Celebrating Janet Mengen
Meet a “Quiet Person,” the Founder of Healing Touch
For a change of pace, I’d like to celebrate the founder of Healing Touch… And write this article without reading her aura.
Don’t get me wrong, I love telling you’all about people’s auras. Or reading their faces. Or doing Skilled Empath Merges.
But this time, for a change of pace, I would like to share this tribute to one of my colleagues, and her very human specialness. Did you ever hear of the late Janet Mentgen (pronounced MEHNT-gn)? Whether or not you did, her story will interest you if you love life lessons. And or deeply spiritual people who don’t show off.
Do you appreciate people who don’t show off, but simply get the work done? That was Janet. Definitely she was one of my heroes.
Very active before the Age of Awakening, she founded an honest-and-accessible system for energy medicine. Along the way she also became a role model for anybody who aims to help people.
Introducing Janet Mentgen’s Specialness
Come join me during an interview conducted some 20 years ago.
At the Day’s Inn near Dulles Airport, 21 students of Healing Touch sit in a conference room. Exactly how under-decorated and generic is this conference room? Even the sunlight that streams through the curtains looks drab. And, at first glance, the main speaker, Janet Mentgen, appears to fit in perfectly.
While in repose, perched on her chair, the teacher seems like somebody you’d easily overlook. Absolutely nothing about her looks flashy. Neither her neat but un-styled gray hair. Nor the short, slightly stocky legs dressed in turquoise polyester leisure-wear.
And no surprise, the total absence of makeup adorning her sixty-something face.“Grandmotherly,” a casual viewer might think dismissively, then scan the room for someone more interesting.
But her viewers here are not casual. They’re advanced students of Healing Touch, a form of healing done by touching and moving around people’s energy fields (or auras). Mentgen is about to describe a technique called “Sandwiching.”
Although her voice is pleasantly steady, you notice nothing remarkable there, either. Any professional public speaker carries a more commanding stage presence. At least until you notice the childlike twinkle in her small brown eyes. And their uncommonly penetrating light.
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Includes Down-to-Earth Energy Healing Skills
She is saying, “When you send the energy through your hands, it can be very visible. Especially if your client is wearing dark clothes. I remember one conference where the person who was demonstrating this technique was working on a very symptomatic person. And the room was dimly lit. The light coming through the practitioner’s hands was clearly visible to everyone who watched: Two inches wide, bright as the beam of a flashlight.”
Mentgen smiles a bit, then pauses reflectively.
“I suppose it helped that the client was symptomatic. Because, of course, she drew more energy.”
Mind-boggling feats of healing, including light shows like this, are calmly taken in stride by Mentgen. Although others have reacted with amazement.
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Wouldn’t Allow her to “Keep this a Secret”
By 1999, when I wrote this article, some 50,000 certificates had been issued to Healing Touch graduates. Altogether the ranks of practitioners were swelling at a rate of 10,000 per year.
Moreover, Mentgen’s organization didn’t advertise, either. Except for sending out quarterly newsletters listing classes held nationwide.
Once I asked my friend Gladys, who teaches shiatsu: “Have you ever heard of Healing Touch?”
She said, “Isn’t that the one nurses do?”
“Most, but not all, are nurses” I replied.
Gladys shrugged. “I think it’s okay. But pretty basic.”
Basic? Hardly
Fact is, nobody at Healing Touch National spends a dime on advertising. Yet I’ve come to interview Janet Mentgen, partly because I happen to have studied Healing Touch, Levels I and IIA. Doing that as a hobbyist. But also because in my professional life, I’ve wound up founding a system for helping people.
Therefore, I know enough about it to be curious about a rare visit from the Colorado-based teacher, finding it easy to set up this interview.
After interviewing Mentgen about the founding of Healing Touch, I wonder about Gladys’s reaction. If she knew the story behind this nationwide movement that isn’t a Movement… Would she still be so under-whelmed?
What’s It Like, Interviewing Janet Mentgen?
Soft-spoken Janet Mentgen carries a slight Western drawl. Her cozy style of delivery might make any achievement sound like no big deal. Slowly, though, my questions coax out her story.
