Worth is not just about the ability to endure; it is about the capacity to be cherished.
What I’m about to tell you may seem bold.
I’m about to tell you about three men with wills of pure steel and hearts of gold. Then I’m going to ask you to believe that somewhere deep inside you that same greatness exists. And then I’m going to show you how to prove it to yourself.
The stories of these men reveal what dignity looks like when a human being is stripped of everything except conviction, sacrifice, and unyielding will. The sacred ache of their hunger became a testimony to the power that can emerge when a man refuses to betray what he believes in.
As you read about the physical reality of what these men endured, some part of you will feel it in your own marrow.
By the end of this chapter—when it is time to do the exercise—your mind will have quieted enough for us to speak directly to your worth.
It is my hope that the words in this chapter challenge you, strengthen you, and awaken something that may have been sleeping inside you for a very long time.
What I am about to show you is a lineage of Magnificence that you are invited to join.
The following are the true stories of three men each of whom used fasting as a moral, political, spiritual, and philosophical discipline: Mahatma Gandhi, Bobby Sands, and Guillermo Fariñas.
Fasting is often misunderstood. Most people think of it only in terms of food, deprivation, weight loss, religion, or self-control. But throughout human history, fasting has also been something far more dangerous and transformative. It has been used as prayer. As purification. As protest. As resistance. As a way for human beings to confront fear, sharpen conviction, and discover what remains when comfort is stripped away.
A genuine fast has a way of exposing the architecture of a person. It reveals where conviction ends and performance begins. It confronts the body with discomfort and asks a terrifyingly simple question: What matters enough to suffer for?
These men answered that question differently, in different centuries, under radically different political conditions. One challenged an empire through disciplined nonviolence. One died inside a prison cell during one of the most controversial hunger strikes of the twentieth century. One repeatedly brought himself to the edge of death in defiance of an authoritarian state that sought to silence dissent. Their politics were different. Their cultures were different. Their histories were different. But all three men understood something that modern life works very hard to make us forget:
Human dignity is not merely an idea. It is something a person must decide whether or not they are willing to embody.
That is why these men were chosen.
Not because they were perfect. Not because every action they took was beyond criticism. And not because suffering itself is noble. They were chosen because each of them, in his own way, reached a point where preserving inner integrity became more important than physical comfort, public approval, or even survival itself.
Most people never encounter that part of themselves.
Most people spend their lives adapting, negotiating, shrinking, performing, apologizing, abandoning their instincts, tolerating half-hearted love, and slowly forgetting the sound of their own deepest convictions. We live in a world that constantly pressures human beings to betray themselves in exchange for safety, acceptance, convenience, or numbness.
This chapter is an invitation to interrupt that process.
Not through ideology.
And not through punishment.
But through encounter.
As you move through these stories, I want you to pay attention not only to the minds of these men, but to their bodies. To the loneliness. To the fear. To the determination. To the ache. To the moments where the human organism itself became the final instrument through which conscience could still speak.
Because something extraordinary happens when a person willingly enters discomfort in service of meaning. The noise begins to fall away. Performance falls away. Pretending falls away. And beneath all of it, something sacred and more honest begins to emerge.
That is the threshold you are about to approach. Not merely an intellectual understanding of dignity. But an embodied encounter with it.
First, I am going to tell you the stories of three men: Mahatma Gandhi, Bobby Sands and Guillermo Fariñas. I am having you read about them so you can get a glimpse into their magnificence, and so when you later complete the exercise you will fully understand what it means when you recognize that those same qualities exist within you.
The Fast as Force: The Life and Hunger Strikes of Mahatma Gandhi
The Man
Mahatma Gandhi is remembered as one of the central figures of India’s struggle for independence, a man whose philosophy of nonviolence changed political history and inspired movements for justice across the world. Yet before people began calling him “Mahatma,” a Sanskrit-derived term meaning “great soul,” Mohandas Gandhi was a shy and deeply sensitive boy who wept at suffering, struggled with fear and self-doubt, loved fiercely, failed publicly, questioned himself relentlessly, and spent his life trying to bring his actions into alignment with his conscience. He was a husband, father, lawyer, writer, spiritual seeker, and imperfect human being whose greatness emerged not from perfection, but from his relentless willingness to keep growing, keep questioning himself, and keep choosing love, truth, and dignity even when doing so demanded enormous personal sacrifice.
