Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  ‘Dreams may tell us about our condition,’ Ruggero said. ‘I imagine you dream of water.’

  I stared. I was presently finishing a book whose title would be Dreams of Rivers and Seas. But I wouldn’t tell him.

  ‘From time to time,’ I said.

  He wanted to know what kind of water I dreamed of, what other elements were present. I told him that most recently I had been looking down from a hilltop watching excavators shifting the course of a riverbed; one enormous boulder wouldn’t budge. In another dream I had heard a voice calling and descended a staircase hundreds of feet beneath our house where I found a stream flowing steadily in pitch darkness through solid rock.

  Ruggero pondered. He consulted charts that showed different coloured lines forming elaborate circuits in the body. He is a small, softly paunchy man with a round friar’s face and bushy beard. I was vaguely irritated, thinking that if I had come and was paying him to do the therapy, he should get on and do it.

  He wasn’t a doctor, he said. These problems had to do with elemental imbalances and blocked energy. Earth must contain water, for example, but not block it. Water must refresh earth but not sweep it away. He could work on those relationships, but if I wanted to recover fully there would very likely be things in my life I would have to change.

  I let these bizarre notions pass in much the same way that I make no comment when my mother talks about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the inevitability of Armageddon. A flaky, New Age mentality was beckoning. Often, Ruggero said, it was a question of the time of the year, the position of a planet. I recalled Dr Hazan and his birth charts, his theories about tussles in the mind. Each element, Ruggero explained – earth, air, fire, water and wood – had its stronger and weaker seasons. No doubt my troubles were worse in winter.

  Ruggero loved to talk of these things, none of them remotely demonstrable. But when he started to touch me all talking ended. Kneeling on the futon he seemed to fall into a trance of concentration, or even prayer. When he took hold of a leg, or arm, his hands immediately transmitted reassurance and knowledge. You were held, and he was knowing you, through touch. Sometimes he seemed to be waiting for your body to tell him something. He held a hand for some moments without moving. It was all new to me and I have to say beautiful, even moving. Emotions moved in me like mud stirred with a stick. ‘Let go,’ he murmured lifting my head. They were the only words he spoke. Or rather, in Italian, one word: ‘Molla’, let go.

  An odd relationship developed. Before and after the treatment, I let him talk for a while about reinforcing this or that meridian, or draining energy from the upper or lower body. It was mumbo-jumbo. At the same time I trusted his hands absolutely. I knew those hands knew things. It seemed better not to try and say exactly what. When I stood up at the end of the session I felt either pleasantly exhausted, or bursting with energy. On one occasion I walked up the hill to the car park with the springy step of a fifteen-year-old. I could fly. Other times my body temperature dropped drastically. I froze.

  Never did Ruggero give me the same treatment twice. He asked how I was. I kept the talk brief; I was impatient to get going with the treatment, irritated by his time-wasting, already removing my shoes to hurry him. Then I would feel ashamed when, instead of giving me an hour, he went on for an hour and a half, even two hours. But always charged the same. ‘Each treatment is a response to your condition as I find it that day,’ he said. So obviously it changed from time to time. If, in the interim, I had dreamed of water, or any of the other elements, I would tell him the dream in one line. Once he remarked that more than any other patient I had convinced him that the shiatsu masters were right about dreams. I laughed and told him I didn’t believe a word of it. It was his hands. Just his hands. Then on impulse I asked him: ‘Make me stand up straight, Ruggero. Please. Help me walk with my head up.’

  The Tangled Wisteria

  FOR THE MOST part Dr Wise is careful to back up the claims in A Headache in the Pelvis with references to respectable research papers. The concept of paradoxical relaxation, for example, is presented as a development of work done by Dr Edmund Jacobson in the 1920s and ’30s. In general, the implication is that if this isn’t mainstream medicine just now, it soon will be.

  But as I suggested earlier there is also a more mystical side to Dr Wise. At one point he cites the Four Zen Horses as an analogy for four levels of readiness for therapy and towards the end of the book he allows himself to mention the ‘ancient wisdom of the Buddha’ as if this positive assessment were something we were all agreed on, rather than a claim that would prompt my mother to throw up her arms in disgust. Attempting to describe the proper ‘attitude of acceptance’ for those embarking on paradoxical relaxation, he quotes, of all things, a Japanese haiku.

  Crisp autumn leaves

  Rustle softly

  Then blow away.

  Written without embellishment, judgement or interpretation, Wise remarks, this description shows the poet simply accepting things as they are, a state of mind pelvic pain sufferers should emulate. As I see it, there is a great deal of embellishment in these brief lines; what is helpful, perhaps, for the person seeking to relax is the image of something disappearing, naturally and rightly, without resistance, as autumn leaves must, the poet’s voice falling silent exactly as the object he describes is swept away. Reading the haiku, you are encouraged to imagine that its eight rustling words have blown off with the leaves, naturally and inevitably, and the mind can now repose in their absence. Dr Jacobson had noticed, Wise explains, that any thinking, however silent, always tensed the various muscles that control speech. To relax deeply one must be rid of thought.

  When I mentioned this relaxation technique to Ruggero he suggested it dated back rather further than the 1920s: I was actually practising an ancient form of meditation, he told me. If I wanted to get more out of it, he knew an organisation that arranged retreats.

  I resisted ‘meditation’. Without having ever really understood what the word meant, I felt that it smacked of the mystical, the oriental. My mindset was not compatible with such practices (whatever they were). To accept that I was engaged in meditation, rather than a therapeutic relaxation exercise developed by medical experts with Ph.D.s, would mean surrendering the tough, realistic side of my identity that had been adopted with a certain urgency when I abandoned my parents’ religious faith.

  And the word ‘retreat’, needless to say, couldn’t help but remind me of times the Christ Church Youth Club took us away for a week at Easter to preach and pray us into born-again imbecility. No amount of pain would drag me back to such foolishness.

  Lying on the futon in Ruggero’s tiny study, I tried to get into the relaxed, non-thinking Dr-Wise state, the better to concentrate on what the shiatsu man was doing to my body. There seemed to be greater benefits if the mind focused wordlessly on the sensations he provoked, perhaps because the more focused you were the more deeply you could relax the muscles he was kneading.

  Suddenly the radio went on very loud right outside the door.

  This was infuriating. Ruggero rented his one room from a dietician who owned the small apartment and used the other room to see her patients. Often there would be two or three anxious, overweight women sitting in the small passageway, reading Gioia or Gente. Sometimes there was an angular mother with her anorexic daughter. To prevent those in the passageway from hearing the secrets confided in her office, the dietician, a busy lady in her fifties with a loud, confident voice, had placed a large radio on a shelf and insisted that it stay on for as long as she was ‘receiving’. The channel she chose was RAI 2, the most inane of Italy’s public stations: between pop songs and publicity spots, two facile middle-aged men joke with each other and various guests and callers in the most wearisome way imaginable.

  The moment this radio disturbed the silence, the efficacy of the shiatsu was in jeopardy. I felt it, and the more I felt it, the more distracted I became and the more the treatment was in jeopardy. I just could not not hear and h
ate the two grating voices with their dumb banter. I couldn’t not listen to their jokes and opinions; on the contrary I found myself listening carefully precisely to confirm how idiotic and poisonous they were. This is costing me fifty euros, I thought. With the radio blaring, it was money thrown away. Not to mention the time. My muscles tensed, I couldn’t relax. I needed silence.

  Ruggero sensed what was happening. He had tried, he assured me, to talk to the woman and get her to use some more soothing form of music, but she had refused. He sat quietly, holding my foot, as if to let me know that he was aware of the rise in tension. A few moments later, he said: ‘By the way, hyper-sensitivity to noise is one of the things associated with imbalance in the water meridian.’

  Ruggero would pronounce these truths, or myths, with such confidence that there was little I could say in response, unless perhaps an unconvinced, ‘How fascinating.’ I wasn’t going to start reading up on shiatsu theory.

  I began to bring my earplugs. At the same time, I noticed that if I managed to get into Dr Wise’s relaxation mode before the noise began, then it would hardly affect me. I heard it, but it didn’t matter. This was curious. On the one hand I resisted Ruggero’s meridian mysteries, on the other, things were indeed related in unexpected ways.

