The Sacred Ache: A Woman’s Return to Grace

The female hunger striker’s path to freedom.

What I am about to show you is not fragility. It is not passivity, weakness, or submission. I am about to introduce you to three women whose courage became so undeniable that entire governments feared the moral force of their suffering. These were women whose convictions were so profound that their bodies themselves became instruments through which conscience could no longer be ignored. Their grace did not make them softer than steel. Somehow, it made their strength even more terrifying to those who sought to control them.

And then I am going to ask you to consider something extraordinary: that somewhere within you, that same sacred force still lives.

The women in this chapter did not become magnificent because they were untouched by fear, loneliness, exhaustion, or pain. They became magnificent because there came a moment when preserving the integrity of their souls mattered more than comfort, obedience, approval, or survival itself. The ache of their hunger became a language. A declaration. A refusal. A prayer spoken through the body when ordinary words no longer carried enough truth.

As you move through these stories, some part of you will recognize them long before your mind fully understands why. You will recognize the exhaustion of carrying dignity through a world that often asks women to betray themselves in exchange for acceptance. You will recognize the tension between tenderness and ferocity. You will recognize the longing to remain soft without becoming weak, loving without disappearing, powerful without abandoning grace.

By the time you reach the exercise later in this chapter, something inside you will already have begun to shift. The noise will have quieted. The performance will have softened. And we will be able to speak directly to the part of you that still remembers what it feels like to be worthy of reverence, devotion, protection, ecstasy, and profound love.

This chapter is not about punishment, nor is it about suffering for its own sake. It is about encounter. There are moments in human life when discomfort strips away illusion and reveals something startling beneath it—something ancient, incorruptible, and profoundly alive. Modern life works very hard to convince women to forget this part of themselves.

The women chosen for this chapter each embodied that truth in radically different ways. Alice Paul confronted a political system that attempted to silence women demanding recognition as full human beings worthy of voice, dignity, and citizenship. Mary MacSwiney became a haunting moral force within Ireland’s struggle for independence, wielding endurance itself as a form of resistance so powerful that governments recoiled from the possibility of her death. Irom Sharmila transformed persistence into something almost transcendent, sustaining one of the longest hunger strikes in modern history through a combination of compassion, conscience, and nearly unimaginable inner discipline.

Their cultures were different. Their politics were different. Their histories were different. But all three women understood something that modern culture desperately tries to sever women from: grace is not weakness, tenderness is not surrender, and a woman does not become powerful by abandoning her heart. She becomes powerful when she finally realizes it was never the weakness she was taught to believe it was.

Throughout history, fasting has been used not only as spiritual discipline, but as purification, protest, mourning, resistance, awakening, and transformation. It has allowed human beings to confront fear, sharpen conviction, and discover what remains when comfort and distraction begin to fall away. A true fast has a way of revealing the hidden architecture of a person. It exposes where performance ends and where truth begins. It asks the body a devastatingly simple question: What do you love enough to suffer for? What truth refuses to leave you even when comfort disappears? What part of yourself are you no longer willing to abandon?

Most people spend their entire lives disconnected from those questions. Most people learn to shrink themselves slowly and quietly. They learn to apologize for their desires, mistrust their instincts, settle for partial love, numb longing, call emotional starvation “maturity,” confuse exhaustion with responsibility, and confuse invisibility with safety.

This chapter is an invitation to interrupt that process. Not through ideology, shame, or self-destruction, but through remembrance. Something extraordinary happens when a woman willingly enters a space of sacred intentionality and embodied reflection. Beneath the noise, beneath the conditioning, beneath the performance, another self begins to emerge. Not a new self—the original one. The one that still remembers how to stand fully inside her own soul.
First, I am going to tell you the stories of three extraordinary women: Alice Paul, Mary MacSwiney, and Irom Sharmila. I want you to encounter their magnificence so that when it is finally time to complete the exercise yourself, you will understand something essential: the same grace, courage, dignity, and sacred fire that lived inside these women also lives within you.

Three Magnificent Women

The three women you are about to meet embody something equally powerful, but different in texture. Where the men hold the line, these women open it. They do not collapse under pressure, but neither do they harden against it. Instead, they transform it. They take the ache—the longing, the grief, the intensity of being alive—and allow it to deepen them rather than diminish them.
These women represent grace—not softness without strength, but strength that does not need to close. As you sit with your own experience—your hunger, your thoughts, your emotions—you are not being asked to become them. You are being invited to remember that this way of being is already available to you. The capacity to feel deeply without losing yourself. The capacity to remain open and powerful at the same time.

