Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

by Tim Parks

'Just when the medical profession had given up on me and I on it, just when I seemed to be walled up in a life sentence of chronic pain, someone proposed a bizarre way sit still, they said, and breathe'. "Teach Us to Sit Still" is the visceral, thought-provoking and improbably entertaining story of Tim Parks' quest to overcome ill health. Bedevilled by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, he confronts hard truths about the relationship between the mind and the body, the hectic modern world and his life as a writer. Following a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system he finds solace in an improbable prescription of breathing exercises that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks expected or wanted to find answers; anything New Age simply wasn't his scene. Meantime, he is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religions in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sport and art in our attitudes to health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Captivating and inspiring, "Teach Us to Sit Still" is an intensely personal - and brutally honest - story for our times.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health, Memoir, Biography, Spirituality, Meditation, Self Help

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 2010

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[Gretchen Rubin]

This memoir was very interesting to me because of its focus on meditation, and also on pain and possibly the placebo effect, two subjects that have fascinated me for a long time.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Starting in his forties, Parks was plagued by urinary problems and abdominal pain. Each night he had to get up five or six times to urinate, and when he didn’t have fiery pangs shooting through his pelvic area he had a dull ache. Doctors assessed his prostate and bladder in tests that seemed more like torture sessions, but ultimately found nothing wrong. While he was relieved that his worst fears of cancer were allayed, he was left with a dilemma: constant, unexplained discomfort and no medical strategy for treating it.

When conventional medicine failed him, Parks asked himself probing questions: Had he in some way brought this pain on himself through his restless, uptight and pessimistic ways? Had he ever made peace with his minister father’s evangelical Christianity after leaving it for a life based on reason? Was his obsession with transmuting experience into words keeping him from living authentically? During a translation conference in Delhi, he consulted an ayurvedic doctor on a whim and heard words that haunted him: “This is a problem you will never get over, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradiction in your character.”

The good news is: some things helped. One was the book A Headache in the Pelvis, which teaches a paradoxical relaxation technique that Parks used for up to an hour a day, lying on a yoga mat in his study. Another was exercise, especially running and kayaking – a way of challenging himself and seeking thrills in a controlled manner. He also started shiatsu therapy. And finally, Vipassana meditation retreats helped him shift his focus off the mind’s experience of pain and onto bodily wholeness. Vipassana is all about “seeing things as they really are,” so the retreats were for him a “showdown with this tangled self” and a chance to face the inevitability of death. Considering he couldn’t take notes at the time, I was impressed by the level of detail with which Parks describes his breakthroughs during meditation.

Though I was uneasy reading about a middle-aged man’s plumbing issues and didn’t always follow the author on his digressions into literary history (Coleridge et al.), I found this to be an absorbing and surprising quest narrative. If not with the particulars, I could sympathize with the broader strokes of Parks’s self-interrogation. He wonders whether sitting at a desk, tense and with poor posture, and wandering around with eyes on the ground and mind on knots of words for years contributed to his medical crisis. Borrowing the title phrase from T.S. Eliot, he’s charted an unlikely journey towards mindfulness in a thorough, bracingly honest, and diverting book that won’t put off those suspicious of New Age woo-woo.

Reviewed as part of the official Wellcome Book Prize 10th anniversary blog tour. Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tim Parks is one of my favorite authors: I love his books about Italy because they give such a good picture of the unique universe that country is, and I love most of his novels because they are written in an ingenious, very intense style and thoroughly zoom in on the psyche of the hectic life and uncertainty of modern man. But this book did not really resonate.

Maybe that's because it's a non-fiction work, and more specifically about Tim Parks himself. No, it is not an autobiography, but the author painstakingly describes his years of pain with physical discomfort (this euphemistic description is in order, because it is about the lower abdomen region), and his attempts to escape an operation. The author presents a whole odyssee along doctors who cannot really help him, but still propose to cut. Finally he tries the alternatives, and they put him on the trail of meditation techniques. Not really with enthusiasm, because Parks is sceptical through and through (a consequence of his personal struggle against his fanatical religious parents); but gradually he finds relief, literally and figuratively.

