Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  I started doing this pose every day for longer and longer periods of time. This is tricky because my paralyzed body gives less feedback than an ordinary one. My muscles do not scream with anguish. This makes it easier for me to unwisely push the limits of a stretch. Eventually, however, if I really overexert in a pose, my paralyzed body will give an autonomic nervous response—its own version of screaming muscles. For example, the skin on my legs might produce goose pimples, or I might feel an energetic tingling through my bladder, or my face might flush. But this level of response is subtle. With a little bit of will, these warnings can be ignored. And that was exactly what I did. I heard my body complaining but pushed on anyway. I wanted to hold the poses longer, get their benefits better … faster. I wanted to prove that my body was, in fact, awakening.

  One day I was showing some poses to my friend Kim. She too did yoga; it was something we shared. Because I was demonstrating, I did a particularly aggressive version of paschimottanasana, paying absolutely no attention to my body’s feedback. She giggled nervously and said, “Wow Matt, you do that pose awfully hard.” I was startled for an instant, paused, but then bristled with pride. This was the moment when I crossed the boundary.

  I continued doing all my poses in this fashion. Some of the outward results were remarkable. I was doing things that defied the imagination for a paralyzed body—arm balances, various ways of approaching a standing position, poses requiring very awkward leg positions, and on and on. My body was proving itself to be quite resilient.

  I was beginning to feel prideful about my body, like I had something to show. I consciously felt my whole body again when I was in a room full of people. When I talked emphatically, I could communicate with everything that I was, not just as a floating head and shoulders. My social presence became more powerful. In truth, such an effect happens for any yoga student. But for me, it was like fireworks. For the first time since the accident, I felt physically vibrant.

  My budding confidence, however, began to feed my ego. I wanted more poses of greater and greater difficulty. I wanted to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that something amazing was happening within me. My poses would be the physical evidence that no one could deny.

  The day of violence is June 15, 1991. June is notoriously gray and foggy in Santa Barbara. On a lucky day, the sun emerges and burns its way through the pressing cloud cover. I remember the precise day because as I get into my car that morning, I place my estimated-tax form on the dashboard—June 15. My plan is to mail it after I practice yoga in a nearby aikido dojo. (Bill and Geraldine, the owners of Aikido Center of Santa Barbara, are kind enough to let me practice in their dojo twice a week.)

  Somewhat to my chagrin, Geraldine insists on being present in the dojo while I practice. She and Bill have an office in the loft upstairs, and she catches up on the bookkeeping as I work. For the last six weeks or so, I have been working on padmasana (lotus pose). It is a seated pose in which the left foot is set on top of the right thigh near the hip, and the right foot is set on the left thigh near the hip. Although padmasana is a powerful meditation pose, it is also physically demanding. It requires flexible hips, ankles, and knees, none of which I have.

  On top of that, I am doing an advanced variation, one that I know now to be ill-advised. I am lying on my back in padmasana, legs in the air, pushing them toward the floor. The room is quiet, my breath is even, my arms are straining to push my legs away from my torso. Crack! A sound like a breaking branch echoes through the dojo. Everything collapses inward. My lower abdomen, my torso, my cheeks, even my skin feel pulled downward through the floor. Weight rips at the backs of my eyes. I am losing consciousness. I hear my voice in the distance say, “Call an ambulance.” My vision dims. I struggle to sit up. I vaguely hear Geraldine asking in her thick French-Canadian accent, “What happened?” “Call an ambulance,” I gasp. We look down at my right leg. Hanging there, held together only by skin, my femur bone is broken about four inches below my hip.

  There is no doubt that most people would have been screaming. But I do not experience the same outward loudness of the gross body injury. I do not have the mind-numbing distraction of crushing physical pain. For example, I do not need the morphine offered by the paramedics. Rather, within this injury, I hear the core channel breach, the chaos of radical energetic disruption—the breaking of a major bone. My inner body is robbed of its direction—ants swarming on honey and into the darkness of the other side. Yes, it hurts.

  I am loaded onto a wooden board and placed on a gurney. The paramedic holds my leg down in a normal position so straps can be fastened. The gurney starts rolling and hits a bump. The upper portion of my thigh and hip stay straight; the rest of my leg falls off and hangs unnaturally over the edge. I experience an instantaneous loss of vision, a drastic yanking of my energy core down and to the left. I hear myself screaming.

  Once I arrive in the emergency room, I am made to wait a couple of hours—alone and behind curtains—while the orthopedic surgeon is summoned. My leg is now in traction. During this time, I try to catheterize myself—I have to pee so badly—but I cannot get the catheter through my urethra to my bladder. Everything is clenched, all the muscles in my abdomen have been yanked downward. I can even feel the pull in my teeth. This remains true for nearly eight hours. By the time my body allows me to pee, there is well over a quart of urine.

  Dr. Gallivan draws the curtain back crisply and with authority. He looks like Clark Kent.

  “Um … Matthew, is it? How did this happen?”

  “I was doing yoga.” A sudden alertness comes over his face.

  “I thought yoga was relaxing,” he laughs out loud. He offers his all-American-boy smile. I tell him the details—what I was doing, my medical history, a little about the strenuous nature of yoga. I even tell him how—because of yoga—I can experience sensation within my paralysis. He patiently nods and writes stuff down. He is a good listener. I like him, but he doesn’t really hear.

  Dr. Gallivan is different from the doctors I had when I was thirteen. Over the course of our relationship—the next eighteen months—he demonstrates a passing curiosity about yoga, about my work, about the potential of the mind-body connection. He even considers sending his young daughter to me as a student. She suffers with severe scoliosis and is facing surgery. But this is a fact about Dr. Gallivan as a person, not about how he thinks as a trained professional.

  As a doctor, he differs little from the physicians I encountered fifteen years earlier, at best displaying a change in form, not substance. For example, he does not tell me what I am or am not experiencing. He is respectful and has been trained in tolerance. Moreover, he does not give me a bad metaphysical argument, as had been done previously—that the sensations in my legs are illusory because they aren’t directly physical. But Dr. Gallivan does stay stridently faithful to his paradigm, to the assumptions that underlie his medical training. He listens to my reports of energetic sensation but does not consider believing them. He does not open to deal with the particular patient that is me. Instead, I am judged to be a nice guy but also a New Age yoga nut. It will cost me.

  Dr. Gallivan recommends surgery for my leg. This entails removing the bone marrow from my femur and inserting a metal rod through its entire length. Two sets of interlocking screws are then put in place, one set near my hip and another just above my knee. This procedure gives my leg the best chance of healing straight. Best of all, it means that I will not need a cast.

  After surgery, Dr. Gallivan is pleased. “I got the bone back together almost perfectly. I couldn’t have hoped for a better result.” He is obviously proud of his handiwork. “But there is a potential complication.” I freeze. I hate this kind of news. “I had to use a longer metal rod than I would have liked,” he continues. “This means that the rod itself comes down to a point just above the knee joint. It puts the knee at risk to another trauma, like an awkward fall.” My jaw is beginning to clench. I know this story. I’ve absorbed it before. I am seething with angr
y disgust.

  “You have got to be kidding,” I snap.

  “But given your activity level, this shouldn’t be a problem,” he answers quickly. “You won’t be playing football anytime soon, will you?” His humor is meant to soothe. “The good news,” he says, “is that I didn’t need the screws by your knee. The bone felt stable enough without them.” I can barely hear him.

  “What about yoga, Dr. Gallivan? What about yoga?” He looks at me, squints his eyes as if playfully sizing me up.

  “Well, don’t be doing lotus pose or whatever it was that caused this,” he jokes. My silence makes him continue. “Seriously, you’re going to have to be careful.”

  “For how long?” I press.

  “About twelve to eighteen months, depending on how fast your body solidifies calcium.” My injury is now complete.