The Body as Battlefield: Alice Paul, the Hunger Strike and Force-Feeding That Won American Women the Vote

The Woman:

Alice Paul is remembered as one of the central architects of the American women’s suffrage movement which won women the right to vote, a woman whose relentless determination helped force the United States to confront the contradiction between democracy and the exclusion of women from political power. During her imprisonment for protesting outside the White House, Alice Paul endured force-feeding after undertaking a hunger strike demanding recognition of women as full political citizens. The violence inflicted upon her body shocked the public and transformed her suffering into a moral indictment of the system itself. Yet what made Alice Paul remarkable was not merely her endurance, but the strange fusion of grace and ferocity within her character. She was not driven by hatred, cruelty, or the desire to dominate others. She was driven by conviction. Her greatness emerged not from physical power, but from her refusal to surrender her conscience, dignity, or vision of justice even when doing so demanded profound personal sacrifice.

Her Story:

In the autumn of 1917, a 32-year-old Quaker woman from New Jersey lay strapped to a prison cot while doctors forced a rubber tube down her throat three times a day. She had not committed violence. She had not incited riot. She had stood silently outside the White House holding a sign. Her name was Alice Paul, and what was done to her body in the District of Columbia Jail would crack open the conscience of a nation and help deliver the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

This is the story of how one woman’s refusal to eat changed history.

A Radical Education Abroad

To understand what Alice Paul did in 1917, you have to understand what she learned in England in 1909. A doctoral student at the time, Paul had joined the British Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant suffragette organization led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She was arrested seven times and jailed three times. During her third imprisonment, after she went on hunger strike, British prison wardens ordered twice-daily force-feedings to keep her alive long enough to finish her sentence. By the time she was carried — literally carried — out of prison, she had developed permanent digestive damage. She was awarded the WSPU’s Hunger Strike Medal for Valour.

She brought the medal home. More importantly, she brought the strategy.

Paul understood something that more moderate suffragists did not: that the body on the line is the most powerful political argument a human being can make. Words can be ignored. A starving woman being held down and tube-fed by government agents cannot.

The Silent Sentinels

Paul returned to the United States in 1910 and spent the next several years building what would become the National Woman’s Party (NWP). In January 1917, the NWP launched an audacious campaign: the first-ever sustained political protest at the White House gates. Six days a week, women dressed in white — known as the Silent Sentinels — stood in silence holding banners that quoted President Woodrow Wilson’s own speeches back at him. One banner read: “We shall fight for the things which we have always held nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments.”

Wilson had said those words. About the war in Europe. About other people’s freedom. The Sentinels wanted to know when he intended to apply them at home.
When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the public mood shifted. The picketers were now viewed by many as unpatriotic. In June 1917, authorities began arresting the women on the absurd charge of “obstructing traffic.” Over the following months, more than 150 suffragists were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned — most at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, others at the District of Columbia Jail. Paul deliberately sought the longest sentence available: seven months, beginning October 22, 1917.

The Hunger Strike Begins

The conditions at the District Jail were deliberately punitive. Sanitation was poor. Food was infested. There was no recognition of political prisoner status. On November 5, 1917, Paul began her hunger strike. Her stated purpose was clear: to demand that she and her fellow suffragists be treated as political prisoners, as was standard practice in every other civilized nation. Her fellow prisoner Rose Winslow began her strike the same day.
By November 8, both women were being force-fed three times a day.

The process was as brutal as it sounds. Guards and medical staff held the women down while doctors inserted a rubber tube through the nose or down the throat. Liquid food — in Paul’s case, raw eggs — was forced through the tube into the stomach. Women frequently choked, gagged, and vomited. The procedure damaged teeth, gums, and throat tissue. Mary Leigh, a British suffragette who had undergone force-feeding in 1909, described it this way: “The sensation is most painful — the drums of the ear seem to be bursting, a horrible pain in the throat and the breast.”
Paul was not broken. She continued the strike.

The Psychiatric Ward: A Weapon of Discreditation

Prison authorities escalated. If they could not make Paul eat, perhaps they could make her mad — or at least make the world believe she was. Her doctor, a man named Gannon, informed her that if she persisted in hunger-striking he would “write a prescription” to have her taken to the psychopathic ward and fed forcibly there.