His Story
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is among the most written-about human beings of the twentieth century, yet the full dimensions of his genius remain surprisingly easy to underestimate. He is remembered as a saint, as an icon of nonviolent resistance, as the father of a nation — images that have a way of flattening the actual man into something more statue than person. The real Gandhi was subtler, more conflicted, more strategically brilliant, and more physically daring than the mythology suggests. Nowhere is this more evident than in his use of the hunger strike, which he employed not as a gesture of despair but as a precision instrument of moral and political pressure — one that he understood deeply, deployed carefully, and was willing to take to the absolute edge of his life on multiple occasions.
From Porbandar to the World Stage
Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a small coastal city in what is now the Indian state of Gujarat. His family was of the Vaishya caste, his father a local administrator, his mother a devoutly religious woman whose practice of fasting as spiritual discipline left a permanent impression on her son. He was an unremarkable student, shy and awkward in social situations, and nothing in his early years suggested the figure he would become. He traveled to London to study law at the age of eighteen, and the experience of navigating a foreign culture — learning to dress correctly, to eat correctly, to speak correctly in the English manner — sharpened his sense of both the power and the absurdity of social performance.
It was South Africa, where he traveled in 1893 to practice law, that transformed Gandhi into a political thinker. The famous incident on the train to Pretoria, where he was ejected from a first-class compartment despite holding a valid ticket because of the color of his skin, is often cited as his political awakening — but it was less a single incident than an accumulation of experiences with systematic racial humiliation that radicalized him. He remained in South Africa for twenty-one years, organizing the Indian community there, developing the concept of satyagraha — often translated as “truth-force” or “soul-force” — and beginning to understand that the most powerful weapon available to the oppressed was not violence, which the oppressor could always meet with superior force, but moral witness, which could not be countered without moral cost.
When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he arrived as a figure already respected throughout the subcontinent, though the scale of what lay ahead was still unknowable. Over the following three decades, he would lead or inspire virtually every major campaign against British colonial rule: the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–1922, the Salt March of 1930, the Quit India Movement of 1942. He was arrested repeatedly, imprisoned for years at a time, and yet continued to find ways to exert influence even from behind bars. He also refined and transformed the hunger strike into something without real precedent in political history.
Gandhi’s Philosophy of Fasting
Gandhi’s relationship to fasting was rooted in Hindu spiritual practice long before it became a political tool. He had observed his mother fast regularly as an act of devotion, and he incorporated fasting into his own spiritual regimen from early adulthood. In his ashrams, periodic fasting was a communal discipline, a way of cultivating self-mastery and purifying intention. This spiritual foundation mattered enormously, because it meant that when Gandhi fasted publicly and politically, he was not importing an alien tactic — he was extending an existing practice into a new domain, in a way that his audience understood and found culturally legible.
He wrote extensively about the ethics and mechanics of fasting, insisting that a genuine fast — what he called a fast “unto death” — must be undertaken only after exhaustive attempts at other means, must be directed at people with a genuine relationship to the faster, and must be capable of evoking a change of heart rather than mere political capitulation. He was impatient with fasting as theater, and worried explicitly that his own example would inspire imitators who lacked the spiritual preparation to sustain a genuine fast or the political judgment to deploy one appropriately. In his view, fasting was not a tool for extracting concessions by making an opponent uncomfortable; it was a way of offering one’s own suffering as testimony to the depth of one’s commitment to truth, in the hope that witnessing that suffering would unlock something genuine in those who had the power to change things.
