What Is the Examen Prayer? — Ignatius’s Five-Step Daily Practice
⏱ 12 min read
You probably already know the headline answer. The Examen is a five-step nightly prayer designed by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1520s for the Jesuit order. You have read that sentence on a dozen websites by now. Most of them list the five steps in a tidy box, suggest you try it for two weeks, and move on. You tried it. It held for a few nights. By the second week the steps had blurred and you had forgotten which one came after which, and the practice quietly stopped.
This is the contemplative version of the question — what is the examen prayer. It is the slow read, walked through Ignatius’s own framing in The Spiritual Exercises, paying particular attention to the part most modern explainers strip out: what each of the five steps is actually for, and what kind of soul the daily Examen, walked over years, is slowly shaping. (Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article sits inside — the Examen-anchored evening page, walked at the pace of one short reflection per night, rather than read about in a blog and lost by Wednesday.)
Ignatius wrote The Spiritual Exercises over a slow decade beginning in 1522 — a small book, not meant for general reading but for use by a spiritual director walking another person through a thirty-day retreat. The Examen is a tiny practice inside the larger work, and Ignatius was unusually emphatic that, of all the practices in the book, the daily Examen was the one most worth keeping for life. The Jesuits have kept it. So have many lay readers. So can you, if you understand what the five steps are really doing.
The shape of the practice, in five movements
The five steps, walked at their slowest:
- Gratitude. Begin by giving thanks for the day.
- Petition. Ask for the light to see the day clearly.
- Review. Walk back through the day, hour by hour, noticing where God was present and where you turned away.
- Sorrow. Acknowledge, briefly and without melodrama, the places you missed.
- Resolution. Look toward tomorrow with one specific intention.
The whole prayer takes about fifteen minutes. Some nights it is shorter — five minutes, when the day has been small. Some nights it stretches longer, when the day has been heavy and the review takes time. The frame is the same. Only the depth varies.
That is the headline. Now the slow walk.
Step 1: Gratitude
The first movement is gratitude. Not the modern “list three things you are grateful for” version of gratitude — though that is downstream of this — but the older posture that Ignatius assumed: I begin by remembering that the day was a gift before it was an experience.
This matters because the soul that begins the Examen with a complaint will review the day as a series of grievances. The soul that begins with gratitude reviews the day as a series of gifts that were sometimes received and sometimes missed. The starting posture sets the lens.
The gratitude does not have to be deep. Thank You for the day. Thank You for being with me in it. Two sentences. The Examen does not require the gratitude to be eloquent; it requires it to come first.
Step 2: Petition — asking for the light
The second movement is one most modern Examen guides skim past, but Ignatius would not have. Ask the Holy Spirit for the light to see the day truthfully.
The reason is practical. The mind, left to itself, will review the day inaccurately. It will exaggerate the wounds and miss the gifts; it will obsess over the small things and ignore the large ones; it will give itself an easy verdict where a hard one was due, or a hard verdict where mercy was already on offer. The petition for light is the small, honest acknowledgement that the soul cannot review its own day clearly without help.
Ignatius wrote one of the lines that most clearly catches this posture of asking — a prayer, late in the Exercises, that is essentially the Examen’s second step rendered as a sentence:
Give me the grace of doing what Thou desirest, and ask what Thou wilt.
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
Read it twice. Give me the grace of doing what Thou desirest. The petition is not for an outcome. It is for the interior grace to see what God actually wants — both in the day just finished and in the day that comes next. The line is small. The asking is what makes the rest of the Examen possible.
Step 3: The review — the slow walking-back through the day
The third movement is the longest of the five, and the one most modern explainers reduce to a sentence. Ignatius treated it as the core of the practice.
You walk back through the day, slowly, hour by hour. Not abstractly — concretely. Six in the morning when you woke. The first conversation. The breakfast. The commute. The first hour of work. The mid-morning lull. Lunch. The afternoon meeting. The pickup. The supper. The evening. The half-hour before this prayer.
At each hour, two small questions, lightly held:
Where was God present in this part of the day?
Where did I turn away?
Not as a courtroom proceeding. As a quiet, honest noticing. He was in the kindness of the colleague who covered for me in the meeting. I turned away in the conversation with my mother when I let the impatience speak. The Examen is not interested in your eloquence. It is interested in your honesty.
This step is where the practice begins to shape the soul. Over weeks, you will start noticing patterns — that you tend to turn away in the late afternoon, or that God is most often present in the small interruptions, or that the conversations you dread are often the ones where grace is given. The review is the way the day becomes legible to the soul, instead of a blur.
Ignatius was explicit that this awareness — the slow noticing of where God is and where the soul has wandered — is the central work of the spiritual life. He framed it elsewhere in the Exercises with the verse from John 15:
If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love; as I also have kept my Father’s commandments, and do abide in his love.
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
Abide in His love. The review is the practice of noticing where, in the day just finished, the abiding held and where it slipped. Without the review, the abiding becomes a vague aspiration. With it, the abiding becomes a daily, traceable, slowly-deepening reality. (For the morning practice that orients the day toward the abiding before it begins, how to pray the Examen walks the front-end version of the same nightly practice.)
Step 4: Sorrow — without melodrama
The fourth movement is brief, and most modern Examens overdo it. Acknowledge the places you turned away. Be sorry. Move on.
The acknowledgement is honest. It is not, however, dramatic. Ignatius is unusually gentle here. He does not want a soul flattened by guilt at the end of the day. He wants a soul that has named the small wanderings, accepted that they were wanderings, asked forgiveness with one sentence, and risen — because the same God whose Spirit gave the light is also the God whose mercy receives the asking instantly. (The Examen is meant to end with the soul lighter, not heavier; if it ends heavier, the fourth step has been done wrong.)