Curious about healing beyond her nursing credentials, Mentgen studied with a series of teachers. Sometimes studying for as long as eight years:
- Dolores Krieger and Janet Quin, pioneers of Therapeutic Touch
- Rosalynn Bruyere, an internationally acclaimed, clairvoyant energy worker. Also an apprentice of biofeedback guru Ana Weiss
- And Barbara Brennan, America’s biggest name in energy-based healing. Turns out, according to Mentgen, Brennan had studied with Dr. Brugh Joy, the Dr. Andrew Weil of a previous generation.
Mentgen also knows “Andy Weil,” mentioning his name without dropping it. Nonetheless I do a double take. Weil’s uncompromising voice on recordings? His authoritative presence in print? Both have caused this man — Santa Claus beard or not — to strike me as formidable. Yet, to Janet, he’s “Andy”?
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Wasn’t What Mattered to Her. Service Mattered.
In 1980 Mentgen began to teach nurses Therapeutic Touch at a Continuing Education class in Denver. Attendance burgeoned. Until she was offering seven classes each quarter.
When students asked for more, Mentgen quickly realized the importance of teaching one level at a time. Thus, so students at different skill levels could enrich each other.
Following demand, she brought out one level of teaching after another.
Still following demand, Mentgen put together her first state-wide conference. She invited two speakers: Janet Quinn, famed teacher of Therapeutic Touch, and Lynne Kegan, President of the American Holistic Nurses Association. After they observed the gathering of 65 practitioners, the speakers pulled Mentgen aside.
“You Have No Right to Keep this a Secret”
“They confronted me,” she recounted, a hint of surprise still in her voice. “They told me, ‘You have no right to keep this here as a secret.’
“I said, ‘Keep what here as a secret?’”
“They said, ‘Well, the model you’ve developed.”
“I said, ‘What model?’
“Understand, I didn’t see it as a model. We’d gone step by step. They explained to me that what I was doing wasn’t being done everywhere else.”
Mentgen was shocked. “What about what I’ve read in the nursing literature about clinics offering Therapeutic Touch?”
Turns out, these had been academic exercises or clinics set up for research studies. Nobody in the U.S. but Mentgen had taught so many practitioners. Energy healers who went on to offer ongoing clinics. By now, they were working all over the state of Colorado.
Mentgen says that in the back of her mind she had assumed that other people across the country were doing Therapeutic Touch every day. Full time. Although “I did wonder why wonder why I never could find any of them.”
Quietly Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Made History
Later Mentgen was invited to speak at a conference herself. It was the Southeast Regional Conference for Holistic Nurses, in Florida. She was expected to pay her way, $390 plus $50 for her room. A divorced mother of three, she had no budget for such a luxury. Finally she managed to “sneak it aside” from her grocery money.
Thus, Mentgen gave her workshop. Afterward she learned that a doctor was going to give a demonstration of dark field microscopy. (This means taking a sample of live blood. Putting it under a microscope. And, then showing it on a screen.)
Knowing what would happen to a patient’s blood after her energy work, hello! Mentgen invited the doctor to do a before-and-after demonstration.
What Happened Next?
Mentgen remembers clearly:
“The volunteer, about 60 years old, had chronic lung problems. We’d just had a lecture from Brad, so we could all see what was on the screen. Red blood cells were stuck together. And every once in a while you’d see a white blood cell. Plus a couple of other things in the field.
“I did a chelation technique [I’d just learned from Barbara Brennan] on the client. When I got to her chest, she sat up and said, ‘Wow, I can really feel this.’ “
She lay back down on the table.
“After I got up to her head, Brad came over. He took the blood sample and put it up. We could see all the red blood cells were now floating free. And around every one was a white light glow. And there were some white blood cells zipping through the field. You could see they were really activated.”
People jumped up, clapping. “You’ve made history.” they said.
Afterward, one of the conference participants said excitedly, “We need to teach this. We need to develop a curriculum.”
“Oh,” Mentgen told them, “I’ve already got a curriculum.”
They held a planning meeting. Only at this point did they make up a name for this set of healing techniques, far broader and more powerful than Therapeutic Touch: Healing Touch. That naming day was April 1, 1988. Mentgen had been teaching it since 1980.
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness & Work… Attacked by an 11-Year Old
In 1988 the American Holistic Nurses Association honored Mentgen as Nurse of the Year.
