The Power of So What
Back in the 1990s, I watched a film with some of my friends that commentated on the ridiculousness of reality TV before reality TV really got big and as it is today. It is not the reality TV reflection that makes this hypnosis audio track pertinent to this film, it is the title and attitude of the anti-hero of the film.
The film is called S.F.W (or So F**king What?) and stars Stephen Dorff as Cliff Spab who is a disillusioned young man who becomes a hostage to terrorists at a convenience store. The Terrorist group ask for the entire situation to be broadcast on television so everyone can see how serious they are and many people get killed in the process. After 36 days, Cliff Spab becomes indifferent to the idea of being killed and having taken a bullet for one of the fellow hostages, when he is continually threatened by his captors, he simply says “so f**king what?”
This makes Cliff a media hero, and the film goes into media stardom. However, it is this notion of getting to a stage where something that once terrified and panicked an individual into compliance, avoidance and a frightened existence turns into indifference and a “so f**king what?” attitude, that is what this hypnosis audio track is about.
A few years back now, I read a great book by John Parkin called “F**k it.” The book featured in news all over the world.
The Times Newspaper once reported that “the F**k It principles comprised of three Eastern principles: Letting go, relaxing, giving up on things.“
On the back cover of the book it says:
Saying Fuck It is like a massage for the mind: relaxing you, releasing tension, allowing you to give up on things that aren’t working. Just starting to say Fuck It can transform your life. And John C. Parkin argues that saying Fuck It is a spiritual act: that it is the perfect western expression of the eastern ideas of letting go, giving up and finding real freedom by realising that things don’t matter so much (if at all). This is the Fuck It way.
John C. Parkin, the son of Anglican preacher realised that saying Fuck It was as good as all the eastern spiritual practices he’d been studying for 20 years. Having said Fuck It to a top job in London, he escaped to Italy to set up the retreat centre The Hill That Breathes, where he now teaches regular ‘Fuck It Weeks’ with his wife Gaia. He writes regularly on his website (thefuckitway.com) and has been featured on T.V., such as The Graham Norton Show, and in the national press, including The Guardian, TheObserver, The Times, Psychologies, Cosmopolitan and Red Magazine.
It is this idea that I have really enjoyed embracing in a variety of ways in my own life and importantly, in therapy. Which may sound crazy to some people…
This hypnosis track’s methodology is based on Albert Ellis’ REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy) approach and it embraces the notion of simply saying “so what?”