  Dr. Gallivan has made a mistake, probably one he couldn’t have anticipated. He chose not to insert interlocking screws just above my knee because he wanted to save my body from unnecessary metal. I am grateful for his restraint, but he was wrong. He felt confident that I wouldn’t need the extra stability because I am not a walker. What he didn’t factor in is how much I use my femur bones when I transfer. Each time I lift my butt from bed to chair, they are what I land on. They are my base—the equivalent of feet for someone in a wheelchair. I need those extra screws.

  I get home from the hospital on a Sunday. On Tuesday, I call his office and tell him that something is wrong. I am hurting too much. He explains this away as postoperative trauma. “Matt, remember, you just broke the largest bone in your body. It’s gonna hurt.” He tells me that if I’m still concerned by the time of my next appointment on the following Monday, then he will x-ray it.

  I am a complete wreck. It takes me a half-hour to rally the courage to transfer into my chair to get to the bathroom. The once-a-day transfer onto the toilet to empty my bowels is excruciating. I am in so much pain, but it is not exactly pain. I am not howling or screeching in agony. Instead, I feel weak and jarred and frightened. It’s like I am living in a tunnel, moment to moment, movement to movement. The pain is systemic, an inward collapsing, as if I am folding on the inside. There are times when I actually grow faint as I try to sit up. Sometimes when I move, I hear a popping sound in my leg; other times, a grinding noise. I keep telling myself, He said it was gonna hurt, as my vision continues to dim.

  By Thursday morning, I am overwhelmed. I call his office again. This time he is impatient with me. “But what about the popping noises?” I ask. He tells me that this is probably the ligaments readjusting their position against the bone of my leg. They get quite stretched during surgery and need to reset. He tells me not to worry. “But Dr. Gallivan, this is too much pain. Something is wrong,” I plead. “Matt, this isn’t yoga,” he retorts. “Just wait ’til Monday.” He places me on the fringe. I turn back to my life and suck it up.

  Come Monday, it takes everything I have to get in the car. As Dr. Gallivan puts my x-ray up against the light, the color drains from his face. He is a good man, a compassionate man. He is even a good doctor, a fine example of his medical training. He didn’t believe my reports of excessive pain because he didn’t believe that I could feel such things. He turns to me and says, “I am so sorry. Your bone now shows a butterfly fracture. It has been rebreaking this whole time.” I inwardly hear the sounds my leg has made over this past week. I feel like vomiting.

  He shows me the x-ray. The term butterfly describes the pattern in which my bone has splintered. “Matt, this newly developed fracture will heal just the same, just not as fast. But I have to operate again … go back in there and insert the extra screws by your knee.” He turns back to the x-ray, stares at it, his index finger to his lips. He is running through his mental checklist, replaying his medical decisions. “Matt, if I had to do it again, knowing the information I knew when I knew it, I would have done the same thing.” Incredibly, he is thinking of himself.

  “You could have fucking listened to me,” I blurt. I have surgery the next morning. It is outpatient surgery and I am done by midafternoon. On the drive home, I notice that the sun is shining. I can feel its warmth against my arm. Two little screws and the pain has become manageable. The relief is like landing in bed.

  It is easy to point a finger at Dr. Gallivan. He could have listened better. He could have believed my reports of excessive pain and seen me sooner. With any unparalyzed patient, he would have. But the issue runs much deeper. Not enough doctors and not enough patients have turned their attention to exploring the mind-body relationship. There have not been enough patients who sense pain energetically but not quite physically—I presented a relatively new phenomenon. We don’t know how a potentially deepened relationship between mind and body should affect how we administer medical treatment. Legally, I do not think Dr. Gallivan was negligent. He was following his training to the best of his ability. The problem was that the medical model itself has not transformed yet. This will take time and a lot more patients like me.