The 1932 Fast: Saving the Depressed Classes
The hunger strike that most directly altered the course of Indian constitutional history began on September 20, 1932, while Gandhi was imprisoned in Yeravda Central Jail in Pune. The trigger was the British government’s announcement of the Communal Award, a plan by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to grant separate electorates to the Untouchables — the caste group Gandhi called Harijans, or “children of God” — alongside separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, and other communities. Gandhi was bitterly opposed to separate electorates for Untouchables, not because he was indifferent to their oppression — his campaigns against untouchability were genuine and sustained — but because he believed that separating them into a distinct political class would permanently sever them from the Hindu community and from India’s emerging national identity, deepening rather than healing the wound of caste.
He announced that he would fast unto death unless the Communal Award was revised. The announcement detonated a political crisis. B.R. Ambedkar, himself an Untouchable and the most formidable advocate for that community’s rights, was placed in an agonizing position: he regarded Gandhi’s opposition to separate electorates as a form of paternalism that denied Untouchables genuine political agency, and he was profoundly suspicious of Gandhi’s motives. Yet if Gandhi died, the resulting backlash against Untouchables could be catastrophic. Ambedkar negotiated furiously, meeting with Gandhi in jail and working with other political leaders to craft an alternative arrangement. The resulting Poona Pact — signed on September 24, 1932, just before Gandhi’s health reached a critical threshold — replaced separate electorates with a system of reserved seats within joint electorates, guaranteeing Untouchable representation without formal separation. Gandhi broke his fast after six days. The episode remains contested: Ambedkar later wrote that he had been coerced by the prospect of Gandhi’s death into accepting terms less favorable to Untouchables than separate electorates would have been, and historians continue to debate whether Gandhi’s intervention helped or harmed the cause of caste equality in the long run.
The 1943 Fast: Resistance from Prison
In February 1943, Gandhi undertook a twenty-one-day fast while imprisoned at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, where he had been held since his arrest following the Quit India Movement in August 1942. The fast was directed not at a specific policy but at the British government’s treatment of the Indian National Congress and its refusal to acknowledge any legitimate grievance behind the Quit India campaign. Gandhi was sixty-three years old, in fragile health, and grieving — his longtime secretary Mahadev Desai had died in custody in August, and his wife Kasturba, also imprisoned, was declining rapidly. The British government, convinced that Gandhi was faking the severity of his condition for political effect, refused to release him and publicly predicted that he would abandon the fast before it became dangerous.
He did not abandon it. By the tenth day, Gandhi’s condition had deteriorated sharply, and medical personnel reported genuine fears for his survival. The fast ran its full twenty-one days, ending on March 3, 1943. Gandhi had proven that his commitment was not performative, but the British government remained unmoved on the substance of his demands. Kasturba died in February 1944, still imprisoned, which Gandhi mourned as one of the great sorrows of his life. The 1943 fast demonstrated both the power and the limits of the instrument: it produced moral clarity without political concession, and it took a physical toll on Gandhi from which he never fully recovered.
The 1948 Fast: The Last Witness
Gandhi’s final and perhaps most remarkable fast began on January 13, 1948, in Delhi — just months after Indian independence and in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic violence of Partition. Hundreds of thousands of people had died in communal massacres between Hindus and Muslims, millions had been displaced, and Delhi itself was riven with riots and retaliatory killings. Gandhi, at seventy-eight and in deteriorating health, announced that he would fast until the violence stopped and until Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh leaders made credible commitments to coexistence. He broke the fast five days later, on January 18, after receiving pledges from religious and political leaders across communal lines. It was an extraordinary final act — a man near the end of his physical resources spending those resources on the most urgent moral emergency he could see. Twelve days later, on January 30, 1948, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed that Gandhi’s defense of Muslims represented a betrayal of India.
Gandhi’s hunger strikes did not always achieve their stated objectives, and they generated genuine controversy — particularly among those who saw in them an element of coercion dressed in spiritual clothing. But as instruments for making the interior life of a moral commitment visible to the world, they have rarely been matched. He showed that the body, offered in complete sincerity, could speak louder than any argument.
