Adventure Inward

Failure, inspiration, and mindfulness got mountain climber Georgina Miranda to the top of Mount Everest and beyond.

BY STEPHANIE DOMET

“A man cannot step into the same river twice: The river is different, and so is the man.” So taught the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. But he didn’t say anything about women and mountaintops, so when mountain climber Georgina Miranda found herself just a few hours from Everest’s peak in 2013, an earlier attempt to summit was very much on her mind.

“I got sick at the exact same place, the exact same elevation altitude, almost to the spot,” she remembers. Miranda was once again in hypoxia, a condition that interferes with oxygen absorption and had, in 2011, caused her to abandon her bid for the peak. “Think of somebody having an anxiety attack. Hypoxia is the same, you can’t process oxygen, you can’t breathe. The more you get focused on it, it just agitates it.”

But at least half of Heraclitus’s assertion rang true for Miranda. She was not the same woman she’d been in 2011—and she was suddenly reminded of that by an Indian mountain guide.

Into Thin Air

“I will never understand how this man recognized me through my oxygen mask, in my down suit, in the middle of the night,” Miranda says.

“‘Georgina from San Francisco, what’s the problem?’ he said. I had befriended Satya in 2011, and he → recognized me when I took a break to change oxygen bottles.

On a hiking trip with friends in Oregon, Georgina Miranda pauses to take in the spectacular view.

“‘It’s the same thing happening again, I’m sick, it’s the same story,’ I said to him. But he said, ‘No, that happened to you in 2011. That’s not going to happen to you right now. That’s what happened in the past.’”

Satya encouraged Miranda to walk with him. “He said, ‘You’re only five or six hours from the top. Walk behind me for an hour and see if you feel better.’” Miranda did.

A busy night on the mountain meant they had to walk slowly, a perfect pace for a climber struggling with hypoxia. “All I could do was literally take one step and one breath.” Eventually the hypoxia passed, and Miranda was able to calm down and drop deeply into the moment. Surrounded by a sea of mountains, one peak in particular stood out. “A lot of people were climbing that peak that night,” she remembers, and as she gazed through the darkness, she saw “all these little lights going up that peak, and it put everything in perspective—here are all of these people pursuing their dreams. I felt part of something so much bigger.”

That spirit-lifter was quickly followed by another and another. “The sunrise on any mountain is really special but especially on a summit day,” she says. “You’re freezing, even when the sun comes up, but it changes everything, your mood, everything— you start to see the orange glow on the horizon and it’s the most spiritual moment I’ve ever had in my life. I just felt one with everything.”

And when she finally summited Everest, she found stillness amid the effort. “You’re never totally at rest, but there was lots of underlying peace. I was taking it all in.” Miranda was struck not only by the incredible scenery, but also by the climbers who summited alongside her. “Some had satellite phones, and they were calling their families and the emotion—seeing other people reach their dreams. It was pretty special.”

Above: Georgina Miranda exploring the Pyrenees mountain range in Spain, 2016: “Any time in nature is a gift.”

Above right: Balancing in Tree pose, in Bali, 2017. While she began doing yoga as cross-training, Miranda later found it was a source of profound healing from burnout: “It’s my daily opportunity to connect with myself, and it teaches me the art of being vs. doing… It’s no longer exercise, just medicine for my mind and soul.”

Below right: When Miranda successfully reached Everest’s peak in 2013, she was elevated not only by the altitude, but also by her mission to raise awareness and funds around gender-based violence and climate change.

Miranda notes she would not have stood atop Mount Everest without two things: her earlier failure to summit, and the mindfulness practice she found in the wake of that failure.

And it wasn’t just that failure. Miranda’s marriage had ended in 2008. When that fell apart, she had already been working for more than a year toward achieving an Explorers Grand Slam—summiting the world’s highest peaks on all six continents— as a way to raise money to support the International Medical Corps, and the work they were doing with women and children who’d survived gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It wasn’t just her own dream dying on that mountainside. It was the weight of what she’d promised International Medical Corps, as well. “I felt like shit. I let everybody down.”

In the months after that failed attempt on Everest, more pieces of Miranda’s life fell apart: A person she’d been dating broke up with her, and she was laid off from her job. →

In summer 2019, Miranda completed the Slovenian Mountain Trail, which was a two-month solo journey: “Sometimes I think the world is not ready for us. Us wild women. Then I remember it doesn’t matter, we pave our own way.”

