A Decolonial Approach to Breathwork
Moving Beyond Creating a Safe Space
I've lost count of how many times "safety" comes up in healing spaces, in ceremony, in a drop-in yoga class, in almost any embodied practice you can name. People say the word and I still stall on it. Safe how? Safe for whom, exactly, and safe from what?
Nearly a decade into this work, I know these rooms weren't built with a body of colour, or a body carrying culture, in mind. I've sat through appropriation, microaggressions, careless and privileged language, felt my body flinch, and then swallowed it so I could still get something out of the session. I'm practiced at that swallowing now. I've also come to understand it usually isn't the facilitator's fault so much as their blind spot. That's exactly why I'm writing this: to point at the ways healing spaces can end up reproducing the harm they claim to be treating.
So what do I actually mean by moving past a colonial idea of safety?
When we talk about society, trauma, and safety, the usual story goes like this. Our nervous systems have been dysregulated by personal trauma, and it's on us to re-regulate so we can feel safe in the world again. I want to pull apart a couple of things buried in that story.
Society is safe and we must re-learn that.
I've sat in plenty of healing spaces where I was told our nervous systems evolved to handle sabre-tooth tigers, that we're carrying survival responses built for threats that no longer exist, and that our job now is to train ourselves out of them. It gets repeated as if it's obvious: our nervous systems are "overreacting," and that overreaction is something to fix.
That framing tells you something about who's usually writing and teaching it. Most have little lived experience of what actually threatens a lot of us day to day. It isn't a sabre-tooth tiger anymore. It's rent. It's illness. It's loneliness, unpaid bills, a relationship that's slowly wearing you down. Somatic theory built without that context has no real relationship to what's life-threatening in the world most of us are living in now. And it gets worse the further you go toward the edges of the room, toward the people carrying the heaviest weight of our social hierarchies. That framing tells them their reactions are the problem.
Neutrality is the goal.
Somatics, modern psychology, most of what we're taught, treats a return to "neutral" as the finish line. Any real charge gets read as the nervous system malfunctioning. That idea quietly hands people a job: dampen the reaction, mute the gut response to real harm, learn to sit with injustice long enough to go back to your desk, or back to a family that isn't working, without making a scene.
I've started calling this a colonial framework. "Colonial" can mean a lot of things, but here I'm using it for the systems that keep the current order standing: capitalism, misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, and the rest.
Put those two ideas together and a pattern shows up. The way somatics and modern psychology are usually taught ends up serving that same order, training people to absorb pain quietly and go back to work without disturbing anything.
A decolonial lens on somatic healing starts somewhere else. It says: your body is doing exactly what it should. It's reacting to what's actually around it, accurately. If you're oppressed or marginalised and your body is on high alert, that alertness is correct. The precision with which we sense danger is the same thing that has kept us alive, present, still here.
Our nervous systems are responding appropriately to the conditions we're in. The dissociating, the numbing, the fawning, the appeasing, that's what got us through to today. I don't take that for granted.
Treating the body like it's broken, like something to be hacked or reprogrammed, is itself a colonial move: control, power exercised over someone, manipulation. The western wellness industry is full of frameworks built on domination, and we'll get into that more elsewhere. It's worth naming here so we don't end up running the same script on our own bodies.
So what does 'safety' mean in the Breathwork Space?
Seen through that lens, it's not much of a leap to say the whole concept of "safety," as it's usually used, comes out of colonial thinking. It's centred on white bodies, and blind to how much trauma most people are actually carrying.
We can't promise safety in a breathwork room. We can't say there's no one there who might harm you, because we don't know everyone's politics. For most people from the global majority, it's likely that someone in the room hasn't done the work of embodied anti-racism. And for anyone carrying trauma, there will be people present who have no idea how their assumptions about gender, sexuality, or ability might land as harm.
Trauma comes from people, often people who are themselves hurting, and some of them may well be in the room. Telling someone the space is "safe" does them a disservice.
Worth saying plainly: as a practitioner, you are not automatically a safe person for everyone. Safety isn't something a facilitator hands out. It's built, slowly, by each person, inside their own body.
As communities and space holders, we can still work to reduce harm and shape spaces that actually serve the people who need this kind of healing. People carrying trauma have every right to their anger, their grief, their need for rest, their demand for a room where whiteness doesn't get to take up all the air. As practitioners working in this moment, we know enough now to meet that need.
So here's what I'm proposing: let's stop promising "safe spaces" and start building collective responsibility instead. Rooms that don't treat neutrality as the goal and charge as a malfunction. Spaces where people are invited to feel what's actually there, the anger, the passion, to notice what it's like to share that and be witnessed, and to work through it together.
We're not preparing bodies for a safe world, because that isn't the world we live in. We're preparing them for struggle, for pain, for holding strength and something like peace while the water keeps rising. We're preparing them to remember the survival wisdom our bodies already carry, to tap into that power, to know where it came from, and to stay honest about the cultural ground we're standing on.
If any of this lands for you, there are a few ways to go deeper with Inspire Breathwork. You can train as a trauma-informed facilitator through our two-year accredited Facilitator Training, go further into decolonial and embodied practice in Breathing Beyond Empire, or work with breath for your own transformation through Tide Ritual. Wherever you're starting from, there's a next step here.Read More:
