Home, career, status, fitness, health, holidays, great food, clever kids, spiritual enlightenment and perfect friends . . . the ideal of modern middle-class life is exhausting. And sometimes, amid this frantic world of achievement-chasing, the temptation is simply to turn around and say “f*** it” to the whole thing. In fact, “f***it f***itf***itf***itf***itf***it”.

Tee-hee, what naughty fun, but it’s hardly proper therapy, is it? John Parkin, 39, is convinced that it is. He believes that saying FI (let’s try to be polite from here on) both cured the debilitating allergies that had plagued his adult life and finally set him on a path to happiness. Now based on an idyllic hill in Italy, he runs retreats that have so far taught FI therapy to more than 150 people. He will run his first workshop in London on Friday.

Parkin should have a gift for the finer points of English idiom. He spent years working as a copywriter in advertising agencies, pushing high-profile brands such as Tango and Pot Noodle. Perhaps it was karmic payback, but in all that time he just never felt well.

“I have always suffered from allergies, asthma, eczema, things like that, and generally feeling sick and tired. I had this sense that I could not carry on like this any longer. I was working long hours and under stress,” he says.

His first attempt to improve matters involved going part-time and indulging his interest in alternative therapies. “I worked in London as a shaman with corporate clients such as people from Orange and Egg, taking them into trance states.” What? “Yeah, really. But it was still the same thing; too fast and too busy.”

When his Italian wife Gaia gave birth to twins in 2001, the couple decided that it was time to say goodbye to busy London, sell the house, buy a campervan and head for the slow, sunny hills in the central-Italian province of Le Marche. The pair trained as hypnotherapists and planned to set up a retreat, teaching t’ai chi, qigung and shiatsu. So far, so idyllic. But it didn’t quite work to plan.

“Part of the move to rural Italy was about helping me to overcome my allergies,” says Parkin. “But the truth was that it was all very stressful, trying to set up abroad and rebuilding a property. I became very sick.” Worse followed.

“We were living in this old house miles from anywhere when, one morning I had an allergic reaction to pollen and started to feel very ill, very quickly. My wife looked out of the window and noticed that the fields surrounding us were blossoming into rapeseed flowers.”

And that’s when Parkin got his first rush of FI. “I ran out into the fields and thought, what the hell, I would smell the pollen until I got overwhelmed by the stuff. I did not react to it at all after that,” he says. Nevertheless, he remained constantly off-colour.

“I got to the point where I had done all the healthy things, but I was still not well. So I thought, FI, and let go of the search to get well. I thought, my life’s OK anyway. Within a week I started feeling better.”

Letting go in order to hold on is an ancient idea encapsulated in the Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment. But to English ears it sounds much more accessible in the form of f*** it! (Oops.)

“FI pulls together these Eastern principles: letting go, relaxing, giving up on things. When you are small, not a lot matters, but as we grow up we develop all these meanings, a semantic universe full of importances about money, success and so on, and all these things contain the potential for hurt, stress and anxiety. You have got a convoy of things that mean stuff, and the bigger that convoy is, the more likely it is that one of the things will be going wrong and causing you stress.”

One of the worst culprits, ironically, is modern self-development culture, says Parkin: “New Age is a minefield for people having agonies about almost being perfect. A lot of what we teach here is about accepting ourselves as we are. For years I wanted to be peaceful. I wanted to be a monk, a mountain of calm. And then I would lose it completely about something. We’re about saying FI about the ideas of what we should be. FI, I’m just me.

“Some people think that the course is about staying home, eating a lot and just generally being irresponsible. But a lot of people get it because they have realised that their life is worn down by overcaring. I get a lot of women in their fifties and sixties pursuing FI.

“We ask people on the course to list all the things that are important to them and then ask what it would be like to say FI to them. We do t’ai chi-type exercises, which show people how it can be harder to hold on to another person if they relax. The more you relax, the more your energy flows and the stronger you are. It’s FI in physical form. When we release our hold on things that trouble us, then things often start to move.

“FI means being open and receiving lots more stuff. If I can’t get down to a task, I give up on it and try again three days later, and then it starts to happen.”

Kit Berry, 48, is a self-confessed convert. She believes that the course enabled her to make the break from career schoolteacher to full-time writer. “My girlfriend found the course on the internet and asked me to come along. She had been told that she had cancer and wanted to think more deeply about the spiritual side of her life, but was scared of going to some of the more straitlaced things,” Berry says.

“We both liked the look of it because it’s not too heavy. John’s work made us giggle. You can take this course more seriously because, paradoxically, it’s not po-faced.”

Berry was working as a schoolteacher and bringing up three teenage sons alone when she started writing in her spare time. “Then the writing began to take over everything. I had got so into it that I felt that I was being shown that this is what I should do,” she says. “I was on the horns of a dilemma for about two years before I went on the course.

“It taught me how we get bogged down with minutiae, that you have to let go and put things into the hands of something greater, rather than worry about everything so much that you can’t go with the flow of life.

“I’ve learnt to say ‘FI’ to the things that don’t matter and to dedicate myself to the things that do. I came back feeling very positive. I left teaching and remortgaged the house to fund the self-publication of my books, and now I’m working on my third novel. Everything has changed because I have let go of my security and all the things I was scared to give up. It’s that old question, ‘What will you do with your one wild and precious life?’ And my friend and I are going back again this June.”

For more information on FI therapy in Italy, visit www.thehillthatbreathes.com

F*** It. The Ultimate Spiritual Way , with John Parkin, the Mind Body Spirit Festival, Royal Horticultural Halls, London SW1, Friday, 4pm-8pm. For details call 020-7371 9191, or log on to www.mindbodyspirit.co.uk

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