I see in the reviews on this book that many people react enthusiastically to this 'conversion' to the world of alternative medicine, but I doubt that they have read this book well: Parks clearly indicates that the meditation techniques certainly helped, and still help, but that it is mainly his introspection, his inner quest to whom he actually is, that helped him relieve. And then it turns out - not entirely surprising to the reader who is familiar with the work of Parks - that our author really is a fretting, nervous wreck, with neurotic ticks, continually under pressure, trying to get hold on everything. And above all, that he is someone who lives fanatically in and through words, constantly using language to get a grip on reality. This introspection (of course, encouraged by the intense meditation) has made him realize that he has to 'let go' (what a buzzword), and he also tries to do that, he even thinks of stopping with writing. But fortunately for us - his readers – in the end he understands that he will only succeed in part, that he is who he is, Nirvana is not for him.

This may all sound very interesting, and it is, but to be honest: it was hard labour to get through this book. Parks extensively goes into all his feelings of pain, neuroses, struggles and thoughts, describes the entire process that he goes through in such detail that it sometimes became a bit too much, and occasionally embarrassingly personal. And although Parks regularly muses on other famous writers and their physical problems, the book doesn’t really provide insight into the work of the author.

[Janey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book is extraordinary. It took courage to write it, to chronicle the demeaning, self-effacing, revelatory, foolish, helpless moments that the overstimulated ego of the author/subject was learning to live with. Out of it comes real wisdom, a journey of discovery that is the best of the self-discovery books I've ever encountered. What illness teaches and how, what surprises it holds, how life is enriched after losing everything, is all in this book. I recommend it highly.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting.

[Glenys · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a great book; insightful, well-written, important. It's the personal story or testimony of a writer -- brought up in England, living in Italy -- working as a translator, teacher, essayist and novelist. He's immersed in language. In middle age he gradually develops problems with urination and increasing pain, but medical investigations of his prostate and bladder show nothing that really accounts for his symptoms. Like many people with chronic pelvic pain and no easy answers from the medics, he becomes increasingly introspective, demoralised and socially withdrawn. He suffers, is increasingly desperate, but can't find a way out. This is the story of how he found a formulation of what was wrong with him (chronic pelvic muscle tension) and came to realise how entirely disconnected he was from his body -- living in his mind, treating his body as a vehicle for his mind, and yet all his inner conflicts, 'tussles', were being expressed unwittingly through his body's restlessness, tension, force. Even in his leisure he's trying to oppose his inner tensions with strenuous, exciting and attention-grabbing pursuits. With great honesty he starts to take responsiblity for what's wrong and to explore a method of muscle relaxation. Encouraged by the results, he goes to meditation retreats and learns how to be aware of his body, to let go of the tensions, and to detach from the inner chatter. He recovers, but this is much more than a feel-good story of self-help in someone with chronic pain. It's a journey into self-knowledge and understanding with many rich layers of meaning. I found it very human, very engaging.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tale of extreme navel gazing and introspection which - due to Tim Parks' engaging style - is, improbably, a page-turner.

I'd previously read three Tim Parks non-fiction books... 'Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona', 'An Italian Education', and 'A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character . . . and Goals!' ...and really enjoyed them all.

Tim Parks is a good writer with the knack of making the everyday absorbing and, in the case of this book, making philosophy, the tyranny of language, and self-enquiry all interesting and accessible.

This book is beautifully written, well observed and accessible. I felt privileged to share in Tim's inner most thoughts as he makes his journey from unwell sceptic to a healthier life characterised by open-minded acceptance. He gains a remarkable wisdom on his journey to self-discovery. Whilst I realise that may sound like airy-fairy nonsense, it really isn't, it's actually very readable and profound, with a universal message. The perfect book for sceptics, because Tim Parks was one, and is only prompted to fully explore his ongoing poor health when he is told he must have urgent surgery.

My only real complaint was that this book was over too quickly.

