What actually is meditation? That thought occasionally crossed my mind in the many years during which I disparaged the practice. I had no idea. The cross-legged statuesqueness of it and the beatific Buddha-smile were enough to put me off. Whatever it was, it stank of prayer. Having escaped my parents’ evangelism, their exorcisms and speaking in tongues, I was more than happy to live as an adult in a world emptied of all things esoteric.
I got busy and used my head and studied and wrote. Life presented itself as a task to which I felt I was just about equal, assuming I gave it absolutely all I had. There was no time for sloppy, slithery, New Age nonsense.
Twenty books later, illness struck. Twenty books and as many years teaching and writing articles and translations, for I had changed language and moved to Italy. But now I couldn’t sit down to write. I had to stand with a laptop on a bookcase. The pains in my bladder were too fierce, the jab in the perineum, the electric shocks down the inside of the groin, a general dull awfulness down there which was an enlarged prostate, the urologist said, but then no it wasn’t that, nor stones, nor bladder cancer, nor any of the other nightmares they tested me for. Eventually the doctors gave up; I was alone, locked up in a life sentence of chronic pain without a diagnosis.
It was at this desperate point that a curious book, A Headache in the Pelvis, told me all I had to do was breathe…