The Subtle Body

I spent the weekend studying yoga with Matthew Sanford. At 13, Matthew was in a car accident which killed his father and sister and left him with a broken spine. In learning how to embody, move, breath in his body - and after many many years of yoga practice and training (along with failure, giving up, pain, anger, love, and surrender) - Matthew has cultivated a remarkably sensitive, engaging, and profound connection to the body, the self, the soul and an amazing ability to show us all how to connect more deeply to ourselves.

Learning from Matthew was transformative. That there is an energy in the body that transcends muscles, bones, the hard wiring of nerves became apparent. Awareness of this energy offers great ease in the body, the psyche, the emotions, offers us a place to rest deeply and find comfort even for the most hard to love and dark inner places.

That this energy is the bodily experience of the divine which inspires us is something our culture or way of life can keep us from knowing; pushing us as it does relentlessly to look outside of ourselves, to the material world, for sustenance.

Allowing for this possibility of an embodied spirit can change the entire fabric of your life including the way you sit, eat, see the sky, touch your child, contemplate literature and death, make love, pray. From this perspective, God, cannot be conjured in the mind but is a lived and ever changing experience of the body, the skin, organs, bones, muscles, arteries, and blood.

Matthew has found the divine in his body (as his body) - even as it is broken, paralyzed, disfigured. Since all of us have "paralyzed" or "silent" parts in our bodies, along with pain, disfigurement, shame, and weakness, his experience and teaching can help us to find a way back to all those places we have abandoned and retreated from and in this way know our "unseparateness" from God (or wholeness, soul, truth, love, you put in your word for this).