  Dr. Gallivan was not the only one who failed to believe. I was the one who didn’t trust energetic sensation. I was the one who was afraid to open fully to what I was experiencing. In order for energetic sensation to become real and vibrant for me, I had to let go of an old healing story. I had to stop trying to overcome the silence within my consciousness, the silence now tangibly embodied within my paralysis. This meant I had to sit still long enough to feel the silence, to accept how vulnerable it made me feel, how broken. I was not ready to feel this and instead returned to willfully proving my experience, rather than having it.

  Breaking my leg was the harshest lesson that I have ever experienced in yoga. For me, nonviolence is no longer an intellectual platitude within my practice. It is an energetic fact.

  16

  Falling Gracefully

  After the second leg surgery, it took twelve weeks for my leg to lay down enough calcium to fill in the break. It was another eight weeks before I could even consider doing yoga, and it would be a year until I could have the metal rod and screws removed. When all was said and done, it took nearly two years before I could do yoga again without exercising special caution.

  During those first twelve weeks of bed rest—I could only get up to use the bathroom and get food—I had ample time to think about the direction of my life. If there was ever a time to quit yoga, this was it. I had just broken the biggest bone in my body. What other proof did I need that yoga and paraplegia didn’t mix? Except that I knew better. The problem didn’t lie with yoga or with my paralysis. It rested with me. I had once again misused the silence between my mind and my body. I had allowed my need to prove myself, my need to overcome my paralyzed body, to rear its head once again. The result was violence.

  Rather than shy away from yoga, however, I stepped toward it. The lesson I learned about the importance of nonviolence only deepened my faith in what I was doing. Here I was, a paralyzed guy studying yoga, and the “back of the elephant” delivered a resounding message, one that was only incrementally less severe than getting smushed under an elephant’s foot. The integration of mind and body requires a realization of nonviolence. Breaking my leg taught me something in the same way that my body memories opened my conception of consciousness to include my body. The lesson was not something I could deny. It was a fact of my experience.

  I believe that the process of integrating mind and body teaches a person on many levels. The motivation that led me into philosophy at age twenty—the vague feeling that I somehow carried a secret about living and dying—was finally coming to fruition. When those screws were twisted into my thirteen-year-old head, my existence was spread so thin that a sinewy silence was revealed, a silence that coexisted with my living, a silence that made me stronger. It was my death.

  I started to see my struggle with the silence, and my need to integrate my mind and my body, in everything around me. I began to feel it in people, in their eyes, their bodies, their struggle with purpose, and their desire to
make a difference. I also began to feel it in such things as a developing environmental awareness. The environmental movement, however misconstrued, is an attempt to integrate mind and body, to balance our wealth generation and consumption habits with the body that is Earth. As I waited patiently for the return of my yoga practice, I formed the belief that mind-body integration is not just a personal health strategy, it is a potentially evolutionary movement of consciousness.

  With these thoughts, the purpose of my life takes its form. I am not sure how something like this happens. For me, it is not a willful commitment. I simply wake up each morning knowing how my energy will be spent, knowing that I will explore the silence between mind and body and its connection to living. I do not have to choose it. It is what I am.

  I also know to trust time. Strangely, this is something I learned while hovering over that Foster frame. Time keeps moving. It may move slowly, it may be without contour or flare, but it keeps moving, plink, plink, plink, as my saliva hits the metal mouth commode below. In those horrifically endless moments in intensive care, I learned how to stay faithful to living, to trust that the passage of time brings results—one way or another. My commitment to mind-body integration is timeless in the same way. If I stay faithful and keep my head down, if I work with integrity, the Universe will take what it needs. The number of years I spend doesn’t matter because my faithful consistency causes time to lose its edges. This is how our kids seem to grow up in a blink of an eye.

  While lying in my bed after leg surgery, I started to make plans. I imagined creating an institute of consciousness that would make the abstract nature of mind-body integration ordinary and useful. That way people would have an incentive to merge mind and body. This, in turn, would have the effect of grounding their silence more directly into their living.