Columbine survivor turns pain into healing with Hero’s Journey yoga class

As yoga class begins, students in a RiNo studio are wearing headphones so they can hear new-age music accompanying the soothing voice of instructor Andrew Fraser, who begins by setting the mood at the Hero's Journey yoga class he teaches.

"There was a time before technology in which we simply sat around a fire and connected with one another via these stories — talking about the amazing accomplishments, the conquests, the discoveries over the next hill — and we passed this generational knowledge on to one another," he said. "So tonight as we flow, I'll be sharing a story, born out of my own struggle, but one with which everyone should be able to find themselves."

His is quite a story. He was a junior at Columbine in 1999 when the shootings occurred. Three of the slain students lived in his neighborhood, just a couple blocks from the school. Not long after, in short order, his best friend died by suicide, a cousin died and an uncle also took his own life.

Feeling surrounded by death, Fraser went through a "dark night of the soul," he said. First, he isolated emotionally, growing averse to letting others get close — lest he lose them, too — and would simply "numb out." Later he turned to extreme sports, including wingsuit flying off high mountains in Europe — exploits that earned him a place in "Extreme Sports: Beyond Human Limits," an exhibition currently on display at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

At Movement Climbing + Fitness, where Fraser is managing director, he found an avenue to share his story: the yoga studio. Most of the classes he teaches are straightforward yoga, but a couple times a year, he leads the Hero's Journey class.

"As companions to the joy, discovery and connection I associated with life, I also came to know pain, hardship and heartache," he said in a Hero's Journey class in October, punctuating his narrative with yoga instruction. "Each successive blow that dropped me to my knees made me further question whether I was really equipped to handle this life … Lower knees to the earth, hero pose … Over the years, I experienced the cruelties of mankind and began to harden myself to them, to guard the remaining warmth of my heart in the cold world outside."

Provided by Andrew Fraser

Andrew Fraser, center, highlining in Poudre Canyon.

In the Hero's Journey, he doesn't mention Columbine or the extreme adventures he took up to start feeling again, relating his story as vague allegory instead. But in an interview before class, he explained how he became an "adventure seeker" — how skydiving, wingsuit flying, BASE jumping, highlining and rock climbing helped him heal from the loss experienced when he was young.

"Each one of these instances was a real gut blow as far as my ability to withstand pain and the loss of people really close to me," Fraser said. "I felt like I was running out of tears. My ducts ran dry, and my response to any subsequent news of a school shooting or a loss of somebody close was to shut down. That may have been an emotional defense mechanism, but I came to a point after experiencing so much pain, so much grief, so much loss, all I knew to do was not to feel it."

He wandered the world for seven years, making friends but keeping relationships superficial. He discovered that, by risking his life, he could begin to live again. Fear, he says, became "like the North Star of my navigation."

"Being totally present with life and coming back totally grateful from the experience, it tended to be the more dangerous activities that actually provided that," Fraser said. "I couldn't get it just by taking a walk in the park or kicking a soccer ball. But if I was walking the knife-edge of a fourteener in the Rockies, I could feel the brush of death on my cheek as the wind blows, and I knew a misstep was going to cause my fatal tumble."

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

Andrew Fraser, managing director at Movement Climbing + Fitness, is pictured on Nov. 20, 2019.

In 2016, he donned a wingsuit — made of nylon with fabric between the legs and from wrists to hips, "kind of like flying an inflatable sleeping bag in the sky," as he puts it — and flew off the 3,000-foot face of Monte Brento in Italy. Then he went to one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, Switzerland's Eiger, which is so malevolent-looking, its name means "ogre" in German. He climbed two-thirds of the way up, via the northwest ridge, and jumped off the notorious North Face. After a brief free fall, the wingsuit carried him away from the mountain on a glide of 30-40 seconds before he deployed a parachute and landed in an alpine pasture.

"The Eiger was my whale," Fraser said. "I had it on my vision board for five years."

His mother, Pam Fraser, wonders where he got the "crazy gene, if there is one," she said, and calls him an enigma.

"I go to his classes, I'm thinking, 'Who are you? Where did you come from?'" she said. "He's very thoughtful, unusually so. He's very deep. How does that jibe with being an extreme sports person? I don't know. He just continues to look for new and different ways to impact the world. He wants to change the world."

People who hear about Fraser's skydiving or wingsuit-flying often accuse him of being an adrenaline junkie or having a death wish, he says.

"I have to constantly debunk that and say, in fact, I'm not. I'm a yoga instructor," Fraser said. "I sit on my meditation cushion every morning. I'm a very grounded dude. I'm not screaming 'Anarchy!' and setting fire to couches on the weekends. I'm a dude that's got my head on my shoulders."

Provided by Andrew Fraser

Andrew Fraser at the Eiger in Switzerland.