Beautiful Morning

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
• master healer Sonia Sommer
• 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. It need not be complex or time-consuming; tiny tweaks 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 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 become happier and are better able to know what you want. Listening to your inner voice can produce incredible results. Let the personal stories, 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.