In Your Pants with Dr. Susie G - Novelist Tim Parks on Pelvic Pain to Inner Peace

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

What happened when British author Tim Parks wrote down his personal experience with pelvic pain? A major US publisher said nobody wants to read about prostate and bladder concerns. They were wrong: Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks was one of the first books I read on male pelvic pain and has empowered others to make their own journey out of pain. Tim shares his own struggles, triumphs, and gems in this episode. He'll encourage you to drop the worry, be open to new possibilities for what can change pain, and to enjoy the journey out of pain.

you're listening to in your pants with dr suzy g the physiotherapist for your private helping you get in the know down below hi friends welcome to another in your pants podcast this is dr suzy g i'm so glad that you all are here with me today on today's show honestly i am so star struck. I have novelist, author, critic, translator Tim Parks on the show today. Tim Parks is the author of one of my favorite books on the topic of male pelvic pain in men. This is actually his memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still. And Tim and I just talk very candidly and frankly about his experience with pelvic pain and his journey throughout the years with it and it is really a conversation just like his book is about hope and recovery which is the most important takeaway message from

our conversation today but we go through some of his challenges that he experienced throughout his course of pelvic pain and then we chat about the most impactful part of his recovery and what really ultimately helped him to navigate out of pelvic pain. So I'm so excited to share this interview with you all. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did interviewing Tim Parks. Hello, Tim. Thank you so much for being on the show with me today. Hi, Susie. Hi. So Teaching Us to Sit Still, which is the novel that we're going to be really talking about for this show. It was one of the very first novels that I actually read on the topic of pelvic pain

in men and is really my favorite to this day. I recommend it often. For those who are listening who may have not read your book yet, could you briefly describe to us what the book is about and what inspired you to write down your personal story? Okay, so not a novel really, a memoir. And it's just a book. It's just a book where I tried to go back in my mind over the events of what were probably three or four years at that point, how I had fallen into a really very miserable condition, both physical and then because of the physical, psychological, which lasted quite a long time, alas. and then and then and then how very gradually i i got out of that uh so so the book the book starts in a bad place um and it gradually comes out of that bad place i mean it's not a book about a miracle cure or anything but i suppose most of all it's a sort it was a sort of personal investigation of what had been the state of mind and the state of my body and also the state of

the world um because i i don't think it's uh like i don't think it's an accident that a lot of guys and women have the kind of problems that i had i think it's to do with the world we live in and to do with this kind of mental space that we create and so on so i was just trying to put But on the one hand, tell the story, because it isn't quite an interesting story. And also, it's nice to tell a story when it's not going to end badly, you know. And then it was really kind of a reflection on, so, you know, what is this world that pushes us into this situation? Right, right. And so what hopes did you have as far as, you know, writing your memoir?

What was your intention for writing the memoir? if any well i should say that you know normally i'm a novelist and i've written literary novels and books about italy where i live uh when i wrote the first chapter of this book and sent it to my agent he said don't you know the last thing the last thing a man needs in the world is to say he's got problems down there you know um and and and that's kind of obvious i i remember when one one major U.S. publisher turned down the book because he said nobody would want to read a book with the word prostate prominently in the opening pages I mean um this is a very serious literary American publisher um so you know the book was a risk for me but you know I

didn't become I didn't become a writer to do what other people tell me so well no really yeah you know I I don't write the books they ask me to write so it was really a book like this for me and there have been two or three books of this kind for me was very much a question of of of exploring what I really think about things like a book is a space where you can it's probably the biggest space available in the world today for a single person where you can organize what you think about something you know um so so that that's what it was uh and also the book is actually quite funny and a lot of a lot of fun at moments as well partly because I was very happy to be out of the problem and it was interesting to go back over it you know right right and and you do bring

lightness to a topic that has really a lot of darkness. And I do see it as a book of a memoir of hope, right? A story, an actual story of a person who has lived and experienced a very deep struggle and a profound one at that, that it seems to me that has shaped the trajectory of your life moving forward. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, let's put a bit of narrative in it so that so people can get a sense of this you you are a very busy guy I mean you know I was teaching to make money translating to make money and then writing also to make money but but writing what I wanted to write and I had you know a wife and and and two then three children and I was living in Italy so that means I'm operating in a foreign language most of the time uh so I'm a very very