Besides that, little official recognition has come to her since that stand-and-jump ovation. However, the glaring exception has been an exposé staged by an 11-year-old girl. As it happened, her parents were true believers… in debunking energy-based medicine.
Emily Rosa’s study, which took one day to complete, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 1, 1998.
The child tested 21 practitioners of Therapeutic Touch. Supposedly to measure whether they could accurately feel the energy coming to their hands from the hidden hand of a person untrained in energy work.
When the healers flunked this test, Emily leapt to the kind of conclusion one might expect. Given her age, and also the fervor of her parents. She concluded that “All further use of Therapeutic Touch by health professionals is unjustified.”
Hearing this, I ask Mentgen her reaction.
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Included Acceptance
“The study was really an exercise in ESP. Not an exercise in therapeutic intervention,” Mentgen says serenely. “While it would have been okay to report the findings in that context, the researcher drew conclusions which were negative and very untrue.”
I asked, “Why do you think the media leapt at the chance to badmouth something that has been done successfully. At little or no cost. For years. And you’ve only helped people?”
Mentgen explains, showing a surprising lack of rancor. “The people behind this were the Rocky Mountain Skeptics, who consider themselves to be scientists. Their purpose is to debunk anything that is not “scientific.” In the Colorado area they’ve been doing this for years. They even crashed our Conference a few years ago, harassing us.”
She chuckles: “That got us on TV twice in one day.
“Anyway, they got the study and released it to the media. This was a blitz. And the media bought it. That press release went around the world. The interesting thing is, it made Healing Touch a household word. Ironically, a lot of people have started to do research since then. We’ve come out the beneficiary.“
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Gave Rise to Well-Documented Success
The October 1998 issue of The Journal of Family Practice publishes findings of a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. That team tracked self-reported joint pain of 27 patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the knee.
For six weeks, eight received Therapeutic Touch from trained practitioners, while another eight received no therapy. A control group of the remaining patients received “mock Therapeutic Touch,” where nurses mimicked the motions involved in the therapy even though they had no training in the procedure.
Regarding the results? “The treatment group had significantly decreased pain and improved function as compared with both the placebo and control groups.”
As reported by Reuters Health, “Although the benefits experienced by the treatment group did begin to fade once therapy stopped, most of those who had undergone therapeutic touch said they still felt somewhat better many weeks after treatment. One patient said she might not have to get a knee replacement as quickly. Another reported major change in her life as a result of the therapy: “I can walk. I have no pain. I have no swelling.”
The authors conclude, it would be “imprudent to reject a safe and effective therapy because we do not understand or do not accept its mode of action.”
Not Included in Janet Mentgen’s Specialness? Being a Medical Intuitive
One term that has become fashionable, with the rising fame of bestselling author Carolyn Myss, is the term “medical intuitive.” I ask Mentgen if she thinks of herself as a medical intuitive.
She considers the label, then says slowly: “Hadn’t ever labeled it that way. I am clairvoyant. And I do see inside the body.
“But it’s natural, something I grew up with. I didn’t know I did it. I just couldn’t figure out why other people didn’t do it.
“There was nothing ever discussed, because why would we discuss something that’s common? If you have on a yellow sweater, there’s no need to discuss it because everyone can see it. It’s not a topic. The same for me as when I see auras and bodies.
“I’m also clairaudient. [Growing up], I didn’t know that was unusual, either.”
Walking into a room as a child, Mentgen could hear the piano strings. And tell whether the piano was in tune! How? She could hear the piano vibrating, even without anyone playing it.
“Just how important do you think abilities like these are for a healer,” I ask.
“Abilities like these aren’t necessary. They’re additional tools. So they may make me a little quicker to catch on, maybe a little more interested.”
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Just Might Have Included Humility
“Oboy,” I’m thinking. “She’s a little more interested? I’m having an interview with someone who can look into my body and see everything that’s wrong.” Part of me wants to change the subject. Fast. But instead, I ask what it’s like to have this specialized kind of perception… unlike the rest of us.
(Of course, Energy Spirituality Aura Reading techniques can work for anybody who studies them. But I sure don’t teach how to tell if a piano that nobody’s playing… is out of tune.)
“I remember one time in a class a lady came in who was limping. She sat down next to me. Said she’d been out dancing the night before. I looked down at her foot and said: ‘Yeah, you need to get that x-rayed. You’ve got a bone broken in three places.’
