The Daily Examen (Examen of Consciousness)

Ignatius set out the Examen in The Spiritual Exercises (SE 24–43). The classic structure is five movements, done in roughly 10–15 minutes, traditionally at midday and/or at the end of the day:

1. Become aware of God’s presence / settle into stillness. Pause, quiet down, and place yourself consciously in the presence of God (in a secular frame: settle into a still, receptive, larger-than-self awareness). This is the threshold step that makes the rest contemplative rather than merely analytical.
2. Review the day with gratitude. Walk back through the day and give thanks for its gifts — small and large. Ignatius makes thanksgiving foundational, not optional. You look first for what was good before you look for what was hard.
3. Pay attention to your emotions / the inner movements. Notice the feelings that arose through the day — joy, peace, boredom, irritation, anxiety, energy, dread. Ignatius taught that these inner movements are data: they show where you were drawn toward consolation (life, love) and where toward desolation (drift, fear). You don’t judge the feelings; you read them. (This is the bridge to the Discernment of Spirits — see cross-links.)
4. Choose one moment / feature of the day and pray from it. Rather than re-living everything, select one moment that stands out — the most charged or significant — and dwell on it honestly. Notice what you did, said, thought, and felt; where you responded to your better self and where you fell short. This is where self-knowledge (The Inner Creates the Outer) is harvested.
5. Look toward tomorrow. Turn forward. Ask for what you need for the coming day, and form a simple, concrete intention for how to meet it more freely and lovingly. Ignatius often closed with a brief prayer (e.g. the Our Father). Ignatius also distinguished a Particular Examen — focusing repeatedly on one specific habit or fault you are trying to change, tracking it day by day (SE 24–31) — from the General Examen that reviews the whole day (SE 32–43). (Sourcing note: the five-movement structure and the gratitude-first, feeling-attentive emphasis are the standard Ignatian/Jesuit presentation of SE 24–43. Step wording is faithful paraphrase; the “examen of consciousness” framing is the modern Jesuit reading of the practice.)

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), a Basque soldier whose conversion during a long convalescence led him to found the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), distilled his spiritual method into The Spiritual Exercises (completed ~1548). → (Ignatius of Loyola).

The Examen is one of the few prayers Ignatius made near-obligatory for his order. Over five centuries it has been carried, taught, and re-presented by the worldwide Jesuit tradition (Loyola Press, the Office of Ignatian Spirituality, The Jesuit Post, and countless retreat directors), and in recent decades reframed for a wider, often non-vowed audience as a daily reflective practice.

It sits alongside Ignatius’s other methods — composition of place, the three powers, and discernment of spirits — as the everyday, repeatable core of Ignatian spirituality.

Stoic evening review — Seneca’s nightly self-questioning (“What bad habit have you cured today?”) and the Pythagorean evening recollection are close structural ancestors: a daily, honest replay of the day’s conduct and feeling.

• Gratitude journaling (positive psychology) — Step 2 is essentially a structured gratitude practice, one of the most replicated mood interventions.
• Expressive / reflective journaling — writing the day’s significant moment and its feeling tracks Pennebaker-style expressive writing.
• Metacognition / self-monitoring (CBT) — noticing thoughts, feelings, and behaviour in context, without immediate judgement, is the same move CBT calls self-monitoring.
• Mindful “review” and loving-kindness — the gentle, non-judging attention plus benevolent intention echoes contemplative review practices.
• Buddhist daily reflection — evening recollection of one’s conduct and states of mind.

Turning it into a guilt audit. The most common distortion — and against Ignatius’s own gratitude-first design. Lead with thanks; review faults gently, as information, not as self-punishment.

• Trying to relive the whole day. You’ll either skim or drown. Pick one moment to dwell on (Step 4).
• Skipping the feelings. The emotions are the point in the examen of consciousness; reviewing only “what I did” loses the inner-movement data.
• No forward step. Without Step 5 the practice becomes backward-looking rumination instead of reorientation.
• Inconsistency. Ignatius prescribed it daily; the value compounds with repetition, like any tracking practice.
• Too long / too formal. Ten honest minutes beats a laborious thirty. Brevity protects daily-ness.