The sentence is small. Lord, I am sorry for the impatience with my mother. Forgive me. Thank You for being patient with me anyway. Three lines. Then the next step.
Step 5: Resolution — one specific intention for tomorrow
The fifth movement is the one most modern Examens leave vague. Ignatius made it specific. Choose one thing, concrete and small, for tomorrow.
Not seven things. One. Not abstract. Concrete. Tomorrow I will pause for a beat before I answer her. Tomorrow I will not check the phone in the first ten minutes after waking. Tomorrow I will call the friend I have been avoiding. The Examen does not produce a tomorrow that is identical to today; it produces a tomorrow that has one specific, named, willed change.
Over a year, those small daily resolutions accumulate. The soul that began January as one shape ends December as a slightly different shape, not because of a grand transformation but because three hundred and sixty-five small concrete intentions, each held for a single day, slowly redirect the trajectory of the life.
Pause for a moment. Notice the shoulders. Notice the breath. Let one slow exhale out. Now — without doing the full Examen — try the smallest version of step three. Just for the last hour. Where was God present in the last hour? Where did I turn away? One beat each. That is the practice in miniature.
The Examen, at its smallest, is what you just did. The five steps are the longer evening form. The miniature can be done at any hour — between meetings, in a carpark, before sleep — and is itself a practice the older Jesuits called the examen of consciousness, distinct from the full nightly Examen but its near cousin.
Why the five steps in this order
There is a logic to the sequence that most blog versions do not name, and the practice falls apart if you change the order.
Gratitude first, because the soul that does not begin grateful cannot see the day truthfully. Petition second, because the soul cannot review itself accurately without the light. Review third, because the noticing is the central work. Sorrow fourth, because the noticing surfaces what needs naming. Resolution fifth, because the prayer must open toward tomorrow rather than close on the day just finished.
If you start with sorrow, the prayer becomes self-flagellation. If you skip the petition, the review becomes inaccurate. If you skip the gratitude, the whole prayer becomes a grievance log. If you skip the resolution, the prayer becomes archaeological — a study of yesterday with no bearing on tomorrow. The order is not arbitrary. Ignatius walked it for thirty years before he wrote it down. You can trust the order. (For the wider question of why evening is the right time for this kind of prayer at all, what is evening devotion walks the longer case for the quiet-time-sweet-spot of the day’s last twenty minutes.)
A journal for the practice
What the Examen most needs is a place to land each night — a small page that holds the five steps gently and lets you write the one or two honest lines that catch the day. Without a landing place, the practice tends to drift; some nights you do all five steps, other nights you skip three, and within a month the practice has frayed.
This is what the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women was built to hold. 140 evening pages, each with a scripture already printed and a small Examen-style structure — space for the gratitude, the petition, the brief noticing, the line of sorrow, the one resolution. Not as a checklist. As the slow nightly container the Examen needs in order to settle into the year. Most women who walk one full cycle find the five steps have become a natural shape of the evening, no longer requiring the printed structure to hold them.
It is not a replacement for the Examen. It is the place where the Examen takes up residence in your week.
What the Examen slowly grows
Ignatius is quiet about the fruit, but the Jesuits who have walked the practice for five hundred years are not. A soul that walks the Examen daily, over years, becomes a soul that is less self-deceived. The patterns become visible. The daily wanderings become smaller. The gratitude becomes more easily accessible in the daytime, not only the prayer-time. The resolutions begin to settle into the actual life. The soul becomes — slowly, and almost imperceptibly from the inside — more honestly known to itself and more responsive to grace.
Ignatius framed the underlying logic in a sentence about the strength of grace, late in the Exercises:
Consider on the other hand how powerful we are when assisted by the grace of God. For Christ says: “He that abideth in me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit.” How so?
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
How so? He bears much fruit by the slow daily practice of remaining in. The Examen is one of the simplest possible answers to Ignatius’s how so? — the practice that, evening by evening, keeps the abiding from drifting. The fruit is what the abiding produces. The Examen is what keeps the abiding daily. (A prayer journal and devotion: 30 prompts that earn their place is the prompt-shaped cousin of the Examen — a daytime practice that walks the same noticing through a different door. And Lent devotional for kids is the seasonal version for households trying to teach the small daily noticing to children alongside.)
How to begin tonight
You do not need a method. You need fifteen minutes and a chair.
Tonight, before sleep, sit somewhere quiet. Light a candle if you want. Do the five movements once. They will be clumsy the first time. The review will feel like it is missing things. The resolution will feel arbitrary. That is normal. The Examen settles by repetition, not by polish.
Do it again tomorrow night. And the night after. By the fifth night, the order will begin to feel natural. By the third week, you will start noticing the patterns the review is surfacing. By the third month, the practice will be holding the shape of your interior life in a way that is genuinely new.
This is the long path. There is no shortcut. The Examen is not a productivity hack. It is the slow daily noticing that, over years, becomes the way you live.
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
Built for the woman who wants the Examen walked at one short page per evening, with scripture pre-printed and space for the gratitude, the brief noticing, the small line of sorrow, the one resolution. The same gentle shape, every night, so the five steps have a settled place to live in the year.
If the wider question of the disciplines the Examen sits inside is your next slow read, the sibling essay What Are the 7 Spiritual Disciplines? — Wesley’s Working List walks the full working list. If the continual prayer that the Examen reviews is what you want to deepen next, The Quietest Spiritual Discipline — Brother Lawrence on Hidden Prayer walks the slow hidden practice the Examen quietly serves.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page per evening, scripture pre-printed, space for the five-step Examen — the nightly noticing, given a place to settle into the year.
