Barbara Janelle
Barbara M. Janelle, resident of Santa Barbara, California for 23 years, passed away on September 25, 2023, at the age of 79. She was born on August 1, 1944, to Norbert J. and Jeannette Pierce Whitaker in the Parkchester area of the Bronx, New York.
The path forward for Barb grew organically, leading from a childhood interest in animals, a passion for reading, and a thirst for sharing knowledge. She graduated from Villa Maria Academy in 1962, earned a B.S. in Geography from Michigan State University (MSU) and an M.A. in Geography from the University of Colorado, culminating in a thesis on Influenza Diffusion, a Study in Medical Geography.
Barb and Don Janelle met as students at MSU in 1964 and were married at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado in 1967. While conducting research for her thesis, she also taught courses in geography at the University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She loved teaching but welcomed her discovery of the Academy’s horse stables. Weekly trail rides in the Rocky Mountains helped reunite Barb with her life-long love of animals. Soon, Muskie (a handsome Husky pup) joined in on the rides.
Upon completion of Don’s military assignment as a professor at the Academy in 1970, Barb, Don, and Muskie moved to London, Ontario, where Don continued his career as a geographer at the University of Western Ontario. Intermittently over the following ten years, Barb held part-time appointments as an instructor at Western. With Muskie, she hiked trails along the winding Thames River, nurtured an interest in painting (watercolors), and explored opportunities for equestrian activities. Then, there was Sam (a brown-black gelding).
Riding and equine activities ensued—she led the Delaware 4-H Horse and Pony Club for children and teenagers in Middlesex County for more than ten years, organized local and provincial horse shows and competitions, served as President of the London Dressage Association, founded and edited Cadora Ink (a national newsletter for the Canadian Dressage Owners’ & Riders’ Association), helped to develop a system of riding trails in the Komoka Provincial Park area, and assisted the Special Abilities Riding Institute (SARI) of London in selecting suitable horses and guiding therapeutic rides for handicapped individuals.
The loss of Muskie during a thunderstorm in 1971 created a difficult spiritual gap, but Muskie maintained an important presence in Barb’s mind throughout her life. Whimsy, the first of six cats, met her need for the physical presence of an animal companion. Then, son Daniel arrived.
Within five weeks of Dan’s birth in Amsterdam in 1976, the family set off by car on a five-week self-organized excursion into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that combined camping and hotel lodging in a dozen countries/Soviet socialist republics, nine of them east of the Iron Curtain—an exhausting adventure worthy of a book. The Polish Ocean Lines’ Stefan Batory provided a 7-day northern transatlantic return from Holland to Montreal. Once home in London, Dan (100 days old) and Whimsy met for the first time as the family reunited with friends and colleagues and settled into a more stable environment. Wortley Village provided an exceptional base of supportive neighbors, convenient services, and a grounding for nurturing Barb’s interests in people and their local environments; it was a wonderful, diverse, and safe community that saw son Dan through high school and his first job.
In the mid-to-late 1970s, Barb was on an intellectual journey to find more holistic and humane approaches for animal care and training, and for addressing human health issues. This came together in 1984, with a one-week training program with Linda-Tellington Jones on the Tellington-Jones Equine Awareness Method (TTEAM), followed by an introduction to the Therapeutic Touch healing method developed by Dolores Krieger (Professor of Nursing at New York University) and Dora Kunz (President for 12 years of the Theosophical Society in America). Barb also embarked on 15 years of weekly Feldenkrais Therapy sessions, entered a meditation program, and initiated her early investigations into communication with animals. She chronicled her path through these multi-layered studies in more than 200 published articles and two books: Embodiment of Spirit: Learning through Therapeutic Touch and Interspecies Communication (2003) and Our Healing Power: Therapeutic Touch for Humans and Animals (2004). For more insight into Barb’s work with animals, search “Honoring Early Animal Communicator, Barbara Janelle” on the web.
Barb was a Recognized Teacher and Practitioner of Therapeutic Touch in Canada and the United States. From the mid-1980s to the year 2000, she taught Therapeutic Touch for Western’s Faculty of Part-time and Continuing Education. She also taught in the University’s Multidisciplinary Palliative Care Institute and trained the nursing and palliative care staff of the Four Counties Regional Health Centre in southwestern Ontario. In the early 1990s, Barb founded and led the London Volunteer Therapeutic Touch Hospital Team, which treated patients in ICU, CCTU, the Cardiac Unit, and the Transplant Unit in London’s several hospitals, and helped to organize the Wellspring TT Team, which worked with cancer patients and their family members at the Wellspring London and Region Cancer Support Centre.
An important source of joy for Barb was a cottage that she, Don, and Dan built in 1989 on beautiful Stevens Pond in Liberty, Maine. Offering long escapes into a world of forested beauty, the setting fostered Barb’s love of kayaking, swimming, and observing wildlife. Spanning visits over 27 years, Barb explored the pond’s islands and hidden coves, experienced its diurnal and annual transitions, and hosted visitors for retreat-based discussions about the care and training of dogs and informal workshops exploring issues and practices of animal communication. It was a place where she could read, write, meditate, and experiment with new recipes without distractions.
Other sources of joy were the week-long summer sessions of Camp Gone-to-the-Dogs, in Vermont, that Barb participated in as a camp instructor for 25 years (1992-2016). Dogs and their human partners convened for fun and guidance with leading trainers from across the continent. The camp gave her access to 100 or more dogs and their owners; she offered consultation and communication sessions, a rich experience that exposed her to all breeds of dogs at all ages for an extended period, often followed up with the same dogs, year-after-year, to create a temporal understanding about the life cycle of animal-human bonding and development.
Following a move to Santa Barbara with Don (and two cats—Houdini and Magic Bailey) in 2000, Barb offered introductory courses in Therapeutic Touch locally, continued advanced workshops throughout Canada and the United States, and focused on her private practice, offering telepathic links for humans to communicate with their animals. But she especially enjoyed the local face-to-face interactions with the wonderful neighbors and their animal partners on La Ramada Drive.
The beauty of Santa Barbara and help from exceptional local artists in the extended learning programs of Santa Barbara City College renewed Barb’s interest in watercolor painting, focused mostly on seascapes and botanical art. She joined with like-minded artists to create the Common Ground Botanical Art Group, sharing the hosting of weekly art sessions at their homes or at local field sites of scenic and botanic interest. Six weeks prior to her death, Barb and Dan’s partner, Melanie, spent a beautiful morning painting on Goleta Beach.
Barb was preceded in death by her parents, and she is survived by her husband Donald Janelle (Santa Barbara, CA), son Daniel Janelle and his partner Melanie Kintigh (Albuquerque, NM), sister Joanne De Boer (Bronxville, NY) and nephew Michael De Boer (Groningen, The Netherlands), along with 16 additional nephews and nieces and their successive generations from Don’s side of the family. A celebration of Barb’s life will take place in Santa Barbara at a date to be determined and made available through personal correspondence in early 2024.
For her presence, the world is a better place. Barb Janelle listened, processed, and learned from her own experiences and from the shared experiences of family, friends, clients, and colleagues. The Janelle family extends its love and thanks for your stories about Barb and for helping us to see through this period of mourning to expectations for the better world that she worked for and dreamed of.