F**k It Be at Peace with Life, Just as It Is Be at Peace with
Life, Just as It Is
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Also by John C. Parkin
Books
F**k It – Do What You Love (2016)
F**k It Is the Answer (2014)
F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way (2008, 2014)
F**k It Therapy (2012)
The Way of F**k It (2009)
Audiobooks
F**k It Therapy (2015)
F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way (2014)
The F**k It Show (2010)
Published in the United Kingdom by:
Hay House UK Ltd, Astley House, 33 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JQ
Tel: +44 (0)20 3675 2450; Fax: +44 (0)20 3675 2451
www.hayhouse.co.uk
Published in the United States of America by:
Hay House Inc., PO Box 5100, Carlsbad, CA 92018-5100
Tel: (1) 760 431 7695 or (800) 654 5126
Fax: (1) 760 431 6948 or (800) 650 5115
www.hayhouse.com
Published in Australia by:
Hay House Australia Ltd, 18/36 Ralph St, Alexandria NSW 2015
Tel: (61) 2 9669 4299; Fax: (61) 2 9669 4144
www.hayhouse.com.au
Published in India by:
Hay House Publishers India, Muskaan Complex, Plot No.3, B-2, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi
110 070
Tel: (91) 11 4176 1620; Fax: (91) 11 4176 1630
www.hayhouse.co.in
Text © John C. Parkin, 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical,
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The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional
medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is
at the reader’s discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held
responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, of the
suggestions made, the failure to take medical advice or for any material on third-party
websites.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78817-089-5 in print
ISBN 978-1-78817-096-3 in ePub format
ISBN 978-1-78817-097-0 in Kindle formats
Interior images: xvi © Gaia Pollini; 218–19 Christian Wheatley/istockphoto
CONTENTS
Welcome to the Game of Life
Level 1: I’ll be at Peace When…
I get a Raleigh Chopper
The school holidays arrive
I’m back with my friends
I get my qualifications
They say ‘yes’
There’s peace in the world
I have my own car
I find my ideal job
I have a place to call home
We have a family
The kids are off to school
We manage to pay the bills and mortgage
We have a larger house
The house is tidy
I’m a success
I’m wealthy
I win that award
I’ve lost this weight
I’m well again
I can take redundancy
The holidays arrive
We have a change of government
I’ve paid off the mortgage
The divorce is settled
I/we retire
The operation is over
This pain has gone
I’m resting in peace
Level 2: I Can Be at Peace Now
Honking the Horn of Peace
I can relax now
How peaceful am I now?
I can be grateful now
I can switch off my phone now
I can bring meditation to life now
I can sit and drink tea now, and be at peace
But I can’t remain at peace for long (there’s always
something)
The family something
The money something
The geo-political something
The health something
The weather something
The me something
The environment something
The work something
The unclear something
The dying something
Level 3: F**k It. Be at Peace with Life, Just as It Is
F**k It to caring
F**k It to positivity
F**k It to being good
F**k It to being authentic
F**k It to being patient
F**k It to how it’s supposed to go
F**k It to loving
F**k It to loving yourself
F**k It to the linear process
From Mad Men to Peaceful Man
The Breeze of Peace
F**k It to doubt
F**k It. Be at peace with difficulty
F**k It. Be at peace with injustice
F**k It. Be at peace with stress and anxiety
F**k It. Be at peace with failure
F**k It. Be at peace with hurtful people
F**k It. Be at peace with bad things happening
F**k It. Be at peace with the bomb
Postscript
About the Author
Join the Hay House Family
WELCOME TO THE GAME OF LIFE
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have read through the ‘contents’ of
this book to see what’s in store for you. Actually, if you’re anything
like me, you may well have read them in the bookshop, to see if it
was worth buying the book.
Because you can tell a lot from a contents list; in fact, you can tell so
much from a contents list that sometimes it’s enough just to read that
– you get the feeling you won’t glean that much more by spending
multiple hours (depending on your reading speed) reading the details
between the chapter titles that constitute the full book.
So, the first part of my job, really, over the course of this book, is to
persuade you that it was worth going beyond the ‘contents’. The
second part is to get you from Level 1 to Level 3. And I’d suggest
that reading the contents alone will not get you to Level 3.
I said ‘if you’re anything like me’, and that of course implies that
some of you haven’t yet read the contents. You’ve dived in
recklessly, with no thought for the context of what you’re reading. Did
you even see the title of the book? Or did a good friend who was
concerned for your welfare give you the book, and you didn’t really
look at it; instead, going on trust, you just got stuck into the
introduction?
