Teach Us to Sit Still
A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
How have the modern world, technology and our addiction to information changed who we are? What effect does it have on our relationships, minds and bodies? What can the simple act of sitting still teach us about ourselves?
When Tim Parks fails to find a cause for his crippling chronic pain, he turns to meditation. This is, however, not your average self-help book or conversion story; instead, it is a refreshingly honest and profoundly moving introspection of one writer and his quest to overcome the inner battle between mind and body. A revelatory read with delightful cultural and literary references, Teach us to Sit Still by Booker-shortlisted author Tim Parks examines how the philosophy of 'sit still, relax and stop worrying' can be profoundly life-altering.
‘Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh; it made me cry; and it made me seriously think about taking up Vispassana meditation’ The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the least exalted physical conditions imaginable prompts a profound journey of self-discovery in this astringent medical memoir. In middle age, novelist Parks (Destiny) came down with excruciating chronic pelvic cramps and urinary difficulties that forced him to relieve himself six times a night. Instead of the prostate surgery his doctors recommended, he embarked on a self-help regimen of breathing exercises and Buddhist meditation, which, despite his contempt for all religious dogmas especially the New Age variety mysteriously eased his ailments. Even more startling was the psychological effect, as he started to question his ambition and busyness, his writing vocation, and the whole language-driven divide between mind and body. Like a latter-day Montaigne, Parks writes in an expansive, essayistic style that uses the pangs and humiliations of physical reality as a starting point for excursions into philosophy and literary criticism; his prose is mordantly funny, self-conscious but never self-pitying, worldly but introspective, attuned to the needs of a soul that he considers thoroughly material and mortal. The result is an absorbing, at times inspiring, narrative of spiritual growth. Photos.
