Renowned yoga instructor Matthew Sanford spun his wheelchair deftly around to face the yogis enrolled in his eight-hour intensive Thursday at the Santa Barbara Yoga Center, a prelude to his keynote address at the center’s Accessible Yoga Conference this weekend. “It turns out one existential truth is that you are rising and falling, falling and rising every day,” he advised.
Sanford’s memoir Waking details his long path to healing after he was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident that killed his father and sister. The heartbreaking story culminates in Sanford’s discovery of yoga as a powerful tool for mental and physical healing, and his resolve to practice despite any physical barrier. Yoga offered newfound bodily connections that began to make his broken body feel whole. “Hearts are transcendent,” he writes of his emotional journey. “They do not break, minds do.”
About an hour into the class, Sanford had an assistant place a folding chair in the center of the room, where students quickly gathered to watch the demonstration. His eyes scanned the room in search of a puppet to perform the exercise. That’s me he’s pointing to, I realized. Suddenly I regretted my minutes-earlier admission to practicing yoga before — that’s what I get for trying to take my notes in tree pose, I guess.