The Misogi Guide

Housekeeping

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On Monday, I covered four takeaways from the 2% x GORUCK Misogi Retreat I recently hosted in Costa Rica. (Read it here.)

Naturally, some people wanted to know the details of our Misogi.

But a key guideline of Misogi—as I explained in Monday’s post—is that you don’t advertise it.

Attention is a hell of a drug, and the internet allows us to get a lot of it and quantify it.

The allure of public attention alters why we do what we do and bends our behaviors. It changes our “why.” (For more on this topic, read Chapters 6 and 7 in Scarcity Brain).

Misogis have a different, deeper why. We do Misogis entirely for inner transformation—to get to the edge of what we’re capable of and watch that edge expand.

And this is powerful: If you don’t quit when no one is watching, you’re less likely to quit in other challenges life tosses your way.

So it’s okay to talk about the generalities of your Misogi with friends and family. But you don’t Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, or boast about the minutia of your Misogi. Stuff like times, distances, details, etc.

Yet this guideline can also present a problem.

A problem with the guideline

In short

Getting ideas for Misogis is hard because there isn’t much information about them.

The details

The quirky and unpublic nature of Misogis makes it harder for others to get ideas for their own Misogis.

For example, we run marathons because other people run them, too. Few people would randomly choose to run 26.2 miles and time themselves doing it if that distance were not a cultural “thing.”

Because people don’t advertise their Misogis, it takes work to come up with your own.

Many people have asked me to suggest exactly what they should do for their Misogi.

It’s an impossible question to answer. Remember that Rule 1 of Misogi is “Make it really hard.” And we define “really hard” by saying you should have a 50/50 shot at completing your Misogi task.

Fifty-fifty is different for everyone—my 50/50 is not yours, his, hers, or theirs. And a host of factors alter 50/50, including landscape, weather, preparation, your background, etc.

But this is also what makes Misogis so compelling. You do your own wild, incomparable thing and learn from it.

So I usually answer the question by referring the person to The Rules and guidelines and telling them to introspect.

I love the self-examination of dreaming up what weird task I may or may not be able to complete.

But I also realize that some people need more direction. We often get paralysis by analysis.

And I’d rather someone do a Misogi with a little guidance than never try because they can’t figure out what to do.

So last year, I attempted to solve this problem.

The Misogi list

In short

I asked people to submit Misogis they’d attempted anonymously. Get the full list below.

The details

I had people send me Misogis they’d done. We got hundreds of responses.

I read about endless rucks, long-distance tire flips, epic canyon hikes, wilderness excursions, snowy mountain treks, backcountry hunts, sketchy encounters with fanged creatures, and on and on.

And people did these Misogis despite life’s inevitable challenges: self-doubt, anxiety, hectic schedules, and even after overcoming dire health diagnoses like cancer.​

The 50/50 rule means your Misogi won’t be an exact copy of any of these. Use them as a jumping off point.

Below is a sampling of Misogis by theme: Quirky Misogis, Walking Misogis, Misogis that Break Psychological Barriers, Spontaneous Misogis, and Wildnerness Misogis. Use these as jumping-off points.

Below them is a link to a document listing all of the submissions. I ran this list more than a year ago and thought it would be good to put it back on everyone’s radar after Monday’s post.

Quirky Misogis

When designing your Misogi, you should make it quirky, creative, and uncommon. When you remove superficial metrics, you can accomplish far more. Here are some of the quirkier submissions I received. Let’s start with Francis, who left for his Misogi the day after he submitted this: