Syd's Vacation Daily Blog Challenge - Day 2: My Miracle Morning

Today is the 4th day in a row that I've done the Miracle Morning ritual. It's something I've heard about a lot, but I've never really looked into it. Frankly, it sounded like a bunch of hippie nonsense to me. However, I recently watched a video by Roberto Blake where he recommended it. I then ended up listening to the audiobook on Tuesday.

The timing of this is interesting because it meant that I could do it for the very first time on Wednesday, May 1st. This is the 2nd time this year that I've stumbled upon a new way of doing things at the beginning of the month, or near it. In early February, I discovered a strategy for planning out your days, weeks, months, and years. I'll just mention that it was a Udemy course by Timothy Kenny. And now, exactly 3 months later, I stumble upon the Miracle Morning. This really motivated me to at least try it for a month.

Really, the principle behind Miracle Morning is to devote the first moments of your day to personal development. Hal Elrod recommends getting up earlier to do it. That's actually an important part of it, but you can do the Miracle Morning in as little as six minutes. The parts of the Miracle Morning are broken up into an acronym called the "Life S.A.V.E.R.S." Here's what each letter stands for:

S is for silence
A is for affirmations
V is for visualization
E is for exercise
R is for reading
S is for scribing (writing)

Here's how I've been doing it. It's funny to me, because a lot of it involves just plugging into things that I either was already doing or have done in the past. (If you haven't figured it out yet, doing the Miracle Morning in six minutes involves devoting one minute to each letter)

For silence, I like to meditate for about 2 1/2 minutes.

The affirmations is where I'm weakest right now. I hear about it all the time. All the successful people do it, but I haven't written ones that really feel good for me to do. For now, I've contented myself with some pretty generic ones that still feel the best among what I have: "I am love. I am Joy. I am abundance. I am enough." That feels tacky to me, but it's what I've got.

For visualization, this is another funny coincidence because I've had a dream book for about 2 months where I write down dreams I have. So what I do is I look through it, pick one, and then visualize it for another 2 1/2 minutes.

For exercise, that's not really a problem for me because I've consistently been exercising three times a week for many years now, but this calls for daily exercise every morning. Since my main tool is the kettle bell, I've known for a while now that you can't really overtrain on kettle bell swings. So for my morning exercise, I just do 25 two-handed swings with my 28 kg kettle bell.

Reading is where I've seen the biggest change. I read a lot of things electronically on my phone, but physical books is where I've been lacking. This is been a great opportunity for me to catch up on that. The book I'm currently reading is called "How To Read A Book". It's awesome, I doubt I'm going to get into it in this daily challenge, but I highly recommend it for people who are interested in analytical reading. Although I've read PDFs and other things on my phone consistently for a while now, I haven't read How To Read A Book in over a month. So the fact that I've read 16 pages in the last four days is significant. These are dense, information packed pages. I also highlight passages that are important to me, so that adds time too, but I like it. I can always read less if I don't have as much time. This is the letter that has taken up the most time in my Miracle Morning so far, and it's probably going to stay that way. Awesome!

For scribing, I've been bullet journaling for him many years now, but I've never really "journal" journaled. So I started that on Wednesday. Right now, I'm just doing a stream of consciousness. Just getting used to doing it is helpful, but the benefits will likely not show up for a while.

That's actually a theme. As transformational as this book has been to so many people, it's kinda like starting to work out. The benefits won't show up right away. I've only been doing this for four days, so I'm eager to see where I'll be in as little as two weeks. If I pursue this daily blogging challenge beyond my vacation, and I hope I do, maybe you'll hear about my progress. Leave a comment below if you'd like that. Take care!