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 6

An extract

Meantime, I was in pain and eager to put A Headache to the test; if I couldn’t have the Californian myofascial anal massage, exhaustively described and somewhat grotesquely illustrated, I would nevertheless try the book’s relaxation technique.
Now.
At once Dr Wise raised a barrier. The paradox in paradoxical relaxation was soon explained: having stretched out on the bed and got yourself calm, you focus on some tension in your body and don’t try to relax it. Just concentrate on it. Let it be. That way, eventually, it will relax itself. But only if you genuinely don’t try to relax it. Paradox.
OK, I’ll try, I thought.
Or rather, not try.
I’ll try not to try.
However, before doing that, the doctor insisted, I must first get into a state of ‘respiratory sinus arrhythmia breathing’ and this complicated process should be done, of course, ‘under the supervision of a professional’.
Damn.
However, Dr Wise then offered precise instructions on how to do it, knowing full well that you wouldn’t have a ‘professional’ in your bedroom. Still, if it didn’t work, you would know it wasn’t his fault.
Basically, the idea was to align the heartbeat with the breathing so that the pulse was a little faster on inhalation than exhalation. Six deep abdominal breaths a minute was optimum, Wise suggested.
I had never really figured out what abdominal breaths were. There were now nine numbered paragraphs of instructions.
‘Take your pulse,’ paragraph one begins.
It always spooks me to take my pulse.
Paragraph four reads:
… count up to five heart beats (if your heart rate is 60, as in the example above) as you inhale raising your abdomen and then count to five heartbeats as you exhale. If your heart rate is 72, you would count up to six beats as you inhale or exhale. There was no way I could do this. The whole rigmarole
reminded me again of Beckett’s Molloy calculating his farts per minute over twenty-four hours. How could anyone begin to relax while checking his pulse, counting beats and trying to breathe in response to computations? Harder than learning the piano, indeed. I had never got anywhere with the
piano. And I had had a teacher for that. Discouraged, I put the book down.
Perhaps I should say here that the one previous experience I’d had of breathing techniques for relaxation had been an amusing fiasco. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, some twenty years previously, we had attended classes in autogenous training; they were supposed to help mothers deal with the pain of childbirth. The doctor was a charming eccentric in his late sixties whose broad smile and glassy eyes sought to radiate a jovial calm. He gathered together about
a dozen couples, had us sit down, eyes closed, on straightbacked wooden chairs and began to intone in a sonorously hypnotic voice: ‘Ognuno si dica, io sono calmo, io sono tranquillo – everyone say to themselves, I am calm, I am relaxed.’ I found it hard not to burst out laughing. As soon as the good doctor thought he’d got the class into a state of deep breathing, he invited us on a mental tour of
our bodies, but speaking as if we were all mothers-to-be, with the result that I had the confusing experience of being encouraged to explore my womb and baby. After about the third lesson, as we were leaving, the man took me aside and said, as if needing to unburden himself: ‘Signor Parks, I
don’t believe I’ve ever seen a person as completely unable to relax as yourself.’
It was like the moment when the debonair pensioner with the white cowboy hat stopped me on the street and ordered me to ‘stand up straight, for God’s sake!’ I had the strong impression that I was being singled out as a freak. People couldn’t refrain from telling me I was uptight. Remembering both these occasions now as I baulked at the hurdle of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, I couldn’t help seeing that they corroborated Dr Wise’s theory that my troubles had to do with excessive, unrelenting tension. So perhaps I should at least try the relaxation technique even if I couldn’t do the complex ten-minute breathing routine beforehand. No doubt this made it even more unlikely that I could succeed without a trip to Stanford. All the same, two simple and effective pieces of advice earlier on in the book had encouraged me to believe that it might be worth at least trying to follow Dr Wise’s programme. To check the position of the pelvic floor, A Headache had said in its opening pages, make as if to urinate, but without actually urinating, and feel if the muscles move. Tentatively, since I’d never made as if to pee without peeing before, I did as asked. Abruptly, a tight girdle of muscle between navel and pubis slid down, as if settling into its proper place. At once I felt more comfortable.
That was odd.
I waited five minutes and did it again.
There.
I caught myself out in the kitchen preparing lunch and did it again.
Yes!
I was astonished. You go to three or four urologists and pay hundreds of pounds only to get the first piece of useful advice, the first instruction that makes a tiny difference, from a selfhelp
book. It definitely felt good to do that. Your defensive reaction to pain, Dr Wise went on, is to pull away from it. This is particularly true in the abdominal area where the muscles pull up in defence of the genitals and away from your pain. Don’t. Push towards it. There was no shortage of pain to experiment with. I pushed, waited, kept pushing. It definitely felt different. There was still the same smouldering, pulsing soreness, but it felt safer somehow, more manageable. I was excited. It was the first time I’d been able to make anything happen with these pains. Instead of the arrhythmia
breathing, I decided, I would just take a dozen deep steady breaths, then start the relaxation, paradoxical or no. I lay on my bed. I placed pillows under my knees, as instructed. Was I ready? No, the neighbours’ dog was barking, and Stefi was playing her guitar. I found my earplugs.
Good.
At last I shut my eyes.
I took a deep breath.

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

To visit Tim Parks newly designed website click here.