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• n  voluntary self-punishment in order to atone for some wrongdoing

• Although an ascetic, he condemned the extreme self-mortification of holy men who lay (as many did last week) on beds of nails, or walked on beds of live coals, or twisted their .
• Nanda, with his second-team head and Shridaman's bench-warming body, retires to the woods for solitude and self-mortification.
• But then he springs a heresy: "Fasting, prayer, drugs, self-mortification, fornication, standing on his head, grace, listening to Tristan and Isolde unabridged three times in a .

• penance
• self-abasement