“She looked at me like, Wow! She had the x-ray and it showed a bone broken in three places. Next week, I saw her. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘How did you do that?’
“I just looked at it. It was a casual remark. Because she came in limping, and talking about how she’d been out dancing.” Otherwise Mentgen wouldn’t have mentioned it.
Of Course, Hearing All this Made Me MORE Curious
So I ask, “How did you discover this ability in the first place?”
Mentgen recounts it happened while she was taking her first class in Therapeutic Touch.
The instructor worked on a patient with Hodgkin’s disease. And then went around the circle of students, asking each one in turn to describe what she observed during the healing. Far as Janet was concerned, nobody described what actually happened. Janet felt reluctant to speak. When pressed, she mumbled: “I saw that one of the bones in her wrist was broken.”
This wasn’t a broken-wrist patient. It was a Hodgkins patient. The instructor started to look annoyed. Suddenly the patient sat straight up off the table. She exclaimed, “I broke my wrist yesterday.”
“How did you see that?” asked the teacher.
“Like an x-ray. I saw the crack in the bone. Didn’t everybody see that?”
Nooooo.
“I didn’t have a clue.”
The Dumbest People Ever Seen
“What else do you see?” her teacher persisted?
Janet answered, “I see things like that all the time.” It seemed strange to Janet Mentgen, having to admit such a thing. Everybody saw inside bodies, she thought. They just never mentioned the obvious. Suddenly she recalled what happened in nursing school.
“I remembered thinking those doctors were the dumbest people I had ever seen. All you have to is look.”
“I remembered my instructor telling me to stop doing the diagnosing and talking about it because I was embarrassing the interns. Because I would say what I thought and two days later they would figure it out.”
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness Was Gift-Wrapped in Being “The Quiet Person”
I ask, “How important is it to be intuitive if you feel a calling to be a healer?”
Mentgen says, “I don’t think it’s important at all. In fact, I feel that sometimes people are exploiting it. It’s a hype. I like to be the quiet person.”
What she does is teach. And work on patients. Also, if you press her, she’ll admit that she also develops extraordinary healing techniques.
Healing Touch, in fact, is defined as a set of techniques that move the human energy field to restore harmony and balance.
Therapeutic Touch is just a small part of the full curriculum, which includes:
- Techniques from Dr. Brugh Joy
- And Barbara Brennan
- An ancient Hopi technique for clearing blockages from the back and neck
- A wound-healing technique for those who have “never felt the same” since their surgery
- Pain Drain, which I think should be required study for all parents of toddlers.
Altogether, there’s an enormous wealth of techniques. Sources are acknowledged in the simple spiral-bound manuals given to Healing Touch students.
Then I Put Mentgen on the Spot
Asking her, “Which of the Healing Touch techniques has she personally invented?”
She thinks for a while, then lists them:
- Whole Body Connection, taught to very advanced students.
- Chakra spread.
- Pyramid.
- Spiral Balance.
- Magnetic Unruffling.
- Beyond the formal Certification Program, there’s also a series of three courses combining principles of hypnosis with Healing Touch
- And Words that Heal: the Healing Power of Storytelling.
What Else?
Interviewing is such fun. You get to ask whatever occurs to you. Originally I was writing this article for Pathways Magazine but don’t recall if it ever was published. (Sadly, Pathways never archives back issues.) Which another reason why I’m publishing it now.
(Writing has always interested me a whole lot more than record keeping.)
Anyway, I asked Janet the following question. Not as somebody who aspired to work as a physical healer.
Already, by 1999, I’d begun working full-time at Energy Spirituality: Helping people with emotional growth and spiritual awakening. For sure, we Energy Spirituality Experts never call ourselves healers. Yet I’ve known so many idealistic souls who dreamed of becoming a New Age-style healer. And so, before ending the interview, I was sure to ask:
“What if you desire to be a healer but feel unworthy?”
Mentgen speaks decisively. “One thing I know for sure: If we all waited until we were well, there would be no healers. We all have to work with our infirmities and limitations.”
Her face softens. “We need people who are on the path to wellness, who are making an effort to clear the garbage. That’s the criterion. As you grow, you get into your heart. You’re fine. As you work with others, you accelerate your [own] healing process. You grow in compassion.”
Janet Mentgen’s Specialness as a Leader Inspired Me.
