Bestseller List  - Non-Fiction Category (Number 2)
(Minneapolis) Star Tribune – July 16, 2006

Bestseller List – Non-Fiction Category (Number 3)
(Minneapolis) Star Tribune – September 3, 2006

Minnesota Book Awards Finalist in the Autobiography, Memoir and Creative Nonfiction category – winners announced on May 5th.
(Minneapolis) Star Tribune  - January 28, 2007

EDITOR’S CHOICE  - BOOK:
Matthew Sanford was 13 when a car crash killed his father and sister and left him paralyzed from the chest down. In Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, he recounts the inspiring tale of how, with enormous determination, he crafted a rich new life that today includes a wife and young son.
Reader’s Digest - June 2006

…Sanford has done time as a philosophy graduate student, and it shows.  His paralysis has taught him powerful lessons about consciousness, and he shares them with lucidity in this funny but wrenching memoir.  Still, it’s his story of how he came to embody his grownup life as a paraplegic-complete with wife, kids, and a job as a yoga instructor-that will truly dare readers to appreciate their own bodies and lives.
Yoga Journal - October 2006 read more

Losing his father, his sister – and his legs-in a terrible car accident at the age of 13 did not stop Matthew Sanford from living his life.  In Waking, he retraces his traumatic trek, from hospitalization to fathering a family.  Holistic philosophy and the practice of yoga eventually bring peace.  The memoir is easy to read, although metered with harrowing details.  Sanford offers a powerful, honest account of his battle: awakening a spirit within a damaged body.                 
Psychology Today – August 2006

Matthew Sanford’s Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence is a literary hymn in praise of yoga as well as an exploration of the nature of consciousness.  As a memoir about sudden onset of paraplegia, it truly is transcendent.  And yes, it is also inspirational, but not in the usual clichéd sense of the word as it so often applies to stories about disability. Sanford’s writing inspires not because of any drama or melodrama connected to loss, but because it awakens us to non-medical possibilities of healing - discovering ways our minds can connect with our bodies to open windows to wholeness-something disabled and nondisabled alike can embrace.
New Mobility Magazine - June 2006  read more

Matthew Sanford’s life and body were irrevocably changed at age 13 on a snowy Iowa road. On that day, his family’s car skidded off an overpass, killing his father and sister and paralyzing him from the chest down.

 “During my first three months in the hospital, leaving my body became a survival skill. I needed to separate from it – otherwise, there was too much pain,” Sanford says. Sharing his journey to find meaning in the mysterious distance between mind and body, Sanford’s Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence takes readers inside the heart of a boy whose world has been shattered.

From intensive-care experiences to becoming a yoga teacher and founder of a non-profit organization, Sanford depicts what it truly means to live in a body and emerge with an entirely new view of being a “whole” person. The author leads readers as he rebuilds from the ground up, searching for “healing stories” to help reconnect his mind and body. To do so, he must reject much of what traditional medicine tells him and turn to yoga as a centerpiece of his daily practice. He finds not only a better life but also pulls back the curtain on what it means to survive devastating trauma, from returning to a broken life to the uncertainty of finding sexual intimacy with a paralyzed body. Most importantly, Sanford’s groundbreaking account is meant to offer a powerful message about the endurance of the human spirit and of the body that houses it.      
PN (magazine) - May 2006


On another level, Waking is an amazing interpretation of the mind-body connection, explored as few others ever could.  The silence of his lower body, his mind’s attempts to “reconnect” on some level, and the role yoga plays for Matt in that ongoing experience is a phenomenal lesson for all interested in the mind-body connection at its deepest level.  This book is an excellent teacher.  It reminds all of us engaged in the healing profession of the power of our words. It also conveys a message for everyone about the power of the human body for healing and connectedness, even when the silence is deepest.
Explore – Sept/Oct 2006  read more

His book (…) is a beautifully written account of his story.  It is sobering, with its revelations of just how unbearable human existence can become after such a physical trauma, yet reassuring, through its narrative of how one man can adapt and learn from his own experience what an entire medical establishment had told him not to believe.
(Minneapolis) Star Tribune – June 28, 2006