Actually, I suspect there are even some readers who’ll ignore the
introduction and go straight to the first chapter. I can say anything
about them here because they’re never going to read it. They don’t
read the chapter titles and they don’t read the introduction. Fools.
They’ll never get to Level 3, as getting there takes a level of incisive
intelligence – along with other qualities like patience and self-
awareness (which aren’t necessarily subsets of intelligence, as I
know plenty of intelligent but impatient and self-ignorant people).
The point I’m making here is about the ‘game’ structure I’ve chosen
for the book – this Level 1, 2, 3 thing. I like a good game, especially
at Christmas: a parlour game, or a board game, or even a video
game (if I can manage to get my hands on a controller).
Actually, I’ve been known to pay my children for a go on their video
games. I say ‘their’ rather generously of course, because I paid my
hard-earned cash for both the hardware and the various overpriced
pieces of software, the ‘games’. So having to then pay a further sum
to actually play the game does seem rather unfair. Hey-ho.
And this ‘level’ thing is more like a video game. It’s rather flippant, of
course, to suggest that ‘life is a game’. For most people, for most of
the time, life doesn’t feel like much of a game: it feels difficult and
stressful. But part of getting to Level 3 is becoming aware that
there’s a game-like quality to life. Which makes life more like a game
that everyone is forced to play, without knowing it’s a game; it’s only
revealed to be a game if you get to the highest level.
All analogies fall down, of course, upon scrutiny. Look at the Old
Testament, for example.
HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT
During a F**k It Weekend I was running earlier this year, I had a
realization: there’s another level to the F**k It concept – one that’s
beyond what I’d previously imagined. This realization sent me on a
journey of discovery (this book) that manifested in rather astonishing
shifts in perspective. And if you read this book slowly, and ponder it
sufficiently, and follow some of the suggestions it contains, and give
it enough time, with a good wind, you too will experience similar (or
dissimilar, but still astonishing) shifts in perspective.
I can’t guarantee that, of course. There’s no money-back guarantee
of Level 3 enlightenment here. But I’m holding nothing back: I’ve
seen some light, and I’ve worked out how to keep seeing the light.
And I’m sufficiently good at describing the light – as well as
explaining how you can see it and keep seeing it – so I don’t think I’d
have to shell out that much cash if there were a money-back
guarantee (and you could persuade me that although you’d done
your part, the light still wasn’t being seen).
So, back to that realization I had on the F**k It Weekend: it both blew
me away with its power and pissed me off – because it kind of
undermined the whole point of the weekend. I also knew that, to
understand this realization fully, and to absorb it into my life and my
way of being, I’d have to investigate it, unpack it, live it, and see what
popped up through that investigation.
The title of the weekend was ‘Be More F**k It’, and early on, the
participants and I listed all the aspects of our behaviour and
personality that are not so ‘F**k It’. So people noted things like: ‘take
things too seriously’, ‘uptight’, ‘thin-skinned’, ‘over-ambitious’, ‘quick
to anger’, ‘judgemental’, ‘stressed’, ‘care too much about what others
think’, ‘afraid’, and so on.
Then we looked at what, for us, would constitute being more F**k It.
Here, people listed things like: ‘relaxed’, ‘open’, ‘happy’, ‘not so
bothered about what others think’, ‘content in my own skin’, ‘patient’,
‘optimistic’, ‘courageous’, ‘light-hearted’, and so on.
I wrote up these suggestions on two flipcharts and we all looked at
the two lists – less F**k It and more F**k It. And then I suddenly
realized something. I asked the group: ‘Can you think of some
prominent people in the world who personify these qualities?’ The
response was immediate: ‘Trump and Obama’. And it was very
striking. Trump was the personification of ‘less F**k It’, as the
participants had defined it for themselves, and Obama was
completely ‘F**k It’.
Granted, this was in the early days of Trump’s presidency, so he was
naturally top of our minds then (as he is now, too). But the list of ‘less
F**k It’ qualities did describe him to a ‘T’ for ‘Trump’. Although
another possible view of the orange one is that he’s actually rather
‘F**k It’ – in his straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip, make-it-up-as-he-
goes-along way.
And the more F**k It list did describe Obama – or ‘No-Drama
Obama’ as his colleagues in the White House referred to him. In fact,
when I saw a particular photo of him – taken in February 2017, when
many of us were worrying ourselves sick about what Trump would
say or do next – Obama’s F**kitness bothered even me: he was on a
boat with Richard Branson, wearing a wetsuit – having just been
kitesurfing – and looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
So, having established what constitutes less or more F**k It in our
lives, I wanted to use a technique called ‘muscle testing’ to evaluate
these qualities. Muscle testing is the ability to gauge how strong you
are, based on certain conditions; for example, it’s often used to test
for allergies. I like to use it to compare the effect on our bodies of
certain thoughts or states.
