How somatic psychology and kinesthetic intelligence can change you.
In the next two companion chapters, you will be guided through a deliberate experience.
At one point, you will be asked to skip a single meal and remain fully present to what arises in your body and mind. Technically speaking, you will be fasting, because even skipping one meal is considered a fast in scientific literature. In doing so, you will join billions of human beings across history who have fasted as a practice of reflection, discipline, sacrifice, clarity, devotion, and transformation.
This is an intentional encounter with deprivation—not as punishment, but as a doorway. It is a way of bringing you into direct contact with something most people spend their lives trying to avoid, and that others throughout history have come to respect as a catalyst for awakening, dignity, courage, and profound psychological change.
You will be asked to feel the pull of hunger and not immediately resolve it. That alone is more powerful than most people realize.
There is both science and wisdom behind this. Even skipping one meal produces measurable physiological and neurological changes, and when the body is not immediately relieved, the mind often begins organizing itself differently. Attention sharpens. Internal noise can quiet. Emotional material that normally remains buried can begin rising gently to the surface. A different kind of clarity becomes available.
What you are about to do brings these elements together—physiology, attention, symbolism, emotion, and meaning—so that you do not merely understand them intellectually, but experience them directly.
And that distinction matters. Because there are moments in human life when an idea stops being abstract and becomes physical. The body understands something before the intellect catches up.
That is what this exercise is designed to do. Not merely teach you.
But allow you to feel something powerful enough that it begins reorganizing how you see yourself.
I’ll first outline the exercise. Then I’ll explain how two powerful and well-researched tools—somatic psychology and kinesthetic intelligence—are used during the exercise to help change the way you think and feel about yourself.
What, you might ask, is the point of this exercise, and what does it have to do with “worshipping and being worshipped” and finding “the hot and holy love you desire” that this book promises? I’m glad you asked. Let me put it to you this way: The odds of your being able to 1) successfully worship your partner, 2) allow yourself to be fully worshipped by your partner, and 3) abandon yourself to deep love all go up exponentially the more deeply you believe that you deserve it. And that, buttercup, is the entire point of this exercise. This exercise is designed to make you believe with every cell in your mind, body, and soul that you deserve every kiss, every embrace, and every expression of deep and reverent love that your heart truly longs for.
The Exercise
I want to give you the exercise up front so that as you read the following explanation about why this experience can change your life, you already understand exactly what you are being invited into.
Here is the exercise step-by-step.
The Magnificent Protocol
Tools You Will Need
- Computer
- Printer
- Printer paper
- Tape
- Notebook or paper
- Pen or pencil
- A warm blanket
Step One
You will be asked to Google the name of three specific people and print out their photographs.
Step Two
Tape all three photographs onto a wall in your home that you naturally see throughout the day—your bedroom, kitchen, hallway, or living room.
Step Three
Leave the photographs on your wall for seven days.
During this time, look at your schedule and choose a day where you can safely skip either lunch or dinner at home. Make sure the meal that you choose to skip is a meal you normally have on a regular basis.
Note: If you have any health condition, consult your physician about whether it is safe for you to skip a meal. If they advise against skipping a meal entirely, consider simply delaying a meal by a few hours instead.
Step Four
On the day you skip your meal, you need to remain at home to complete the exercise.
Before you begin, stand quietly in front of the photographs taped to your wall. For the actual exercise you will be asked several questions to help you reflect on each person.
Step Five
As you skip your meal, you’ll be asked to notice when hunger begins appearing in your body. And you’ll be asked to wrote about it.
Step Six
This step will have you think about how each of the three people sacrificed themselves for what they believed in for the good of others.
You will asked to consider that you are every bit as worthy of dignity, courage, love, and greatness as they were.
And again you will be asked to write about it.
Step Seven
Let’s call this the cuddly step. In this step, you’ll be asked to wrap yourself in your favorite warm blanket and sit in bed or your most comfortable chair for as long as you like.
This will be the the end of the exercise
and the beginning of you believing in yourself.
What follows is an explanation of why science has found that an embodied exercise like this one can profoundly alter the way a person thinks, feels, and experiences themselves. My hope is that seeing how science explains this will motivate you to do this exercise, change how you feel about yourself, and bring you the hot and holy love you deserve.
Somatic Psychology, Kinesthetic Intelligence, and the Transformative Power of Embodied Ritual
There are moments in human life when an idea ceases to be abstract and becomes physical.
