Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  As I move into this pose, something clicks or snaps into place or becomes manifest. I experience a new ding. I suddenly feel a tangible sense of my whole body—inside and out, paralyzed and unparalyzed. I am stunned.

  “Jo, this feels different, something is different. I can feel where the pose goes, the unity between the actions. I can feel it actually moving,” I gasp. “The abdomen hits back and up, and the straight-leg thigh pushes into the floor … right?”

  “Yes.” She says, breaking a smile.

  “Then the … energy”—I struggle for words—“moves out through the heel.”

  “Well actually, the physical action is to hit down with the thigh and stretch out through the heel,” she says, her tone informative.

  “… as the spine and chest lift in opposition,” I chirp in. My mind is racing. How am I feeling this? How is this possible? I am perplexed, but the moment is mine. My entire body is working in concert. It has been a long time—some thirteen years. My lost body and my potential body have joined in this pose. My past, my present, and my future are touching. Although I am choking with grief, I am also an excitable boy. I have worked so hard to make it back to this moment.

  Jo and I do not say much. It is too big, too fresh, and not to be spoiled. Silence—the lamp’s light, the darkness outside the window, our reflections in the glass, my creaking house. My world has changed its shape tonight. A new level of me is coming alive. I am overwhelmed with the feeling that my body has been waiting for me to stop neglecting it, waiting for me to quiet down and listen. My heart is breaking. I feel grateful.

  This was a simple but radical breakthrough. Jo and I discovered that alignment and precision increase mind-body integration regardless of paralysis. The mind is not strictly confined to a neurophysiological connection with the body. If I listen inwardly to my whole experience (both my mind’s and my body’s), my mind can feel into my legs.

  This is one of those truths that is easy to pass by, like the existence of dinosaurs. But in fact, it should dumbfound us—that, on some level, something as simple as the more precise distribution of gravity can transcend the limits set by a dysfunctional spinal cord. When I move from a slumped position to a more aligned one, my mind becomes more present in my thighs and feet. This happens despite my paralysis. It is simply a matter of learning to listen to a different level of presence, to realizing that the silence within my paralysis is not loss. In fact, it is both awake and alive.

  To be sure, I do not experience the same thing as most people when my mind connects within my paralyzed body. For example, as my chest lifts while in a sitting position, I cannot go on to physically press down through my heels and slightly extend my toes. I do not have the luxury of confirming my presence through flexing muscles. And yet, I still experience a level of integration. I gain some form of energetic awareness—a tingling, a feeling of movement, not outward but inward, a sense of hum. It is a form of presence, and it subtly connects my mind to my body.

  This level of energetic sensation is what guides my teaching of yoga all these years later. I can teach a walking person the subtleties of a standing pose, for example, because of my energetic experience. I can “feel” the pose, feel how the physical instructions are intended to amplify, guide, and direct the flow of energy. When I teach, I give instructions and then I observe not just whether the physical actions are occurring, but also whether the intended energetic release is happening through the student’s mind-body relationship. If the energy of the pose is not flowing correctly, I can often adjust the student and enhance his or her experience.

  That I can teach walking students reveals something miraculous about yoga and yogis of the past. These yogis made a stunning discovery about the human metaphysic. They uncovered an energetic level of our experience and combined it with disciplined physical action. They literally made it possible for “more” of each of us to manifest Here. Perhaps most important, they were able to pass this knowledge down through generations.

  My ability to sense this energetic level has greatly increased with thirteen years of yoga practice. Now, for example, if I receive acupuncture, I can often sense the changes in my energetic meridians. The needles make energy connections between different parts of my body, and my mind can often track them, even amplify them. What were once labeled “phantom feelings” are somehow related to time-tested Chinese medical practices.

  The energetic realization I experienced in maha mudra affects how Jo teaches me. Rather than worry about maximizing the number of poses I can do, she shows me the general principles within the poses, how they actually work. For example, poses are always moving in at least two directions, usually opposite ones. Jo teaches me that there is a logic to a yoga pose, a structured way that it creates itself. This is one of the gems revealed within the Iyengar method—by emphasizing alignment and precision, poses virtually write themselves.

  Up until this point, Jo and I had unknowingly assumed that my paralyzed body would be capable only of the physical outline of the poses. The hope was that I would at least derive some therapeutic benefit. For example, the soles of my feet can be made to touch each other if I use my arms to make it so. This position stretches the groin and lower abdomen and thus increases blood flow to the area—a good thing. What we didn’t realize was that, once my feet were in this position and if I really paid attention, I could feel that pressing my heels together changed the awareness in my lower abdomen. This created an inner sensation of my knees moving toward the floor, which, in turn, made my lower abdominal muscles feel like they were lifting. Once this connection was felt, I could feel the sense of direction within a pose. It then became something that I could work on, something I could practice.

