The Nonbinary of Breathwork

By Em Chiappinelli

April 2026

I’ve approached the gradual process of identifying as nonbinary through starts and stops.

It’s tumbled forward in moments where I find reflection and validation in a piece of writing, in a perspective told by a nonbinary person that lands perfectly for me, or when I make contact with an inner they/them within myself that is sitting cross-legged on the floor of my being, curiously observing the world around them. 

I’ve retracted from seeing myself as nonbinary when, as it goes, I judge myself from the imagined perspectives of those I’m close to who don’t understand that kind of a thing, and thus won’t take it seriously. Or from those who seem way farther down the path than I am. The softness of the exploration snaps shut when either end of the cultural gaze creeps in, and the prickliness of my own internalized denial and judgement crawls into that tender opening. 

My preference for being in spaces that promote a non-ordinary, nonbinary type of awareness has always been the common thread in my life though, mainly through the kind of work I’ve chosen and in the lifestyles I’ve pursued. My profession as a breathwork facilitator constantly reinforces  - in formal training and through the sessions I have with clients - how to navigate the fractured poles of our identities and find the thread that connects them back to each other. 

Recently, during a class for my ongoing training in breathwork, my teacher was commenting upon how important it is for breathwork facilitators to recognize when a client is grappling with the two sides of an emotional experience. They might be deep in a process, for example, where they are working through some embedded layers of shame in the pursuit of an internal sense of freedom. As they’re breathing and their real-time sense of freedom grows in their body, they may want to ignore the shame that habitually dominated that space within them. 

She was explaining to us that if in those moments, we only focus on prioritizing the freedom they are moving towards, we may lose the (sometimes distorted) wisdom that is contained within their shame. Often our deepest experiences have at least two sides to them, and we need to be aware of both: the side we identify with (like freedom), and the one we don’t want to identify with (like shame) that speak to the lived experiences we have gone through and how we adapted or reacted to them. If we don't maintain an awareness of both, then the side we aren’t identified with will likely grow in more insidious, unconscious ways. 

This struck me as a piece of nonbinary wisdom – it’s essentially a way of psychologically holding the container within which we created and perpetuate binaries. But this can be a pretty hard orientation to maintain in our good/bad masculine/feminine black-and-white cultural conditioning. 

I’m reminded of Tema Okun’s presentation of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, where she emphasizes the way that either/or thinking can work to reinforce hierarchies of existing power structures in the ways we interact with each other. One example that she gives is about a risk of either/or thinking: “Trying to simplify complex things, for example believing that poverty is simply the result of lack of education.” In this example, we’re collapsing our view of poverty into an assumption about a poor person’s level of education, as opposed to understanding the structural conditions that create poverty in our society and the many, many factors that create our class experience. 

Through this lens, my embrace of a nonbinary identity reflects a teaching that many of us need to have reinforced again, and again, and again. That teaching is: What we think we know is pre-programmed in a way that we may be totally unconscious of, based on our life experience, position in society, and a bunch of other stuff. And that unconsciousness can present as a truth that is potentially quite limiting or potentially quite harmful to ourselves or others. 

The limits of my own binary thinking were grazed in a strong way during that training. You see, doing breathwork can lead to a whole range of experiences. It can bring up old memories, injuries, illnesses, forgotten family dynamics, even cultural archetypes that we may be unknowingly subscribing to (and…a lot more). At the end of that day of training, I was exchanging breathwork with another student. When it was my turn to breathe and her turn to facilitate me, I found myself slipping into a rare experience of safety and ease within my body. What then came out of my session was really surprising: I essentially experienced a full-blown exorcism, with the convulsions, screaming at the top of my lungs, sobbing uncontrollably, fluttering eyes rolling into the back of my head and all. It looked (and I imagine sounded) like an exorcism from the movies. But the interesting thing about it for me was…I had no idea where it was coming from.

I’ve never had an experience like that before in the eight years I’ve been practicing breathwork. What was so surprising about it was not the dramatics that exploded out of me, but the lack of any sort of personal story attached to them. There was nothing coming to me about my childhood, my family’s history or ancestors, the dynamics in the culture. I really had no idea why this was happening, even as I was doing all of the wild things. In the midst of the bodily movements and expressions, I kept wondering: Is this really happening? Was I…tortured in some past life? Am I literally being possessed by something, medieval-style, but in 2026?

It was like I had struck upon an incredibly deep, unconscious program that was so far out of my awareness that I couldn’t even cognize what or who it might be related to. 

In the days that followed that experience, I started making sense of it by accepting that the nonbinary orientation to my experience will never end. I will never be able to fully understand the totality of reality and all of its strange components – every landing place is maybe just a stepping stone of the known in a gargantuan ocean of the unknown, an ocean the size of everything. I thought I already knew that through my work as a breathwork facilitator, but it hit me in a much more expansive way. 

Even if I think I know what I contain, I know myself (!) and how I identify, there will always be the opposite end of the binary to whatever conclusion I have drawn. In some ways, the unknown and the known are the ultimate binary, and having a nonbinary awareness of the bothness of reality is a different take on the same grace that is spoken of in many religious traditions. And maybe that’s what being nonbinary really means to me.