BY LINDA HANSON
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER 

After suffering a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the chest down, 13-year-old Matthew Sanford coped by distancing himself from his body.

During painful medical procedures he would imagine himself floating out of his body to escape. At one point, he wished his legs could be amputated because he considered them dead weight.

For years after the car accident, Sanford considered his body as something he lugged around. As a survival tool, he disconnected his mind from his body.

The Duluth native's journey to restore his mind-body connection is told in his book, "Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence," which will be released Tuesday by Rodale Books. Sanford, 40, will be in Duluth to attend a book release celebration at Northland Country Club, where he caddied as a boy.

Sanford's memoir shares his life from the time he awoke from a three-day coma after a car accident, through his adolescence in Duluth and into manhood, where he awoke to the need to mend the connection between his mind and body. To do so, he turned to yoga.

"I needed to heal and find my body," Sanford said.