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 wildfires, chilling statistics about encroaching data center expansion, 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. Meaning: 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 understand this one, and the learning journey is still at large. Today I’m going to 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.

The first one is a personal story. Unlike many folks 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 begin 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 seems to be able to see me too.

My typical response to this has been 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 breathwork training to get me here), I have managed to start trying 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 it felt vulnerable to even try to make myself stay with it, not run away from it, and keep breathing while it’s happening.

But each time I did it, a similar result happened. It’s a little hard for me to articulate. In the moment, 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 was also able to feel myself there still, as opposed to gone or trapped in some secret/chaotic inner place of lost within my own mind. And while there, it’s almost as though I could look around from within it. I had this incredibly energizing feeling of presence and almost a sense of excitement at trying to figure out what to do from there.

Inspired by those results, I later tried breathing with fear while walking across a small river. As I made my way across, I felt these waves of worry come over me about potentially slipping and injuring myself on the slick rocks or getting carried away by the current (I almost drowned in a similar manner when I was younger). And again, I felt this electric feeling of aliveness, presence, and agility, that stayed heightened until I made my way across. I did it one more time recently when I showed up to a two-day gathering where I didn’t know a single person, and was worried about whether or not I’d find anyone to talk to or connect with. Same results. The trick was that if I did it in the real-time moment, when the actual fear was ramping up in my body, I would stumble into this new and surprising combination of alertness, agility, and groundedness.

Each time I tried this, I found that there was a sense of something starting to balance out. Like some scales of energy were re-calibrating to give me a place among, within, and even equal to the strong feelings as they took over. 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 this potentially counter-intuitive experience wasn’t just a sense of returning to a state of calm or feeling resourced. It felt more active, as though I was in the middle of something that I was currently making it through. Does that make sense? And afterwards, I had a sense that I was incorporating a new understanding of myself into my psyche, beyond what I had previously thought about myself, even if that new understanding was very subtle.

The second story comes from a breathwork client and what she recently shared with me; it’s something that touched me deeply (and she gave me her consent to share it here). She’s been practicing connecting to her breathing in between our sessions, like a champ, and found herself one day sitting with her son in their car before a hockey tryout that he was terrified of showing up for. He wouldn’t go in, being too wracked with anxiety to leave the car. Eventually, she told him to start to connect to his breathing and kept urging him to do it despite his confusion at this advice. As he did, his fear eventually cracked, a sense of relief flooded in, and he started crying. She started crying too, seeing him get in touch with himself in this way. When the intensity of his feelings had moved up and out, he got up and left the car to head in for the tryout.

After she relayed this story to me, she said that she was starting to appreciate this miraculous fact about breathing (which I believe takes a while to fully grok): 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.

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We are always dancing with fear. It keeps us alive, alert, and looking out for the dangers being communicated to us at every level of our experience. 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 the 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 offer this…

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, 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/we need it.