She was placed on a stretcher and taken.

For one week, Alice Paul was confined to the psychiatric ward of the District Jail. Prison officials checked on her once an hour through the night, flashing an electric light into her face each time. They weren’t just “observing” her; they were using sleep deprivation, a known torture technique known as state-sanctioned sleep deprivation. Her windows were nailed shut — the government literally depriving her of air. She was held in solitary confinement with iron-barred doors. The stated purpose was observation; the real purpose was intimidation and the hope that if they could brand the leader of the suffrage movement as mentally unstable, they could discredit the entire movement.

It failed. Catastrophically.

Paul smuggled notes out of the ward. Her attorney, Dudley Field Malone — a Wilson appointee so outraged by the women’s treatment that he had already resigned his government post in solidarity — obtained her release on a writ of habeas corpus. Prison officials admitted they had no doubts about her sanity. The psychiatric confinement, exposed to the press, looked exactly like what it was: a desperate government using the machinery of mental illness to silence a woman who was winning.

The Night of Terror

Meanwhile, at the Occoquan Workhouse, things were about to get worse. On the night of November 14, 1917, prison superintendent William H. Whittaker ordered approximately 40 guards to “teach the women a lesson.” What followed became known in history as the Night of Terror.

Guards dragged women down hallways and threw them into dark cells. Lucy Burns had her hands shackled above her head and was forced to stand all night. Dorothy Day — later founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — was slammed down over the arm of an iron bench twice. Dora Lewis was thrown so violently that she lost consciousness after her head struck an iron bed. Alice Cosu, witnessing the assault on Lewis, suffered a heart attack and was denied medical attention until the following morning.

The women were not rioting. They were demanding to be treated as political prisoners.

The Tide Turns

News of Paul’s psychiatric confinement and the Night of Terror leaked out of the prison walls. The press erupted. Public outrage was swift and enormous. The NWP organized large picket protests specifically addressing the treatment of Paul and other suffrage prisoners. Thirty-one additional picketers were arrested.
The government blinked.

In late November 1917, under massive public pressure, federal authorities released Paul, Burns, and all remaining suffrage prisoners. When Paul emerged from the jail — pale, thin, having been force-fed three times a day for weeks — she issued a statement on the steps of the National Woman’s Party headquarters that has become one of the most quietly devastating sentences in American political history:
“It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.”

In early 1918, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the women had been illegally arrested, convicted, and imprisoned from the start. In January 1918, President Wilson — who had refused for years to endorse women’s suffrage — publicly announced his support for the federal suffrage amendment, citing the role women had played in the war effort. The body politic had moved. Within months he was actively calling on Congress to act.
Congress passed the 19th Amendment in June 1919. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. American women had the right to vote.

The Body That Would Not Yield

Alice Paul lived to 92. She spent the remaining decades of her life fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, which she authored in 1923 and which still, at this writing, has not been fully ratified. She never stopped. The woman who was carried out of a British prison with permanent digestive damage in 1909, who was strapped down and tube-fed in 1917, who was sent to a psychiatric ward to be broken and emerged instead unbreakable — she kept going.

What Alice Paul understood, and what her body demonstrated at the cost of her health and freedom, is that political power is not only exercised through legislation and elections. Sometimes it is exercised through the willingness to make your own suffering undeniable. To force a government to look at what it is doing. To refuse, in your bones and your gut and your starved and aching body, to pretend that what is happening is acceptable.

The tube went down her throat. The right to vote came out.

Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.
— Alice Paul

The Iron Will of Ireland: Mary MacSwiney and the Fight for Freedom

The Woman:

Mary MacSwiney is often remembered as the sister of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died after a seventy-four-day hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. Yet Mary herself became one of the most formidable women in Ireland’s struggle for independence—a woman whose moral force, emotional endurance, and unwavering convictions made governments fear what her death might symbolize.

Before she became a hunger striker herself, Mary endured the unimaginable experience of watching her beloved brother slowly die for what he believed in. Many people would have emerged from such grief shattered or broken. Instead, something in Mary hardened into conviction. The sorrow entered her body and became a form of embodied resistance so profound that she herself would later undertake hunger strikes rather than betray her conscience. Yet despite her extraordinary will, Mary MacSwiney was not cold, cruel, or emotionally numb. Her strength carried a deeply human quality. She understood suffering, loyalty, love, sacrifice, and the terrible cost of conviction. Her greatness emerged not from the absence of pain, but from her refusal to surrender the integrity of her soul even when doing so demanded enormous personal sacrifice.