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Bobby Sands: A Life of Passion, Purpose, and Love
The Man:
Bobby Sands was the first of ten Irish republican and Irish National Liberation Army prisoners to die during the 1981 hunger strike in HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland. He died on May 5, 1981, after sixty-six days without food, becoming one of the most internationally recognized figures of the violent political conflict between Irish republicans, British authorities, and unionists in Northern Ireland during the late twentieth century. Yet before Bobby Sands became a symbol carried through history, he was a son, a father, a writer, a musician, a friend, and a profoundly human young man whose life was far larger than the manner of his death.
His Story:
Bobby Sands was a man of extraordinary spirit, whose life was defined not only by his convictions but by the love, laughter, and humanity he shared with those around him. He was born in 1954 in Rathcoole, outside Belfast, the kind of neighborhood where community was stitched together from small loyalties — the faces you knew on every corner, the shared language of a particular street, the bonds forged by proximity and hardship.
From the beginning, Sands was known as someone who lit up a room. People who knew him as a boy and young man remember his humor, his quick wit, his gift for making others feel seen. He was the kind of person who remembered details about people’s lives and asked about them later, which is a rarer quality than it sounds. He loved music, particularly traditional Irish music, and he played the tin whistle and the guitar. He loved Gaelic football. He loved the ordinary pleasures of friendship — conversation, laughter, the particular warmth of people gathered together around something they cared about.
Those who knew him consistently describe someone brimming with personality. He was funny. Not performatively funny in the way of people who need an audience, but genuinely, naturally funny — the kind of person whose observations about everyday life made people laugh before they quite realized why. He was also tender. He was devoted to his son Gerard, and those who witnessed him as a father speak of a man who was fully present, affectionate, and fiercely loving. Fatherhood mattered to him in a way that was visible and unashamed. He wore it openly, the way people do when love is the truest thing they know about themselves.
What is sometimes overlooked, because his death has cast such a long shadow over everything that came before it, is that Sands was a genuinely gifted writer. He wrote poetry, personal reflections, diary entries, and political commentary, and what runs through all of it is not bitterness but remarkable vitality. His writing crackles with imagery, with humor, with an almost defiant love of beauty. In One Day in My Life, written during some of the most brutal conditions imaginable, he describes birdsong, the particular quality of light through a prison window, the texture of memory, and the stubborn persistence of hope. He wrote about the small sensory pleasures — the sound of rain, the idea of green fields — with the vividness of someone who understood that paying attention to beauty is itself a form of resistance. His literary voice was distinctive: earthy, lyrical, direct, and deeply alive.
His most famous poem, The Rhythm of Time, speaks of a force embedded in human history that cannot be permanently extinguished — a spirit of dignity and refusal that rises again and again across cultures and centuries. It is not a poem of despair. It is, at its core, a poem of deep and stubborn hope.
People who spent time with Bobby Sands in the years before and during his imprisonment describe someone who managed, improbably, to remain oriented toward life rather than away from it. Even in confinement, Bobby continued creating warmth, humor, and community around him, because that is what people with genuine warmth do — they cannot help it.
Bobby’s political convictions grew from the world he was born into. Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a place of genuine upheaval, where Catholic nationalist communities faced structural discrimination in housing, employment, and political representation, and where the violence shaped the daily texture of ordinary life. He came of age inside all of that — the roadblocks and curfews, the sound of helicopters overhead at night, the particular anxiety of living in a community that felt besieged. His eventual involvement with the Irish republican movement was not an abstraction to him. It was personal, rooted in the specific geography of his experience and his deep identification with the people around him.
In 1972, Bobby was arrested for possession of firearms and served several years in prison. After his release, he became involved again with the Irish republican movement and was later arrested in connection with a bombing operation in 1976. Although Bobby maintained that he had not participated in the shooting that occurred during the incident, he was convicted of firearms charges and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. It was during this second imprisonment, inside the harsh and escalating conditions of the Maze Prison protests, that Bobby Sands would eventually become one of the central figures of the 1981 hunger strike.
Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years old when he died, and if you allow yourself to stop there — at the number, at the age — something catches in the chest. Twenty-seven is still young enough to believe your best years are ahead of you. It is young enough to fall in love again, to change your mind about something important, to write a poem that surprises even yourself. Bobby was twenty-seven, and he had already done most of those things. He had already lived with a depth and richness that many people twice his age never manage.
