One year ago on May 24, Northeastern student and campus yoga instructor Evan M. Kenny stood on top of Mount Everest, took off his oxygen mask for a moment — and just breathed.

“In and out, 10 times,” Kenny says.

The temperature below zero and low oxygen saturation in the atmosphere made inhaling painful, he says. “It was piercing my nose.”

“But I just had to have that experience and just sit there and have a meditative period.  The sun was rising and the full moon was setting in this perfect kind of tandem effect. It was like indescribable magic.”

What made the experience all the more rewarding was that just a few years earlier  Kenny’s body had been too beaten down by years as a Navy rescue swimmer and hotshot firefighter to take on such an extreme physical challenge.

Enrolling at Northeastern under a program for military veterans and becoming involved in the university’s yoga and meditation program helped set him on the path to healing in body and spirit, Kenny says.

In more than one way, the behavioral neuroscience major’s path to the Himalayas started on Northeastern’s Boston campus.

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Illustration by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University