busy guy and all of a sudden this apparently successful life successful life more or less um is interrupted by a series of pains I mean I'm sure people following your channel will be aware what we're talking about all the you know abdomen pains frequent urination difficulty sitting down for long periods of time you know I would find that I couldn't sit down I would go to give a conference on something and then find that you know it was going to be really hard work to get through to the the end if I had to sit down you know I took just to standing up to speak actually in that period because you know people saw how impressive this is but actually it was just because i couldn't sit down so all that's going on you know and they and and all of a sudden

your life like you say well if it's going to be like this for the rest of my life you know i really don't want this at the time at the time there wasn't really much literature on pelvic pain i mean everything was considered to be prostate pain so you know the doctors then start frightening you with possibility of cancer and bladder cancer prostate cancer and then at the very least um an operation to put a kind of freeway through your prostate uh and then big issues about what sex would be like after that and uh yeah the word issues was not a joke there i didn't mean it as a anyway um so you know uh that was the situation and then very gradually thanks to the internet thanks to finally beginning to get a view on this whole problem of muscle tension and so on

i began to realize that that you could as it were breathe your way and exercise your way out of this problem but i also realized that in order to do that i was going to have to change my lifestyle big time um uh you had to change my attitude to my body big time um to the whole question of enjoying myself and what was enjoyment and so on in any way to cut a long story short But with the help of breathing exercises, some shatsu massage, and then an introduction to meditation, I began to sort out this problem. It took about two years, I think, to get to a point where I felt the physical situation was solved. But the interesting thing was that the whole business of meditating and so on made me very aware of all those tensions that wired up the desire to achieve, be a winner, you know, over anxious about the world. uh that all that stuff was was actually kind of in there as well like you know the whole physical

thing was wrapped up with the whole way of living so so you know i mean i don't think you ever get completely out of that i mean it's not like i've become a buddha or anything but but um but you you do begin to learn you know when to when to chill out a lot more uh like now i meditate or we meditate with my partner every morning we do 40 minutes 45 minutes not quite every day i mean sometimes it's good to have a lion uh but uh i don't do you know half an hour to an hour of yoga every day whatever but but most of all um a sort of different attitude to the body a different attitude to work you know um i think all those things were very important and uh from that day on from from that period on and when the book came

out particularly i i just started to get tons of mail from people in the same situation i don't know if that's a good thing or not because obviously you know it's not something i wanted to turn into a profession or anything i just wanted to write about it but it was very clear to me from the email and from my conversations with fellow sufferers it was very clear to me that there's there's a big issue of lifestyle and people with with people with major conflicts on their hands like an unhappy marriage or a job they're not they're not in the right place you know and all that can lead to the kind of tension where your whole body is just gripping all the time you know and where you're you're punishing yourself partly because you have projects that

you don't consider to be you know the right projects and so on i so appreciate the reference to working in opposed to working out as one could say right you know um really the the premise of is teaching us to sit still from your book is how to how to how to put the snow globe down right you're just so tussled and you do have a chapter that says a tussle in the mind um there's so much chaos and when you kind of put that down for a second and allow that flutter to just settle down how profound that in itself is a teaching and an insight into the inner world or the inner experience of self the embodied self and also the experience of pain and where that is all coming from right because the biomedical model has a very myopic view of the situation in my opinion

how you know helpful for for for certain things not discounting it but it was truly not all encompassing of the humanistic side of care or the humanistic approach to addressing a lived experience of an adversity, whether that's physical pain, emotional pain, often both. Sure. I mean, it's clear that modern medicine is a wonderful thing when we have a situation where a very clear intervention can be helpful. I mean, in the present world we're living in now, I'm not going to say no to a vaccine when it's finally offered me because those things make sense.

I think when the problem is, one of the problems is that medicine then gets this totally fixed and channeled vision of the world where it's imagined that whenever there is pain there is a solution of this variety you know um so so you come along with with pelvic pain and you say well you know we're gonna we're gonna solve this by by putting a big hole through your prostate so that you know you'll pee easily and that will sort out that uh and then you say well what about all these other pains i'm having and they say well actually we don't we don't know why you're having those pains you know but but they still want to intervene on something and so on so it's clear that you know we all we're all hugely

admiring of of medicine but but concerned about medicine when it just wants to intervene without thinking of all the all the other repercussions uh let's but talking about sitting still you know i'd like to talk about that for a minute i mean you say you know we can stop for a second and that's very therapeutic um i think the problem for me at the beginning was i had probably never stopped i remember the first time i decided to follow this series of exercises called paradoxical relaxation by the famous dr wise uh who one of the one of the big guys earlier in this field um and it's basically a a meditative situation where you learn to observe your breathing and so on and so forth and and you're invited to empty your mind of of language you know

