Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (edition 2010)

Writing about pain is difficult. It is difficult to describe, and difficult to convey how it affects one's life without sounding whiny. Parks successfully does both these things. He then does a fabulous job of describing his unconventional and hope-inspiring road to recovery. The way he describes the retreats he attends is as delightful as it is terrifying. ( )

I enjoyed this book. Well written, autobiographical , universal in its insights. ( )

Tim Parks was a reasonably healthy guy, when he started having severe pains and trouble going to the bathroom. The first half of this book documents how his condition gradually took over his life. Doctors ran every kind of test on him – they all came back normal. Even so, many of them recommended surgery. Well, Tim was terrified of the surgery.

Even though he considers himself a huge skeptic, Parks tried other methods of healing. Part Two of this book discusses his journey to health again. The methods that helped him the most were meditation, shiatsu massage, and essentially learning to calm down and relax his tension. He realized his body had been tense his entire life, which no doubt contributed to his severe pain. He was sensitive to noise and needed quiet time to heal.

Part One of this book was difficult reading for me, but I enjoyed Part Two more, as Parks began to heal. However, the author is very intelligent and includes lots of references to artists and writers I haven’t heard of, so I have a feeling many things were over my head.

However, I would recommend this to anyone who is battling an unknown illness, and anyone who suspects that it would benefit their health to learn to relax and sit still.

(I received this book through Amazon's Vine Program.) ( )

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. ( )

This is an interesting look at one pain, his pain and what happened when he tried out meditation and how it changed his relationship with his pain and his life and where he actually had to examine his mind-body connection.

It's actually an interesting read, and I dare you to read it without starting to consider meditation. He examines quite deeply what his experiences were and what the conventional options were (and the illustrations really didn't leave anything to the imagination!) I found it very interesting and worthwhile ( )