul Portraits are intended to support the beginning process of connecting to our baby’s story to integrate it.
The Soul Portrait experience allows the part of you who knows, to receive what you need to begin to transform your experience of separation, disconnect, and pain. It is your neorcortex, the adult brain that highly socially constructed by your culture who fears, not your emotional soulful baby-self who loves to find the joy in your shadows.
As children we are taught that our birth was our mother’s experience, her story. Maybe the father has his story too, and the doctor, nurse, midwife, and doula tell their version of our birth. Very few of us have experienced our mother and father (and medical attendants at our birth) hearing our story of coming into being - that story is in our limbic brain, our emotional brain. We tend to live feeling unheard, unseen, unfelt, unsupported, and unwanted. This is the agony of the untold story.
The Soul Portrait is the visual representation of what Soul knows. It is our introduction to our adult-self hearing, feeling, and engaging in our our own story of our early incarnating self, and the journey of embodiment from conception, embryologic and fetal stages of gestatation, labor and birth, and infancy (first year and half of life.)
This is when our foundational story is imprinted in our early body-mind-soul. It is sensory, and emotional and importantly, it is PREverbal. That is how we know art works, to touch us deeply beyond words.
We grow up hearing the stories of our mother birthing us and the stories of those present - father, doctor, nurse, midwife, doula - who both witnessed our story, and was part of the story - did things to us. Few of us have experienced being held and supported to tell our story and our mother and father to hear it, get it. (This is the therapy I do with babies and my colleagues do with adults.)
“Every thought we think creates a molecule called a neuropeptide, that connects to a cell receptor site and manifest as our physical reality.
”
Our own primal, birth story is in our early brain that was in development. We live it everyday in how we related to the world and others. Too often, in the search for being seen, felt, heard, and wanted, we seek out the opportunity to heal NOT having that.
Our Limbic brain was in development in our last trimester through labor and birth, and through our first year of life. It is our “emotional operating system” that runs in the background of all of the “programs” that our mother/father, family, culture “installed” that is now our adult neocortex.
It is therapeutically possible to access it, and the intention is to integrate and learn to hold, support, listen to, want, welcome our own baby self … what ever happened.
Very few of us were seen, heard, and held as sentient beings by our mother and father. Your portrait is the beginning you giving that to your early self - your inner baby. Your adult self can support yourself to process what your embryologic self, your prenate self, your birth self experienced.
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
”
In my twenty years of doing this work, I see how people want to engage, but the wounding is so emotional, so painful, so preverbal. People do not understand that this emotion is the communication, the language of their baby, is their child, their old teen or adult who re-experienced the trauma over and over. People do not realize that that pain is so intense from not being seen, felt, and told and heard, but that was then.
That was then. You were a baby. This is now. Your adult self can support your early brain/self to process what your embryologic self, your prenate self, your birthing baby self experienced. For real. It’s amazing.
The Soul Portrait connects your intention for what you want, desire, need, in the context (story) of what you are experiencing at the moment - pain, confusion, grief, stuck, etc. - and we connect with your Higher Self/Intelligence and your early Baby Self. Our Baby Self is our early brain, our early Limbic brain.
The Soul Portrait here was done with a mother, for her and her then 15-month-old son who was conceived in rape by her boss.The Soul Portrait “flies under the radar” of that vigilant childhood and adult brain; and, I painlessly - for you, and joyfully express it in symbols - a beautiful, organic, abstract and compelling drawing - that your early emotional self knows how to read.
Most therapies, coaching, etc guide you to “get rid of” and “release” the pain, or the story. Pain IS your early self - who remembers your soul’s plan - crying. You can not rewrite what is neurally wired in your early brain and body. You can embrace your wounded early self and integrate it in your primal neural wiring. You do that by listening to your early self.
Like for this mom and her son above, the process creates like-magic changes in your emotional self; and therefore, your thinking shifts your behavior and this is manifested in and co-creates with your outer world.
First Soul Portrait, with Shelley, acrylic on canvas, 2013
Janel is an incredibly gifted artist and healer. Janel worked with me over a period of years, helping me to release deeply held grief after the loss of an infant son and the loss of my father a few years earlier.
In one of our sessions Janel started to paint an image of the divine masculine and divine feminine as I described to her how those qualities were manifesting in my life.
As we continued the process, Janel continued to paint, and this beautiful tree arose. I love the image of the tree reminding me to keep my connection to the earth while reaching for the sky. The painting is a beautiful reminder of my healing journey.
I’m very grateful to Janel for her work which she does with honesty and loving presence. - Shelley, Personal fitness trainer, Missouri
Carol-Anne colored her second Soul Portrait here. It was around a very specific intention and issue that was very unlikely to be resolved in her favor, but did come to be resolved - a year later.
She wrote:
I knew your drawings worked!
-Carol-Anne, Artist, Tech, Florida
I responded, The impossible is possible. Your Higher Self knew what you needed to do, to get past your neocortex, so it could happen.
“I feel like if I can look at the stars I am happy. I feel like it was really cathartic and healing. I had this huge breakthrough after our session.” ”
See - Feel - Do
Art is Activism
My art and therapy are about creating change personally and on the collective, cultural level to save humanity.
We see art, and it is does - is supposed to - make us feel something - joy to pain, anger to bliss. Then we need to go DO something with that!
Soul Portrait to the right is from my art residency @SeeFeelDoDC and solo closing show, “See Yourself”. Portrait is about the high mortality rates of black women in the US.
“Peace … it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still be calm in your heart.”