i think this was the first time i'd ever done that you know i was 50 something it was the first time I had tried to be awake without thinking in words you know um so it wasn't easy it wasn't like something I immediately realized oh yeah it took me I did begin to realize quite quickly that if you did manage it you got an a relaxation effect in your lower abdomen that was extraordinary And so that made it worthwhile going on. But then also just into honestly, just as a guy, a writer, I got interested in it, you know, and and the funny thing is that even getting interested in it, getting more interested in that than in my problem was therapeutic because a problem tends to take over your world. You know, there's just you and your problem. So I began to follow those practices and somebody told me to start going to meditation retreats, which I was very much against because I was kind of an anti-religious person. um i'm not anti-religious now but i'm certainly not religious um it is extremely difficult to sit still to sit still and by still when you get into the world of of that kind of meditation

you you genuinely mean still like you're sitting still i would go to meditation places and see a guy sit as still as a buddha for two hours and you just think how can how how can they do that you know what is happening in that guy's body and mind that means that he's not suffering because when i sat still it was like sitting on coals it was like sitting on you know pins and needles and and then my mind going crazy and so on but you know these guys they they can gradually teach you how to do this and I learned how to do this uh and it and it is a huge a huge thing when uh for the first time you begin you begin to say wait a minute actually life is a little bit easier than I thought it was I don't need to be so wired up or I don't need all this stuff you know I can still

be very efficient I mean I think I'm probably more efficient um but I don't do it to be efficient I do it because it's wonderful and so on. So I actually think that this medical condition is very much linked to a modern Western lifestyle. Somebody stationary, somebody sitting down, somebody over a computer or something like that, wired up with somatizing in the stomach in the abdomen in the lower pelvic floor um getting stiffer and angrier and all the yeah i mean you know this this situation so uh yes and the book was a sort of invitation to say hey

you know let's think about this in terms of our families the way we were brought up also you know western philosophy if you want christianity what you like what christianity invites you to think about your body and so on like my parents very religious my father's anglican clergyman my parents were very much into the charismatic movement um and and the body was just a vessel the word was you know it was just a container for me uh and so there was no need to teach you had to you had to dress properly and put a tie on but that wasn't respect for your body that was respect for you know society in the church and god but no particular respect was necessary for your body and when you got ill you call the doctor

and the doctor comes along and the doctor gives you a medicine and maybe you know you get better and when you get better you think you got better because of the medicine and maybe you did but maybe maybe you would have got better anyway but that was about it really in terms of thinking about the body um and even if you think about what we did at school you know we did biology and you know you're invited to look at skeletons and uh blood blood circulation they never invite you to think about the relationship between muscles organs bones uh they never invite you to look at your own body and say you know look feel that that what's it feel like what's it really feel like so you know it was a different time maybe you know 1950s 60s um maybe it's different now you

know i know that in british schools now a lot of schools actually do mindfulness i mean you know no kidding they do they do british schools do mindfulness i'm happy to hear that i have a bit of a bias the brits are funny the brits are a bit weird but on this they're quite ahead now um strangely enough strangely enough yeah they get the kids to sit for 10 minutes and just concentrate on what it what it feels like yeah that's amazing that's amazing i mean i i have to say i'm a bit of a bias i have a bias with everything you're saying because i too for the past several years i'm a practicing buddhist and have also experienced the profound effects of of meditation and mindfulness and alertness practices in my life. And so it's, it's

experiential. It really is. You can, you can, we can talk about it and describe it, but it's kind of like eating a piece of chocolate and you're, you've eaten it, but the person next to you hasn't eaten it yet. And you're trying to describe how amazing, well, if you like chocolate, let's just assume you like chocolate but you're trying to describe it yeah but even that if you think about it i mean we everybody eats so you can say to them well it's like eating something new that you'd really like yes um you know i had a i had a very funny conversation about this with um with a a new a neuroscientist who was he was one of these guys who was doing tests on buddhist monks to see what happens in their brain when they when they meditate you know and he was saying

yeah you know they you can see that the gamma rays go up and this and that area of the brain and so on uh and i said to him you know so he said well so we can see that meditation is probably useful and i said have you ever meditated and he said no i said look imagine you know imagine you've never had sex okay now this is getting interesting describing sex as a series of you know things that happen in the penis and things that happen in the brain you know does that really tell anybody what it's like to have sex not at all if you had meditated you would never have needed to do all these neurological exams because you would be perfectly aware very true so well so well put So well put. Speaking of sex, actually, this is now that we've opened up that Pandora's box.