In 2006, long before her first Everest attempt, Miranda had discovered yoga and mindfulness, and used them to train for the climb. Now, in looking for strength and healing, she found herself leaning in to her practice.

Breath Becomes Her

“To do any climbing, you learn breathwork, but you learn it from a mountaineering standpoint. They don’t teach it to you for your soul, or your spirituality or for self-awareness. They teach you breathwork so that you can climb a mountain and deal with the altitude,” she says.

And through yoga she’d been exposed to the idea of meditation, though she’d often spend her time in savasana at the end of a yoga class evaluating her own performance, or thinking about what the rest of the day held.

“My real practice of mindfulness didn’t come until after that climb. It was coming home and realizing that I couldn’t deal with the failure, I couldn’t process the emotions.”

And so Miranda began to look for ways to push back the feeling of failure that was permeating her life. She had to reckon with the way she had approached mindfulness before, and make a choice to try something different this time.

“When you’re going through something terrible, you use mindfulness, and then life gets a little better, and you’re like, OK, I’m good. But no! You’re still a hot mess. Go back!”

Eventually, she developed a daily practice of meditation and yoga— “My practice had actually formed into a practice versus something I just did every once in a while”—and in so doing, found a way not only forward, but also back up Everest.

“Mindfulness was what helped me have a successful expedition in 2013, because I know my mind would have got the best of me that night,” despite Satya’s best efforts. But Miranda points to the chicken-eggness of her journey: “I don’t think I would have been pushed to take the mindfulness practice so seriously if I hadn’t been doing these extreme things.”

Today Miranda’s mindfulness, breathing, and meditation practices have deepened to become a daily way of life—she chooses time in nature above anything else, and brings what she learned on Everest to her work as a coach, social entrepreneur, and public speaker. “I have a passion to wake people up, whatever that means to them. If you’re numb, you have to find something to snap you out of it, at least to start that journey back to yourself.” On Everest, being fully present is vital. “You have to be, because if you aren’t, you could trip and fall and that’s your last day. If you applied those same principles to everyday living, you would live completely differently.”

For now, Miranda is looking forward to three remaining expeditions in her Explorer Grand Slam attempt—to Antarctica, where she’ll ski the last degree to the South Pole and climb Mount Vinson; to the island of New Guinea, to summit Puncak Jaya (also known as the Carstensz Pyramid); and the North Pole last-degree ski. A lesson she’ll take with her on those excursions is one she’s had ample opportunities to encounter, including that night on Everest in 2013, when Satya encouraged her to keep her focus on the present. She’s learned to be less fixated on the summit—which is a funny outcome for a mountain climber.

For goal-oriented mountaineers, the summit is the thing. But then, she says, “That’s how most climbers die, they get so fixated on the idea that they must summit, but getting up is only half the journey. Then you have to get down. Most accidents happen on the way down. People don’t listen to their body.”

But mindfulness helps, she’s learned—for those climbing mountains, or just climbing their daily list of tasks to be done.

“Our mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. If you can learn to tame your mind, you can learn to live fully in the present moment. And then you will have the most successful life, because you’ll find that internal happiness. It will stop this crazy hunt for joy or happiness or anything outside of yourself and you’ll realize it’s always been inside you.” ●

About The Author

While there’s no roadmap to wisdom, there is a path to greater perspective, insight, and emotional freedom. Founding editor Barry Boyce calls on his four decades of practice to take us on the journey.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CAROLE HÉNAFF

In my experience most people who start practicing meditation find it, at first, to be an unusual or unnatural experience. Asked to sit still and pay attention to our breath repeatedly, most of us will formulate some version of the thought,

“Why would I do this?” and after a little while, “Why would I keep doing this?”

It feels like an artificial, contrived activity.

“I don’t want to do this anymore. What’s the point? I could be doing something productive, or enjoyable. On top of it, I’m no good at this. I can’t do it.”

If it were a TV show, we would change the channel; a conversation at a party, we would move along; a concert, we would leave at the intermission, and maybe never buy a ticket for the band or orchestra or singer again; a website, we would bounce. I have indeed seen people leap up very early in the proceedings and leave for good. One guy stormed out, proclaiming,

“This shit is stooopid.”

In point of fact, we are not wrong about the strangeness. The standard instruction for mindfulness meditation is artificial. It’s an artifice, a technique to gradually—or possibly in a sudden flash—bring us down into where we are. Paying attention to our breath is pointless and unproductive, and yet that is the very point.

