Enrolling at Northeastern under a program for military veterans and becoming involved in the university’s yoga and meditation program helped set Evan Kenny on the path to healing in body and spirit.
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.
Growing up in a small town in Ohio where patriotism “was really baked in,” Kenny joined the Navy immediately after high school and trained to be an aviation rescue swimmer with MH-60R helicopter crews.
“It was very physically demanding to get through,” Kenny says. “We started with around 46 guys and graduated 11 from rescue swimmer school.”
During the two-year training period Kenny jumped out of helicopters in a wetsuit, helmet and fins and practiced towing people through heavy waves. He followed up with four years of active service, including three in Japan, medevacing injured crew members off ships.
“I had a great experience. I gained a lot of perspective and leadership and understanding of different world events,” Kenny says.
But when it came time to re-enlist in 2018, he decided to follow his own path, backpacking with his partner through 30 countries in Europe and Africa before taking jobs as a snowboard instructor in France and then Vale, Colorado.
The COVID-19 pandemic suspended lessons for a while, so Kenny pivoted and earned his EMT license. Relocating to California, he became a ski patroller in the winter and picked up wildland firefighting in the summer.
“I ended up getting hired on to a hotshot crew because of my previous military experience,” Kenny says. Hotshots with the U.S. Forest Service are considered to have higher levels of training and experience and are sent to cover tougher fires.
“We were deployed up and down the whole state going to different fires. We would put in lines to box in fires and do all kinds of preventative maintenance or structure protection,” he says.
Establishing lines meant using hand tools to dig trenches in the ground to stop the fires advancing long enough to bring in engines and hoses.
“Those were busy days, 16-hour days, two weeks at a time and then just a day or two of rest and recovery before going back out. One hundred-degree days weren’t uncommon. You’re wearing all this gear battling high heat on the fire line, so it got quite hot.”
“The Dixie (Northern California) fire in 2021 was a huge one,” says Kenny, who was also at Yosemite for a couple weeks controlling fires set by lightning strikes.
The work was not only grueling, it was dangerous, as proved most recently by the death of a hotshot fighting the El Dorado wildfire almost five years ago.
“There is little room for error in this fast-paced, dynamic environment,” Kenny’s Ventana Hotshots squad boss wrote in a letter of recommendation. “I never had to worry about Evan. It is not very often that I can lean on a first-year firefighter as much as I was able to lean on him.”
When his girlfriend got into physical therapy school in Boston, Kenny decided it was time to hang up his seasonal employment helmets and move with her to the East Coast, where he used his G.I. benefits to enroll at Northeastern in 2022.
What promised to be the start of a new chapter in his life was marred by a breakup with his girlfriend and physical suffering due to the toll the military and other jobs had taken on his body.
“I had really big bulging discs in my lower spine and such bad radiating sciatica that I was disabled,” Kenny says. “I couldn’t really get out of bed for periods of the day. Waking up, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sit up.”
Kenny turned to the Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center for relief, where a physical therapist helped restore his mobility. She also showed him how yoga poses could help with flexibility and even ease pain.
Intrigued, Kenny explored yoga online and with YouTube videos and started attending free yoga classes offered through Northeastern’s Center for Spirituality, Dialogue and Service.
“I really changed my ability. It re-abled me in a lot of ways,” he says. Kenny was also drawn to the meditation sessions offered by the CSDS and the sense of connection and service he had been missing since leaving the military.
“I did suffer from a very deep period of depression and loss of identity,” Kenny says. “Through meditation, there was this feeling of overcoming something.”
When a semester in Australia in January 2024 did not pan out, Kenny remembered what Sagar Rajpal, executive director of CSDS, had said about the many yoga training opportunities available in his native India.
Instead of going Down Under, Kenny headed to a “beautiful ashram” in Rishikesh for one month and 200 hours of instruction to expand his capacity at Northeastern, where he now works as both a yoga instructor and meditation fellow — or as Rajpal puts it, “a mellow.”
“Then I had another two months to basically travel around,” Kenny says.
He decided to head to Dharamshala, a town in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh that hosts the Tibetan government in exile.
Waiting in line for the overnight bus, Kenny met Sersang, a woman of Tibetan heritage and her young son who were scheduled to join up with family and receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama.
“I said, ‘That’s so cool. I would love to see him,’” Kenny says.
“We continued to talk and connect,” he says. “I did an astrology reading for her son. It was just a nice, kind of endearing friend for the bus journey. But when we arrived, she asked for my contact number and I said, ‘OK.’”
A couple days later she called and said, “Hey, we’re going to see the Dalai Lama. Do you want to come?” Kenny says.
“I showed up the next morning and there were many hundreds of people there. They had us sit in a waiting room for almost two hours,” Kenny says.
“Finally, they let us in and we got to see the Dalai Lama. I had this very beautiful, powerful, spiritual moment when he reached up and patted my cheek, like a loving mother to a child. Like, ‘You’re doing so well. I’m so proud of you.’ There were no words spoken. There didn’t need to be.”
