When Matthew Sanford was 13 years old, a car crash on an icy Iowa road killed his sister and father and left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Today, the 42-year-old is a yoga instructor.

“I just missed my body … I was looking for a way to feel whole again,” he said as he explained why he took up yoga.

Sanford spoke to a crowd of nearly 100 people Thursday evening at the Church of the Servant in Oklahoma City. He said his recovery process seemed infinite. His back, neck and wrists were broken. One of his lungs had collapsed, his internal organs were damaged and his digestive system had completely shut down. After spending two months in intensive care, he returned home.

Sanford said he has always considered himself athletic, and even at that young age he felt it important to restore his body.

The doctors who treated Sanford said he would not live very long, unless he made an effort to build his upper body strength, said Kerry Richards, administrative secretary for Oklahoma City yoga center Mind, Body and Spirit.

For the next 12 years, Sanford said he feared his body would become nothing more than a lifeless shell. So he searched for ways to rehabilitate his body.

Sanford said he discovered yoga at 25, and his life was dramatically changed again.

He learned to do yoga by using his arms to position his lower limbs in yoga poses.

“He learned to stay in touch with his whole body, even the parts he can’t feel,” Richards said.

He said yoga, which dates back almost 4,000 years, is the art of combining mind, body and spirit.

Sanford said his first yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich, was an inspirational leader who respected every one of her students, both paralyzed and non-paralyzed.

Zukovich treated Sanford as a partner, and they experimented with the idea of practicing yoga together.

“What we figured out needs to be shared, it needs to spread throughout the country,” Sanford said.

In 2001, he created Mind Body Solutions, a non-profit organization with the purpose of bringing national recognition to the idea that minds and bodies are connected.

“The real frontier is getting the patient engaged in the healing process,” Sanford said.

Two years later, he won the Karma Yoga Award, and this year he took home a $100,000 prize as the Quality of Life Award winner from the Volvo for Life Awards.

He has also written a memoir called “Waking,” which talks about his experiences with the birth of his two sons. Thirty-four weeks into his wife’s pregnancy, doctors informed the couple that one of the babies had died.

This devastating news became the metaphor for his book: life and death going on simultaneously.

Sanford has become an inspirational role model over the years, and has spoken all over the country, Richards said. He has even appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”.

“Presence in your body is habit, it’s how you live your life, it’s how you move, its how you breathe, it’s how you live your life every day,” Sanford said.

Sanford will give a presentation and sign copies of his book at 11 a.m. today at the OU Health and Sciences Center, College of Health Building, 801 N.E. 13th St. in Oklahoma City, where he is leading a workshop for physical therapy students.