  This has a wonderful effect. It means that I can follow the energetic flow of a pose, which allows me to see and feel the corresponding physical movements. This helps me to feel the heart of yoga despite my limited access to its physical movements. I can feel a pose’s inner workings, its focus. This, in turn, allows poses, or modified versions of them, to organically arise out of the body I have, not the body everyone else has. The principles of yoga, its logic, hold for my body in the same way as for anyone else’s. Its outer expression just looks different. The result is that I start to realize new ways to feel my body, to gain presence, not on the outside but on the inside. I begin to feel a different kind of life.

  Jo and I part on the evening of sharing my experience in maha mudra, knowing that much more is possible. My entire body will be able to work on both the inside and the outside of the poses. As my paralyzed body gains strength and resilience, as my confidence in it increases, my yoga will expand to limitless places—a promise that yoga extends to any of its practitioners.

  On a practical level, what begins is an acceleration of my study. In addition to Jo’s visits to Santa Barbara, I travel to San Diego for one long weekend a month. A four-hour drive, a stay in a cheap motel, and an intensive focus on yoga. Luckily, Jo’s family accepts me into their lives—her husband, Mike, her youngest son, Mylo, even her two older kids, Michelle and Skip, who live on their own. I do everything but sleep in their house. Mike, a wonderful cook, woodworker, and yoga teacher, feeds me and keeps me light. Mylo, the little brother I never had, I tease relentlessly—a tall order for a nine-year-old to accept. As a group, we share downtime, between time, drive time, even difficult time. I am adopted as a yoga student, a friend, and an extension of the family.

  Hour after hour, Jo and I sit on her living room floor and work. Our agenda is to not have an agenda. We immerse ourselves in yoga and follow whatever comes. Before long, I am trying a new pose in a new way, and with a sense of my entire body that I never believed possible. Signpost after signpost passes behind us. Our dynamic seems to defy description. We feel part of an emerging secret, something unexplainable. Energy is moving through my paralyzed body, some sort of awareness, some sort of new life. Somehow, I can guide it, intend it, become part of it. Somehow, Jo can see it in me, feel it, focus it wi
th her instruction. She can tell when I am not working to extend through my left leg, when my mind is only making it to my knees, or when I have forgotten my feet. She confirms what I am experiencing. I am learning to listen within my paralyzed body to a level I never knew existed. Reality is actually being re-formed for my mind.

  What is happening? How is it possible? In maha mudra, how can I feel that the thigh hits down and the lumbar spine (lower back) lifts in opposition? First of all, both of these actions occur below my purported level of sensation, that is, below T4, my nipple line. Second, my muscles do not fire—they remain flaccid. Where is the sensation coming from? The answer is that it doesn’t matter—it is coming from the back of the elephant. When that thirteen-year-old boy came to believe that the sensations in his legs did not exist, he was convinced to ignore what was right in front of him—the feelings within his own body. It’s as if the monk was told by his teacher that the approaching elephant was imaginary and to pay no attention to it. Luckily, inward energetic sensation is more forgiving than an elephant’s foot.

  The mistake rested with the doctors. They worried that I would form a belief that conflicted with their implicit view of the potential for mind-body integration, that I would use the experience of sensation in my legs to believe that I might walk again. But there are many possibilities for healing within the mind-body relationship. There is healing other than healing to walk again.

  Still, I struggled to believe that I could actually feel the inner energetic sensations in maha mudra. When I look at my legs, when I consider what’s missing—voluntary movement, muscle tone, flexion—what is it that remains? Obviously, my legs are still physically present in the same way that a table is present. But what else? I do experience this new level of sensation, but it’s not like normal sensation. It is not immediately responsive; for example, when I pinch my leg, shock waves do not instantly invade my brain. The truth is that my legs are not very interested in what surrounds them, in the texture of my pants, in the softness of my socks. Instead, they present a hum, an energetic buzz. (Imagine the buzz you feel when you finally get into bed after an exhausting day.) It gets louder sometimes, tingles sometimes, even seems to change its “color” when my legs get cold. Moreover, this buzz is directly affected by the quality of my perception, by how well I listen. Meditative attention amplifies it to the point of exaggeration; an engaging social interaction pushes it into the distant background; a rock concert makes it disappear completely.

  And yet, this energetic buzz persists, fluctuates, moves, and spreads. It also reflects changes in my bodily state. For example, it becomes agitated if my bladder is too full, or if my bowels need emptying. It spikes during systemic pain, like when I have a high fever. More important for my yoga, this energetic awareness responds to my mind’s intent. It becomes louder when my physical body comes into greater alignment and is “darkened” in places within my body that my mind has unknowingly abandoned.

  When I look at my legs, when I truly listen, I hear what exists before movement. Through paralysis, the outer layer of my legs and torso have been stripped away. What remains is what’s present before I enter the world through effort and action, before I engage my will. I begin to perceive the history of my body as similar to the fate of an artichoke as we eat it. Green leaf after green leaf, thriving muscle after thriving muscle, is peeled away until nothing but the heart remains—a heart that presents itself first as silence.