4/5

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a hard one to rate. It deserves a lot of stars because it's so worth reading and learning from. But it's not easy to read. Not because the writing is bad - it's great, actually. It's just that the content challenges so many (mostly Western) assumptions about the connection between body and mind, between health and thought. The author is a challenging personality as well - tense and obsessive, but also thoughtful and caring and a skilled story-teller.

What makes the book so worthwhile is what the author discovered as he explored treatments for his chronic illness and sought alternatives to medication and surgery. Although his illness involved urology and pelvic pain, what he learned about meditation and massage applies far more broadly.

The book will appeal especially to people who work and revel in words - writers, linguists, analysts, and all of us who tend to over-think every issue and dilemma. When do words become a barrier to meaning and understanding, when do they become a substitute for the experience of life? It all sounds kind of flaky, I know, but strangely enough this is a book for skeptics, not eager believers.

[Tati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I recommend this short little gem to everybody. Especially those living a normal modern life, doubting, fearing, maximising, being angry and yelling at other people (who always are the idiots) when driving. Not esoteric at all, but very enlightening in not even 100 pages. I will gift this to all of my friends.

[Mindy · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a yawn---Man hurts. Man frets. Man finally sits still and shuts up. Man feels better.

There---I just saved you hours of slogging through Tim Park's preoccupation with himself.

[Ian Laird · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is a problem you will never get over, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradiction in your character.” (p71)
– Doctor Hazan (Ayurvedic practitioner) to Tim Parks, who is suffering chronic abdominal pains with no evidence of anything medically wrong with him

The expatriate English writer, translator and teacher Tim Parks, then in his twenties followed a girl named Rita to Italy, married her and stayed. In his early fifties he began suffering acute abdominal pains, associated with multiple night-time trips to the bathroom. The afflictions lasted several years and defied most of his attempts to alleviate them.

He sought urgent medical advice and was told he should have surgery: specifically Trans-Urethral Resection of the Prostate or TURP, which involves drilling through the prostate to widen it and fixing up the sphincters at either end. He balked and toyed with Ayurvedic solutions (including ‘an enema of sesame oil and various herbs to be held in the colon for as long as you can manage, certainly not less than forty minutes’ (p71), which advice preceded Doctor Hazan’s observation above). An examination, conducted in a chair which ‘looked like a Meccano-built torture instrument assembled by a provincial serial killer’ (p91), showed no sign of cancer or other problems. The pains did not go away.

There followed batteries of tests, methodical alterations to diet, and numerous techniques until Parks discovered paradoxical relaxation, which helped, especially when accompanied by respiratory sinus orthythmic breathing. He explored bringing his pathological tension into the ‘main curriculum of life’, shiatsu massage and finally Vipassana meditation, learned on lengthy retreats.

Ultimately all this worked and the pain and the multiple night-time journeys to the bathroom all but disappeared.

I am a near contemporary of Tim Parks, so I read the 300 plus pages of his excruciatingly detailed yet quite brave account of his medical tribulations with a mixture of fascination and apprehension, as I have recently endured three abdominal surgeries over a twelve month period, following a lifetime of excellent health.

It’s a salutary read. But we need to return to the matter raised by Dr Hazan: what was ‘the profound contradiction in [Tim Parks] character’ which he needed to resolve? An inability to relax? Too much tension? Did writing itself cause the problems?

The book was published in 2010. By 2017 Parks had divorced Rita, his Italian wife of thirty years and started a new life with a PhD student half his age. Now that might cause some tension.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book hungrily, perhaps because I can relate to the desperation of an undefinable illness, of the chronic discomfort that one searches futilely for solutions: relinquishing alcohol and caffeine and exercising more or less and spending hours on the internet and cruising various doctors (for me, the standard family practice led to a neurologist led to acupuncture, where it has settled for the time being, but there is hope too in yoga and supplements and still, the flutter of discomfort is humming at the periphery). In many ways, I might have previously rolled my eyes at all the penis-art, the connections Parks made to columns and figs in water jugs, but then I allowed myself to imagine it as a less gendered viewing--if Parks were a woman suffering from a woman's-body-specific ailment, I would have celebrated the allusions and obsessions. It's unfair of me, and, as a mother to a toddler-daughter and 21-weeks pregnant with a boy, my feminist self is shifting more rapidly than it did as a Women's Studies minor in my undergraduate years.

