Article in The Times, UK

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Eyes wide shut to a meditative solution
Tim Parks
Last updated June 22 2010 12:01AM

Our writer suffers from a debilitating illness that regular medicine failed to explain or treat. But he found salvation in meditation

One gloomy 5am in the winter of 2006, unable to sleep and trawling the net yet again for some explanation of the chronic condition that had made my life a misery, I came across an extract from a book with the ugly title A Headache in the Pelvis. Here, after two years of expensive consultations and invasive medical tests, I found at last an accurate description of my plight.

The authors David Wise and Rodney Anderson listed 23 symptoms, which would tend, they said, “to take on a life of their own”. I had 16 of them, including back pain, constantly changing abdominal pain, frequent nocturnal urination and fierce twinges in legs and perineum. They called it Chronic Pelvic Pain syndrome and concluded: “The effects on a person’s life have been likened to those of heart attack, angina, or Crohn’s disease. Sufferers tend to live lives of quiet desperation. Anxiety, depression and ‘catastrophic thinking’ are the norm.”

I was hugely cheered on reading this. Apparently, I really wasn’t making it up. For two years I had oscillated between the conviction that I had cancer, or that my condition was psychosomatic. Of the two explanations I preferred the latter but, despite my best efforts, I could identify no way I was “using” my illness to manipulate others, somatise stress, evade unpleasant duties or fulfil a deep-seated vocation for unhappiness. As each medical test indicated that I didn’t have cancer, I expected I’d quickly feel better. I didn’t. It was as if my body and I could never get comfortable together. The doctors proposed to tunnel a motorway through my prostate and permanently open the upper of the two sphincters that controls urination. This wouldn’t alleviate my pains, which they didn’t understand or seem concerned about, but I’d pee better, they thought.

I rebelled. None of the medical tests had indicated problems with my prostate. On the net, many women seemed to have the condition. And now, in A Headache in the Pelvis, I read: “95 per cent of patients with prostatitis do not have an infection or inflammation that can account for their symptoms . . . the prostate is not the issue . . . We have never seen a satisfactory surgical intervention for these pains.”

What to do? I had given up on official medicine. Its drugs made me sick. Its operations threatened my manhood without promising relief. Brought up in a family that practiced faith healing, I had built my identity in opposition, around the principles of cold reason and evidence-based medicine. No laying on of hands for me. Ayurvedic herbs brought no relief. Nor did my endless experiments with diet. Now Anderson and Wise had nothing better to suggest than massage and breathing exercises. It seemed a joke, but worth a go. What I didn’t realise was that they were demanding a radical change of attitude and lifestyle.

Let’s recapitulate. It was only when these pains had interrupted my work that I accepted I had a problem. I set off to the doctors to get myself fixed fast. Biology lessons had taught me that the body was best left to the experts. It wasn’t me. Me was the guy writing the books, hopefully getting known. The body was an enabler. It gave me eyes to read and fingers to type. It was also a fashion accessory. Which was why I kept running and canoeing and visiting the gym. To look well. My parents’ distinction between body and soul consolidated this attitude. The body was in God’s image, so you’d better not do anything impure with it. What really mattered was the soul, which went to Heaven. The body might get recuperated after the Last Judgment, but no one seemed overly anxious about that. The thing was to pass muster as a person, a soul. Faith healing, just as official medicine, doesn’t require you to enter a new relationship with your body. On the contrary, it’s an even quicker fix than the drugs or the scalpel.

Now A Headache in the Pelvis talked about years of stressful overachieving, sitting at a desk and an embattled mental attitude that had led me to tense the muscles of my pelvic floor so that they had atrophied and were pinching the nerves that crossed them from bladder, penis and prostate. What I needed was an hour a day of breathing exercises called “paradoxical relaxation”.

An hour every day? Forget it! Not just any hour, the authors said, but an hour of prime time. “You must accept these pains as part of the main curriculum of your life. Many patients are too busy to dedicate themselves to our treatment.” They weren’t suffering enough to give the time.

I was definitely suffering enough. And growing curious. On your back, allowing your breath to establish its own pattern, eliminating all words from your mind, you focus on tension in the body and just, well, nothing, let it be. You go to meet the pain itself, and again, let it be.

It took many months. How would I ever clear the words from my head? Finally, the answer came: by interesting the mind in the sensations of the body, by allowing these two estranged partners to spend time together. I shall remember for the rest of my life the day when, from the dry, knitted tension of my forehead, a great warm wave rose up and crashed across my chest and limbs, sweeping everything before it: thought, tension, pain. For five minutes I was pain free, utterly relaxed. It was the beginning of the way back.