Inspires Me to this Day.
Healing Touch students, to judge from those at the Dulles Days Inn, are a diverse group. Including:
- Nurses
- Massage therapists
- And energy workers with no credentials beyond their own thirst for learning.
Some in this group are dressed conservatively. Then there’s the tall, scruffy guy with a long ponytail.
From the Healing Touch Courses I’ve taken, I know that’s just the start of the diversity.
Ideologically, students include enthusiastic New Agers, resolute born-again Christians, and a huge variety of additional belief systems. Yet everyone in Healing Touch classes puts their beliefs private. Together they practice techniques on each other, bringing occasional tears and a steady upsurge of wellness.
Yet I Can’t Help Noticing
Underneath Mentgen’s non-sectarian language, plain for any lover of God to see, are sacred ancient mysteries.
After all, she’s teaching laying on of hands, practiced since Biblical times. So I ask, “How do you hold together such a wide range of students?”
“Through the work,” she says. “I let energy be the teacher for them. I just guide them a bit to access the inner healer. So many people are searching for inner peace and wellness.”
“That’s all?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter what your belief system is,” Mentgen says. “If you work from the heart center, all the rest follows.”
Do People Know What a Bargain Her Training Is?
Love is all well and good. But this street-savvy New Yorker thinks that Mentgen may be missing a marketing opportunity.
In 1999, The Barbara Brennan School of Healing, based in New York, charges what? About $20,800 for a four-year, part-time course of study. Plus, students must pay for travel, room, and board.
A comparable certification program for Healing Touch, by contrast, costs $1,325 ($600 for students) and it can be taken locally or close to home.
“How come you charge so little?” I ask her, point blank.
“The purpose is to fit the budget of RN’s.”
A client-driven budget — how quaint!
One More Question, Because I Was Just So Curious
Yes, there’s one final question, even more personal, that I can’t resist asking.
“When I first saw your photograph in a Healing Touch workbook, I looked at your aura. And I was awed by your ability to get out of the way, personally, when you heal.
“The way you transparently let huge amounts of spiritual light move through you. Reading auras, I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you have any tips you could share about how this is done?”
(“Tips.” I’m thinking meanwhile. “This sounds so pathetic. It’s not like she’s Heloise, for crying out loud.” But how else to ask her? How could my question not be awkward?)
Mentgen listens patiently to my request for the Cliff Notes version of becoming a world-class energy mover. “Have tips? Sure don’t.”
Nevertheless She Thinks More about My Question
Then Janet Mentgen answers:
“I see the work as being the important thing and not me. I was told that this work is even unto the seventh generation. When you start figuring it out, you realize that if it were dependent on you, it’s not going to make the seventh generation.”
Her words have been so quiet, yet so startling. I stare, eyes popped as wide open as they can stretch.
Janet continues:
“[In my spiritual guidance] I was told if I would do the work? They’d do the rest of the work for me. And that’s what has happened.
“I was instructed to build a foundation for the work. You don’t do that by holding onto the strings. So I probably live that philosophy.”
Mentgen, I conclude, has to have one of the smallest egos in the world of professional healing.
And So I Ask My Final-Final Interview Question
“Janet, how do you keep your balance?”
Healing Touch, not surprisingly, is an essential part of her lifestyle. Every day she finds herself using her skills to help somebody. “There’s always someone. Some animal. Or myself. I do it all the time.”
“You always manifest your spirituality through service. As I develop my spirituality, I develop it for the point of serving. I think of Christ as being among the people. When you see people from the heart, you only see them from the heart. Nothing else. All discrimination and pettiness falls away.”
Healing is her passion, Mentgen admits. “It’s my total being. If I have to go to a social event and there’s no other healer, I have nothing to say.”
And when she’s not out, carousing riotously with doctors and nurses?
“I live almost a monastic life, a very strong spiritual peace. I follow a daily plan, get proper rest, nutrition, walk. I do my prayers, Bible study. And I try to have a Sabbath every week. Typically it’s not every Sunday because I travel.”
Just what does Janet Mentgen do on that when-she-can-take-it day of rest? “I stay home, do things that are holy leisure. Fun for me. My favorite thing? I put on my yellow John Deere hat and ride my garden tractor.”
Blog photo by Farid Askerov on Unsplash