Yet even within the full historical complexity of his life — which included real violence and genuine moral controversy — the human being himself remains something worth celebrating. Bobby loved people, could make an entire cellblock laugh during some of the darkest days imaginable, and produced writing that still stops readers cold decades later. Someone who, facing death at twenty-seven, continued to express tenderness and even joy in the private pages of his diary.
The nine men who followed Bobby Sands — Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, and Mickey Devine — deserve the same quality of attention. They were musicians and farmers and brothers and sons. They loved football and music and the particular pleasures of ordinary Irish life. They had senses of humor. They had people who loved them extravagantly. History has a dangerous habit of turning people into monuments, and monuments don’t laugh or cry or make you feel something real. These ten men were unmistakably human, and that humanity is exactly what makes their story so enduring.
When you sit with Bobby Sands’ image during this exercise, let yourself encounter someone who was, above all things, fully alive. Let yourself feel the warmth and humor and literary gift and fierce love that characterized this man long before he became a symbol of anything. History keeps his name. What this exercise asks of you is something more intimate: to receive him, briefly, as a human being — someone who played guitar and wrote poetry and laughed with friends and adored his son and found the light worth noticing even when the walls closed in.
A person who truly encounters their own dignity becomes far less willing to accept relationships built on indifference, contempt, emotional starvation, or half-hearted love. Once you begin to understand your own worth, you begin to hunger for relationships that honor it. That kind of aliveness deserves to be met with our own.
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
– Bobby Sands
The Man Who Starved for Truth: The Life and Hunger Strikes of Guillermo Fariñas
The Man:
Guillermo Fariñas Hernández is one of the most enduring and internationally recognized dissidents produced by post-revolutionary Cuba, a psychologist, journalist, former soldier, and political activist whose repeated hunger strikes transformed his own body into a site of moral and political confrontation with the Cuban state. Yet before he became a symbol of resistance carried through international headlines and human rights reports, Fariñas was a deeply intelligent and psychologically perceptive man shaped by the contradictions of the Cuban Revolution itself — a man who believed that dignity, truth, and freedom were not abstract political ideals but realities that had to be defended at the level of ordinary human life, even at enormous personal cost. His life and hunger strikes force difficult questions about conscience, suffering, the limits of state power, and what a human being is willing to endure rather than surrender the right to speak freely and live with integrity.
His Story
Guillermo Fariñas Hernández is one of the most consequential dissidents the Cuban government has ever failed to silence. A journalist, psychologist, and former soldier whose body has become a living instrument of protest, Fariñas has waged his most dramatic battles not with words or weapons but with the deliberate refusal of food — transforming his own physical suffering into an act of political resistance so potent it commanded international attention and ultimately moved the Cuban state to act. His story is not simply one of defiance; it is a meditation on the relationship between the body, dignity, and power, and on what a single human being is willing to endure in service of conscience.
A Life Shaped by Revolution and Its Contradictions
Born on January 2, 1962, in Santa Clara, Cuba, Fariñas came of age fully inside the revolutionary system he would later spend his life challenging. He served in the Cuban military during the Angolan Civil War in the 1980s, an experience that exposed him to both the pride and the disillusionment that often accompany ideological commitment in practice. Upon returning to Cuba, he pursued higher education, eventually earning degrees in both psychology and journalism — a combination that would define his public identity as someone equally interested in the interior life of individuals and the external machinery of state power.
By the late 1990s, Fariñas had become a vocal critic of the Castro government. He founded an independent news agency, Cubanacán Press, through which he circulated information and commentary that the state-controlled media would never publish. This work was neither safe nor abstract. Independent journalism in Cuba carried — and continues to carry — the risk of surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, and worse. Fariñas understood these risks and accepted them, framing his work not as opposition for its own sake but as a defense of basic human dignity and the right of ordinary Cubans to know the truth about their own lives. He became affiliated with the dissident movement that coalesced most visibly in the aftermath of the 2003 Black Spring crackdown, when the Cuban government imprisoned seventy-five journalists, librarians, and activists in a single sweep, sentencing them to terms ranging from six to twenty-eight years.