No, not back. Forward. This new awareness of the body, acceptance that the body was me, was suddenly so much more interesting than the pain on one side, or my writing on the other. It wasn’t long before I was trying shiatsu and discovering that while I believed not a jot of the practitioner’s bizarre formulations, his hands knew things that other doctors didn’t. “Your ‘paradoxical relaxation’,” he said, “is an ancient form of meditation.” He suggested a Vipassana meditation retreat.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done: ten days in seated silence focusing on the here and now of breath and body, with no chants, no mantras, no images or any aids. Without even the purposefulness of therapy. I wasn’t there to get better, just to return to an old routine but — most therapeutic of all — just to be there.

For five days it was an agony of fevered introspection and aching limbs, a scary exposure to one’s own self regard. Until at last it happened. How can I describe? As if eyes closed behind already closed eyes and, more wakeful than ever, mind and flesh embraced. The two were one. Then I knew the world was different from what I had supposed.

Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks is published by Harvill Secker on July 1

The sceptic’s guide

1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed

2. Set an alarm to finish so you’re not worried about time

3. Get yourself sitting comfortably, back upright

4. Focus the mind on breath and body. When it wanders off, bring it gently back

5. Just sit still. There is nothing to be achieved beyond an awareness of the moment

From http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/article2566417.ece (login reqd)

[carld]

Great article...Is he a member here?

Best

[superuse]

Dr. Wise seems to have a low regard for just hourly relaxation (or paradoxical relaxation) as a cure to pelvic pain. The trigger point/myofascial internal release taught or done by a professional, along with moment-to-moment relaxation (hourly monitoring of ones pelvic state/tension at work/during the day with an alarm aid) taught at the clinic, or the book seems essential.

I believe in a letter posted here, (and on his website) he noted that 3-5 hrs/week of his meditation sessions may be for naught, if a substantial amount of the other 100 waking hrs/week are spent tensed up at a computer monitor/etc with the pelvic tension returning to its previous (bad) state. Moment to moment relaxation is difficult. It takes a long time to relearn (if one ever "learned") how to sit and concentrate at a computer monitor for 2000hrs/yr. Hour after hour my alarm would vibrate, and upon checking my pelvis and butt were clenched a bit, especially on deadline or engrossed in something.

Also note he seems the usual - type A overachiever with a sedentary job (requiring heavy mind use) along with the running and weights.

Get well
-jim

[webslave]

Meditating to make the pain go away

[Whoaday]

Hey Webslave,

It's Whoaday. Been a while. I am in a lot better place now...mentally. Not (as) pent up. I was wondering...there was been a lot more on this forum recently about relaxation over physical intervention. I realize that you are one of a few that got better without much, if any, physical intervention. Are you open to the possibility that trigger point therapy may not be the answer?

I only say this cause I have seen more positives in my life from relaxation than from the physical events. I tend to align myself more with the TMS process. While I don't agree with or follow EVERYTHING Sarno says, there seems to be much benefit in realizing there is nothing structurally wrong, and that the mind has created all of this.

Just wondering where you fall on all of this now?

[webslave]

Relaxation is the long way round, but it works. I completely changed my life so I could relax 24/7, but in retrospect I'd rather have had PT to the affected muscles + relaxation training. That would have got me better more quickly. I know that because the little intrapelvic massage I did do, in an amateurish way, and aimed mainly at the prostate, helped. If I'd had proper treatment I could have kept the lucrative but high pressure job I had.

[webslave]

From The Huffington Post
Feb 19 2011

Tim Parks, author of "Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing," had his very own health crisis -- chronic pelvic pain -- that sent him on a similar voyage through the health care system. And led him to his own important discovery: that simply sitting -- or meditating -- was what he needed to do to heal.

He describes the moment he first realized that meditation was going to help: "A great wave of relaxation came over me. For a minute, the pain was gone."

His book recounts -- in this novelist's entertaining and thoughtful way -- his entire journey, including the experts he consulted, the treatments he tried, his resistance to all things esoteric, and, finally, to his deepening understanding of the value of meditation in his life. He now sits for an hour each morning, before the pressures of the day encroach

[superuse]

It has the advantage of being artistic, a bit romantic, in touch with yourself, listen to your body etc. Should the newspapers, articles, Huffpo etc see or get into the "gloved finger and triggerpoints on the left obturator internus at 3 o'clock to the prostate", trigger point maps, etc I think most readers, critics, and any write up this fellow is getting would have run for the hills. As such it is a pretty useful public introduction. Any concept it reinforces to doctors and such that it is "all in your head" is a negative. But, you have to take what you can get.

Lets face it, before anyone was affected by symptoms, the "obturator internus" and "piriformis" was something Kirk or Picard took a left turn at before battling the Klingons at Alpha Centauri III in episode 45.

Get well
--jjf

[webslave]

Curing the Pelvic Headache
NY Times article