Muscle testing is easy to do: you stand up straight, raise one arm out
to your side and then make a statement out loud; a person standing
directly behind you then tries to push down your arm while you resist
the pressure (see the drawing below).
Muscle testing
The first ‘muscle test’ I usually do is a person’s name: they say their
own name out loud, followed by an invented name. They discover
(usually) that their arm is stronger (i.e. it resists the pressure more)
when they say their own name.
The F**k It Weekend group and I set about testing less and more
F**k It. Each person chose a sentence that summed up a less F**k It
aspect of themselves – for example, ‘I’m really impatient.’ They said
this sentence out loud as another person tested the strength of their
outstretched arm. After this, they tested a more F**k It version of the
same thing (though it had to be believable). So: ‘I know that,
sometimes, things need to happen at their own pace.’
Now, truth matters in muscle testing (as the testing of the person’s
real name demonstrates), so the more F**k It assertion had to draw
on some truth within the person. And, in this example, most impatient
people can see that things do need to happen at their own pace
sometimes.
With the group organized into pairs, the testing took place. And,
generally, people found that they were physically stronger when
asserting the more F**k It sentence.
After this exercise there was a question from one of the group, so I
invited her out to the front, to test her myself. She was, indeed,
stronger with the more F**k It assertion. Job done. I could have let
her sit down, but there was something wrong. Even though she was
happy with the result – and couldn’t believe how much stronger
she’d been when giving herself permission to be more F**k It – I still
felt there was something wrong.
As the woman started to return to her seat, I called her back, and
asked her to test a new sentence. Now, I’ll tell you what she was
testing, but I won’t tell you who she was. So I’ll call her ‘Judi Dench’.
(Of course, it wasn’t actually Judi Dench – that’s just a name I’ve
given her. She was nothing like Judi Dench, and neither did her
name begin with ‘M’.)
So Judi Dench’s ‘less F**k It’ sentence was: ‘I care too much what
others think of me.’ (‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have become an
actor then, eh, Dame Judi?’ you might say.) And her ‘more F**k It’
sentence was: ‘I don’t care so much about what others think of me.’
Which was believable and possible for her, so it made her stronger.
The new sentence I asked her to test was this: ‘On occasion, it’s
perfectly natural to be bothered about what others think of me.’ She
began repeating this new sentence, and raised her arm ready for me
to test her (for a third time). I pressed down on her arm – slowly at
first, as we teach people to do, then more forcefully – and I couldn’t
budge it an inch. Judi Dench was rock solid. Again, she couldn’t
believe it.
THE THIRD LEVEL TO F**K IT
But this time she was confused: wasn’t the point of the exercise to
see how ‘being more F**k It’ was the answer? In fact, wasn’t that the
point of the whole weekend? Well, yes it was. But my definition of
what ‘being more F**k It’ means was being tested itself. I felt
exhilarated though, as I knew this was a big insight for us all.
I knew then that there was a third level to this F**k It thing. In Dame
Judi’s case:
Level 1: I stress about what others think of me, and that blocks
me and bothers me.
Level 2: I find a way to be not so bothered about what others
think of me.
Level 3: I realize that it’s fine to be stressed about what others
think of me occasionally, as it’s perfectly natural.
And in our case, when we apply Level 3 to the subject of being at
peace – which is what this book’s about, after all – it goes something
like this:
Level 1: I’m stressed and don’t feel peaceful.
Level 2: I find ways to feel peaceful.
Level 3: I’m at peace with being stressed at times and peaceful
at others, as both are a natural part of life.
Now that might be confusing you as you read it (as it confused Judi
Dench and the rest of the group on that ‘Be More F**k It’ workshop).
If so, relax: there’s a whole book here for us to explore this.
Or you might instead feel a blast of freedom as you realize what this
book has to offer. The doorway to this understanding is ‘F**k It’.
Saying ‘F**k It to being peaceful’ can easily confuse you (if being ‘at
peace’ is what you’re after – and, having bought the book, there’s a
good chance that it is), but it can also offer a glimmer of the freedom
to come when you start to care less about things; even the very
things you most want.
So, please say after me: ‘I know I want it, but F**k It to being
peaceful.’ And let’s go explore this new game of life some more.
