by Nick Duerden
I am eager to see muscle testing up close, in real life as it were, no pendulum in sight. But I am to be disappointed by it, for among the 40 of us at least, the results prove inconclusive. None of us seem quite able to get the hang of it. We are instructed to extend an arm and hold it firmly, then repeat – in our heads only – first a belief, then a lie. As Lucinda had already told me, the arm is supposed to remain firm with the belief, less so with the lie. What is interesting here is that we all want it to work, a collective willingness to witness a miracle and experience the ramifications such new knowledge might mean to us. Concerned for our health, our states of mind, each of us wants to swallow Parkin’s wisdom whole and immediately reap the benefits. And so, perhaps unavoidably, we tend to make our arms stronger during the truth, if only to confirm the theory. The next time, we try to do it properly. But then, gradually, two by two – for we have teamed up in pairs – we begin to confess to doubts. Is it really working? Are our muscles really more tense when we tell the truth than when we lie? Holly, my partner, isn’t fully convinced, and neither am I.
Parkin starts to explain it a little more, but time is short, he has much more ground to cover, and so we move on.
The 40 of us in attendance – Parkin calls us fuckateers – have brought so much baggage with us, it’s a wonder there is any space to sit down. But we do, on the floor, crossing legs like in a school assembly, and sitting up straight. Collectively, we are dealing with the usual calamity of ordinary life: relationship issues, work crises, ill health. One man speaks of, and freely displays, anger issues that, he says, particularly come to the fore when he is behind the wheel of a car. ‘And I get violent.’ Perhaps in a show of fraternity, a man across the other side of the room explains that cucumbers can make him very, very cross. Everybody laughs. A woman in her late 30s worries that her critical parents are affecting her personal relationships. She has been seeing a divorced man for three years, and is terrified that by introducing him to her parents the relationship will sour. I am surprised by how many are happy to talk to the room, out loud, in so intimate a way. One young woman, from Yorkshire, with punk hair and an Iggy Pop T-shirt, tells us about difficulties at work.
At first she hesitates, but then she says: ‘Oh, I’ll never see you lot again, so what difference does it make?’ She says that she works in fashion, an environment where she has to look as good as possible, ‘not in clothes like these, of course, and with more make-up.’ But she frequently feels she falls short: ‘that I’m not good enough, that I’m not pretty enough; I’m too fat’.
Some here have previous experience with alternative therapies and self-help courses, while others have been tempted through the door simply by the use of the rude word. ‘F**k It sounded like a right laugh,’ a young man I’ll call Sav tells me. We range in age from early 20s to late 50s, Guardian readers mostly. There are several ruminative beards, and a lot of pseudo-tribal tattoos, but fewer sandals than one might expect. The sense of anything remotely New Age is largely conspicuous by its absence, a factor that permits many of us to unclench.
The F**k It dancing has obvious clubby comparisons, an organic equivalent to being chemically enhanced in a field somewhere outside the M25, and thus uninhibited in a way one could never be in the real world. Parkin insists it is emboldening stuff, that it peels away at the inner onions Lucinda had told me all about. He says that on his retreats, people have been known to really let go at this point, to cry, to woof even, and to shout out with the carefree abandon one normally associates with foreigners. Here in London, however, where most of us are diligently British, we employ a greater sense of reserve and decorum. No woofing, then, just a lot of wobbling of legs, some rocking back and forth, a few yoga poses. I keep my eyes tight shut, except when I don’t, when I peek because I cannot help myself. Some look relaxed as they spin around and jump up and down on the spot, others look full of determined concentration. Few have broken out of their restricted floorspace, as if a fine might be imposed on any who dare move too freely. This isn’t Italy, after all. The Yorkshire punk is making out with her boyfriend, the laying on of tantric hands. Parkin himself is performing a succession of stiff-armed robotic moves, the Tin Man dancing to Kraftwerk. I close my eyes again, face the wall and shake myself senseless.