Her Story:

Mary MacSwiney became part of one of the most psychologically and symbolically powerful lineages of embodied resistance in modern history. Her life reveals what can happen when grief, conviction, love, nationalism, conscience, and personal sacrifice fuse so completely that the human body itself becomes a moral instrument. Although her brother Terence MacSwiney is often remembered more prominently in historical discussions because of his death during a seventy-four-day hunger strike in 1920, Mary’s own actions demonstrate that she was far more than the sister of a martyr. She became a formidable force in her own right—one whose endurance and refusal carried enormous symbolic weight during Ireland’s struggle for independence.

Mary MacSwiney was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1872 into a politically engaged family deeply involved in Irish nationalism and cultural revival movements. Like many members of the MacSwiney family, she believed passionately in Irish self-determination. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland were periods of intense political upheaval, with growing resistance to British rule and increasing demands for Irish sovereignty. Yet Mary’s contribution to this struggle was not limited to political rhetoric or organizational work. Over time, she became associated with a far deeper and more psychologically intense form of resistance: the willingness to suffer physically rather than betray deeply held convictions.

To understand Mary MacSwiney’s significance, one must first understand the impact of her brother Terence’s death. Terence MacSwiney served as Lord Mayor of Cork and was arrested by British authorities during the Irish War of Independence. While imprisoned in Brixton Prison in London, he began a hunger strike that would ultimately last seventy-four days before his death in October 1920. His suffering attracted international attention and generated enormous sympathy for the Irish cause. Around the world, newspapers reported on his deterioration, his resolve, and the extraordinary endurance of a man who chose starvation rather than submission.

But for Mary, Terence’s death was not merely a political event or historical symbol. It was personal. She watched her brother slowly die. She witnessed the emotional and physical consequences of prolonged fasting and the terrible collision between conviction and mortality. For many people, such an experience would have become a warning against further sacrifice. For Mary MacSwiney, it became something else entirely: embodied grief transformed into somatic conviction.

That transformation is one of the most psychologically striking aspects of her story. Mary did not merely inherit her brother’s political ideals intellectually. She absorbed the emotional and bodily reality of his sacrifice into her own nervous system. In later years, she herself undertook hunger strikes—twice—lasting twenty-three days and thirty-four days respectively. In both cases, authorities released her rather than risk the public outrage and moral catastrophe that might follow her death.

This creates one of the most fascinating paradoxes in the history of female hunger strikers. Historically, governments often proved more willing to allow male hunger strikers to die than female hunger strikers. This was not necessarily because women suffered less or possessed weaker convictions. In many cases, the opposite was true. Female hunger strikers often wielded extraordinary leverage precisely because governments feared the public horror associated with visibly destroying female bodies. The suffragettes themselves understood this dynamic and strategically weaponized it. Their suffering exposed the contradictions of societies that claimed to value women while simultaneously brutalizing them when they demanded dignity, rights, or political agency.

Mary MacSwiney’s hunger strikes existed within this larger cultural and psychological tension. British and Irish authorities understood the symbolic implications of allowing another MacSwiney to die. The image of a woman following her brother into martyrdom carried the potential to intensify outrage, deepen sympathy for Irish nationalism, and further undermine the legitimacy of state power. As a result, the threat of Mary’s death itself became politically potent.

Yet it would be a mistake to interpret her survival as evidence that her sacrifice mattered less. In some ways, the opposite may be true. Mary’s hunger strikes reveal the terrifying power of unresolved possibility. She became a living continuation of the MacSwiney lineage rather than its tragic conclusion. Her body itself carried historical memory forward.

Mary MacSwiney and her brother Terence MacSwiney established something that would echo through generations of Irish resistance: proof that the human body itself could become a political and moral instrument powerful enough to challenge an empire. Decades later, the 1981 H-Block hunger strikers—Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, and Michael Devine—would follow a path their suffering helped carve into history.

The psychological power of listing names individually rather than reducing them to statistics should not be underestimated. A number remains abstract. Names become human. Each name evokes a body, a face, a family, a history, and a life that can never be repeated. Readers do not merely process such lists intellectually; they feel them physically. The accumulation lands in the nervous system. This embodied reaction is central to understanding why hunger strikes exert such unusual emotional force. They transform political struggle into intimate human confrontation.