I remember a part of the book where you were asked to write a preface based on a novel called Il Bel Antonio about impotence. Right. I'm curious how your sexual identity evolves over the course of of this health journey and your struggle with you know in bunny in air quotes here chronic prostatitis and and what you would recommend to others as far as their struggles facing a similar situation as you know with their sexual identity and sexual health and how that's all enmeshed in this narrative well let me say these things are very difficult to talk about because uh that more difficult than just talking about the physical things like urination or something like that because here you'd have to talk about your relationship with somebody else

which i have no intention of doing um but let me say this let me say this it's clear that when you're in a relationship that's in difficulty for some reason um sex will inevitably become part of that difficulty one way or the other i mean you might have a wonderful sexual life to counterbalance what's going on uh in other areas or or the sexual life might fall into as it were disrepair because because you're you're just not talking to each other or something like that or because you hate each other um and if you're going through stuff like that and going through this other stuff here there's going to be all kinds of problems going on and the idea that you can solve one problem without solving another it's not going to happen um i don't think you're going

to walk away from a pelvic pain problem without very seriously looking at at some stuff somewhere that's going on in your life it might not be relationships it might not be a sexual problem um but but you mentioned the novel il bel antonio um it's a fantastic novel italian novel of written in the fascist period uh and basically bel antonio it is an incredibly handsome guy who marries an incredibly beautiful woman but he but he can't get it up uh and particularly He can't get it out with her. And in the Sicilian world, because this is a Sicilian novel, the idea of not being potent just becomes like this huge, very common. It's a very funny book. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's called The Bell Antonio in English. you can get it it's available it's a famous book um so it's a book about impotence basically and

about the role then that impotence places in in society but in your life and psychologically well i think most guys will go through a period of impotence sooner or later and certainly most guys who run up into issues in their marriages and uh divorces and so on and so forth um and certainly like in my case i felt that when i went through a period like that it was clearly linked to all kinds of stuff that was going on uh and and again you know imagine that i'd gone to some doctor who had who had looked for a physical solution to this problem I mean it would have been nutty you know but a lot of people like physical solutions because the you know because solving your own life is one of the

most yeah yeah it's pretty much the most the most tough thing to do I mean to actually change you know absolutely it's hard when that is reflecting what's going on on the inside and to actually kind of peek at it you know it's you know I don't know how I don't know how useful it is even to think in terms of inside and outside I think that is you know inside and outside it all feels pretty much the same to me in our heads we have a bunch of neurons um a body in the world and an experience you know i i don't i don't need it i don't even think we need to place it inside like when i'm when i'm meditating with my eyes closed i'm as outside as i am as i am now um outside inside i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm like i mean

i know that it's kind of useful just to say to distinguish between maybe what what's uh what we normally call psychological and what we would call an obvious physical problem like you know it's non-dualistic it's what i'm hearing there's no no such dualism that exists right as what you're saying because it's it's this the environment all of these factors that you've mentioned throughout our whole conversation about our narrative our relationships the contextual social cultural factors interpersonal all of those are they're just enmeshed it's like this enmeshment of a sense of embodiment of how we interact with the world and how the interworld and the world interacts back and there is no you know I think that is the issue as far as

the separation between you know there's so much separation and compartmentalizing of absolutely well science i mean science has its successes by compartmentalization you know it has a laboratory and it separates something and then it studies that something and and that's fine i mean it is fine uh but we know actually that in our lives none of it's separate um and even saying things like us and the world gets complicated i mean the world is is very largely as it were my experience you know like we know that we know that when an animal sees the world it's a completely different world of color and so on we know that when a bat sees the world it's constructed with ultra waves so you know the world is but it's very largely like our experience is

the world interacting with the body so so then i actually wrote many years later another book more more of a fun book in many ways called called out of my head which is looks at a whole philosophy of thinking about about experience where where experience actually happens outside your head like the experience is the world your body encounters as it were So, but anyway, to keep this practical, I think it genuinely changes the way you behave on a normal level. uh if you start realizing um that your constant attempts to control the world to be super wired up obsessively getting everything right and then to control a relationship even when a relationship isn't working um to find some way around the problem okay if one starts

