About Jan Mundo

Jan Mundo, CMSC, CMT

Claire Holt Photography

Jan Mundo is a somatic coach and bodyworker who specializes in transformation of headaches, migraines, stress, tension, pain, and trauma.

For fifty years, since 1970, she has been placing her hands on people’s headaches and migraines (including her own) and relieving them and their associated symptoms on the spot with the Mundo Method. A talent and a gift that’s been honed through decades of practice, she says, anyone can learn: hundreds of her students and clients have learned to self-apply this therapy.

Migraines have always been in her life beginning with her mom, who had severe migraines. Ten-year-old Jan would help by massaging the “knots and spurs” in her mom’s neck and back. Later, to address her own severe migraines during perimenopause, Jan developed a holistic self-care program, so she could not only relieve, but prevent her migraines from occurring, without medication and side effects.

After twenty-one years of informally relieving people’s pain, she got a “license to touch,” graduating as a certified massage therapist (Massage School of Santa Monica). When her fifteen-year chronic back pain “unlocked” in a cathartic breathing workshop and her clients’ emotional content would emerge through their massage sessions, her path diverged into Somatics in 1992. She certified in Body-Centered Therapy and Conscious Relationship Transformation (Hendricks Institute), graduated as a Master Somatic Coach and Bodyworker (Strozzi Institute), and trained in Somatics and Trauma (Haines). She has also trained in multiple healing and transformative modalities, including energy work, intuitive development, chi gung, mindfulness meditation, and breathwork.

She has held holistic headache and mind-body classes at medical and community centers, corporations, and conferences, including New York Headache Center, UCSF, Kaiser Permanente, Hill Physicians Medical Group, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Apple, LinkedIn, Athleta, US Association for Body Psychotherapy Conference, and The Embodiment Conference. You can read Jan’s CV here.

The Headache Healer’s Handbook: A Holistic, Hands-On Somatic Self-Care Program for Headache and Migraine Relief and Prevention by Jan Mundo (New World Library) delivers her complete program and shows readers how to reclaim their lives by following it. Published in Massage Magazine, Migraine Again, the anthology Being Human at Work (Strozzi-Heckler), Spiritual Midwifery (Gaskin), and The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook (Hagler), for which she was a contributing editor. In 2001, a retrospective pilot study showing the efficacy of her holistic program was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Cephalalgia.

Little known fact: Jan is a founding member of The Farm intentional community in Summertown, TN, where she lived for fifteen years. Their collective lifestyle, vegan diet, meditative practices, midwife-assisted home birth, attention to energy and “the vibes,” and spiritual agreements are foundational to her work and teaching today. American Commune, the 2013 documentary film about The Farm, written and directed by her filmmaker daughters, Rena Croshere and Nadine Apolonio (Mundo Films), features Jan’s life story.

Always a New Yorker and a Cali-girl, she has three grown children and seven grandchildren, was born in New York, raised in L.A., liberated in sixties Berkeley, finally lived in Manhattan for over a decade, and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Schedule your FREE 30-minute Headache Detective Call with Jan today!