What made Mary MacSwiney particularly compelling was the combination of severity and restraint within her personality. She possessed extraordinary determination without theatrics. Her suffering did not appear performative. Instead, it carried the atmosphere of someone who had crossed an internal threshold beyond which compromise no longer felt morally possible. That quiet intensity often proves more psychologically haunting than overt displays of aggression.

Her story also reveals something profound about the relationship between grief and identity. Modern culture often treats grief as something temporary to be processed and eventually resolved. But for certain individuals, grief becomes formative. It reorganizes the structure of the self. In Mary’s case, the death of her brother appears to have deepened rather than weakened her commitment. The pain did not extinguish conviction; it fused with it.

This dynamic helps explain why hunger strikers throughout history continue to exert such enduring fascination. Their actions force observers to confront difficult questions about conscience, suffering, embodiment, and meaning. What does it mean when someone values an internal principle more than physical survival? What happens psychologically when the body itself becomes the final remaining instrument of resistance? And why do such acts continue to move people emotionally across generations and political boundaries?

Mary MacSwiney’s life does not provide easy answers to these questions. Nor should it. Hunger strikes occupy morally and psychologically complex territory. They involve suffering, sacrifice, political struggle, and human vulnerability in ways that resist simplistic interpretation. Yet precisely because of this complexity, figures like Mary MacSwiney continue to resonate.

She represents a form of feminine power that modern culture often struggles to categorize. She was not powerful because she abandoned tenderness or transformed herself into a caricature of hardness. Nor was her strength dependent upon physical domination. Instead, her power emerged through moral endurance, symbolic presence, emotional gravity, and an almost unbearable level of conviction.

In this sense, Mary MacSwiney’s story transcends Irish political history. It becomes a meditation on what happens when a human being decides there are truths more important than comfort, safety, or social approval. Her life reminds us that dignity is not merely an abstract concept or intellectual belief. It is something embodied. Something lived. Something that, in rare moments of extraordinary courage, individuals become willing to suffer for rather than betray.

No physical victory can compensate for a spiritual surrender.
— Mary MacSwiney

The Iron Lady Who Would Not Eat: Irom Sharmila and the Sixteen-Year Fast That Shook India

The Woman:

Irom Sharmila became known throughout the world as “The Iron Lady of Manipur,” yet there was nothing cold or emotionally hardened about her. Beneath her extraordinary discipline was a woman of deep sensitivity, compassion, intelligence, and profound moral seriousness. She was a poet, a peace activist, a daughter, a lover, and a woman whose conscience became so powerful that she willingly transformed her own body into a living protest against violence and injustice.
After witnessing the aftermath of the Malom Massacre in 2000, in which ten civilians were shot and killed by Indian security forces, Sharmila made a decision that would alter the course of her life and eventually place her among the most extraordinary hunger strikers in human history. She began a fast demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, a law that granted sweeping powers and legal immunity to military personnel operating in regions such as Manipur. She did not eat again for sixteen years.

Yet what makes Irom Sharmila remarkable is not simply the unimaginable endurance of the fast itself. It is the strange and beautiful fusion of gentleness and absolute will within her character. Even while confined to hospital rooms and force-fed through a tube inserted into her nose, she continued writing poetry, reading scripture and literature from many traditions, speaking about peace, and holding onto her belief in love. She refused to become consumed by hatred even while resisting what she believed to be profound injustice.

Her greatness emerged not from domination, rage, or physical force, but from her refusal to surrender the integrity of her conscience. She reminds us that there are forms of strength so quiet, so disciplined, and so deeply rooted in love that they become almost impossible to break.

Her Story:

On the morning of November 2, 2000, ten ordinary people stood at a bus stop in Malom, a small town in the Imphal Valley of Manipur, in northeastern India. Among them was a 62-year-old woman and an 18-year-old named Sinam Chandramani, a recipient of India’s National Bravery Award. Soldiers from the Assam Rifles opened fire and killed all ten of them. The soldiers were not prosecuted. Under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act — a law granting Indian military personnel the authority to search, detain, and shoot on mere suspicion, without fear of civilian trial — they never would be.
Three days later, a 28-year-old peace activist named Irom Chanu Sharmila sat down near the site of the killings with a placard. She announced she was fasting until the government repealed the Act.

She did not eat again for sixteen years.