The body understands something before the intellect catches up. A person may read a hundred books about courage, resilience, sacrifice, dignity, or devotion and remain unchanged. Yet one direct embodied experience—a ritual, a fast, a movement, a physical act of symbolic identification—can alter how a person sees themselves at the deepest level.
This is one of the central insights of somatic psychology and embodied cognition: human beings do not merely think with their minds. They think with their entire bodies.
An exercise as simple as printing out the image of a historical hunger striker, physically taping it to a wall, voluntarily skipping a meal, and journaling about the experience may appear psychologically modest on the surface. Yet when viewed through the lenses of somatic psychology, kinesthetic intelligence, experiential learning theory, embodied cognition, symbolic ritual, and neuropsychology, such an exercise has the potential to become profoundly transformative.
The exercise works precisely because it is not merely intellectual. It is embodied.
The Body as an Archive of Meaning
Somatic psychology is founded on the idea that the body stores emotional experience, memory, identity, and psychological patterning. Rather than treating the mind and body as separate systems, somatic approaches recognize that emotion, cognition, posture, sensation, movement, and nervous system activity exist in constant dialogue.
This understanding radically changes how transformation occurs.
Traditional insight-oriented approaches often assume that if a person intellectually understands something, they will naturally change. Somatic psychology challenges this assumption. A person may understand dignity while still physically embodying shame. They may intellectually believe they deserve love while their nervous system remains organized around fear, collapse, or self-protection.
Why Physical Action Changes Identity
One of the most overlooked truths in psychology is that identity is often shaped through enacted behavior rather than passive reflection.
Kinesthetic intelligence—the form of intelligence involving bodily awareness, movement, coordination, physical intuition, and embodied understanding—plays a powerful role in how human beings internalize meaning. While commonly associated with athletics or dance, kinesthetic intelligence also influences ritual, emotional learning, trauma processing, and symbolic action.
The hunger-striker exercise activates kinesthetic intelligence because the participant is not simply consuming information intellectually. They are doing something physically and symbolically meaningful. They create a symbolic space. They alter their environment intentionally. They voluntarily endure discomfort. They participate physically in meaning itself.
Every step in the exercise recruits sensorimotor systems, emotional systems, attentional systems, autobiographical memory, and symbolic cognition simultaneously. The participant selects an image, prints it, tapes it to a wall, looks at it repeatedly, voluntarily experiences controlled hunger, and journals from inside the bodily sensation itself.
This matters enormously.
Research in embodied cognition suggests that cognition is inseparable from bodily experience. Human beings understand abstract concepts partly through physical metaphor, posture, movement, sensation, and environmental interaction. In other words, the body is not merely a container for the mind. The body participates in thought itself.
The nervous system also tends to assign greater significance to experiences involving bodily participation. This helps explain why rituals throughout human history almost always involve physical acts such as kneeling, fasting, bowing, singing, touching, dancing, lighting candles, carrying objects, silence, prayer, pilgrimage, and sacrifice. The body marks the experience as significant.
Somatic approaches recognize that symbolic physical acts can reorganize emotional meaning at a deep level because the nervous system interprets direct participation differently than passive observation. The participant who skips one meal in conscious solidarity with a hunger striker is not pretending to become that person. Rather, they are creating a bridge between admiration and embodiment.
They begin moving from:
“I admire courage.”
to:
“I can physically participate in courage.”
That distinction is psychologically enormous because it transforms courage from an abstract ideal into an embodied experience.
The Importance of Symbolic Identification
Human beings are profoundly shaped by identification.
Throughout history, people have modeled themselves after saints, revolutionaries, philosophers, warriors, spiritual teachers, artists, activists, and martyrs. Symbolic figures provide psychological templates for identity construction and emotional aspiration.
Embodied cognition research suggests that symbols become more psychologically potent when tied to sensory and physical experience. This helps explain why the printed image on the wall matters so much within the exercise. The image externalizes the symbolic relationship and transforms it into a repeated environmental cue.
The image becomes:
- a visual anchor,
- a nervous system cue,
- a repeated emotional reminder.
Each glance at the image reinforces qualities associated with the person:
- endurance,
- dignity,
- sacrifice,
- moral conviction,
- resilience,
- courage,
- spiritual strength.
