Ian Franklin-Wilkerson grew up in a family of healers. His mother, Michele Newmark, was a renowned Reichian therapist in San Francisco. His father is a chiropractor. He has ten chiropractors in his extended family. Healing isn’t something Ian chose. It chose him.
But Ian brought something new to the lineage: music. After his uncle Bobby handed him a BC Rich electric guitar at age twelve, Ian fell in love with rock and roll and the way it made him feel. He describes discovering the Beatles, Hendrix, Bob Marley, and feeling “revolution through music, empowerment, sovereignty, righteousness.” That passion led him to Berklee College of Music, where he earned dual degrees in Music Therapy and Songwriting, graduating with honors.
For nearly eighteen years, Ian has been a Board Certified Music Therapist in clinical practice, working across an extraordinary range of populations: children with autism, veterans with PTSD, teens with eating disorders and suicidal ideation, adults with brain injuries, patients in psychiatric acute settings, memory care, hospice, and community wellness. His company employs five music therapists and operates 90% out in the community, traveling into homes, day programs, group homes, neuro rehab clinics, teen treatment facilities, and hospitals.
When his mother passed in 2016, Ian stepped into the breathwork side of his heritage. Her former clients came to him seeking her “flavor, her vibe, her essence.” He realized it was time to fulfill his destiny and carry on the Reichian breathwork tradition, not out of obligation, but out of devotion. Today, he integrates deep mouth-based Reichian breathwork with interactive music therapy to help people release trauma stored in the body’s musculature, what Wilhelm Reich called “body armor.”
In this episode, Ian walks us through the neuroscience of why music activates every region of the brain simultaneously, making it one of the most powerful tools for neuroplasticity and neural priming. He shares a deeply moving ten-year case study of a young man on the autism spectrum who progressed from perseverative scripting to playing four instruments and preparing for independent living. He explains why playfulness and whimsy may be the most underrated clinical tools in healthcare. And he challenges the breathwork community by making a case for intentional mouth breathing as the “get better faster” ingredient that most practitioners are skipping over.
He also leads the GBF crew through a live breathwork exercise that listeners can do anywhere, anytime, right now.
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