Who is Matthew Sanford - Paraplegic Yoga Teacher

Guided by his yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich, Matthew began to explore what it truly means to live in a body, and discovered new meaning and purpose in the "distance" between mind and body.

This excerpt is taken from the transcript of The Body's Grace on NPR's "Speaking of Faith:

"One of the big healing things for me was to recognize that my paralyzed body didn't stop talking to my mind. It changed its voice. It went to a more subtle whisper that doesn't have as much clarity. It's sweeter, it's quieter and it doesn't as quickly react. I try to describe it as energetic presence. Like if you were to squeeze my ankle, it would feel like you're squeezing a tube of toothpaste, I can feel the surge up my body through my spine.

Ms. Tippett: But you feel it as energy rather than as nerve endings.

Mr. Sanford: Right. It's not as loud. It's not as crisp. For me, it's also very auditory, and I don't know if that is because I'm just auditory, like that's how my brain's wired, or, you know, I don't know if I were more a visual person, but I kind of, I inwardly listen and hear. I pay attention and I can feel these changes....."

Matthew Sanford brings this awareness of the body-mind connection into his teaching of yoga. He teaches to both able-bodied and disabled yoga students in a way that can help everyone understand the importance of the mind-body relationship.

Even though Matthew can't do most of the poses that his able-bodied students can do, he knows how the poses work in the body, and with his unique understanding of the connection between body and mind he can guide his students deeper into their poses by teaching them to pay attention to their body's subtler sensations.

Matthew Sanford considers himself lucky in that the first yoga teacher he encountered was an Iyengar Yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich.

Iyengar Yoga focuses on developing a heightened awareness of alignment, clarity, and precision in the practice of the yoga poses, making this practice a good fit for people with disabilities. The work in each pose can become more and more subtle as practitioners are able to focus their attention more and more fully within the pose.

As Matthew Sanford says, "This is essential for me as a student living with a disability because I will only gain full access to a limited number of asanas [yoga poses].....I have to learn more from the experience of less. I also have to learn asanas from both the "inside-out" and from the "outside-in". Iyengar yoga is the only yoga I have encountered that makes this possible "(from Iyengar Yoga and Paralysis, in Yoga Rahasya, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2007, pp. 62 - 66)

Iyengar Yoga is also useful for anyone with disabilities (and many of us have the more minor disabilities of weakness or stiffness in different parts of the body) because of its use of props. Props such as blankets, straps, chairs, benches, or even walls, can help us move into and stay in poses with more integrity, so we can start to experience more clearly what is really going on in the body and mind as we stay in the poses.

In the same Yoga Rahasya article, Matthew ends by saying, "I live in a different mind-body relationship than an ordinary yoga student. The more I practice, the more I explore, the more I encounter the profound genius of Sri B.K.S. Iyengar. He has left a trail even for someone like me. When I hear people criticize Iyengar yoga for being a strictly physical practice, I smile and shake my head because I am living proof that they are mistaken. I also know to whom I am grateful."