A sceptic's search for health and healing

A series of blog posts by Tim Parks, featuring extracts from his new book Teach Us to Sit Still.

Day 1

You get ill, you go to the doctor, he prescribes a medicine, you get better. That’s the sequence of events we believe in, isn’t it? The sooner he gives you the medicine, the sooner you get better and the sooner you can get back to the important things of life: work, romance, sport. So it’s irritating when he can’t figure it right away and sends you off to do a few tests. Then a few more. Worse still when he tells you you need an operation. There’s a waiting list. Waiting lists are unacceptable because being ill is not really being alive. Still, if the operation solves the problem, at least at the end of the day you’ll be back to normal, you’ll be you again and can stop thinking about your body.

But what happens when the doctors can’t figure it at all. Or they give you the drugs and the drugs don’t work. They propose operations even though the tests haven’t shown anything wrong. You don’t trust them any more. Meanwhile, your condition is getting seriously worse. Afraid you’ve dreamed it up - you’re a hypochondriac the pain isn’t real - you get on the net and find that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, share your condition, in one form or another. But you knew it must be real because sometimes the stomach pain is so bad you can’t sit down. Still, if it is real, it’s worse! Because none of these thousands, millions, of sufferers in the chat rooms knows what to do about it. You’re looking at a lifetime of chronic pain and with nothing on the surface to tell anyone you’re not well, nothing to explain why you’re not more cheerful.

That was pretty much my case when I found a book that at last described my condition accurately and suggested a solution. Knowing the kind of guy I am, the authors dressed the solution in pseudo medical terms: “paradoxical relaxation following respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia breathing and myofascial trigger-point release massage”. As it turned out, what they were really asking me to do was completely rethink my relationship with my body, No, more radical than that: to understand that my body was actually me.

By the time, three months later, I was getting better, I was no longer interested in my illness at all, but enthralled with the doors that had been opened to me, and the revolution in my thinking about pretty much everything, literature, art, achievement, the very nature of purposefulness. Finally I was persuaded to try something I’d always imagined was bunkum: meditation. It was on a ten day retreat, trying to empty my head of all the words that just won’t go away that I at last got to the core of my illness and saw the way to health.

Which is what Teach Us to Sit Still is all about.  

Teach Us to Sit Still is published by Harvill Secker on 1st July.