realizing that maybe all that is the wrong place to be it can be terribly helpful for little practical things like having a pain in the ass you know to put it brutally yeah yeah literally and figuratively i'm i'm curious to hear your thoughts because you had mentioned and i'll quote the sentence um that this was another thing about this condition a symptom almost, I was absolutely determined not to talk about it. I wanted to come out of it without anyone having known. And I can imagine, and from the narratives of those that I work with so far, that this is, of course, very distressing as you're describing this symptom, as you put it. I'm curious as to why do you think it was so challenging to talk about it or to have,

um you know more of a social support which we which at least from the literature that i've read is a very um it's a prognostic factor as far as recovery and how important social support is that camaraderie the um just having someone to share their own story with you who is also struggling in a similar way so what are your thoughts like what are your thoughts about that and what, if anything, would have made it easier to talk about it with others based on your experience? Let's say, first, the world has changed enormously. I was having these problems when I was about 50,

so that's the early noughties, like 2003, 2004. um there was no social media or if there was i wasn't on it um it would have been very early days there was email and so on um fortunately there was the internet but you know there weren't all these support groups everywhere and let's face it even even now but certainly much more in the past i mean it's difficult to for a guy to start talking about problems that basically uh kind of undermine your manhood as it were you know and in a world where quite clearly like quite clearly that one of the main dynamics in the world today is success and failure you know particularly in the usa obviously even more than in europe um so i mean talking about this kind of

problem apart from the fact apart from the fact that it's you know you just feel that it's not a sort of savory thing to talk about is it it's not a sort of nice thing to talk about you know i've been peeing i i went to the bathroom six seven times last night you know um it took me long time to pee i had a pain here um after i've been after i after i've been to the bathroom in the morning i felt i felt better you know it's it's not dinner table conversation is it and but not only that at the same time you're saying i i have a problem right and also let me be honest that i suspected i think deep down from the beginning that the problem was was was a kind of this problem as well you know it was kind of i'm a guy who's who's screwed up as well you know

at least to a degree although i've always been a very jolly person i think as well so i also grew up in a very puritan evangelical household where you just didn't talk about this stuff you know if you had a dick it was because you were told not to touch it and that was about it you know um so all that kind of thing had always been a big big problem for me uh talking about sex is fine you know but talking about that was was more difficult um and in fact it was a very major moment when when I was able finally to begin to see what the nature of this problem was and to start getting better I almost immediately felt that I could also speak about it and I noticed that speaking

about it I already felt more confident that I could deal with it but not only deal with it but that it was kind of okay you know that it was going to be all right uh and that i could and even if i still had some kind of problem it wasn't like the end of the world you know so i saw talking helped me to get out of a catastrophic thinking situation that said let me say that i remember spending some nights when i couldn't sleep reading early chat lines on the internet from people suffering with pelvic i remember i remember i typed pelvic pain into the browser uh for the first time because even pelvic pain was not a relation you immediately arrive at when you have a problem in your stomach i remember finding something like six million you know

entries and then you start getting the just this load of suffering load of suffering and you start realizing how many people have got this and how few of them have found an answer to it at least in those days and i must admit that was that was kind of depressing uh so that was a bad place to go uh but but later talking about and one of the reasons i wrote the book was uh you know in a certain sense one of the reasons why i wrote the book just indicates why i'm probably not completely out of that mindset i thought i'm gonna turn this this problem i'm gonna turn this problem into a success you know and in fact the book sold like despite my agent's initial preoccupations it's it's all pretty well yes especially in in europe uh not so well in the

usa that's interesting that is interesting so speaking of the web so i i love this and i have to I have to read it on page 130 I like underlined it multiple times here so I want to share it with others but you wrote the truth is we know nothing about our bodies I thought nothing what's in there what's going on each research paper contradicts the next every discipline is scathing of the others a second opinion a third the web is an ocean of confusion above all every story told in words every medical story in particular is always a thousand times clearer than reality however unhappy narrative is of its very nature reassuring gives the illusion of knowing when all anyone ever really knows is how he's feeling now now and now in the instant

for me for me that just really was profound and really hit home with a lot of the narratives that you know i hear um as far as in the work that i do and and so this web this ocean of confusion as you put it what would you advise for for a man who is currently in this situation and who's trying to navigate really limitless the paradox of limitless information on the web as it is very different now right there's so much contradictory it's even more so yeah I mean I get a lot of mails like this you know I mean it it's been like I can't it's quite a long time since I wrote the book but i still get you know four or five males a week on this and obviously in the past it was a lot more i think you know i think the first thing the first thing you have to say is

i always point them to a book or two you know i think david wise's book is still useful um very useful it it was the first book that i that's that's a headache in the pelvis it was the first book that i read that actually described the symptoms in a way that that was that was like it is um and so once you know if you can establish that that is the area where you are you know if you haven't got some symptom that might genuinely be a bladder cancer or genuinely be so once you've established that you've got this really rather miserable chronic condition uh so the great news is you're not going to die okay and now that's actually quite important to have that in your head yeah i'm not gonna have you know chemotherapy

blah blah blah i mean so i can stop doing medical tests so that's the first you know if you don't need the medical tests just stop doing them because nothing will make you more ill than doing a lot of medical tests uh and then and then say to yourself this is going to be a long process let's make let's make it a good journey because because you're going to have to do it or keep suffering so if you're gonna have to do it then let's put it at the top of the curriculum as uh the top of the top of my program uh like let's not just say like i always used to say you know i can give quarter of an hour to this problem and then i've got to get on with my day you know uh so it's got to be the other way around i'm gonna i'm actually gonna give some

prime time to this problem and since giving prime time to the problem means not working not looking after the children in that moment or whatever i'm going to enjoy it i think if you get in that frame of mind i'm gonna i'm gonna actually use this problem to learn how to chill out and to take a look at the way my life's going like you know the stuff i'm doing uh the jobs i'm in the relationships i mean whatever it is particularly if there's something particularly conflicted going on um you know do i want to say do i do i want to live in italy do i want to go back to the uk you know do i want to be in this relationship do i want to leave uh use use the problem and and above all uh just accept that you might have a you know that you're getting up five six times a night

stop worrying about it just do it maybe it'll get better as as you go on but but above all don't get up and worry about it just just get up you know it's not easy at the beginning but i was certainly very very much helped when i when i gradually began to accept that it was interesting to go to that a couple of meditation retreats you know but i think a certain frame of mind is required a helpful way you say let's make it an exploration you know like let's go and talk to this crazy doctor suzy and uh which i'm so grateful and appreciate it let's go and talk to this young woman about about my problems and and you know let's be all right with that you know that kind of thing yeah and and I think this goes into the part of the book where you actually

mentioned the headache in the pelvis and you alluded to the fact of the defensive reaction to pain is to pull away right to avoid it to change it to just do something other than that Instead, you've, well, at least that's what Dr. Wise and the headache in the pelvis encouraged everyone to experiment with pushing towards or nudging towards the pain. I'm curious as far as what worked for you to do that, like successfully to kind of just nudge towards the pain rather than react or pull away from the pain so that those who are listening, who are experiencing it could experiment with as well yeah it was a long time ago i slightly changed some of my positions on this but let's say that wise in his book uh invites you to do

a simple test where you know you have a pain in your lower abdomen of course we all pull away from pain he just says just just imagine just try pushing towards it as if you were going to pee or something just just pushing towards see what it feels like see what it feels like and i remember that that i just wow yeah actually it relaxes a bit if you do that so i would you know i thought this guy wise does know something about this stuff like none of the urologists i'd seen you know like intelligent guys i mean you know a couple couple of expensive ones they hadn't been able to tell me that let me say that more generally uh through the meditation and so on uh because obviously being in a sitting position to meditate can cause pain so you know

if you're going to stay meditating you're going to have to learn how to how to deal with that or whether you want to deal with that and rather than pushing towards pain i i've learned that actually if you can just be with it and and just stop thinking that it has to be solved and like some pains have to be solved immediately like you have a very serious appendicitis you better solve it that's what pain's for to tell you that there's a problem once you know that that the pain is a chronic pain that's not going anywhere or a sitting pain if you just learn to actually be with and not even to think of it as pain, not going to war, not trying to solve it, then actually all of a sudden

there is a sort of change. It's not that it goes away. It's just that it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. But I think everybody has to learn, has to, everybody is invited to experiment with this stuff, you know. and but but definitely obviously we grow up imagining that the way we are and the way we feel is that the way all human beings have always felt for all time and then as you get you know as you get a little more experience and you read around a bit and you look at other cultures and