Like taking your clothes off in public and announcing your nakedness, it is all surprisingly liberating. But then I clatter heavily into Holly, which again convinces me that one should never let oneself get too carried away in public, just in case. Health and safety.
John C. Parkin used to work in the advertising game, which probably explains his chunky zebra-striped glasses. He spent the 1990s working on campaigns for First Direct and Egg, and on mischievous ads for Pot Noodle.
‘I always liked the idea of mucking around with people’s heads,’ he explains when we meet three days before his Let Go seminar. We are in his publisher’s office in Notting Hill, a boardroom whose corner water feature strives to create an atmosphere of serenity but which instead merely sounds like a small child peeing continuously. Parkin is in his late forties, and bearded, his uncombed hair all too clearly unused to being told what to do. He boasts a belly he tells me his brother-in-law calls ‘fat’, and, despite living in Italy, where adherence to fashion is law, is endearingly scruffy. He looks like he’s about to go rambling.
He has dabbled in yoga, Tai Chi and hypnotherapy, Christianity and, as he puts it, ‘all sorts of philosophies’. He spent time in Glastonbury training to become a shamanic healer, and by 2001, he and his wife (also an alternative therapist) were parents to twin boys, and had relocated to Italy, where they started running idiosyncratic retreats in Umbria. ‘HOLISTIC HOLIDAYS, ITALIAN NOSH’, read their first online campaign, accompanied by a picture of a woman in yoga pose, burping loudly. The burping offended many. ‘Oh, we got loads of letters saying how disgusting it was, ha ha!’ he roars.
But it also attracted people turned off by other, more regimented retreats, the kind that demanded pre-dawn sessions and vows of silence and that required attendees to subsist purely on vegetables.
‘I couldn’t see what the problem was, starting at 10 o’clock in the morning after a hearty Italian breakfast,’ he shrugs. ‘And I don’t see why I can’t both do yoga and drink wine in the evening. Ice cream, too. I like ice cream. You know, I can do yoga, and I can also swear and get drunk at night. Does that make me any less spiritual? That was our philosophy, and people really connected to it. We weren’t the only ones, in other words.’
It was at one of these early retreats that Parkin, attempting to help a Parisian businesswoman de-stress, suggested she might simply say ‘fuck it’ to her problems, and see what happened. This seems, on the surface, a terribly irresponsible thing to do. How much, after all, did he know of her circumstances? And how easy is it, really, to say fuck it to the job, the dog, the husband? Nevertheless, she later wrote to say how incredibly effective the advice had been. Parkin, always one to spot a potential fad, immediately realised he was onto something, and wrote his first F**K It book, F**K It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way, in a frenzy. By 2008, it was an international bestseller.
The concept, he readily admits, isn’t an original one. He borrowed liberally from Taoism and Buddhism, ‘and all the colours of New Age spirituality’. But what he did do, and rather niftily, was to retune it to pique the interest of those people who wouldn’t normally go within a mile of such books, but at the same time tap into the prevailing Zeitgeist of self-awareness, self-discovery and self-improvement. Everybody has a yoga mat these days.
Any lingering resistance people feel, he suggests, is due to its restrictive Eastern origins. But then a former adman does know how to speak to an audience, and so simply by employing that sonorous expletive, he successfully broke down any remaining barriers, and tempted the curious in their droves. Many who attend his retreats are complete newcomers.
If his books are ultimately rather silly and over-irreverent, far more concerned with making jokes than with
imparting genuine enlightenment – he writes about women with ‘ample breasts’, of ‘goat shagging’, and claims that 99 per cent of all Americans are obese because they ‘bin eatin’ donuts again’ – then in person Parkin is a much more considered, thoughtful proposition. He does not play the clown. And he presides over the Saturday seminar with an understated ease that doesn’t seem to employ skill, but clearly does. He holds our attention throughout, and though he is sifting through some very edited highlights in a manner that can only ever really give us the merest hint of its true depths, it still amounts to ample food for thought. Nothing he says sounds puerile or open to ridicule. He is simply encouraging us to ask questions of ourselves, an obvious suggestion that many of us appear to overlook in the race to our daily finish lines and self-imposed deadlines. And though he himself has utilised the F**k It life to great effect – bestseller status has made him wealthy – there is nothing aggressively motivational about him as there is with so many of his peers. To me, he seems less Tony Robbins than he does Bagpuss. Listen quietly, and it is genuine wisdom he imparts.
