The Misogi’s Way: How Doing Something Tough Every Year Can Change Your Life
A few months ago, I was undertaking one of the toughest challenges of 2023 — climbing a 3726-meter mountain. Now, as I sit down to write this post, I find myself missing the pain and struggle that I experienced on the mountain. I love the fact that my days are filled with these grueling challenges because it helps me stay focused on the present moment, where everything feels real, instead of worrying about the future.
These experiences of pain and struggle to embrace fear and limiting beliefs are known as Misogi.
Hiking Rinjani was one of my misogi last year. I didn’t know what I got myself into. I struggled a lot during the journey. Multiple times, I wanted to give up and return to my bed’s comfort. But, I discovered a deep passion for the mountains, a yearning to connect with nature, a long hike as if it never ends, a journey to the unknown, and an insatiable drive to push my physical and mental boundaries. By overcoming adversity, I learned to be more resilient, persevere, push through discomfort, become more adaptable to changing circumstances, and feel victorious.
Misogi is traditionally a Japanese Shinto purification ritual with deep cultural and religious significance, which means purifying, cleaning, or washing away. The purpose of misogi is to purify the mind, body, and spirit by removing impurities and negative elements.
It involves making the pilgrimage to an icy waterfall by standing and immersing yourself in the pain of cold. The shock of the cold water is believed to cleanse the mind and body of impurities and promote spiritual renewal.
In today’s modern world, popularized by Dr. Marcus Elliot, it’s about challenging yourself to achieve the things that you don’t think possible in the first place, with only a 50% success rate.
There are only two rules of Misogi:
One, it has to be really fucking hard. Two is that you can’t die.
The Importance of Misogi
Early humans regularly faced potentially lethal danger from hungry predators and venomous snakes, members of other tribes, violent weather, treacherous landscapes, loss of social status, and so on.
Failure even a hundred years ago could mean that you die. Failure now is that you fuck up a weekly business review presentation, and your boss gives you a bad look. Yet, we overestimate the latter than the former. We forget how failure in the past can impact the quality of our lives.
Nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success. Engaging in an environment where there’s a high probability of failure, even if you execute perfectly, has huge ramifications for helping you lose a fear of failing. Huge ramification for showing you what your potential is.
One way to describe a Misogi is by taking a closer look at a Hero’s Journey as an example:
The hero exits the comfort of home for adventure. He’s hit with a challenge. It tests his physical, psychological, and spiritual fortitude. He struggles. Yet he manages to prevail. He returns with heightened knowledge, skills, confidence, experience, and a clearer sense of his or her place in the world.
Remarkably, research from the late 1800s proves that mere mortals benefit from epic physical trials. Let’s take an example from The Maasai People.
The Maasai people, an ethnic group in East Africa, have a traditional rite of passage known as the “Eunoto” or “Emuratta.” This ceremony marks the transition of young Maasai men from adolescence to warriorhood:
Central to the Maasai warrior initiation is the circumcision of the young men, symbolizing their departure from childhood and entry into manhood. Then, the young men undergo a period of isolation during which they receive training in the skills and responsibilities expected of warriors. This includes learning about traditional weaponry, hunting, and strategies for protecting the community.
Initiates are subjected to tests of endurance, courage, and strength. This may involve physical challenges, demonstrating their ability to withstand pain and adversity, and proving their readiness to defend the community. The culmination of the initiation is marked by a grand ceremony where the young men are presented to the community as warriors. This is a moment of celebration and acknowledgment of their transition to adulthood.
To take things further, I’d like to take an analogy from the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as it is inspiring to represent someone who’s embarking on a misogi:
Walter is tasked with the responsibility of handling the final cover photo for the last print issue, which Sean O’Connel takes. Left without choice, he embarks on the journey to find Sean O’Connel, which takes him to various locations around the world, including Greenland and Afghanistan.
Walter encounters physical challenges and dangers, such as jumping onto a moving helicopter on a ship, skateboarding down a winding road, and climbing the Himalayas. He learns to embrace uncertainty, take risks, and step out of his comfort zone.
The challenges he faces force him to confront his fears and limitations, whether jumping into icy waters or confronting dangerous situations. As the journey takes him closer to Sean O’Connel, their interactions provide insights into the meaning of true adventure and the value of capturing the essence of life in a single photograph.
The journey becomes a process of rediscovering what it means to truly live. It also involves a budding romantic connection between Walter and his colleague Cheryl Melhoff.
In the end, Walter’s journey isn’t just about finding the missing negative; it’s about finding himself. The movie beautifully combines elements of adventure, self-discovery, and the pursuit of a meaningful life, making it a heartwarming and visually stunning exploration of personal growth.
I bet you can now see all these patterns of Misogi, which involve:
The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person. It’s an exploration and expansion of the edge of a person’s comfort zone.
If we can understand these patterns, we can easily integrate it into daily life, but without a chance of being dead for sure.
Introducing misogi into our lives
In his book, “The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self,” author Michael Easter tells a concept about “Toughening”:
This theoretical idea was that being completely overwhelmed by negative, stressful things wasn’t good. But it also theorized being totally sheltered shouldn’t be optimal, either. There should be some amount of stress that gives you optimum psychological and physical well-being.
The toughening theory played out in animals. For example, there was a study where Stanford scientists stressed young squirrel monkeys. They removed them from their families once a week for ten weeks. When these monkeys grew up, they were significantly more resilient and capable in the real world than their sheltered siblings. They were the leaders, the doers.
It is concluded that confronting risk, fear, or danger produces optimal stress and discomfort, which in turn promotes outcomes such as improved self-esteem, character building, and psychological resilience.
Jesse Itzler, an American entrepreneur, author, and rapper acknowledges how Misogi can improve our lives to be better.
Jesse is convinced that we must do one defining thing every year that makes our hearts shrink and scares us the most. An extreme challenge that will make a memorable experience every year. An epic story to tell that we can pass down to our grand children.
If you think climbing a mountain like Kilimanjaro or Everest would be a proper option, do it.
If you think of participating in extreme endurance races such as triathlons and Ironman, then do it.
If you like to travel, go solo-traveling for a few months, exploring countries far away from your own where you know nothing about.
If you like cycling, go for a long-distance trip to visit cities that interest you, meet new people, and test your physical and endurance capability.
Deep-water scuba diving would be a great option for anyone who loves diving by exploring the deep-sea walls, underwater caves, or remote and untouched dive sites.
There are so many physical trials that you can do to embark on a yearly misogi challenge. But what makes Misogi fascinating is it doesn’t have to be physical; you can also do some mental challenges such as starting your own business, podcast, YouTube channel, and any other creative ideas.
When you undergo a new, stressful experience like misogi, you’re transferring short-term memories into long-term memories — what just happened to you and what it led to, and what you should do next time you face a similar situation. In general, this is because memory is about the future. We retain experiences that may be of survival value at another time.
Misogi, or toughening ourselves, can be a powerful habit we can do every year to redefine who we are. To give ourselves a chance to become a new person regardless of the outcomes. Whether it will be a failure or success, we learn, prevail, and grow stronger, emerging as a new force that will keep arising in the face of numerous obstacles that come our way.
What will be your Misogi in 2024?
Please share it in the comments.
