‘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 out: sit still, they said, and breathe. I sat still. I breathed. It seemed a tedious exercise at first, rather painful, not immediately effective. Eventually it proved so exciting, so transforming, physically and mentally, that I began to think my illness had been a stroke of luck.’
Bedevilled by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, author Tim Parks confronts hard truths about the relationship between the mind and the body, the hectic modern world and his life as a writer. Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking and improbably entertaining story of Parks’quest to overcome ill health.