  ‘The fact is,’ Ruggero said, ‘that if you want to stand up straight, a meditation retreat would be useful.’

  This seemed mad. Presumably one spends ninety per cent of a meditation retreat sitting cross-legged with one’s brain in one’s navel. What I needed were some serious back exercises. Perhaps a physiotherapist.

  Meantime, Ruggero’s treatments had become progressively more violent. No, ‘violent’ is the wrong word. ‘Aggressive’ is also wrong. I can’t think of a word that properly describes what Ruggero’s treatments were becoming. Let’s say that he did everything with more strength and force and pressure. ‘You’d have been in hospital, if I’d tried this the first day,’ he chuckled, forcing fingers under my shoulder blade. Many of the moves resembled wrestling grips. Legs, hips, back and neck were stretched this way and that. His fist sank into my stomach. Yet I never perceived it as violent. If there was pain it was always combined with a pleasurable sensation of release. He pushed the ball of his hand deep into the muscle at the top inside of the leg, and if I hadn’t decided never to talk during the session itself, I would have asked him to do it again.

  ‘Next you’ll be making love,’ my wife commented.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not his type. He says my muscles are woefully stiff.’

  No homo-erotic thoughts crossed my mind, but I did wonder how Ruggero managed with the young woman sometimes waiting in the corridor when I left: early twenties, long legs, bright nervous smile.

  ‘Oh, I’m very shy,’ he laughed.

  He wasn’t.

  I’d been seeing Ruggero for about three months when something new occurred. In the night, the thigh muscles immediately above my knees were suddenly seething with tension. I woke and couldn’t sleep. My thighs would burst. I had to get up. It went on for weeks.

  Did I have varicose veins? I wondered. My wife thought I should go for a check-up.

  ‘Drainage,’ Ruggero said.

  Ruggero never has any problem fitting unexpected developments into his vision of things, his narrative. In this he is like my mother who ascribes everything positive to God and everything negative to the devil. The work he was doing, Ruggero explained, was aimed at draining trapped energy (vata?) downwards from my belly through my legs and out through my feet. Evidently, it had now descended to my thighs. Like sludge in a blocked pipe.

  If nothing else, I decided, this was an innocuous and optimistic version of events and certainly better than the one that saw me winding up on the operating table. It was also true that I was now ninety per cent free of the pains higher up that had made life so miserable for a year and more. Apart from the frequent night-time trips to the bathroom, I was cured.

  ‘So at some point I can expect the action to move down from thighs to calves?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He was confident.

  ‘Then ankles and toes?’

  ‘Ankles, soles and away.’ Ruggero smiled. ‘The meridians terminate beneath the foot.’

  ‘And why would meditation help me to stand up straight?’

  After he had finished and I had got dressed, Ruggero sat down at a tiny wooden table and made notes of all the things he had done to me. He was meticulous in this regard. Everything was written down and filed. He might have been a doctor.

  ‘At the moment you’re just trying to lift your head and force your back straight.’

  This was true: when I went running in particular I made a huge effort to fix my eyes high, on distant trees and hedges; but as soon as my concentration wavered and I started to think of something else, I was looking at the stony ground again. All my life, mind elsewhere, I have looked at the ground.

  Grinning, Ruggero got to his feet and mimicked a man bent double but with face thrust up, a hunchback hoping for the moon.

  ‘Like that.’

  ‘Hard to see what else I can do,’ I said despondently.

  The truth is, I had no idea what sort of process it would be, learning to stand up straight. I had supposed Ruggero would free things up a bit, muscle- and bone-wise – perhaps there would be a dramatic, liberating crack at some point – and then I would finish the job with a superhuman, largely masochistic effort of will, pushing out my stomach and yanking back my shoulders, as if in thrall to some bulldog sergeant major.

  ‘It won’t work.’ Ruggero shook his head.

  I did everything in my power to prove him wrong. Constantly pulling my head up, I got a stiff neck, which Ruggero then relieved, but without any advantage to my posture. A summer passed, and a winter. If I did an hour a day on my back, following Dr Wise’s rigmarole, the stomach pains stayed away. But I knew they hadn’t gone far. They prowled the borders of the small haven of comfort I’d staked out, predators waiting for me to tire, wolfish shadows beyond the firelight.