The First Hunger Strike: 2006
Fariñas had conducted hunger strikes on earlier occasions, including protests related to prison conditions and his own treatment following arrests. But the action that first brought him to international prominence began in January 2006, and it was remarkable in both its scale and its specific motivation. The Cuban government had implemented restrictions on internet access that prevented ordinary citizens — including patients in hospitals and psychiatric facilities — from accessing online information. For Fariñas, a psychologist with a deep investment in the idea that information is essential to human wellbeing, these restrictions were not merely political inconveniences. They were a form of psychological harm.
He announced that he would refuse all food until the government lifted its internet restrictions, and he kept his word with a tenacity that stunned observers. The hunger strike lasted seventy-three days. By the end, Fariñas had lost more than forty pounds and had fallen unconscious multiple times, requiring hospitalization and intravenous feeding to keep him alive — interventions he often refused until physical collapse made them unavoidable. Medical personnel and international observers feared repeatedly that he would not survive. The Cuban government did not capitulate on the internet question, and Fariñas eventually ended the strike on the advice of supporters who argued that his death would serve neither the cause nor the Cuban people. The experience left permanent damage to his health but also permanently cemented his reputation as a man whose commitment to his principles was not rhetorical.
The 2010 Hunger Strike: 134 Days That Changed Cuba
The hunger strike that made Guillermo Fariñas a figure of genuine global significance began on February 24, 2010. Its trigger was the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Cuban political prisoner who died on February 23, 2010, after an 83-day hunger strike of his own — the first political prisoner to die of a hunger strike in Cuba in nearly forty years. Fariñas had known Zapata Tamayo and was devastated by his death. Within hours, he announced that he too would stop eating, demanding that the Cuban government release all political prisoners whose medical conditions made continued imprisonment a death sentence.
What followed was one of the most dramatic and medically harrowing individual acts of protest in the early twenty-first century. Fariñas sustained his hunger strike for 134 days, a period during which he was hospitalized repeatedly, fell into comas, received last rites from a Catholic priest who believed he was dying, and was kept alive through forced medical intervention on multiple occasions. International organizations, foreign governments, and human rights bodies — including Amnesty International, which designated him a prisoner of conscience — urged his release or the Cuban government’s compliance with his demands. The European Parliament, then in the process of deliberating its annual Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, was monitoring his condition closely.
The outcome of the 2010 hunger strike was, by any measure, extraordinary. The Cuban government, in negotiations brokered in part by the Catholic Church and the Spanish government, agreed to begin releasing political prisoners. Over the following months and extending into 2011, more than one hundred political prisoners were freed — the largest such release in Cuba in decades. Fariñas ended his strike on July 8, 2010, after receiving credible assurances that seriously ill prisoners would be released. He had not eaten for more than four months. He was emaciated, weakened, and in fragile health. He was also, by any reasonable accounting, victorious in a way that few individual protesters ever achieve: he had moved the apparatus of a one-party authoritarian state.
The Sakharov Prize and Its Aftermath
On October 21, 2010, the European Parliament awarded Guillermo Fariñas the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, one of Europe’s most prestigious human rights honors — the same prize previously awarded to Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Cuban government refused to allow Fariñas to travel to Strasbourg to receive the award in person, a refusal that itself became a statement about the nature of the regime he was challenging. He eventually received the prize in a ceremony in Havana attended by European diplomats, in an act of quiet diplomatic choreography designed to honor him without triggering a full rupture in EU-Cuba relations.
The award did not end Fariñas’s activism or his confrontations with the Cuban state. In the years that followed, he continued to write, to speak to foreign journalists through whatever channels remained available, and to serve as a living argument for the proposition that nonviolent resistance — even taken to its most extreme physical limits — retained moral and practical force in the twenty-first century. He was harassed, surveilled, briefly detained, and subjected to what he and his supporters described as ongoing low-level persecution designed to exhaust without martyring him.