Sersang was adamant about staying with Kenny, he says. “I felt bad that she might miss her opportunity, but she said ‘I told you I would help you meet him, so I will.’ That struck me so deeply, and I’ll remember her kindness forever.”
Seeing a circling bird over his head, Kenny got a sense of the presence of his recently deceased grandmother, who liked to quote the Dalai Lama in birthday cards and notes and who found strong spiritual symbolism in the flight of eagles.
“There’s this moment when I feel like she’s with me and we’re meeting the Dalai Lama together,” Kenny says.
Before leaving the ashram, Kenny had started making inquiries about joining expeditions to climb Everest, the world’s tallest mountain at 29,032 feet.
“The idea just kept coming as I left for India, which surprised me because it was never something I wanted to do when I was younger,” he says. And when he was older, disc and sciatic issues made such a feat seem impossible.
But improvements wrought by physical therapy and yoga study led Kenny to think, “I could just go for it. This thing that so few people do — I’m in a position that I could make this happen.”
“I’m not a mountaineer,” Kenny says. “I told an expedition team I found online about my work experience with the Navy and the ski patrol and ropes and cold weather and firefighting and hiking with a lot of heavy gear and extreme temperatures.”
“I said I feel all of these things I’ve done have been leading me to this big summit, this big adventure,” Kenny says. His parents were initially apprehensive but ultimately gave their full endorsement.
He says his mother, Cynthia, says, “Fear is never something I’d put in my son’s backpack.” He was accepted on the Summit Climb team two days before it closed admissions.
The serendipitous nature of Kenny’s adventures in South Asia, including the Everest climb doesn’t surprise Rajpal or Jacob McGee, a Marine veteran and president of Northeastern’s Student Veterans Association.
“He’s that kind of a free spirit,” Rajpal says.
“He’s like the man in the Dos Equis commercial, ‘The most interesting man in the world,’” McGee says.
It also wouldn’t shock them to hear that Kenny led his climbing team in a couple of yoga sessions as well as meditation and breathwork.
“At Northeastern, he soon became a student leader in many of our different initiatives, including our daily mindfulness and yoga sessions and the mindfulness and wellness retreat, where we take 30 students to the Providence Zen Center every fall and immerse them in different wellness practices,” Rajpal says. “He’s really grown into a mindfulness leader.”
McGee says that Kenny can often be found in the veterans lounge, talking and listening to his fellow veterans, many of whom also experience chronic health problems related to their military service.
With his commitment to fitness and clean living, Kenny is an inspiration — but never a spoilsport, McGee says.
To go from being practically bed-bound to climbing Everest, “maintaining strength was paramount,” Kenny says. “A huge part of that for me was the meditative practices, the breath work that I learned in my yoga teacher training was actually instrumental.”
The expedition took nearly two months and involved the mountaineers’ familiar routine of reaching Everest base camp at 17,000 feet and traveling up and down between base camp and progressively higher camps to acclimate to lower oxygen levels before the final push to the summit.
“I was doing breath work on the mountain to try to regulate and to try to increase my efficiency of oxygenation as well,” Kenny says.
The late May weather was clear and beautiful, but like other teams using the South Col route, Kenny’s group of five sherpas and five climber clients had to cross the unstable and deadly Khumbu Icefall glacier field between base camp and camp one.
“The sherpas would say, ‘Bistari, bistari,’ which is slowly, slowly. Just one step, one step at a time. And that kind of mantra really stuck,” Kenny says.
Once they left camp four on summit day, they witnessed the frozen bodies of climbers who’d perished along the way.
“It was very surreal, very grounding, and makes the gravity of what we’re going through a bit deeper,” Kenny says.
Choosing to climb at the end of the weather window, the team did not have to wait in line for a chance to take in the view from the world’s highest peak, where oxygen levels are only 33% of what they were at sea level.
“It was the full moon and clear skies and not another soul on the mountain except for us. We had about 30 minutes on the summit to just sit there.”
That’s when the mask came off, for just a moment or so, so that Kenny could use his breathwork training to take it all in without feeling dizzy or hypoxic.
“I felt, ‘Wow, I’ve really come so far.’ I did overcome a lot of stuff. Through yoga, through spiritual connection and then coming together at this literal summit, it felt I had come from such a deep, dark place to such a high, beautiful one.”
Back at Northeastern, Kenny continues in his studies with the goal of becoming a clinical psychiatrist or Ph.D. researcher, with a focus on using science-backed yoga, meditation and other modalities to improve brain and emotional health.
Kenny also continues to lead free yoga and meditation classes on the Boston campus and is in the process of obtaining 501 c3 status for a nonprofit he founded, Infinite Initiatives, that will bring mindfulness techniques to the homeless, elderly and disabled.
“It’s not to say that yoga is a cure all for anyone experiencing medical conditions,” Kenny says.
“It is something that’s been invaluable for me in regaining the capacity to move that I had severely lost in a lot of ways. So I’m very grateful for that,” he says.
“A lot of the credit for my spiritual metamorphosis is the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue and Service. When I separated from my girlfriend and went into this introspective journey I found so much community there.
“The trail unfolded in front of me,” Kenny says. “And I just trusted and followed along.”