The Courage to Feel | iHanuman

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The Courage to Feel

The Courage to Feel, Matthew Sanford on Yoga, Disability, and Mending the Mind - Body Relationship
By Sara Avant Stover
On a cold and misty Sunday afternoon in 1978 Matthew Sanford and his family were driving home from a Thanksgiving weekend in Kansas City, Missouri. Matthew, then thirteen, was asleep in the backseat when their car crossed a bridge, skidded on a patch of ice, and toppled down a steep embankment. Three and half days later, he woke up from a coma to learn that his life as he had known it was over. Both his father and sister were dead and he was paralyzed from the chest down.

The days and years that followed became a bumpy journey of healing. Ultimately it was Yoga that led him to re-connect the vast schism that this trauma cast between his body and mind. Now a Yoga teacher, motivational speaker, author of Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, and founder of the non-profit organization, Mind Body Solutions, Sanford teaches audiences of all abilities on the importance of connecting to one's body.
Over lunch at a sidewalk café in Boulder, Colorado, Matthew shared his insights on how we can enter more deeply into yoga and the gift of simply feeling alive.
Fit Yoga: Being paralyzed from the chest down and navigating through life in a wheelchair, your approach to yoga is non-conventional, to say the least.  Can you tell  us more about it?
Matthew Sanford: There are many, many paths to yoga.  There are many ways to achieve a realization, movement,  or flow with prana (or life force). What you experience with me when I'm teaching is that it's possible for prana to move without  muscular action.

That's a mind- bender for a student of vinyasa (or flow) yoga, where the practice is so muscle-oriented.  Sure, when you couple the muscle connection with the movement, breath, and rhythm of vinyasa yoga, you end up with a similar thing to what I am teaching and experiencing But what if you're like me and that's just not possible?

As yoga has to grow and will grow, we need to have openings, or portals, for all different abilities. And that's part of what my story and my approach illuminate.

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