The Law She Refused to Accept

To understand Irom Sharmila, you must understand the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 — known by its acronym, AFSPA — and what it meant for the people of Manipur. Manipur is a small, landlocked state in India’s remote northeast, a region the central government in Delhi has long treated as an afterthought, a buffer zone, a security problem to be managed rather than a people to be governed with dignity. Under AFSPA, soldiers in designated “disturbed areas” were granted sweeping, largely unaccountable powers: to arrest without warrant, to destroy property, to shoot to kill based on suspicion alone. The Act had been applied to Manipur since 1980, and in the two decades that followed, documented atrocities accumulated — extrajudicial executions, torture, rape — with virtually no prosecutorial consequence for the forces responsible.

Sharmila had been working with a human rights organization called Human Rights Alert, reading reports and meeting survivors of military violence, in the weeks before the Malom Massacre. When those ten people were killed at a bus stop, she understood with sudden and absolute clarity that the existing forms of dissent were insufficient. After deep reflection, she arrived at an idea that would define the next sixteen years of her life: an indefinite fast.
She was not coerced. She was not desperate. She chose.

Five Hundred Weeks of Force-Feeding

Three days after her fast began, Sharmila was arrested by Manipuri police and charged with attempting to commit suicide — at the time a criminal offense under the Indian Penal Code. She was transferred to judicial custody and, on November 21, 2000, subjected to nasogastric intubation: a tube inserted through her nose and down into her stomach through which liquid nutrition was forced into her body to keep her alive.

That tube remained in her nose, virtually without interruption, for the next sixteen years. She was force-fed for more than five hundred weeks.

Each year, the cycle repeated with Kafka-esque precision. Indian courts — recognizing that her hunger strike was a form of peaceful protest and not an attempt at suicide — periodically released her. Each time she was released, she continued her fast in public. Each time she continued her fast in public, she was re-arrested on the same charge. The government could not let her die, because her death would be catastrophic politically. It could not let her live freely, because her living freely would be seen as surrender. So it inserted a tube in her nose and called it medical care.

Sharmila called it what it was. “The government arrested her, confined her to a hospital room and force-fed her for 16 years,” said Amnesty International, which declared her a Prisoner of Conscience, “seemingly to break her will.” They could not break it.

What Magnificent Looks Like

Here is what makes Irom Sharmila extraordinary beyond the headline number of sixteen years, beyond the nasal tube, beyond the legal absurdity of being repeatedly arrested for the crime of not eating:

She vowed not only to fast but to neither comb her hair nor look in a mirror until AFSPA was repealed. She maintained this across a decade and a half. She met her mother only once during the entire fast — once — because she was certain that seeing her mother’s anguish would break her resolve. She said: “The day AFSPA is repealed I will eat rice from my mother’s hand.”

She fell in love. Confined to a hospital room with a tube in her nose, she began exchanging handwritten letters with a British man of Goan origin named Desmond Coutinho, an activist and writer who had read about her struggle. They wrote to each other for a year before being allowed to meet in person — a meeting that required a two-day fast by Desmond before Sharmila’s protective supporters relented. Her supporters, fearing that love would dilute her political resolve, had been blocking the meeting. When she finally won the right to see the man she loved, she had already been fasting for over a decade. She wrote about him in poetry: “Wait for me, my love.”

Desmond, for his part, said simply: “I am marrying a mahatma and I have a rough idea that it’s not going to be an easy-going life.”

She wrote poetry throughout her confinement — in Manipuri, from a hospital bed, with a tube in her nose, in solitary confinement. A notebook with a pink and blue cover and white sheets, gifted by a visiting author, became the vessel for a 1,000-line prose poem about birth, death, suffering, and the purpose of a single human life. Her poetry collection, Fragrance of Peace, opens with a poem called “Love.” She also wrote with political ferocity, in a poem called “Be Brave, Sister”:
“Why blame fate endlessly / Prove your strength, sister / Dream your destiny as birthright / A high seat awaits you here.”

She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She received the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights in 2007. A bedside pile of books she kept during her confinement included the Quran, Hindu scriptures, the Bible, Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, Manipuri poetry, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. She discussed Japanese folk stories with visitors. She painted.

She did all of this with a tube in her nose.

The Decision to Stop

On July 26, 2016 — sixteen years, eight months, and twenty-four days after she first sat down near the Malom bus stop — Irom Sharmila announced she was ending her fast. She had not achieved her goal. AFSPA had not been repealed. The Indian government had not moved.

