Workshops

Riffing off the song Who Says (John Mayer), this workshop explores the sensation of freedom as it travels through ANY and ALL bodies.  In Matthew’s words, “Just because I cannot walk up and down a flight of stairs does not make me any less free.”   For far too long, freedom has been defined as being free of constraint.  Incorrect.  It is only through constraint that freedom can be truly realized. More than mental, more than physical, freedom is a transcendent sensation, a feeling of lightness and sense of direction, that travels through our bodies from ‘inside-to-out.’  Through discussion and a series of yoga poses, this workshop explores the sensation of freedom as it travels through an altered mind-body relationship.

Living with a disability is a complex social endeavor.  One such complexity is dealing with the projection of sympathy, from loved ones, from strangers, and from our culture at large.  On one hand, sympathy is dehumanizing.  It cuts; it injures; it limits.  On the other, a judgment of sympathy is often an attempt to acknowledge, […]

People living with disabilities must “accept” a wide variety of things: their condition, their limitations, marginalization, discrimination, patronizing, invisibility, well-intending people who say horrible things, stairs, stares, pity, and on and on.  The problem is that the transformation of disability requires something more organic than psychological acceptance.  Disability contains an underlying energy that can be […]

“Say a little, but not too much.” This is a practical lesson that people living with disabilities have learned through experience. Even when curious and asking a question, “able-bodied” people can only take in the truth of our lives in fleeting moments. By about the third sentence, subtle head nods and frozen smiles begin to say, “I stopped […]

Join Matthew and our adaptive yoga community as we begin creating an open-ended letter to our culture at large. This lively, fun, and well-intending conversation briefly revisits this year's previous themes while also offering advice and insights about the universal experience of living with a disability. The inspiration for this dialogue comes from an old […]