No. 10 - Expansion and What You Find In the Wilderness
Misogis, my worst backpacking apparel, and a (hopefully) welcome recommendation for how to expand your life in 2025
I had a totally different post in mind for today. But I’m reading a really engaging book — The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter — and came across a chapter about Misogis (more on that in a sec) and immediately had a newsletter lodged in my brain. One of those good brainworms that just kept tunneling deeper and deeper into my mind. So the other post has been put in the drafts folder, and you’ll have to indulge my kind of New Year’s post for a moment. Wishing you a wonderful New Year full of expansion.
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OK, so, Misogis. A traditional Misogi is a Japanese Shinto practice of ritual purification via washing the entire body in a waterfall, lake, or river. Some folks just get into cold water before sunrise as a daily practice. Aside from the pre-dawn situation, I’m totally into the idea of a nature-based cold plunge.
But the non-traditional version of a Misogi I want to share with you requires a bit more explanation. Let’s start with Michael Easter. Easter is an author, journalist, and professor who, for his book, The Comfort Crisis, spent time with different folks who have significant experience being uncomfortable in different modes. Hooked!
One of the people Easter spends time with is Marcus Elliott. Elliot runs P3, an elite athlete training facility that uses a lot of data to determine where athletes are holding themselves back and where their true potential lies. From how Easter describes it, the output of the P3 lab is pretty impressive. Like NBA champion impressive.
Easter is interested in Elliot's personal hobby, though: Misogis. Twenty or so years ago, Elliot and a friend started doing kooky, difficult adventures — like moving a boulder underwater in the ocean for five hours or running the rim of the Grand Canyon without training — as a way of testing their limits, and he kept up the tradition over the years calling the adventures Misogis.
There are two rules to Elliot’s version of Misogis: you have to have a 50/50 shot at success/failure, and you can’t die. He also has two guidelines: it should be “quirky, creative, and far out,” and don’t advertise your Misogi. Pretty simple!
If you want to read more about Misogis,
has a great summation on his Substack, , and if it’s not already obvious, I highly recommend you read The Comfort Crisis, as well.When I was reading the chapter on Misogis, I definitely had flashbacks to different events that, in retrospect, feel quite a bit like Misogis. And for the sake of context, I’ll break Elliot’s second guideline and quickly share one of them: the first time I went backpacking.
I was 24, and it was a 10-mile out-and-back overnighter to summit a peak in the British Columbia backcountry on a generally considered “challenging route” with new-to-me friends when Matt and I first started dating. I had very minimal experience backpacking, save one summit of the Grand Teton when I was 17 with my Dad and brother (possibly another Misogi — oops! ok last one I’ll mention!), and none of the right gear.
An early birthday present from Matt came in the form of an appropriate backpack, which I immediately made inappropriate by throwing my cutest warm clothes into (blegh!!) and setting off with friends. “Cutest warm clothes” included hiking boots that should have blown out from being nearly 10 years old at that point (read: dangerous to dust off and head into the backcountry with), yoga leggings (read: thin), a flannel from Urban Outfitters, a printed, reversible, Free People long cotton jacket (it was so cute, really!), and a cotton scarf.



I was completely out of my depth. I mean, old shoes with a likely chance of failing me and thin, cotton layers at 8,000 feet in the Cayoosh! Come on, Morgan! Somehow, mainly thanks to Matt’s backpacking experience and my now dear, well-versed on the ins and outs of the Canadian backcountry friends, I not only survived but fell completely in love with the pursuit of backpacking and what you find in the wilderness in yourself and others.
It’s on the edges of your comfort zone that you find the boundaries of your comfort zone can push out a little further still. I once had a yoga teacher explain to the class that working on your edge is where true growth happens and where change is possible. You don’t have to work on your edge all the time, but we all probably should do more on the edge than we are.
So, in thinking about the New Year and exhausting myself reading about all of the ways to plan for 2025, make resolutions for 2025 (though apparently, resolutions aren’t cool anymore?), manifest 2025, and set goals for 2025, I found myself instead thinking about edges and Misogis.
And without mountains to climb in Chicago — clearly, one of my preferred flavors of Misogi — I started thinking about how I could maybe do smaller Misogis closer to home and within my routine this year. How can I, more frequently, occupy the liminal space between my comfort and discomfort in order to expand the boundaries of my world?
A lot of wonderful folks have already written and shared beautiful prompts for approaching the New Year, and I’ve personally read and employed a big weird combo meal of manifestation and goal setting for myself from all of them.
’s wonderful list of prompts; ’s manifestation and vision board process, and ’ reflective prompts. I so encourage you to read their lovely posts because reflection and celebration are so helpful and motivating!Afterward, I would encourage you to ask yourself how you want to expand this year. How can you expand your life and the short, precious time we get to spend living it? How can you widen your experience of self, of others, of the world?
The answer to “How you want to expand this year?” can be so much more than a superficial thing we desire. Sure, everyone wants to make more money, climb that career ladder, buy that house, travel more, save more, exercise more, compare less, etc. But what if rather than aiming to step up, we stepped out, we expanded?
Not out of the race, necessarily, but into a different mode, a wider world. I’m talking about expansion through something new. And to think about how to make that step you need to understand whether you’re a person motivated by fear or curiosity. And it might not be a clear answer. And it might depend on the situation. That’s ok! But understanding how you’re wired to behave in certain situations might help you understand where you can be a little less fearful and a little more curious. And if you’re already curious, how can you deepen that curiosity?
So, if you’ve determined you’re motivated by curiosity or curious to try that motivation on, you can start by imagining your world, your comfort zone, as one circle, maybe the size of a dinner plate. And then you can imagine a much, much larger sized circle concentric to that dinner plate: that’s your potential new world. Aren’t you curious to know more about it?
If you are even a teensy, eentsy, little bit curious, — and I really hope you are — here are some things I’m planning on doing and questions I’m asking myself in favor of expanding my world this year:
Do a Misogi. And don’t post about it or tell anyone about it.
Dine somewhere I normally wouldn’t. A cuisine, a neighborhood, a type of restaurant, try something new.
Talk to someone I wouldn’t normally.
Volunteer.
Travel differently: take a train, a boat, a bike, my own two feet.
Travel somewhere that actually needs tourists.
Travel somewhere that isn’t on a list.
Don’t book a hotel in advance.
Buy less. Enjoy more. Reuse, repurpose.
Is there something I regularly buy that I could learn to make?
What’s something that keeps me comfortable? If that something went away, would my overall happiness go down? If not, ditch it.
What shortcuts do I employ in life? Are all of them necessary? Are there a few that I could remove in favor of discovery along the way?
Do another Misogi.
I hope some of these spark ideas for you to explore your edge and expand your world. If you need some more prompting, what can you think of that scares you, even just a little bit? Do that.
How do you want to expand this year? I’d love to know in the comments!
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