‘Are you a modern guru?’ I had asked him three days previously.
‘No, no, I am not,’ he responded. ‘I’ve simply been lucky enough to think about how things work and to look into the spiritual and emotional life. If anyone takes time out of their work and learns how to relax, to think about what they really want, then anyone, everybody, could come up with this. All I’ve really done is taken years out of my life to ponder it all, and I still do, six hours a day. If anything, I’m a specialist, that’s all.’
I had also asked him whether he felt responsible for those who came to see him seeking answers, those he summarily sends off newly confident, and to hell with the consequences.
‘No. I don’t feel any responsibility at all. I just feel a joy in being able to spread these ideas, and to talk about them. I do not know more than you know. You know a lot of stuff, and you, we, have most of the answers within us. It’s just we’re not really looking. It is all there, though. It’s there, but we are not listening. What we try to teach here is to give you your own sense of responsibility. What I’m trying to say is this: listen to your mind, your body. Stop holding yourself back. Put aside what society thinks about you, what you think about you. Instead, go inside and listen to yourself. What is it that you want? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Your fears? Listen to the answers, and give those answers value. For many of us, we will be doing this for the first time in our lives. The more we listen, the more we relax, the more things work, the better we feel, the happier we are.’
Towards the end of the seminar, Parkin tells us to fill in the blanks in the following sentence: ‘In order to feel full of . . . I need to let go of . . .’ The list can be as long as we want, he says. Write as much as you like. For the next five minutes the only sound in the room is that of pen on paper, everybody scribbling furiously.
After the dance, which serves as the climax of the day, we lie down for a final meditation session. Parkin encourages us to ponder on what we have learned today, and how we might use it for quieter, less driven, more contented lives. Then it is time to go. One middle-aged woman, Caroline, departs quickly, waving cursorily at us all while breathlessly talking about a train to catch, elderly parents to get home to. Others stay to mingle.
When I get to my bus stop a quarter of an hour later, Caroline is still there, now really very anxious. She smiles at me in vague recognition, eyes darting towards the horizon of Commercial Road in vain. I commiserate, but then wonder whether I shouldn’t encourage her to employ those two words we have spent the day immersing ourselves in. After all, there will be more trains, and her parents aren’t going anywhere.
But then the universe suddenly realigns itself to our rhythm, as can sometimes happen, and coughs up a pleasant surprise. The bus arrives.
We exchange a smile of relief. ‘Oh, thank fuck for that,’ she says.
Like all of us, she’s a work in progress.
Seventeen
One day, I am sent to interview a journalist like me, but a proper one, a war correspondent for television news. Out of a flak jacket, she is less serious and quick to laugh, wonderful company. She tells me about her time in Ramallah and Islamabad and Amman, and I am light-headed with envy. She agrees to answer what everybody always asks of people like her: what draws them to such dangerous territories? ‘To tell the story,’ she says, simply.
She shows a generous, and seemingly sincere, interest in my work, and I find myself telling her, as if in competition, of the only experience I have had that is comparable to her far more grown-up endeavours, a trip to Israel a few years ago for an American magazine, our hosts so keen to show us the unblemished tourist side of Tel Aviv that they went to laughable lengths to shield us from the reality of everyday life there. The photographer and I essentially spent an enforced seven days in its red-carpet five-star hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants, none of which were of much interest to the young and self-consciously adventurous demographic the magazine appealed to. If I wanted to see the truth, I’d have to hunt it out.
I tell her about the morning we were taken to a vibrant food market, accompanied by our guide and a chef who was going to cook us lunch from all the fresh produce we found there. We met eager stallholders, all of whom foisted upon us their wares – ‘Special discount, my friend.’ The chef, laden with fruit and vegetables and cuts of meat, saw an acquaintance coming his way, a locally famed sommelier to whom we were introduced; hands were shaken, backs enthusiastically slapped, tourists still a comparative rarity around these parts. But the sommelier was frowning.