Over time, repeated visual exposure combined with embodied participation can strengthen associative emotional networks in the brain. This is one reason athletes use visualization rituals and physical anchors, and why trauma therapies often incorporate somatic grounding, movement, sensory orientation, and symbolic action into treatment.
The nervous system learns through repetition, sensation, emotional salience, and enacted experience—not merely through logic alone.
Anchoring in Somatic Psychology
Somatic psychology is grounded in the understanding that human beings do not experience life through thought alone. We experience it through the body. Memory, emotion, attachment, fear, love, shame, safety, longing, and dignity are not stored merely as abstract ideas in the mind; they are carried within the nervous system and expressed through posture, sensation, breathing, tension, movement, and physiological response. This is one reason people can intellectually “know” something about themselves while still feeling something entirely different in their bodies. A person may logically understand that they deserve love, safety, tenderness, or respect while simultaneously carrying years of embodied conditioning that tells them otherwise.
One of the central insights of somatic psychology is that meaningful psychological change often occurs most deeply when the body becomes directly involved in the experience of transformation. Symbolic action, sensory experience, ritual, visualization, breath, physical sensation, emotional intensity, and deliberate behavioral interruption all have the capacity to alter how the nervous system organizes meaning. In many therapeutic approaches, this is referred to as anchoring: the process through which physical experiences, emotional states, environments, objects, imagery, or repeated actions become neurologically associated with particular psychological meanings and internal states. Over time, these associations can become powerful pathways back into specific emotional experiences such as safety, courage, dignity, calm, devotion, or self-worth.
The exercise you are about to complete draws upon these principles intentionally. The photographs, the physical sensation of hunger, the act of reflection, the written responses, the visualization exercises, and even the experience of warmth and physical comfort are all designed to engage the body and nervous system directly rather than merely appealing to the intellect alone. This matters because the nervous system learns most powerfully through lived experience. Repeated embodied experiences of dignity, worthiness, reverence, courage, tenderness, and self-respect gradually begin reshaping the emotional architecture through which a person experiences themselves, relationships, love, and meaning itself.
Why Voluntary Hunger Changes Consciousness
Fasting has historically been associated with spiritual transformation, purification, sacrifice, resistance, devotion, and heightened awareness across numerous cultures and traditions.
Even mild fasting alters bodily awareness.
A skipped meal changes:
- stomach sensations,
- attention,
- energy patterns,
- emotional awareness,
- interoception,
- self-observation.
Interoception—the ability to perceive internal bodily states—is increasingly recognized as central to emotional awareness and psychological processing. When a participant voluntarily experiences hunger while reflecting on a hunger striker, the experience stops being purely philosophical and becomes visceral.
The body itself begins asking:
- What does sacrifice feel like?
- What does discomfort mean?
- How do I respond when relief is delayed?
- What qualities emerge when comfort is removed?
- What values matter enough that discomfort becomes meaningful?
This is no longer abstract philosophy.
It becomes lived experience.
Importantly, the exercise derives much of its psychological power from the fact that the hunger is voluntary, limited, intentional, and symbolic rather than coercive or extreme. The participant is engaging in controlled experiential learning. Research consistently demonstrates that direct embodied participation produces deeper integration than passive intellectual instruction because the nervous system remembers experiences differently when the individual actively participates in meaning-making.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Notes:
This chapter is preparation for the exercise “The Magnificent Protocol.”
The following companion chapters contain 1) The Magnificent Protocol exercise for men, and 2) The Magnificent Protocol exercise for women:
The Discipline of Desire: A Man’s Return to Worth
The Sacred Ache: A Woman’s Return to Grace
Did you ever see the faces of the children, they get so excited
Waking up on Christmas morning hours before the winter sun’s ignited
They believe in dreams and all they mean, including heavens generosity
Peeping round the door to see what parcels are for free in curiosity
I believe in love but how can men
who’ve never seen light be enlightened?
Only if he’s cured will his spirits future level ever heighten
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book exploring the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, devotion, and hot and holy love.
Medical Disclaimer: This exercise is educational in nature and is not intended as medical or psychological treatment. Consult your physician before fasting, especially if you have any medical or mental health condition.
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Yin, M., Xiao, R., & Wagener, N. “Reflective Motion and a Physical Canvas: Exploring Embodied Journaling in Virtual Reality.” arXiv, 2026.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and leading expert in counseling, psychotherapy, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and high-caliber relationships.