stuff you really actually that's not true you know this notion that existentially we're all the same is maybe true only at the very deepest level but the hundreds of our behavior patterns of our attitudes to pain of our sensitivity to this and that is very much locked up in a cultural paradigm so you know uh you can you can get out of this kind of pain fairly easily uh i would say at the end of the day i mean fairly easily compared with other stuff how profoundly is this situation or this health issue bound up with the light your life narrative or the life narrative you know personal issues need to change etc um what are your thoughts on that probably i've already talked too much about this you know um i mean i'm probably maybe i'm very affected by what my own

case was but i've also seen it with with with the other people i've known who have similar situations you're talking about a situation which is caused by muscular tension like at the very deepest level of you know the base of the body if you want between the top and the bottom and the pelvic floor um you're talking about becoming extremely tense there and then the muscles getting into a situation where they're they're not allowing all that all the nerves passing through them to to uh to pass easily and relax you know what so why are you doing that well i suppose it's imaginable that you're doing that because because you have some physical job that actually requires some absolutely miserable wrapped up tight position for 10 hours a day or

something but there can't be many people like that so a lot of what's going on is probably some kind of direction of energies that uh that might better be explored and directed elsewhere so again and again i've seen seen that people dealing with this have have have problems of of constant tension funnily enough um i noticed that a lot of the people getting in touch with me were people who like me were working in two languages all the time uh which caused an awful lot of tension especially if you're constantly like i was teaching in italian uh so constantly anxious about about my performance because you know you're teaching two Italians and you're in England you make mistakes so but I notice also that people who do get better

from this uh quite quite quickly are people who are very willing to take on the on board the idea of change you know and that that people who just say no I'm going to give this the half hour that i would give to any problem like i want to go to the dentist and have my tooth fixed i want to go here and have this fixed i want to take my car and have that fixed and i want to take my pelvic floor here and have that fixed it's not going to work um it's not going to work so i would i would obviously you don't want to invite people to start imagining that they have problems they don't have But I just suspect that, you know, step back a bit from life and say, maybe we can ease off the gas and have a look at what's going on. It's probably a good idea. Yeah. So how did you work with that resistance initially? Because in your book, of course, it didn't start off that way. You had to go through a process. This was a life process and a self-discovery.

what what well how in what ways did you work with that resistance right because had somebody told you perhaps maybe in the very beginning like listen like that um that ayurvedic doctor you saw who's who really started to you know speak to you very frankly about the confounding contradiction of your personality i think that's what it was so i'm curious about you know what advice can you offer around the that like resistance that we all have to change i mean let's just be honest we all have that that resistance to change i you know i don't i don't know if anything i can say will do it i mean some the point is it's one of those questions where you you understand that moment in the bible where jesus says he who has ears let him hear you know

um you say it if they want to listen they'll listen if they don't they don't but i remember i remember a situation the pain i was invited to talk at the pain clinic in london um at great ormond street which is in england the place of last reference for people with chronic pain who haven't managed to solve it anywhere else so these are very highly specialized guys and they'd read my book and then by a minute come and talk about it um and afterwards we have a chat and and they said well you know we've discovered that shatsu is extremely useful for these kind of problems but we can't get any money from the government for shatsu because scientifically it's never been actually proved that shatsu is right because of course you can't do a blind test for shatsu

because you can't establish that everybody has the same problem and that everybody really did the same thing and then everybody you know it's just one of those places where the whole idea of scientific experimentation is in all kinds of difficulty um but they said we get great results if people do it it's the only thing that gives results uh that we know okay now i suggested this to various people and some people will do it and say yeah useful uh i know that people will say no I've read all this stuff on the net the science doesn't say it's useful so I won't do it why not do it I mean you could at least try it you know no I won't do it so some people are very very close to that but to go back to to what you said the book I wrote was in fact very much about

how you pass from having a simple what seems like a simple medical problem to an awareness of a whole life issue um there were a number of steps i had i had had a process process a genuine prostatitis problem many years before where a urologist had unwisely given me to read an italian manual of urology which said prostatitis sufferers are worried depressed difficult people who usually end up getting operated in their 60s you know so but what was interesting what was useful in this rather unpleasant description what was useful was that there was a psychological profile and i remember when i went to get my first scan uh bladder scan um the ecography they're called i don't know what they're called in