But Parks referred to others' "bellyaching" so often, it called stark attention to his own. Oh, how I sympathize with the chronic pain, but at some point, his personality began to sour--there was such emphasis on his in-shapeness (which is important, I understand, to show the reader how it wasn't bad diet or lack of exercise that led him to his pains, but we get that through his regular walking and his kayaking and dinners and such) and he contrasts that with a friend's doughnut-eating-leading-to-diabetes, a friend who is trying to help him, to the point of frustration, in the impression Parks gives. (I've always be so cautious now that my former doctor is a social friend, not to mention ailments unless she mentions them first, as I don't want to take advantage of her profession, and I get the impression that Parks has exactly the opposite temperament.) Later, when he's at a retreat, he indeed bellyaches about noises, about music, about the leader's immaturity (and his fatness), about the fruit served. He calls his shiatsu healer "hardly sophisticated folks." These disparagements create an unappreciative character, which does set up the ability to become enlightened, but eventually, it becomes relentless, and I'm ready, like the author's final sentence expresses, to move on.

A small irritation that was the author's choice: the inclusion of images. He's a good enough writer that every image described was certainly not needed to enhance the text, and much more often than not, the Google'd-type images detracted. Perhaps the Valzquez was useful, and I understand the desire to fold in anatomical and surgical illustrations, but having them plunked into each chapter's narrative cheapened the effect. Perhaps, graphic-design-wise, it would have felt more professional to have the image start the chapter, to be referred back to, or include an appendix, but as it is, it just felt like the cut-and-paste style of blogs, and even then I have a low tolerance, preferring the blogs that illustrate will exclusively photographs by the blog author, keeping editing and style consistent.

[SeyedMostafa Meshkati · Rating 2 out of 5]

« تکه‌های نیک، ترجمه‌ی مجموعه‌ی وینتیج مینی انتشارات پنگوئن، حاوی تکه خوراکی‌های کوچکی‌است از متون ادبی. این تکه خوراک‌ها بر خلاف یک وعده‌ی غذایی کامل،‌اندکی گرسنگی را برطرف می‌کند، ولی بی شک گرسنه را سیر نمی‌کند »

چند ماه پیش بود که تو خیابان انقلاب برای خرید لوازم یکی از مراسم‌های شورای صنفی دانشکده داشتم راه می‌رفتم که چشمم خورد به یک‌سری کتاب کوچک با رنگ‌های متنوع و چینش جالب با یه تایتل جذابی که در لحظه یادم نیست. گفتم اینا که حجمشون کمه، تایم خاصی نمی‌گیره خوندنشون، برم ببینم چین و چند تاشو تست کنم.
این کتاب ( آرامش ) و یک جلد دیگه از مجموعه‌رو خریدم که با وضعیت فعلی احتمالا حالا حالا‌ها نخونمش.
هدف این کتابا تو نقل قول بالا از مقدمه‌ی همین کتاب هست. « تکه خوراکی‌های کوچک ». ولی به نظرم اینا حتی تکه خوراکی کوچک هم نیست، عملا خوراکی‌های بی سر و تهی هستن که شاید، شاید شمارو مجاب کنه بعد از آشغال خوردن، برین و یه وعده غذای درست بخورین.

این جلد از سری « تکه‌های نیک » عملا خلاصه‌ی کتابی از تیم پارکس بود به شدت بی‌سر و ته بود، پر از جمله‌های ناقص، روایت‌های ناقص. شاید تنها پوینتش بعضی از جمله‌هایی بودن که می‌شد چند دقیقه‌ای بهشون فکر کرد. تازه بعضی جلد‌های دیگه که شامل بخش‌هایی از چند کتابن و نمی‌دونم عملا چه هدفی رو می‌خوان دنبال کنن.