We need to be tricked into not escaping from where we are. We like to have tasks, so when given the task of continually anchoring our attention to something very simple, we want to get it right, but what the simple meditation instructions really do is reveal to us our repeated desire to escape where we are—thinking that the grass is indeed greener somewhere other than where our body and mind are at present.

As we notice how trying it can be to pay attention to the simplicity of the moment and how unceasing our stream of thoughts is, we come to see the contrast between being lost in thought and being fully engaged with where we are and what we’re doing and feeling. We may think it’s a battle between the breath and our thoughts, but that’s a battle we will never win. Seeing the contrast is the point, so we stop being so concerned about all these thoughts. It takes some of the seriousness out of them when they become like passing clouds.

Over time, the focus on meditation technique can indeed recede a bit, and when we practice meditation, we develop a sense of presence that doesn’t need quite so much maintenance. But the straightforward technique is always there to fall back on in times of great stress and distraction—even crisis.

One of the early (and ever-present) challenges in practicing meditation is the very human characteristic of having goals. Having an aim and a purpose is essential to most everything in life. If you set out on a trip, you need a destination. When you make a meal, you have a plan for how it’s going to turn out. If you’re in business, you want the business to succeed, so you have lots of goals.

But goals become very tricky on the path of meditation. I use the word path, because it is an unfolding journey, but if you try too hard to be the boss of where you’re going, with too many expectations, the road will be rockier. It’s like trying to control the destiny of a child or a partner. There are simply too many causes and conditions determining what happens next. The path of meditation, the arc as some say, is not a straight line. It’s about lots of ups and downs, ins and outs.

The path of meditation rewards patience, and a willingness to adapt to what emerges next, and to be honest with oneself when hard truths surface. Meditation is not something that occurs outside of life circumstances (pain, illness, financial difficulties, loss, etc.). On the contrary, by asking us not to escape from where we are, meditation plunges us straight into the vicissitudes of real life, along with any baggage we may be carrying. So much for the primrose path of mindfulness. →

The Heart Calls to You

What will inevitably come to the fore as we spend more and more time sitting with ourselves—becoming familiar with the texture of our mind and what lurks within—is emotion. In contrast to a simple perception (of heat or light, say) or an abstract thought (like, There goes a cat), emotion carries lots of energy and color. It manifests throughout the body and it can repeat itself, taking the shape of a mood. What begins as anger can develop into a highly irritable mood state. In the same way, a moment of happiness can blossom into a cheery mood. (If our moods are intensely anxious or persistently dark, we may need to seek clinical treatment.)

I have known no meditator who has stuck with the practice for whom the emotional landscape has not become an area of intense interest and curiosity. It’s not something you sit around idly thinking about, though, or wring your hands over. It’s something you sit with, time and again, seeing up close the life cycle of an emotion. You are getting to know yourself now in a very intimate way. The bit of stability gained from basic attention practice (usually anchoring on the breath) allows you to probe more courageously into your emotional terrain. When you find it too intense, you can see the need to fall back on cultivating your attention more. And if you do so, you may be able to probe further. It becomes a virtuous circle, more attention leading to deeper probing to more attention, and so on. We alternate resting and probing.

The fruits of meditation emerge as byproducts, while you’re not looking. If you try with great pressure to calm yourself and even to be kinder to yourself and you push and push, your goal will likely elude you. It’s as if you are a gardener trying to will a tomato into existence. If you water the plant, and attend to enriching the soil, and you’re fortunate enough to get enough sun, the fruit will emerge. Voilà! One day, you are suddenly picking ripe tomatoes. In meditation, it may be someone else who first notices that you’re a little less stressed, that you are reacting less dramatically to bad circumstances. Did you make that happen? It emerged from just being there, which quietly leads to less focus on me, me, me. That’s the real mark of progress, the fruit, the beneficial byproduct: less me.

The notion of less me raises an inevitable— and highly reasonable—set of questions, such as does this mean utterly lacking in personality, a big part of what makes life fun? Or, if there’s less me, how do I figure out how to take care of myself? What about my passions, wishes, desires—do these all go by the wayside?

Short answer to all these questions: No.

It is devilishly hard to describe, and best understood as a way of being that accrues over time with experience. It means less firmly gripping to the part of ourselves that constantly seeks security and attention, rather than resting in confidence and faith that life is ultimately workable and that we are OK as we are. Less take, more give. Less self-serious, more carefree. More heart, less head. Your pain and your plight is not of paramount importance. Everyone’s pain is of paramount importance. →