Welcome to my very first blog. The blog Beyond Waking will have wide ranging subjects that come directly from what I am experiencing and thinking about. I wear many hats. I am the author of Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (Rodale: 2006). I am the founder and president of the non-profit Mind Body Solutions (www.mindbodysolutions.org) whose mission is to help people transform trauma, loss, and disability into hope and potential. I also do professional speaking at conferences, in corporations, at colleges and universities, and particularly within our healthcare system (www.matthewsanford.com). I am also a yoga teacher who teaches both nationally and internationally to people of all abilities. Perhaps most importantly I am a father who cares very deeply about the future world that his son and his son’s children will inhabit. In all of these contexts, I am a passionate advocate for deepening the connection between mind and body.
This blog will feature insights and wisdom gleaned from living in a hopeful world that is also deeply out of joint. I will share stories and facts from the places I am going and the people I am meeting. I will also hopefully turn in some beautiful sentences as I continue my lifelong process of writing. My aim is that this blog inspires you, occasionally fills you with wonder, makes you ache a little, but always shares the beauty and weight of living and dying simultaneously.
Blog 1: I just returned from Yakima, Washington where I was one of the keynote speakers at the Washington Behaviorial Science Conference. One of the conference’s cosponsors was the Washington Correctional Commission. They wanted to highlight the critical role that mental illness and its treatment play in a successful prison system, especially in the reintegration of inmates into our greater society. Budget cutbacks and shortfalls are pushing our correctional system to its limits, but it is also spurring on great innovation. During the other keynote presentation, I encountered a sobering fact: 75%-85% of all the people incarcerated have experienced some form of physical and/or sexual abuse. The upshot is that trauma and the inability to heal trauma is one of the direct causes of a life of criminal behavior.
The societal costs of unhealed, untreated trauma, loss, and disability are staggering. I already knew this to be true but I had never realized how this directly relates to criminal behavior. My non-profit Mind Body Solutions does not currently work within the criminal justice system. We work more directly within healthcare. However, we have pioneered a mind-body approach to trauma, loss, and disability, one that focuses on both people living with trauma, loss, and disability and their caregivers. I am encouraged and hopeful that such a conference of caregivers sought out my message of a mind-body integration and healing. I was honored when the over 600 participants gave my keynote a standing ovation and when my breakout session was filled beyond room capacity. But in truth, 99% of those people did not know me from Adam. Their response was not so much a reflection on me, but rather of how hungry they were for a more integrated and grounded approach to their lives and to their work. The world is growing and changing and the appetite for a mind-body approach grows along with it.
Remember a mind-body approach to living begins as simply as feeling more consciously the gentle touch of sun on your skin or taking in the beauty of luscious green leaves as they are illuminated by late afternoon sunlight.