The Body as Testimony
What makes Guillermo Fariñas remarkable is not simply his endurance, though the physical facts are staggering. It is his understanding of what a hunger strike accomplishes that distinguishes him from mere suffering. In interviews, he has articulated a clear theory of the act: that in a political system which controls information, controls movement, and controls public space, the body is one of the few remaining domains a person can claim as sovereign. To refuse food is to assert, in the most radical possible way, that one’s physical existence belongs to oneself and not to the state — and to make that assertion visible, legible, and impossible for observers to ignore. It is a form of testimony written in flesh.
Fariñas has also been candid about the psychological dimensions of prolonged fasting. He has described the dissociation, the hallucinations, the periods of clarity alternating with delirium, and the point — which he said he reached and crossed multiple times — at which the body stops fighting and a kind of terrible peace sets in. That he continued through those moments, not once but repeatedly across multiple strikes and multiple decades, suggests a quality of will that is genuinely difficult to categorize. It is not exactly courage in the conventional sense. It is something more interior and more absolute — a commitment to a version of integrity that he apparently regards as non-negotiable regardless of physical cost.
Guillermo Fariñas remains alive, continues to live in Cuba, and continues to speak. In an era inclined toward cynicism about individual agency in the face of systemic power, his life makes an uncomfortable argument: that one person, with nothing but a body and a refusal, can sometimes be enough.
I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of living without dignity.
– Guillermo Fariñas
The Magnificent Protocol
Here is the exercise that I call “The Magnificent Protocol” because of the magnificent men it represents. As you read in the previous chapter “A Return to Love: The Soul’s Right to Dignity” this exercise is based on decades of research. But it is also based on the connection you will establish with the men you just read about.
When you do the following exercise, please follow the steps closely. Following the sequence as well as the content of the steps themselves is important for the success of the exercise.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the purpose of this exercise, but it’s important to say it here again.
The way this exercise is tied to “worshipping and being worshipped” and finding the “hot and holy love” described in this book is because it directly strengthens a man’s sense of his own worth. The more deeply you believe, in your body, mind, and soul, that you are worthy of reverence, tenderness, passion, loyalty, and profound love, the more capable you become of 1) successfully worshipping your partner, 2) allowing yourself to be fully worshipped by your partner, and 3) abandoning yourself to the ecstasy of deep love.
So have it with your whole heart.
Here is the exercise step-by-step.
The Exercise
Tools You Will Need
1. Computer
2. Printer
3. Printer paper
4. Tape
5. Notebook or paper
6. Pen or pencil
7. A warm blanket
Step One:
Google the following men’s names and print out photographs of all three of them:
Mahatma Gandhi
Bobby Sands
Guillermo Fariñas
Step Two:
Tape all three of the men’s 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 health problems discuss with your doctor which meal you can safely skip. Only if they are concerned with your skipping a meal entirely should you ask them if you can delay the meal by a few hours.
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. Look at each person thoughtfully.
Remember that every one of them willingly endured discomfort, sacrifice, uncertainty, or suffering because they believed something mattered more than their immediate comfort.
Think about the fact that all three of these men believed deeply in love, specifically in the context of love for family, people, and country.
Step Five:
As you skip your meal, notice carefully when hunger begins appearing in your body.
Where do you feel it?
You may discover that hunger is experienced in places beyond the stomach. You may feel it in your chest, throat, jaw, shoulders, emotions, thoughts, or nervous system.
Write down where you feel hunger in your body.
Then write down how the hunger affects your emotions, thoughts, attention, memories, and sense of self.
Step Six:
Now sit quietly with the following statement:
“All three of the people taped to your wall were human beings who were willing to endure profound sacrifice for what they believed in and for the people they loved. And you are every bit as worthy of dignity, courage, love, and deep human meaning as they were.”
Write down how this statement makes you feel.
Step Seven:
I call this the cuddly step.
Get your favorite warm blanket. Sit either in bed or your most comfortable chair with your blanket wrapped around you. As you sit there in your blanket, think of your beloved’s arms wrapped around you embracing you, caressing you. And think about how you deserve this love, devotion and warmth.
Sit for as long as you are comfortable.