  And I was tiring. The relaxation sessions were getting boring. Occasional waves of relaxation no longer impressed me. I didn’t know where to take them or what else there was to achieve. I began to skip. After all, I still had so much work to do. It was getting more and more difficult to find sufficient time for the university, and my writing, and my translating, and my family, and, of course, the need to keep fit.

  So, gradually, the excitement of having ‘cured myself’ gave way to disappointment. A revolution had been left incomplete. It hadn’t delivered. I hadn’t changed. Life is so much longer than any of our enthusiasms, I thought. To every wave its undertow. I dreamed I was on a balcony with wife and friends and we were trying to unravel a wisteria that had grown in and out of the railings to the point that the two seemed inseparable. It was an ancient thing and I knew it was important to detach every tangled inch of it intact, otherwise it would never flower again. Everybody was helpful and handling the plant, which was my plant, with immense care – but the wisteria did seem so knotted, so stiff, so very old and unbending that sooner or later, I was sure, we would just have to hack the trunk down.

  Catastrophic thinking.

  Eventually, in April 2008, I boarded a train to the small village of Maroggia in the Valtellina, north of Milan, whence I was picked up and driven to a haphazardly renovated farmhouse high up on the Alpine mountainside. As the gate was closed behind us, I saw a card with the notice:

  PARTICIPANTS AT THE RETREAT MUST NOT LEAVE THE GROUNDS FOR THE DURATION OF THEIR STAY.

  The Gong

  PARADOXICAL RELAXATION IS done lying down, knees raised over a cushion to flatten the back. Vipassana meditation is done sitting cross-legged like a Buddha. Before confirming my booking, I phoned the meditation centre to warn them that I had never been able to sit cross-legged; I wasn’t a flexible guy. They reassured me I could always use a chair. Lying down, however, was not permitted. The back must be upright.

  I wa
s anxious.

  ‘The position is not the problem,’ a man with a haggard, monkish face announced.

  On arrival, I was surprised to find people talking. I had assumed the whole retreat took place in silence. Sitting on the front doorstep of the farmhouse, looking out over an Alpine panorama of peaks and stone and misty cloud, a girl in her mid-twenties had been expressing her concern (and mine) about spending ten to twelve hours a day with her butt on a low cushion.

  ‘The position is not the problem,’ this gloomy, handsome man repeated. From the way he spoke it appeared that there was a problem, perhaps a very considerable one, just that it wasn’t ‘the position’.

  What then?

  Before departing I had looked up ‘Vipassana meditation’ on the net:

  Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self-purification by self-observation. It is a universal remedy for universal problems.

  ‘Universal’ and ‘remedy’, I thought, are two words that when put together can only epitomise wishful thinking, unless we are talking about a bullet in the brain. Purification, on the other hand, was a concept I couldn’t begin to understand and hence a goal I could hardly desire. As for seeing things as they are, I knew that meditation was done with the eyes closed.

  ‘Vipassana helps you to start feeling your body,’ Ruggero said. Lots of shiatsu practitioners did it; it enabled them to explore the meridians. He suggested I look on the retreat as a merely physical therapy.

  What could that mean from a man who didn’t believe in the separation of mind and body?

  In the early evening we gathered in the meditation room and were invited to take a vow of silence. Seventeen of us. From now on we wouldn’t be able to compare notes. Since the centre advertised itself as a lay Buddhist, non-religious organisation, I was surprised by the liturgical solemnity of the language and the moral seriousness of some of the avowals. For the space of our stay: we mustn’t speak or communicate in any way; we mustn’t kill, or harm any living creature; we mustn’t steal or use what was not ours; we mustn’t ingest intoxicants or any mind-altering medicines; we mustn’t indulge in any sexual activity; we mustn’t disturb those around us; we mustn’t read or write; we mustn’t engage in any other religious or meditative practice; we mustn’t leave the grounds; we mustn’t wear shoes in the meeting room; we mustn’t lie down in the meeting room; we mustn’t sit with our feet pointing towards the teacher.