I’ve been getting acquainted with the breath for a long time. I encountered it in a new way as a budding mountain athlete 13 years ago, noticing as I took my first steps on a mountain how the air grew thin and scarce the higher the altitude. When I deepened into my practices of mindfulness and yoga, I discovered that a simple breath could bring an immediate sense of renewal when nothing else could. And again, as I ascended peaks like Mount Everest, I experienced how my breath could ground and center me while on the boundaries between life and death. I thought that I knew my breath pretty well—and I did. But none of this could fully prepare me for last January, when I found myself in an emergency room, gasping for any breath at all.
After my oxygen levels dropped to a life-threatening low, and finding myself unable to breathe on my own, I was rushed to a hospital in Portugal, where I was living at the time. I spent 24 hours in the ER as doctors tried to determine what was wrong with me and to stabilize me and my breathing. The first…