Her reason for stopping was not defeat. It was strategic evolution.

“I have been fasting for the last 16 years,” she told a local court. “I haven’t got anything from it yet. I am ending my fast today. I want to try a different agitation now.” She announced her intention to run for political office, specifically against the Chief Minister of Manipur. “If the CM has the power to repeal AFSPA, I will become the CM.”

On August 9, 2016, she tasted honey for the first time in sixteen years. She smiled. Then she sobbed. The nasal tube was removed from her face. She touched honey to her lips in front of reporters and the cameras of the world. She did not win the election. She received 90 votes.

And yet she was not defeated. She said: “People did not know why I quit my hunger strike. They thought Sharmila diverted from her struggle. I explain to people that I have just changed the strategy but the struggle is the same.” She married Desmond in 2017 in a quiet ceremony in the Tamil Nadu hills. She continued to speak, to organize, to advocate for the repeal of AFSPA. In 2022, under sustained pressure from years of protest and international scrutiny, the Indian government announced a partial removal of AFSPA from several northeastern states, including portions of Manipur — the first significant rollback since the law’s enactment.

The body had spoken. For sixteen years and over five hundred weeks, it had spoken without stopping.

Why She Belongs in This Conversation

Irom Sharmila did not fast for the right to vote, as Alice Paul did. She did not fast for national independence, as her Irish and Indian predecessors had. She fasted for the right of ordinary people — women at bus stops, teenagers with bravery awards — not to be shot and killed by their own government without consequence. She fasted so that soldiers could not murder citizens and go home to dinner.

She is the longest hunger striker in recorded history. She is also a poet, a lover, a daughter who saw her mother only once in sixteen years for fear that love would cost her her resolve. She is a woman who chose her people over her own pleasure, her comfort, her hair, her reflection in the mirror — and then, when the fast had given all it could give, chose a different way to keep fighting.

She never stopped. She simply changed weapons. As she herself wrote, in a poem about the long road ahead:

“I’ll spread the fragrance of peace, From Kanglei, my birthplace, In the ages to come, It will spread all over the world.”

I believe in the power of love.
— Irom Sharmila

The Magnificent Protocol

Here is the exercise step-by-step.

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 three women and print out photographs of all of three:
Alice Paul
Mary MacSwiney
Irom Sharmila

Step Two
Tape all three of the women’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. Make sure the meal that you choose to skip is a meal you normally have on a regular basis.

Note: If you have a 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 must 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 carefully.

Remember that every one of them willingly endured discomfort, sacrifice, uncertainty, or suffering because they believed something mattered more than their immediate comfort.

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.
Do not censor your answer.
Do not try to sound wise.
Tell the truth.

Step Seven
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 steps whenever you feel the need. All the steps have 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 your power and worthiness. Or do Step Seven in this last step and wrap yourself in a blanket when you want to feel embraced and loved. I invite you to create whatever anchors you need to create as many bridges and paths as you need.

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.

Integration: Wrapping Up and Returning to Yourself

What you just moved through was never just about history. It was an encounter with three women who carried extraordinary moral force inside ordinary human minds and bodies. Women who felt fear, loneliness, longing, grief, tenderness, exhaustion, and love — yet still refused to betray the deepest truths within themselves.

For a little while, you stepped outside the constant noise and demands of your life. You allowed yourself to experience emptiness instead of immediately filling it. You sat beside stories of women who transformed their own bodies into instruments of conscience, compassion, resistance, and sacred resolve. And somewhere in the middle of that encounter, you were invited to recognize something profoundly important:

The same capacity for grace, courage, devotion, and inner sovereignty lives within you too.
This chapter was never meant to glorify pain. It was meant to awaken remembrance. To help you feel, not merely understand intellectually, that there is a part of you worthy of exquisite care, honesty, passion, protection, adoration, emotional safety, and wholehearted love.

When a woman truly begins to reconnect with that part of herself, her entire relationship to life begins to reorganize. She becomes less willing to negotiate away pieces of her soul in exchange for approval.

Less willing to shrink herself to avoid making others uncomfortable.
Less willing to confuse attention for devotion or longing for love.
Less willing to remain inside connections that starve her spirit while asking her to call it maturity.

At the same time, something softer and more radiant often begins to emerge.

A deeper trust in intuition.
A greater capacity for intimacy.
A quieter but more unshakable confidence.
A willingness to receive love without apologizing for needing it.
A desire to protect the tenderness of the heart rather than abandon it in order to survive.

