Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Ignatian Contemplation
To enter a scene (classically a Gospel scene) vividly with all five imaginative senses, so it becomes felt and personal — drawing out insight, emotion, and a relationship with what is contemplated.
Ignatian contemplation in one pass: Settle. Compose the place — build the scene in your mind’s eye with concrete physical detail. Name the grace you desire. Enter as a participant: watch the persons, hear what they say, see what they do — reflecting after each. Then apply the senses: see, hear, smell, taste, touch the scene. Close with a heart-to-heart colloquy. Don’t analyze — be there.
What it is
Ignatian contemplation is Ignatius of Loyola’s method of praying with the imagination (The Inner Creates the Outer): you take a scene — classically a passage from the Gospels — and enter it as if you were there, building it with all five senses until it becomes vivid, felt, and personal.
Its two named techniques are the composition of place (“seeing the place,” SE 47) — constructing the setting in the mind’s eye before you begin — and the application of the senses (SE 121–126) — moving through the scene by deliberately seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching it.
The aim is not analysis but felt encounter: to let the scene work on your emotions (The Inner Creates the Outer) and self (The Inner Creates the Outer), so that insight and relationship arise from inside the experience rather than from thinking about it.
Mechanically it is one of the richest historical examples of structured multisensory mental rehearsal.
The Method
Ignatius lays this out across The Spiritual Exercises. A contemplation typically runs:
- Preparatory prayer / settle. Quiet down and ask that everything in you be directed toward the purpose of the prayer.
- First prelude — composition of place (SE 47). Ignatius’s instruction: “see with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which one wants to contemplate.” You build the scene: the room, the road, the lakeshore, the hill — its layout, light, and physical detail — so you have a concrete place to stand inside. (For an invisible subject, e.g. one’s sins, he substitutes an imagined representation.)
- Second prelude — ask for what you desire. Name the specific grace or fruit you want from this contemplation (e.g. understanding, sorrow, joy, love). This focuses the whole exercise.
- The contemplation proper — watch the people, hear the words, regard the actions. Ignatius directs you to attend to three things: the persons in the scene, what they say, and what they do — and after each, to reflect and draw fruit. You are a present participant, not a distant reader.
- Application of the senses (SE 121–126). As a deepening pass — often a second contemplation of the same scene later in the day — you go through it sense by sense: see the persons; hear what they are saying; smell and taste the sweetness or quality of the place; touch — for example, the ground, garments, the place where the persons stand. This makes the scene bodily and intimate rather than merely visual.
- Colloquy — close in conversation. End by speaking, heart to heart, with the figure contemplated (Christ, Mary, God) as “one friend speaks to another,” then a closing prayer.for the colloquy in detail.) (Sourcing note: the composition-of-place quotation is from SE 47; the persons/words/actions structure from the Second Week contemplations; the five-sense walk-through from the Application of the Senses, SE 121–126. Step wording is faithful paraphrase of Ignatius’s documented method.)
Source & Lineage
Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, built imaginative contemplation into the Second Week and beyond of The Spiritual Exercises (~1548), where the retreatant contemplates the life of Christ scene by scene. → (Ignatius of Loyola).
Imaginative, scene-entering prayer was not invented by Ignatius — it has roots in earlier medieval meditationes vitae Christi and Franciscan devotion — but Ignatius systematized it into a repeatable method with explicit preludes, sense-application, and colloquy.
The Jesuit tradition has carried and taught it ever since (Loyola Press, The Jesuit Post, the Office of Ignatian Spirituality), and it remains the most distinctive single feature of Ignatian prayer.
The Traditions' versions
SATS / “living in the end” (Neville) — entering an imagined scene from the first person until it feels real; structurally the same act of sensory immersion, aimed at assumption rather than encounter.
- Mental rehearsal / visualization (sport & performance psychology) — vivid multisensory first-person rehearsal of a scene to engage emotion and motor/emotional systems.
- Guided imagery (clinical) — therapeutic multisensory scene-building for calm, healing, or exposure.
- Tibetan deity / scene visualization (sadhana) — highly detailed, multisensory imaginative construction held as real.
- Imaginal exposure / rescripting (CBT) — deliberately entering a scene in imagination to process emotion (a close clinical cousin — same engine, different aim).
- Method-acting “sense memory” — recalling a scene through individual senses to evoke genuine feeling.
Common refinements
Thinking about the scene instead of being in it. Analysis is not contemplation. Stand inside the place; let it happen.
- Demanding a perfect mental picture. Aphantasic or low-imagery people can still sense presence, sound, and feeling — Ignatius’s five senses give multiple doorways; use whichever works.
- Skipping the composition (Step 2). Without first building a concrete place to stand, the contemplation stays vague and abstract.
- Forgetting to name the desired fruit. The second prelude focuses everything; omit it and the prayer drifts.
- Stopping at the visual. The application of the senses (sound, smell, taste, touch) is what makes it intimate — don’t reduce it to “picturing.”
- No colloquy. Skipping the closing conversation drops the relational payoff and leaves the experience inert.