Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Noted novelist and translator Tim Parks has departed from his usual themes to write this autobiographical account of his journey from a life dominated by acute pain to one where a reasonable equilibrium between body and soul enables him to live in relative comfort and healthy productivity.

Teach Us To Sit Still will be of great interest to anyone with a chronic medical condition which the doctors seem unable to cure, but also to anyone who is concerned about work/life balance and the long-term effects of ignoring the body's needs. I can't say I'm in any either of those categories but I still found it a fascinating read. But the book is not only about pain and a quest for healing, for Tim, being the writer and scholar that he is, digresses frequently into philosophical and literary themes which break up the stark accounts of medical processes.

Tim Parks developed a set of problems in the region of prostate, groin and pelvis which had a devastating effect on his life. The first part of the book describes the medical explorations which he had to undergo in order to seek a diagnosis. Any man reading the book is going to squirm with discomfort as Parks' recounts the procedures carried out on him, some of which make root canal work sound like a head massage.

I can only admire Tim for his candour in sharing with his readers the daily humiliations caused by his complaint. Nobody wants to hear a doctor say, "It has to hurt I'm afraid", and there is pain in such quantities I found I had to skip quickly through some paragraphs.

The tests he undergoes all show that there is nothing wrong with him. His relief at finding out that he does not after all have prostate cancer is tempered by having to go home to live with the condition, perhaps for ever. However, such is Tim's desperation, that he starts to investigate alternative forms of medicine, visiting an Ayuverdic practitioner who has interesting but bizarre things to say, and then finding a book by Doctor David Wise, A Headache in the Pelvis which seems to be a turning point in his journey towards recovery.

But it is the last third of the book in which we read of a kind of breakthrough - I am torn in writing this review in wanting to say what happens while not wanting to spoil the book. Let me say that Tim's decision to take up Vipassana meditation was fruitful in a variety of ways.

I think most people would recognise the need for more centredness in their lives, and by reading this book they will see how meditation practices could help them with niggling symptoms which inhabit the background of their lives. This is not a self-help book but rather an involving journey with a fine writer through things we all hope we don't have to deal with in our own lives.

I enjoyed this books and would recommend it to others. But it is not quite what I was expecting from reading other reviews.

The first part details Tim Park's unsuccessful encounters with the Italian (and Harley Street) medical establishment as he tries to find out why he is in so much pain. Answer: it's a mystery, but they can, if he wishes, operate on his prostate and it might help. He decides against.

In the second part of the book, he gets to grips with the problem himself. Partly through reading a self-help manual he orders on the web. Partly through the experience of meditation. He doesn't actually go a bundle on either. He wonders whether the aim of the self-help book is really to sell more help (to be provided at more expense in California). He doesn't buy into Buddhist philosophy. But he does get (a lot) better.

Throughout this weaves the question of who he is and what has made him as he is. He says in the Introduction he wouldn't have written the book if getting better had meant going into psychotherapy and working out his relationship to his parents. In fact, he does work out his relationship to his father (now dead) and amends it. But this self-awareness comes from his meditation. You do also get a clear sense of what has made him and what he is like.

You will also find a fair bit of reflection on the nature of translation (through which the author makes his living in part), on DH Lawrence and Samuel Beckett.

In short, this is a very thought-provoking book - highly discursive, however - and one that raises more interesting questions than it answers!

This is a gem of a book. As the wife of someone who has spent many years suffering intermittently from prostatitis and chronic pelvic pain, and for whom it has had a particularly devastating impact over the past 6 months, I found it enormously reassuring - as well as enjoyable - to read Tim's story. CPP is not a life-threatening or even serious condition. But it can have a surprisingly corrosive effect, not just on the life of the person suffering from it but on all those close. And it's not always easy for those close bystanders (let alone more distant observers) to understand the pain and misery it causes or be continually patient and sympathetic when their own lives are put on hold as a result.

Tim Parks' symptoms, medical experiences and personal dilemmas have been unnervingly similar to those of my husband. As a woman, it is hard to appreciate quite what the pain must be like and why it is so utterly demoralising. Tim's descriptions have helped me better understand what my husband is going through; and his frankness about the mental anguish of trying to come to terms with a condition that seems astonishingly common yet so poorly understood (and too embarrassing for most people to discuss without sniggering) is hugely refreshing. Then to read his fascinating account of how he managed to come to terms with it all gives hope indeed. It should be required reading for anyone affected by CPP, their wives and partners.

But this is not just a book for those blighted by CPP. As other reviewers have made clear, there is much more to it than just the unpacking of a particular health problem. It is a fascinating exploration of personality, a journey through the limitations of modern medicine, an unravelling of the impact of troubles in life and a lesson in how to come to terms with oneself. All told with humour and intelligent asides into the worlds of language, literature and art. There can be few people who would not enjoy and learn something from it.