Anchors: A Final Exercise Note
Repeat any step of this exercise – or all the steps whenever you feel the need. Each step has mutliple anchors in them. Anchors are psychological tools that re-attach to the original experience. For example, do Step Four and skip a meal when you want to feel a deeper sense of your power and worthiness. Or do Step Seven again and wrap yourself in a blanket when you want to feel embraced and loved. I invite you to create whatever anchors you need in order to build the bridges and paths to your hot and holy love.
This is the end of the exercise…
and the beginning of you believing that you deserve the best that life and love have to offer.
Decompression: Wrapping Up
What you have just completed was not merely an intellectual exercise. You interrupted the ordinary rhythm of your body, mind, and spirit long enough to encounter something many people spend years trying to outrun: their own dignity.
For a brief period of time, you chose not to immediately silence discomfort. You allowed yourself to feel hunger, reflect deeply, and stand in the presence of human beings who willingly endured extraordinary suffering in service of conviction, conscience, truth, and love. And then you were asked to recognize something both simple and radical: that the same human capacities that existed within those men also exist within you.
The purpose of this exercise was never to worship suffering. It was to encounter worthiness. To experience, not merely as an idea but as a felt reality within the body and nervous system, that you are worthy of reverence, tenderness, devotion, honesty, passion, and deep love.
Because once a person truly begins to believe that, something changes.
The standards change.
The boundaries change.
The relationships change.
The way the body carries itself changes.
Even desire changes.
A person who encounters their own dignity becomes less willing to abandon themselves to relationships built on indifference, contempt, dishonesty, emotional starvation, or half-hearted love. At the same time, they often become more capable of loving others with presence, loyalty, courage, tenderness, and reverence.
You do not need to become a political prisoner, revolutionary, or historical figure to live with dignity. Human life offers endless opportunities to embody it:
telling the truth,
keeping your word,
protecting your heart,
remaining loyal,
allowing yourself to be seen,
and refusing to continue accepting love that diminishes your humanity.
Perhaps something inside you has already begun remembering this.
If so, protect it carefully.
And carry it into your life, your relationships, and your love.
Live boldly, Worship wildly. And allow yourself to be worshipped right back.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Listening to you, I get the music
Gazing at you, I get the heat
Following you, I climb the mountain
I get excitement at your feet
Right behind you, I see the millions
On you, I see the glory
From you, I get opinions
From you, I get the story
— We’re Not Gonna Take It, The Who 1969
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.
References (Mahatma Gandhi)
Brown, J. M. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. Yale University Press.
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Fischer, L. (1950). The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. Harper & Brothers.
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Gandhi, M. K. (1958–1994). The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vols. 1–100). Publications Division, Government of India.
Guha, R. (2013). Gandhi Before India. Alfred A. Knopf.
Guha, R. (2018). Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948. Alfred A. Knopf.
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References (Bobby Sands)
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Coogan, T. P. The IRA. HarperCollins, 2002.
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References (Guillermo Fariñas)
Amnesty International. (2010). Cuba: Guillermo Fariñas — Prisoner of Conscience. Amnesty International Publications.
European Parliament. (2010). Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought: Guillermo Fariñas. European Parliament Official Journal.
Farber, S. (2011). Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment. Haymarket Books.
Frank, M. (2013). Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana. University Press of Florida.
Human Rights Watch. (2010). Cuba’s Repression of Dissent. Human Rights Watch World Report.
Lacey, M. (2010, July 8). Cuban dissident ends hunger strike after 134 days. The New York Times.
Marsh, S. (2012). Cuba’s dissidents: Ineffective opposition or harbingers of change? Bulletin of Latin American Research, 31(1), 19–35.
Reporters Without Borders. (2006). Cuba: Guillermo Fariñas and the internet access protest. RSF Annual Report.
Reuters. (2010, February 25). Cuban dissident begins hunger strike after jailed activist dies. Reuters News Service.
Smith, W. S. (2010). The Cuban dissident movement: History, structure, and prospects. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 2(3–4), 218–232.
Sweig, J. E. (2009). Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press.
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.
