Matthew Sanford is a nationally recognized yoga teacher, an accomplished public speaker, the critically acclaimed author of Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (Rodale: 2006), the founder of a non-profit, and a leading voice in the integrative health movement who has inspired and enhanced the lives of thousands. Matthew was recognized as a national hero in 2008, winning the Volvo-for-Life Award in the Quality of Life category. He is a pioneer in adapting yoga for people living with disabilities and won both a Karma Yoga Award from the Yoga Journal and a Judd Jacobson Memorial Award for this work. Matthew’s non-profit, Mind Body Solutions, is dedicated to helping people transform trauma, loss and disability into hope and potential, which includes a growing initiative for veterans. www.matthewsanford.com or www.mindbodysolutions-mn.org

Matthew Sanford--

The year was 1978. It seemed like an innocent late November day – thirty-one degrees and misting – and the unthinkable happened to my family. Our car skidded off an overpass and tumbled down a steep embankment. As a thirteen year-old boy, I opened my eyes three and a half days later to the news that my father and sister were dead and I was permanently paralyzed for the chest down.

After waking from the coma, then twelve months of hospitals and rehab, I left my childhood behind and began a new life. The doctors led me to ignore my lower body, to focus only on what was left. I would become a powerful upper torso and willfully drag my paralyzed body through life. For twelve years, I did this. I graduated from high school, from college, and even from graduate school – but something was missing. It was my body. I was a fun-loving, athletic little boy who loved hanging up-side down and climbing trees. Being a floating upper torso wasn’t enough. I needed to find my body again; I needed to reconnect with that thirteen year-old boy. I started yoga at age twenty-five and I have been practicing ever since. Not only have I found more of my body than I ever dreamed possible, I am now in a position to help countless others heal in unexpected ways. I have had a hard life – the car accident was only the beginning…but everyone has a hard life, everyone has losses.

In the thirty years since, I have become an author, yoga teacher, and founder of a non-profit. I wrote Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (Rodale: 2006) not to tell a story of overcoming disability, but rather to bring the reader intimately inside the importance of the mind-body relationship. I want readers to connect with that innocent thirteen year-old boy. I want them to connect with their own innocence and begin their own journey of transformation.

Through a page-turning story, Waking helps people realize the vital importance that their mind-body relationship plays in their lives. Everyone is leaving his or her body – everyone is aging. The lifelong journey of that thirteen-year-old boy to find new life within his paralysis becomes an archetype for everyone’s journey. Through yoga he wakes to subtler levels of sensation within his mind-body relationship. He realizes that the sensation of his paralysis is not an obstacle to overcome, but a teacher of what it means to experience the hum of life without direct control over it. He wakes to a new kind of freedom, a different kind of hope.

My work with yoga, paralysis and disability has led to practical insights about how to live in our bodies. I believe that mind-body integration is not just a personal health strategy. I believe it is a movement of consciousness that can change the world. I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate. When we fully inhabit our bodies, we are more intimately connected to the world around us. We treat it differently, more gently, and with greater wonder and awe. We all have an inner capacity for survival, grace, acceptance and healing. Believe me; healing is possible, even when curing is not.

We are creatures who love stories. We have been trading stories around the campfire for millions of years. It is stories that shift consciousness, that inspire us to action. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be. I offer my personal story of waking because we need stories of transformation – now more than ever. My hope is to inspire readers to explore their own stories, their own lives, and thereby help transform the world.

Consciousness: An Awareness of Self

Turning The Nation Around-- From The Bottom Up

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