‘You should not be here today, I think,’ he told us. ‘I have a very bad feeling.’ He looked nervously over either shoulder, a bad spy in a B-movie.
I asked him what he meant.
‘Bomb,’ he replied, explaining that there had been rumours of an attack here today, perhaps on the market itself, the perfect place for maximum casualties. (A bomb had exploded in a nearby falafel shop just two weeks before we arrived, killing two.) Our guide began remonstrating with the sommelier, telling him that he should not be putting the frighteners on a couple of journalists who were here to write nice things about their city for the good people of America. Potential tourists, in other words.
Our guide bustled us onwards, suggesting we leave the market anyway, to go and see the owner of a shop that made jewellery out of leather: necklaces, bracelets, even anklets. ‘You can interview her. She is interesting.’ I firmly suggested otherwise, insisting that it was my intention to write about the real Tel Aviv, not an airbrushed version.
‘But this is not what we agreed,’ he countered, threatening to talk to his boss, who would call my editor, who would then contact me to tell me off.
It was approaching midday, and the market was at its busiest. It was easy to give the guide the slip, to disappear down behind the fruit stalls, piles of empty cardboard boxes towering beside them. The guide didn’t have my mobile number; we would be lost to him until we chose, finally, to return to the hotel.
Without him, a very different side of the city revealed itself. We submerged ourselves in the labyrinthine alleys of the market, a photo opportunity at every turn. The cafés we went to were cheap, rough and ready, full of life, the coffee black as tar. In one we spoke to some young women who told us that nightlife started late in Tel Aviv, after nine. ‘We stay in to watch the evening news to see if any bombs have gone off.’ If there had been no explosions, they would get dressed up and go out; if there had been one, they would assess the severity, check to see if any of their friends had been casualties, and then would very likely go out drinking in another part of the city instead. ‘It’s life,’ they said. ‘We refuse to live in fear.’
In a park, where we shaded ourselves from a merciless sun, an elderly Hasidic Jew approached me with a concerned look on his face. He rested his hand on my arm and gazed into my face. I saw wisdom in his eyes. He told me that I had a big n
ose and that my fringe was too long. If I cut my hair short, it would take the attention away from the protuberance. Later, along the seafront, we were halted by police who had just found a suspect package on the beach and were in the process of cordoning off the area. We were the first to be stopped, a crowd gathering behind us, and so we were lucky: ringside seats.
The suspect package was a small backpack beside a beach towel. Even I could tell from my distant vantage point that it contained nothing more sinister than a pair of underpants, their owner having likely mistakenly left the shore without them, but this did not stop the dispatching of a small radio-controlled tank which puttered, gingerly and comically, across the sand towards it, stopping a few feet from it, then raising a protuberance of its own, something that it took me several moments to realise was a mini machine gun.
The crowd bristled, but nobody took a step back. Each of us wanted to see what happened next.
Even anticlimaxes can be thrilling. The policeman with the remote control in his hands lifted a thumb, then pressed on a button I felt sure must have been a bright shade of red. Though the tank was small, and its machine-gun arm comparatively tiny, the sound it made was impressive, the retort loud, echoing in my ears and the pit of my stomach. It fired four shots, paused, then fired a further two.
The bag did not explode. The policeman now approached with confidence, unzipped it and retrieved a posing pouch and a towel. The crowd duly dispersed, the road open again, business as usual until the next suspect package, the next quickly spread rumour.
‘We drink because we can,’ a group of friends told us later in a cavernous bar in the trendy Jaffa district, over fluorescent cocktails. ‘And in defiance.’
On the way back to the hotel, late at night, we crossed a square where otherwise observant Jewish men, wedding bands on their fingers and clutching at their tzitzits, sought rough trade under the safety of darkness, creating Kama Sutra shadows that spilled from the bushes.