Showing Up for the Fear /

It's Already Inside You

By Em Chiappinelli

August 2025

If there’s one theme that has been ringing loud and clear this year, both within me and with the folks I work with and know, it is fear. In my corner of the world in northern Virginia, the recent headlines have included smokey skies from distant Canadian fires, chilling statistics about encroaching data center expansion, shameful and proliferating terror tactics from ICE deployed against our immigrant neighbors, to name just a few.

In the context of my work facilitating breathwork sessions for people, we work with fear in the ways I’ve been trained according to the guidelines of integrative breathwork. We breathe with it, allow it to grow or gain in intensity, locate it in the body, and keep breathing with it until there is some release or shift that gives us the information we need to keep going. What’s so tricky about breathing while feeling fear is that the fear is telling you to GO GO GO and yet all you are doing is lying there and breathing. It can be uncomfortable, to say the least.

There are so many ways to talk about breathwork. It took me a while to get this one, and my understanding of it is just starting to blossom in this late summer heat and humidity. I’ll share two anecdotes to try to illustrate what I’ve learned about what can happen when we breathe with fear, in the hopes that it will come in handy for you or a beloved who might need this reminder in a pinch.

Unlike many I know, I don’t fall asleep mulling over all of the things that happened during the day and worrying about what is coming tomorrow. When I start falling asleep, I start seeing strange faces up close in my mind’s eye, and weird visions that get more and more real the more the boundaries between awake consciousness and asleep consciousness start to blur. It’s…scary! I don’t know what’s happening or who I’m seeing. I don’t really have a framework for what I’m experiencing when this happens, which adds to the fear, especially when what or who I am seeing seem to also be able to see me and interact with me.

Typically, my response to this is that I either ignore, avoid, or distract from this end-of-day phenomenon with books, television, or company late into the night. Recently (and it’s only taken eight years of breathworker training to get me here), I have managed to start doing something different. I have started breathing with the very young-feeling fear that begins boiling as the images come on. That’s been a new shift, and felt vulnerable to even try to do: Stay with this experience, don’t run away from it, and keep breathing while it’s happening.

Each time I did it, a similar result happened. It’s a little hard to articulate, but I started to, in a way, show up on the same level as the images that were overwhelming me. Almost as though I rose to the same size as them in my mind, so that I no longer felt as small and dominated as I did when the fear was roaring. I felt myself there still; not gone, obliterated into some secret, chaotic inner place of lost within my own mind.

I also deployed breathing with fear while walking across a river, worried that I might slip and injure myself on the slick rocks, real-time in the midst of traversing the fast-flowing waters. And I did it again when I showed up to a meeting where I didn’t know anyone else there, and was worried about what a new group of people would think of me. In each of these scenarios, something got through to me loud enough that I listened to it. I remembered to connect with my breathing as it was moving in and out of me.

Each time, something balanced out - like scales of energy recalibrating to give me a place among and within the strong feelings. I was able to look around, and return to having my wits about me enough to make decisions and interact with the situation I was in. But it wasn’t just a feeling of returning to a state of calm or feeling resourced. It feels different; it’s a strengthening. A sense of having made it through something and incorporating it into the understanding I have of myself and what I am capable of doing beyond what I had previously thought about myself, even if that understanding was unconscious or subtle.

The other anecdote came from what a breathwork client recently shared with me; something that touched me deeply. She’s been practicing breathing between sessions, like a champ, and found herself sitting with her son in their car before a hockey try-out that he was terrified of showing up for. He wouldn’t go in, being too wracked with fear to leave the car. Eventually, she told him to start to pay attention to his breathing and kept urging him to do it despite his confusion at this new advice. As he did, his fear cracked. He started crying, back in contact with his vulnerability and feeling the relief of, what I would call, returning to himself and his real experience. Seeing this, she also cried. He got it, even at a young age. And when the intensity of his feelings had moved up and out, he got up and left the car.

After she told me this story, she said that she was starting to appreciate this miraculous fact of breathing: that it is already within us. It is always there, always available, even though most of us were raised without knowing that there is something “there” that can always, always, be tapped when we start to go under.

We are always dancing with fear. It keeps us alive, alert, and looking out for the dangers being communicated to us on every conceivable level of society right now. Some of us are in serious danger right now; some of us are overwhelmed by the things we are scared to face; some of us are buzzing with sourceless fear that our creature bodies resonate with in solidarity with all that we know is happening in our world right now. So to meet the moment of fear that is so loud and alive this summer 2025, I just want to say…

The other side of fear is capacity. The two are wed to each other, inextricably in dialogue as we evaluate our surroundings and determine on a daily basis what to do next. I hope that in moments where you have the spaciousness to give it a try, and the fear has gripped you, that you try breathing with it to see what happens. So that if and when you come across situations where you need a life raft, whatever form that comes in, for whatever is coming your way, you remember that there is something that is already inside of you, waiting across the bridge of your own breathing. May this remembering be there for you when you need it.