Ah, the gorgeous offerings of Italia; the taste of luscious wine, the beautiful landscapes’ rolling hills, quaint little cobblestone villages, spaghetti for days, and a ‘Fuck It Retreat’ where you can learn to say ‘Fuck It’ and as the cool kids put it, live your best life with Italian specialists.
The retreats employ a holistic philosophy of self-love and letting go. After all, ‘Fuck It’, in the most contextual meaning of the phrase, refers to shedding all unwarranted societal restraints or beliefs about oneself that may hold one back from achieving true contentedness.
During the retreats, participants, or ‘fuckateers’, will learn about and participate in the arts of yoga, meditation, xigong, chi kung (energy breathwork), tai chi, and ‘fuck it’ dancing, in which they’ll learn to truly let go and move their bodies in whatever way they choose.
The retreats are run by couple John and Gaia Parkin out of Italy, although they do offer ‘Fuck It’ Retreat sessions in Dublin and London from time to time. While the couple met in the nineties, it wasn’t until 2002 that they decided to leave their stressed-out pace of a life in London behind and start hosting holistic retreats in Urbino, Italy.
But John and Gaia offer more than just Fuck It Retreats:
Courtesy of their website, eff-it-helps.com, John and Gaia have written and are offering a quiz “How F**K It Are You?“, a free Fuck It E-book, One-on-One Skypes with Gaia, and an interactive e-course in which you can “experience John and Gaia’s Fuck It teaching at a deep level from anywhere in the world.”
Their website also provides updated blog posts about varied topics such as stress, how to slow down, how to find love, and some good old Donald Trump bashing.
Since the Fuck It Retreat’s inception, John has authored many books on the subject:
Fuck It – Do What You Love: “Do What You Love is an urgent call-to-action – for us to recognise that life is short and that many of us have more choice than we ever have had to orientate our lives around Doing What We Love. This is a handbook to doing more of what you love: from help in working out What You Love, right all the way up to Making a Living from Doing What You Love.”
F**k It, the Ultimate Spiritual Way: The original F**K It book, “this is the book in which John proposes that using this profanity can have a profound spiritual and therapeutic effect – as powerful as meditation or more complicated therapies. Why? Because ‘F**K It” gets to the heart of the problem: that we care too much about too many things, and take it all too seriously. Say ‘F**K It’, lighten up, and watch it all go more smoothly.
The Way of F**K It: “A small book with lots of F**K It wisdom. John & Gaia condense their F**K It philosophy into a series of lines, that are the illustrated (by Gaia).”
F**K It Therapy: “the most detailed exposition of the F**K It philosophy. John & Gaia wrote it after years of teaching F**K It Retreats: so it contains detailed information about how to use F**K It in every area of your life.”
F**K It Is The Answer: “less of a book and more an oracle. The idea is this – you think of a question, any question – and then you randomly turn to a page of this book, where you’ll find an answer to your question.”
