Modern misogi ranges from the brief and routine to the deliberately severe. At the mild end, worshippers rinse their hands and mouth at a temizuya, the water basin found at nearly every shrine entrance, a token echo of the full-body original. At the demanding end, misogi shuho, organized cold water training, has practitioners stand beneath a waterfall or wade into a river or the winter sea, often chanting norito prayers or a fixed invocation while the water strikes them, sometimes for a set count of repetitions or a fixed period of minutes, an ordeal understood to burn away both physical and spiritual impurity through sheer discomfort deliberately endured.
Certain shrines and lay Shinto organizations run structured misogi retreats open to the public, and the practice has also been adopted, in adapted form, by some schools of martial arts and by sumo, where ritual purity carries over from Shinto cosmology into competitive practice. The depth of winter, particularly the period around the new year, is a traditionally favored time for the most rigorous cold water misogi, on the logic that greater hardship yields more thorough purification, and participants frequently describe the practice in terms of mental discipline and renewal as much as religious obligation, an emphasis that has helped it survive, in a more elective and voluntary form, well past the eras when purification was principally a priestly duty rather than a personal pursuit.