در کل، به نظرم با خوندنش خیلی وقتم رو تلف نکردم، ولی عمرا به کسی بخوام پیشنهاد کنم این سری رو! یا حداقل این جلد از سری مربوطه رو!

[Lynette · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is probably 2 and half stars. I should start by saying how I came across this book. I referred a patient of mine to a very specialist pain clinic as her life had completely succumbed to pain, vomiting and immobility and we as her doctors could offer no solutions. At the point of being discharged a psychiatrist who had met with her recommended she read this and out of nosiness I thought I'd give it a go too.

Its started very well, I enjoyed the first 50%, Parks paints a startling picture of his frustration and angst at finding no answers. I enjoyed his narrative largely accepting that his writing style isn't one that would normally draw me in, but the content was interesting. But I felt that between 50-75% of the way through it completely lost focus, I got very tired of his continual literary references and struggled to engage with it. I don't feel at the end of it I really connected with the end of his journey.

Disappointedly I'd hoped this might be something I could recommend to some more of my many patients with medically unexplained symptoms, but I'm not sure people will find any solace in such a dense read that really falls short of keep the reader engaged.

[Aiza Idris (biblio_mom) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Firstly I am in love with the velvety texture of the cover. Secondy, this author is funny. I like the story-telling method of writing for a self-help book. Only the book does not have "enough ingredients" to make it a very good read. But i have a great time reading

[Daniela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Het boek zet aan tot nadenken, maar daar blijft het ook bij. Erg omslachtig en onduidelijk geschreven, stappen zijn niet altijd even goed te volgen. Wel wat herkenning, maar geen grote ideeën gekregen om de zoektocht van het leven te vervolgen in navolging van zijn stappen. En dat kan kan ook niet aan de vertaling liggen;)

[Barbara Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Parks is a successful writer who has written novels, nonfiction, and various magazine articles. Now he has written a unique memoir in which he is searching for a diagnosis or solution to mysterious pains and other physical symptoms no one can figure out.

Rather than a sad, whiny, poor-ol'-me sort of memoir, this is honest, factual, and often funny. At first he thinks his terrible pain, urinary frequency and other symptoms are simply physical. Prostate is the first body part to come under suspicion of course, but when he finally sees a doctor and has tests, that suspicion doesn't pan out. He is very funny about the indignity of his symptoms and more so the tests.

Then he fears he has cancer but that doesn't seem to be the case either. There is no physical diagnosis. He buys a book that helps some, but mostly convinces him that his lifelong constant tension and anxiety could be the problem. He tries therapy, massage, and finally retreats. What happens to his mind and his physical symptoms along the way is surprising but entirely believable. This guy doesn't just launch into possible solutions with enthusiasm; rather he drags himself into them with a hearty dose of skepticism. He would be the first to detect quackery and denounce it.

I loved his humor and the fact that the best thing he learned in this process was to be honest with himself. His wife was at first supportive, then bored with the whole thing, and then very happy with the new Tim Parks. I hadn't read anything by him previously, but I imagine his writing became much better, and took a whole new direction during his long search for a cure. Memoir lovers, this is for you. I think you'll find it unique among the other memoirs you've read.