  I received something in exchange for absorbing so much trauma at age thirteen. I experience a more direct contact with an inner presence of consciousness—the heart of the artichoke. Although my life has taken much away, it has also revealed a powerful insight.

  This healing story also helps me relate to yoga. A new beginning for anyone’s study of yoga is when the poses provide glimpses into what lies beneath their physical action. Often, it takes years of practice before this happens, before the poses present themselves as movements of energy, as an unfolding of presence. The yogi begins to see poses as expressions of this energy, not creators of it. This is what helps poses become more graceful, less strenuous, more nourishing—a heightened awareness of the energetic core of physical action. Most students’ path through hatha yoga, then, travels from the physical level to a more energetic level.

  My path is different. My paralysis, my life as an artichoke, gives me an early glimpse into this energetic level, the way the alignment of a particular pose creates an energetic resonance and thereby forms the whole. Once I intuit this, I attempt to trace this energetic core back into the physical and outward through my paralyzed body. In other words, I do yoga backwards. This phrase—“yoga backwards”—helps me to understand my process within yoga, helps me feel like I belong.

  In maha mudra, I begin to realize that the silence I encounter within my paralysis is the nexus within my mind-body relationship. The silence that helped me leave my body and protected me from pain in intensive care is the same silence that helps me energetically connect mind and body. The silence can both separate and integrate—a transforming realization. In my yoga practice, the practical effect is that my paralyzed body becomes one of my teachers, not something I prejudge as a hindrance. This is healing—the potential I feel in the world breaks wide open because my realization has moved inward.

  15

  Broken Yet Again

  In yoga, there are no accidents. Injuries are not the result of misfortune or bad luck. They almost always have a subtle place of origin, a harmless bad habit perhaps. But as the bad habit is repeated, it leads to still other bad habits—cracks appearing in a foundation. The mistake may be physical; it may be mental. It may develop quickly; it may take years. But always an injury can be traced to a failure in one’s practice. Always the body pays for this escalating lapse of consciousness.

  The energetic realization that I experienced in maha mudra set much in motion. I began to experience occasional flashbacks during my yoga practice. As I did more and more poses, especially twists and backbends, the energy trapped in my spine began to release. As this happened, I would revisit my traumatic past and, in particular, the accident scene. One day I might experience rushes of body fear—clammy sweats, shortness of breath, dizziness. On others, I might experience a full-fledged body memory—a feeling of falling, a collision with something, a jarring twist, the smell of grass. Although difficult in the moment, these experiences catalyzed a new sense of freedom. Finally, the trauma that had struck through my thirteen-year-old body was coming into my field of vision. I was surrounding it. It was no longer surrounding me.

  This period of time brought some amazing dreams. I met with my sister on a landing of glass stairs. It was the meeting she had promised in four years, except it had been five and a half. I guess ghosts are not good at time. She held me, and I cried and cried. I was finally coming back alive and she was leaving me. She went up the stairs, and I slid down.

  I also had an encounter with my near death. While sleeping one night, I awoke to a black presence floating just above my chest. It reached into me, grabbed my spine, and began to lift me off the bed. As it released me and flew out the window, I truly awoke, paralyzed with fear but thankful for the rising sun and the sounds of birds.

  Finally, I had a series of dreams in which I kept meeting a woman. I was attracted to her, but not sexually. Each time we met, she handed me a boy to hold, beginning first with a baby and then, with each successive dream, a slightly older boy. It slowly dawned on me that these boys were versions of me. She had been caring for them until I was ready. The car accident had taken my childhood and I was finally getting it back.

  This series of dreams culminated in a painful realization. The “she” in my dreams was also me—the caring, more nourishing part of me that was pushed aside when I was guided to willfully overcome my disability. For me, the integration of my mind and my body has meant realizing a deeper connection with the more vulnerable, feminine aspect of my consciousness. I suspect that the same might be true for a lot of us.


  But the energetic realization in maha mudra also began a mistake. Experiencing this new level of energetic presence was exciting, and it was easier to feel excited than to feel how I had mistreated the “she” within me. The result was that I fell back into the clutches of an old healing story. I set out to prove the realness of this energetic sensation rather than simply have it. The result was that the excitable boy in me became very willful in his yoga practice. My body paid the price.

  I repeated my rehabilitation’s mistake with the silence. Rather than simply feeling the silence that contains the depth of energetic perception, I treated it as an object for my will—I pushed when I needed to soften. The result was unintended violence. I know now that energetic realization both requires and creates the realization of nonviolence. Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way.

  I know the moment that my yoga practice passed over the threshold into violence. The pose was paschimottanasana (full-forward bend)—sit on the mat, legs straight in front of you; press the thighs downward, extend the spine upward; inhale, and, on an exhalation, reach down, clasp the wrist of one arm with the hand of the other and pull back against the soles of the feet; finally, rest the chin on the shins, just beyond the knees. Among a host of other things, this is an incredible stretch for the hamstrings.