You do not need to chain yourself to a movement, endure imprisonment, or fast for years in order to embody these qualities. Human life offers countless opportunities to live from this deeper place:

speaking truthfully,
honoring your instincts,
remaining emotionally present,
allowing yourself to be cherished,
walking away from cruelty,
choosing relationships that nourish rather than diminish you,
and refusing to participate in your own emotional disappearance.

Perhaps some hidden part of you already recognizes this feeling.
Perhaps something ancient inside you has begun waking up again.
If it has, do not rush to abandon it when you return to ordinary life.

Protect it. Feed it. Trust it.

Carry it into the way you speak, the way you love, the way you touch, the way you choose, and the way you allow yourself to be seen.

There is nothing weak about a woman who remains openhearted while standing fully inside her own dignity. There is something magnificent about her.

And may you never again settle for a love that cannot recognize it.

Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.

You’ll feel me coming
A new vibration
From afar, you’ll see me
I’m a sensation

Send your troubles dancing
I know the answer
The few I’ve touched now are disciples
Love as one, I am the light

— Sensation, 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 (Alice Paul)

Baker, Jean H. (2011). Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists. Hill and Wang.

Ford, Linda G. (1991). Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912–1920. University Press of America.

Library of Congress. (n.d.). Historical Timeline of the National Woman’s Party, 1917. Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party. https://www.loc.gov/collections/women-of-protest/articles-and-essays/historial-timeline-of-the-national-womans-party/1917/

Stevens, Doris. (1920). Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote. Boni & Liveright. (Reprinted 1995, NewSage Press.)

Turning Point Suffragist Memorial. (2017, November 18). Alice Paul’s Note from the Psychopathic Ward. https://suffragistmemorial.org/november-18-1917/

History.com Editors. (2019). The Night of Terror: When Suffragists Were Imprisoned and Tortured in 1917. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/articles/night-terror-brutality-suffragists-19th-amendment

American University Magazine. (2020). Alice Paul and the Petticoat Army. https://www.american.edu/magazine/article/alice-paul-and-the-petticoat-army.cfm

References (Mary MacSwiney)

Beresford, David. Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. HarperCollins, 1987.

MacSwiney, Mary. History of the Irish Republic. Irish Press, 1932.

Maume, Patrick. “MacSwiney, Mary.” Dictionary of Irish Biography. Royal Irish Academy.

O’Malley, Padraig. Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair. Beacon Press, 1990.

Sullivan, M. L. “Terence MacSwiney and the Politics of Hunger Strike.” Irish Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 95.

Townshend, Charles. The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence. Penguin Books, 2014.

References (Irom Sharmila)

Amnesty International. (2016, August 8). India: End of Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike an opportunity to repeal AFSPA. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2016/08/india-end-of-irom-sharmila-hunger-strike-an-opportunity-to-repeal-afspa/

Blakemore, E. (2016, August 9). Why India’s “Iron Lady” went on a hunger strike for 16 years. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-indias-iron-lady-went-on-a-hunger-strike-for-16-years-180960075/

Mehrotra, D. P. (2009). Burning Bright: Irom Sharmila and the Struggle for Peace in Manipur. Penguin Books India.

Sharmila, I. C. (2008). Fragrance of Peace [Poetry collection]. Translated by Tayenjam Bijoykumar Singh.

The Quint. (2016, August 9). Wait for me, my love: Excerpts from Irom Sharmila’s poetry. https://www.thequint.com/lifestyle/books/irom-sharmilas-poetry-the-ideas-behind-a-16-yr-old-hunger-strike

Vaid, M., & Singh, T. B. (2012). Iron Irom: Two Journeys. Zubaan Books.

YourStory. (2017). 12 quotes by Irom Sharmila that offer an insight into her iron-willed mind. https://yourstory.com/2017/03/quotes-by-irom-sharmila

CNN. (2016, August 9). Irom Sharmila of India ends world’s longest hunger strike. https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/09/asia/longest-hunger-strike-ends/

In the world of me and you,
All is forgotten when we’re inside.
And the words that pass us by,
I am not listening to all of its lies.

And it’s up to you,
Why won’t you say?
Make our lives turn out this way.
If they knew, that we have got nothing to lose,
No reason to hide from what’s true.
Then we have got nothing to lose.

— It’s Up to You, The Moody Blues 1970

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.