[Electric · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you came to this book because you want to know more about meditation you came to the wrong place. parks describes his very personal process of dealing with his physical (and mental) suffering by re-learning how to breath and pay attention to the here and now. he rejects the concepts behind this form of meditation (buddhism) and is building his own eclectic method just like so many other people are. for me the book was entertaining because it tells about the specific difficulties people that are somehow "intellectual" (writers, scholars,...) have, when faced with something like insigt meditation and the emptying of the mind. still looking for the narrative, still living in the future of acomplishment. parks has some really good remarks on body/illness/health and is illustrating these points with literary examples. this book is also about his process of creating, writing and translating, something I always like to read about, even though I haven`t read any novels by parks. It helps if you are male and have some experience with your prostate to enjoy this book but it is not required to understand his pain.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calm is a 95-page chunk from Tim Parks's book Teach Us To Sit Still, about his experiences with Vipassana Buddhist meditation, chronic pain, and spirituality. Parks was raised in a deeply religious household (his father was an Anglican priest), from which he seems to have fled both physically and mentally at the earliest possible opportunity; faith is obviously a deeply vexed issue for him. He writes pitilessly, with great wit and self-deprecation, about his attempts to be more mindful, to meditate better, and about the depths of his despair when a meditation retreat seems to promise nothing but more physical pain and suffering. When, at last (and very briefly) the meditation does work, he writes of his body's feeling of liberation and release with an illumination and a joy that is reminiscent of mystics like Margery Kempe—and also acknowledges how fleeting such joy must be (his return to discomfort is "liturgy after revelation"). I'd very much like to read Teach Us To Sit Still in its entirety now, and perhaps try to pick up my own meditation or yoga practice again.

[David Fenton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly enjoyable read. Tim Parks's search for relief from a pelvic pain he has suffered for many years and his determination to find an answer that does not involve surgery is engaging and informative. His writing style is friendly and easy. As the medical explanations for his pain become more vague and the more insistent they are that he needs to undergo surgery, the more Parks decides to explore other avenues. Being a writer, he starts out by wondering if it's all in the mind. He ponders other famous pain sufferers like Thomas Hardy and Mussolini. He realises that, as a writer, he hardly ever lives in the moment and it is this that causes the tension that leads to the pain he suffers.

A lovely, well told story of the relationship between mind and body.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a doctor, so this book was interesting to me, & medically correct. However, I found it so over-analytical & I think the author was pretty neurotic. I admire his search within for what the route of his pain could be (& wish more people would do so!) however I think reading all of his thoughts in such great depth was too much for me. The journey he went on was interesting & admirable, but the writing style & reading the interminable self-analysis wasn't for me.

[Torgeir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read for anyone who is curious about the meditation retreats of John Coleman, a student of the Burmese meditation teacher U Ba Khin. The book is a narrative about someone who is discovering the connection between his mind and body for the first time.

[Bart Veldhuijsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een verassend klein boekje. Ik had het gekocht omdat ik anders in de trein niks had te doen en het is erg goed bevallen. Het zijn een paar hoofdstukken van een boek en het gaat over Tim Parks die gaat mediteren, wat heel interessant en intens is om te lezen.

[Maria Novella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed "Calm", a book part of the Vintage Minis collection with selections from Tim Park's "Teach Us to Sit Still".
Park, in these selections, explains how he's an absolute skeptic about spirituality. Until he finds himself immersed in the alien world of a Buddhist meditation retreat and, slowly, he really finds that inner peace.
How to find that peace? How to stay calm, how to not be submerged by problems, by pain?
"Calm" is a very fast read and a very enjoyable one. I myself am very skeptic about spirituality. I've tried once, one session of yoga and I still can't understand how you're supposed to free your mind from the everyday's problems and stress. All I could think of was exactly what I was supposed to avoid. Free your mind! I know one session is not enough, but I started reading this book fully sharing Park's point of view: skepticism.
I loved reading his journey towards finding what he was (probably not) looking for. His writing is captivating, funny, and honest.

[Dpdwyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine book that I will read again. The author, a successful writer and translator living in Italy, develops debilitating prostatitis, with severe pain and frequent urination. Medical tests find no definitive diagnosis, but his doctor recommends surgery. He searches for alternatives, fighting his preconceptions while making progress with relaxation techniques and Vipassana meditation, ultimately learning about himself.

The book’s charm results from the author’s honesty, intelligence, and understated humor. The descriptions of the indignities and embarrassment of his ailment had me laughing and wincing at the same time. Then he starts to take a hard look at his life of the mind divorced from his body. Paying attention to his body, it starts to soften and change. He comes up with no easy answers but offers one way to begin to approach our estrangement from our whole being.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my usual sort of book - not anyone's, excerpt perhaps men aged over 50 who want to understand more about their prostates and peeing mechanisms into which it goes in very great detail for half the book. But Parks writes well enough that even this is quite riveting, especially the casualness of the surgical interventions offered. Even within this there are little glimmers that there might be something different happening, something psychological or spiritual even, and that medicine might not be the answer. It's his journey through these possibilities that finally lead him to Vipissana meditation and a pain-free pelvis. This is a wonderful book for those who know or suspect that medical interventions have their limitations, who suffer in their thousands from "pelvic pain" and who are looking for other answers. However, it's also a remarkably good read.

[Suad Shamma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know that I liked this book very much. It dragged quite a bit, even though it's less than a 100 pages long, but also...I didn't feel Tim Parks' experiences were genuine. His first experience described in the book on a five day Buddhist meditation retreat to heal (he had back problems) and find calm and peace was interesting to read about. However, when it came to his second experience, he began to lose me. I felt like he was...basically trying to cash in on his experience.

He kept talking about not wanting to write about it, and all this stuff was being written in his head, but then...well...he wrote about it anyway.

I don't know if I believed him or believed in his journey to self-healing.

[Evi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Parks gaf in 'De roman als overlevingsstrategie' een voor mij vernieuwende kijk op schrijven. Ik paste zijn theorie toe op andere boeken die ik las en bleef verder nadenken. "Geef me meer van deze schrijver!", zei ik. "Zelfmedelijden maakt je een groot verteller van saaie verhalen" zegt hij vooraan in dit boek. Deze schijver kan goed vertellen, maar eigenlijk is het inderdaad best saai. En zijn strategie. Niet de mijne, zo bleek. Zelfs deze beschrijving is er saai van geworden.

[Ruud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressed! Especially because of what he - Tim Parks! - has achieved by sitting still. From a neurotic wreck to ultimately putting things into perspective and persevering in his daily meditations, while at first - partly because of his upbringing, his roots in a dogmatic religious environment - he was extremely skeptical about everything that smelled like floating. I’m not familiar with this writer's fiction but was particularly interested in the subtitle of this book due to a regular attraction to meditation (which it has not yet come to).
The first part about his crusade against hellish pains in the lower abdomen region (not to be confused with the prostate, because the problem appears to occur in both men and women) filled me with very contradictory feelings: too spacious experiences with allopathic medicine described in great detail and adorned with the most ghastly images. For me it really started at about 70%, chapter The Gong (page 216): the experience of the retreat and everything around it, the struggle, the surrender, the acceptance, the relapse and going through the process again. In any case, great respect that this man eventually went to participate in a retreat and that this man persisted. He gives beautiful descriptions of it, of the entire entourage and what it does to him. Some are truly brilliant and worth rereading (especially comparing ever-chattering thoughts in his mind with flocks of birds before sleep to a glass of water with a fig in it; his earliest images eventually take on meaning!). If something would be an incentive “to sit still” then for sure it would be this book and for many reasons ...

[Phil Calandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story of the author's quest to overcoming a crippling health condition namely Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome or non-bacterial prostatitis. I'm very disheartened concerning some of the negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. I haves suffered from CPPS for nearly 20 years. In fact in reading this book it seemed like my own autobiography. Very much like the author, I tried all kinds of alternative treatments (acupuncture, homeopathy, removal of all dental amalgams, and other treatments) as well as traditional medical treatments-All to no avail. I would have gone to a witchdoctor if I knew there was any possibility of getting relief. I recently completed the book "Mindfulness with Breathing" by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu after reading several other books on Buddhism and other Eastern Philosophy. In 11/18, as outlined in "Mindfulness with Breathing," I started a 5 minute breathing exercise and gradually progressed to 15-20 minutes twice a day. In the middle of January, I noticed substantial alleviation of symptoms that heretofore no other treatment protocol proved effective. There are some very legitimate criticisms of some reviewers in terms of the author's writing style and his penchant for going into tangents and loosing the reader; however, due to my similar experience with the alleviation of CPPS symptoms, I am compelled to give this book a five star rating and encourage those with similar symptoms to read this book.