ultrasound scan that's right ultrasound scan i said to the lady who did the scan very nice lady i said uh people with the kind of situation i have what are they like and she said they're usually overworked very busy guys very you know so i began to get a sense that there was a cycle profile and then there was a famous time when i was in delhi for a for a conference and i just thought well let's try it let's go to an ayurvedic doctor you know i don't believe in this stuff but who knows and i went to this guy and he sat there with his wife which i thought was very kind of not scientific to sit there with your wife you know and they were both very charming very very western people actually very charming and they listened to me and they made me talk for

you know you can see that i could talk forever but they they made me talk for about half an hour and and then the guy said you know well you know we could give you a few things you know to sort out your problem a colon wash and stuff like that with herbs you know and oils I said but until you solve the profound problem in your personality I don't see I'm thinking how can this guy say this you know this is outrageous he's only spoken to me for half an hour but again again you just think well maybe wait maybe i do know what he's talking about so um so there you are you know it really is a question of you know in my case maybe i wanted to hear this narrative anyway it was a narrative i finally began to accept and acting on it was useful at the end of the day

so there is a buddhist monk called our name shanti deva and he once said and maybe you've come across this saying that suffering has many good qualities what what was if if any the silver lining in all of this for you yeah well of course you know suffering has good qualities it it rarely feels like that while it's going on of course right and very often after suffering you're glad to forget it you know i'm i'm glad not to think about some of the stuff i went through but of course looking back you have to say to yourself um i learned an awful lot and uh my life now is much more pleasant i've i've learned how to be ambitious without flogging myself you know ambition is a very dangerous master i can take over your life um so you know there were all

kinds of you know i i love the meditation i go to a meditation retreat once a year i love it i love the fact that i can be absolutely calm for 40 minutes every day and start my day calmly um so yeah there were positive things i learned also frankly in other medical situations and in other questions when you're talking to other people and so on to be much slower in judging them and much more open to the possibility that there's other stuff going on like not to believe immediately anything a doctor tells you but but to accept they're telling you in good faith and and to think about it so like one of the things you learn with meditation is to be less immediately reactive like that is only to react when you've actually become aware of the

situation um not to be sudden not to be you know uh so i think i think that's been very useful throughout throughout this i mean there was a moment when i was sort of offered an operation the famous terp the transurethral blah blah blah um that same day at that same moment if i'd accepted that it would have been like if i'd accepted that it was a purely medical problem to solve with an intervention from that point on it would have been very difficult because then my body would have been changed and it would have been very hard to figure out what was going on so not reacting immediately always getting yeah I think a second opinion is is always useful particularly if the first opinion is drastic

absolutely good advice good advice so to before we hop off together i i i would like to offer just um the space for the men out there who are are stuck in this rut and feeling hopeless about their current situation what's one if you had to share just one thing with them what would it be difficult one thing uh that this this this is something you can deal with it's just a question of backing off from it uh accepting it a bit more and don't try and solve it next week you know don't try and solve it next week just accept we're going to be on this road together for a while so we better make friends you know yeah make some space one of my patients said this is a crock pot process not a microwave I love using that exactly that's a very nice way to put it

yeah it makes pleasantly domestic yeah you know i suppose you know one thing one thing take it easy you know which of course is is terribly easy advice to give people people write to me and you realize you know in the past i used to accept phone calls now i i don't but you know i remember you just suddenly think god this guy's so wired up i was fine compared with this you know people phone you and you realize that you know they're in they're in very serious difficulty mentally and they're talking about a physical problem we just feel calmed down yeah right right there's no separating

it's not it's not like you've been you know they with pancreatic cancer it's not even COVID you know maybe actually COVID will be over quicker but you know anyway thank you so much Tim thank you so much again for your wisdom your wisdom and sharing your story or narrative with us I mean it was truly profound for me again I'm biased because I really do really highly recommend your book and um so uh how if if listeners wanted to learn more about you uh what would be the best way to connect or learn more about you or of course your book but they will find there's a website with all the books there's a there's a facebook page which i don't have friends on the page but i just put articles up and and i whatever i write i put a link on

Facebook or Twitter okay I'm not a big Twitter social media person but it's useful for putting up a an article or a story or whatever yes thanks thank you so much again Tim and to all of our listeners and viewers thank you so much for being here with us today and as always until next time my friends and loving wellness for your pelvis. This is Dr. Susie G. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Be sure to head on over to drsusieg.com where you can get more information, show notes, and related articles on today's topic. Also, if you like what you're hearing, head on over to iTunes, subscribe to the podcast, and leave us a rating review. We'd love to hear feedback. Thanks again.