A Beautiful Morning: How a Morning Ritual Can Feed Your Soul and Transform Your Life

You deserve a life you love. A Beautiful Morning can help you create it. Discover the power of a morning ritual to transform your day—and your life. How you start each day affects the quality of your day, and therefore your life. Being mindful in the morning centers and energizes you, helping you live with purpose, serenity, and joy. A morning ritual inspires personal transformation by providing space to connect with yourself, discover what you truly want, and visualize how to achieve it. A Beautiful Morning is filled with insights, ideas, and an abundance of resources you can use right away. It will encourage and support you in creating a daily practice that easily fits your current life and guides you toward increased happiness and fulfillment. Implementing a morning ritual changed Ashley Ellington Brown’s life, inspiring her to write about this powerful practice so others can benefit. She interviewed more than twenty women who are living their dreams, including • best-selling author and life coach Martha Beck • wellness advocate, entrepreneur, producer, author, and wife of Spike Lee Tonya Lewis Lee • author, artist, and coach Cynthia Morris • master healer Sonia Sommer • life coach Anna Kunnecke • painter, author, and creativity coach Tracy Verdugo • great-great-granddaughter of Frances Hodgson Burnett and writer Keri Wilt • horse whisperer and Equus Coach Koelle Simpson These women describe their individual morning routines and offer suggestions on creating yours. Learn from them how a personally meaningful morning ritual can • Provide space for clarity and inspiration • Refresh and restore you • Enhance your relationships • Empower you to be your best self • Enable you to steer your life with purpose toward a clear vision of what you want A Beautiful Morning is about increasing your ability to be, not your ability to do. Productivity is marvelous, but to be calm and centered while you’re productive—that is the essence of a happy life. And good news: you don’t have to wake at dawn or follow a strict regimen! A morning practice is meant to enhance your life, not complicate it. The best ritual fits you. It need not be complex or time-consuming; tiny tweaks to what you’re already doing can have incredible impact. Your morning routine could take a minute or an hour; it could include meditating, exercise, journaling, talking with a friend, counting your blessings … whatever brings you joy. It doesn’t even have to happen in the morning. A Beautiful Morning is for you if: • You’re burned out from constantly striving to meet others’ needs, while putting yours off until “later.” • You feel frazzled and overwhelmed, like there’s never enough time to do what you have to—much less anything you might want to. • Your day often feels out of control and hectic. • You’re extremely productive, but feel like you never accomplish anything meaningful. • You crave peace and wish you could be more calm, centered, and patient. • You feel stuck or vaguely dissatisfied with how your life is going. • You yearn for something more but have no idea what that might look like, or how to get it. • You want to wake up feeling excited and focused, ready to engage enthusiastically with your life through meaningful actions that fulfill you. When you take care of yourself through mindful daily habits, you are happier and better able to know what you want. Self-awareness helps you see what nourishes you and what drains you. Paying attention to your inner voice can produce incredible results. Let the personal stories, tips, suggestions, and resources in A Beautiful Morning inspire you to create a morning ritual that will lead you to the rich and full life of your dreams. “You’re already doing a ritual of some sort. The question is, is there any life force in it? ... Remember the grace, beauty, and magic that live in you. It’s like your radio … set yourself on the highest possible frequency for the day.” --Sonia Sommer, Master Healer (ch. 8)

Ashley Ellington Brown grew up in New Orleans and spent her childhood lost in the magical worlds of her favorite books. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Foreign Affairs (which she did not use, although she had a lot of fun getting it), then worked as a waitress, receptionist, advertising copywriter and account executive, book editor, and employee communications manager for the world's third-largest death care firm before becoming a freelance writer in 2000. She also authors the blog Joy Detectives, about her quest to enjoy her "one precious life" as much as she can. This quest led her to experiment with implementing a morning ritual, despite not being a morning person. She quickly discovered how life-changing it was, inspiring her to write A Beautiful Morning: How a Morning Ritual Can Feed Your Soul and Transform Your Life about this powerful practice so others can benefit. Ashley lives in Florida with her husband and son and their rescued beagle, Snoopy.