Teach Us To Sit Still

Teach Us To Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing, by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, RRP£12.99, 352 pages

This might be a tricky book to track down in a shop, as Tim Parks admits in the introduction of Teach Us to Sit Still, an unflinching account of his years of chronic illness – and a recovery entailing an Indian doctor, a cranky-sounding book and meditation.

You won’t find it on the New Age wisdom shelf, it’s not autobiography, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing Parks – a Booker-shortlisted novelist and non-fiction observer of Italian life – usually writes. It feels, throughout, like a book he felt compelled to write. “I was amazed, when someone showed me a way back to health, to realise that I knew nothing of my body at all, nothing of its resources, nothing of its oneness with my mind, nothing of myself.”

He is not exaggerating. This is a crazy, wince-inducing, uplifting book that makes light work of the mental and physical burdens of middle age, and offers everyone a fresh perspective. The nature of Parks’s illness is stuff we know he wouldn’t tell us unless he had to. It is undignified, middle-aged man trouble, writ large – terrible pains in the abdomen, bowel problems, getting up several times in the night to pee. He is poked, prodded and explored by the best doctors that Italy (and Harley Street) can provide. He hasn’t got cancer. He is given odd pills that do nothing for the pain. He suddenly becomes an old man. His faith in evidence-based medicine fading fast, Parks feels he has nothing to lose by consulting an Ayurvedic doctor while on a trip to India.

He’s told he has a “blocked vata”, that there’s a struggle inside him. Birth charts are consulted. “Are you telling me it’s entirely psychosomatic?” says an indignant Parks. He’s told: “You only say psychosomatic ... if you think mind and body are ever separate.” That’s the first revelation. There are many more. Parks has lived in Italy for 30 years, but suddenly begins to understand the underlying tension involved in speaking a foreign language – on guard for mistakes and never sounding quite right.

The sceptical son of a clergyman, he is as rational as they come but ends up on a 10- day meditation retreat and learns to leave words – English and Italian – behind. In its later stages, the book becomes part-memoir, as Parks recalls his difficult relationship with his father. But by the end of the narrative, when he feels physically and mentally recovered, something has profoundly shifted as he allows himself to exist in a totally different world, where every spare moment is not filled with computer-work and reading. “Here is silence and acceptance, the pleasure of a space that need not be imbued with meaning. Intensely aware, of the flesh, the breath, the blood, the consciousness allows the ‘I’ to slip away.”

In writing this book, Park has done a service to the many people who would never look at a cheesy self-help book or try anything with a whiff of spirituality about it. We age, and our bodies bear the burden of decades of tension and neglect. Parks has found a way to reverse that and it is an amazing thing.