waking post 3

As I finish reading Waking by Matthew Sanford, I am overwhelmed with emotion. I know that this sounds dramatic, but if you read it, I am sure that you know the feeling.  I am finding it hard to express in words the emotions that are coursing through me at the moment. I wish that my sentences would flow the way Sanford’s do. His writing, even his prose, is poetry. It is beautiful, melodic and captivating. Reading about the death of a child was raw, painful, and beautiful. He captures his feelings, the moments, the whispered words and silent thoughts. I felt as if I was in the room with him and Jennifer, allowed a glimpse into the most painful and wonderful time of their lives. I am grateful for the way that he opens the doorway of his life to his reader. Sanford holds nothing back; every emotion, good and bad, are laid out for the reader to examine. He bares his soul to the reader. Because of that, this book was more than I expected. I anticipated a boring book about yoga, maybe with some interesting facts about the recovery from a paralyzing trauma. Sanford delivered so much more.

            Silence. This is a word used frequently throughout the book by Sanford. This is the word Sanford uses to describe the lack of feeling in the bottom two-thirds of his body. Silence is what Sanford must come to terms with and also learns to listen through.  For years after his accident, the Silence falls to the background; it becomes the fate of his life. His body will live in Silence for the rest of his life. This is what the doctors tell him. Never will he be in contact with his body again. This is the lie that Sanford is trapped in for years. Not until he begins the practice of yoga does the idea that he can “feel” his body even enter his mind. He is surprised to learn that he can do things with his lower half that he never thought possible.  Yoga helped him hear through the Silence.

            Yoga philosophy manifests itself in this section through Sanford’s body memories and how he feels the energy passing through his paralyzed body. Sanford describes his body memories as his “body bearing witness to what [his] mind could not” (180). He describes the feelings of terror and trauma that his body “feels” from the accident in his youth. His body retained the feelings of being broken, even if he mind does not remember it.

            Sanford also describes how he can feel the energy passing through his body while he does yoga. Honestly, this concept was difficult for my mind to grasp. I cannot begin to imagine what it is like to have no feeling in your lower half, so it was difficult for me to understand how he can “feel” anything. When he talked about doing yoga backwards, I began to understand what he meant. Instead of doing a pose and then understanding how this affects his inner being, he concentrates on the energetic level of his being and then works to translate that to his physical body.

            Another important part of his yoga journey involved one of the concepts from the yoga sutras. Sanford has a large encounter with the importance of one of the limbs of the eight-fold path. Early on in his yoga practice, he gets cocky and anxious to do more. This haste, or what he calls “violence,” results in a broken femur, surgery, a metal rod in his leg, and over a year of no yoga practice. He mentions the importance of non-violence in his life. He says that the violence in his life came from an inability to fully believe what he was experiencing in yoga. In order to overcome it, he must be willing “to sit still long enough to feel the silence, to accept how vulnerable it made [him] feel, how broken” (213).

            In Iyengar’s translation of the yoga sutras (taken from the BIC yoga capstone blog) discuss non-violence in this way:

II. 34 Uncertain knowledge giving rise to violence, whether done directly or indirectly or condoned, is caused by greed, anger or delusion in mild moderate or intense degree. It results in endless pain and ignorance. Through introspection comes the end of pain and ignorance.

II. 35 When non-violence in speech, thought and action is established one’s aggressive nature is relinquished and others abandon hostility in one’s presence.

Sanford’s violence came from delusion about the condition of his body. It also came from a greedy desire to move forward too quickly. He pushed his body too far. And the result was pain and ignorance. And, through introspection, Sanford is working to overcome this violence in his life. When he chooses to sit in the silence, to face to truth of his state and learn how to “feel” in his paralyzed body, he overcomes to violence in his life. And the reward for this will be that others will approach him without hostility as well. What a beautiful representation of yoga philosophy at work.

            Overall, I loved this book, in case my posts did not say that enough. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed reading it. I would definitely recommend it to anyone that is thinking about practicing yoga, or even someone looking for a good book to read. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. I look forward to class discussion and reading everyone’s blogs about the books.