Some truths must be felt before they can be believed.
This chapter is preparation for something I’m going to ask you to do in the next chapter: an exercise called The Magnificent Protocol. But before you experience it, I want you to understand why it can be powerful — because understanding what’s happening beneath the surface can help you get more from it. The Protocol reaches into something most of us have been carrying for years: the conditioning that shapes what we believe we deserve, and the deep human longing to be fully and profoundly loved.
Most people who want to be loved already know they want to be loved. They understand it intellectually. They can articulate the desire, recognize it in themselves, even name the specific ways they have been loved inadequately or not at all. What they cannot do — what years of conditioning, disappointment, self-erasure, and accumulated small betrayals of their own worth have made genuinely difficult — is feel, in the body, at the level where attraction and surrender and deep love actually live, that they deserve it. That they are worth the full, reverential, uncompromising devotion they long for. The gap between knowing you deserve love and actually believing it — in your nervous system, in your bones, in the wordless place beneath every careful thought — is not a small gap. For many people it is the central gap of their entire lives. And it is precisely that gap this exercise is designed to close.
In the next chapter, 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 a brief period without food changes what you experience physically and can affect attention and cognition. But the effects of short-term fasting vary considerably from person to person, which is why the point of this exercise is not to manufacture some special mental state. It is to make an ordinarily abstract idea physical: to notice hunger, remain present with it, and discover what becomes available when discomfort is experienced deliberately rather than immediately relieved.
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.
Before you begin the exercise, I want to explain, briefly and without the jargon, why it may work.
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.
This may sound straightforward. It is not. Most people have spent years — sometimes decades — being subtly or explicitly taught that their desire for deep love is excessive, that their longing for reverence is unrealistic, that wanting to be truly worshipped by another human being is either naive or arrogant or both. They have learned, through the ordinary accumulation of ordinary life, to negotiate downward. To accept less. To call emotional starvation “being realistic” and call the slow disappearance of their own needs “maturity.” The conditioning runs deep and it runs quiet, and it lives in the body rather than the mind — which is precisely why intellectual arguments about your own worthiness, no matter how compelling, tend not to change the fundamental feeling. That feeling does not live where arguments reach. It lives where only embodied experience can go. And that is exactly where this exercise is going to take you.
Before I send you into The Magnificent Protocol itself, I want to speak directly to the part of you that may already be skeptical. Photographs on a wall. A skipped meal. A warm blanket. How is any of this supposed to change something that years of relationships, therapy, self-help books, and hard-won self-awareness may not have managed to change? That skepticism is entirely reasonable, and it deserves a real answer rather than a reassuring wave of the hand. So let’s give the skeptic in you something honest to chew on: not proof that this exact exercise has been laboratory-tested, because it hasn’t, but the real research on why bodies can change minds in ways minds alone sometimes cannot.
Why Your Body Has to Be Part of This
Here is something most people never get told: you cannot think your way into believing you deserve love, because the belief was never stored as a thought. It was stored as a body.
This is a central insight of somatic approaches to psychology: psychological experience is not expressed through thought and language alone, but also through sensation, movement, posture, arousal, and other bodily processes. A person can know, in words, that they deserve love, respect, and tenderness while their shoulders, their breath, and their physical responses still tell a different story. Ogden, Minton, and Pain’s work on sensorimotor psychotherapy specifically integrates these bodily dimensions with emotional and cognitive processing.
That is where embodied cognition comes in. Wilson’s research describes an emerging view of cognition as deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. The mind is not simply a separate observer perched above the body, taking reports from it; bodily action and our interaction with the environment participate in cognition itself. We can understand something intellectually and still encounter it differently once we have physically lived through it.
Kinesthetic intelligence — our capacity to learn and know through movement and physical action — is what makes ritual so much more powerful than reflection. It is why every tradition that has ever tried to transform a human being has used the body to do it: kneeling, fasting, bowing, lighting candles, carrying something heavy, walking a long way on purpose. Kolb’s experiential learning model explains why: we integrate an experience far more completely when we live inside it than when we merely consider it. The exercise asks you to do exactly this. Choosing the photographs, taping them up, letting them watch you for seven days, feeling hunger arrive and refusing to make it disappear — none of this is decorative. Each act moves the exercise from something you understand about worth into something you have physically done in the name of it. You begin moving from “I admire courage” to “I can physically participate in courage,” and that shift is not a small one. It is the difference between an idea and an experience.
The photographs do a particular kind of work here too. Human beings have always shaped themselves by identifying with figures who embody a quality they long to claim — saints, revolutionaries, artists, the quietly magnificent people of history. A printed image taped to a wall you pass every day becomes a repeated cue, returning your attention again and again to the same qualities — dignity, endurance, sacrifice, courage. Paired with the physical experience of the exercise, the photographs help move those qualities out of abstraction and into something you repeatedly see, contemplate, and physically encounter.
Why Hunger Matters
The hunger in this exercise is not an accident, and it is not there to make the point more dramatic. It is there because hunger is one of the few experiences reliable enough to make an idea stop being philosophy and start being felt.
This works through interoception — your capacity to sense what is happening inside your own body. Khalsa and his colleagues’ extensive review of the interoception research describes it as central to how emotional and psychological experience actually gets processed, not merely thought about. The moment you feel real hunger while standing in front of a photograph of someone who sacrificed everything, the question you are asking stops being rhetorical. What does sacrifice actually feel like? What happens in me when relief is delayed? What matters enough to make discomfort meaningful? Those questions no longer live in your head. They live in your stomach, your attention, your breath — which is exactly where the answer needs to land if it is going to change anything.
Research on fasting and cognition, including Benau and colleagues’ systematic review, shows that temporary fasting can affect cognitive functioning, although the findings vary considerably and do not support the idea that a single fast reliably improves cognition. But cognitive enhancement is not what this exercise requires. What matters here is much simpler: hunger gives you an unmistakable bodily sensation to notice. The hunger asked of you is voluntary, brief, and chosen. You are not depriving yourself to prove something bleak. You are creating a limited encounter with discomfort in the company of dignity — and discovering what it feels like to remain present rather than immediately make the sensation disappear.
That, quietly, is the reasoning behind the whole exercise. Not a lecture your body has to sit through, but an experience your body gets to have — one designed to help your sense of worth become something you can feel rather than something you merely know.
This chapter is preparation for the exercise “The Magnificent Protocol” in the companion chapter: The Magnificent Protocol: A Return to Worth. Turn the page, and let’s find out what beautiful thing may happen when you actually do it.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song:
— “The Only Living Boy in New York,” Simon & Garfunkel, 1970
Companion Chapter:
The Magnificent Protocol: A Return to Worth
Medical Disclaimer: The Magnificent Protocol is an exercise that 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.
This chapter is from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
