The Examen Prayer of Saint Ignatius

A cannonball, a boring convalescence, and a discovery

Before he was Saint Ignatius of Loyola, he was simply Íñigo López de Loyola, a Basque nobleman with ambitions of military glory and romantic conquest. Those ambitions ended abruptly in 1521 at the Battle of Pamplona, when a cannonball shattered his leg. During the long, immobile recovery that followed, with nothing at hand but a life of Christ and a collection of saints' biographies — not his preferred reading — he noticed something he later treated as decisive: daydreams of chivalry and romance left him excited in the moment but empty afterward, while daydreams of imitating the saints left a quieter, longer-lasting sense of peace.

That noticing — paying deliberate attention to the emotional aftertaste of different thoughts, not just the thoughts themselves — became the seed of an entire spiritual method. Ignatius spent the following years refining it, eventually compiling it into the Spiritual Exercises, a structured retreat manual finalized for publication in 1548, which he required every member of the religious order he founded, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits, formally approved in 1540), to complete.

The five steps

Within the Exercises, Ignatius included a shorter daily practice meant to be prayed even outside a full retreat setting — what has come to be called the Examen. Its structure runs through five movements:

1. Become aware of God's presence. Begin by simply pausing and recognizing that the day about to be reviewed was lived in God's presence, whether or not that presence was consciously noticed at the time.
2. Review the day with gratitude. Walk back through the day's events — not exhaustively, but attentively — looking for what was good, however small, and giving thanks for it.
3. Pay attention to your emotions. This is the step most directly descended from Ignatius's own cannonball insight: notice the emotional movements of the day, which Ignatian tradition names consolation (movement toward faith, hope, love, and peace) and desolation (movement toward doubt, restlessness, and distance from God).
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it. Rather than trying to process everything, select a single moment — a conversation, a decision, a feeling — and bring it directly into prayer.
5. Look toward tomorrow. Close by looking ahead with hope, asking for grace for whatever the next day may hold.

Ignatius intended this to be brief and repeatable — traditionally prayed at midday and again in the evening, and short enough, by his own description, to fit inside about fifteen minutes rather than requiring an extended meditation period.

Not the same as an examination of conscience

The Examen is sometimes confused with a traditional examination of conscience, the review of one's actions against a moral standard — commonly the Ten Commandments — undertaken before sacramental confession. That practice has genuine roots in Catholic tradition, and the Catechism references examining one's conscience in the context of preparing for the sacrament (CCC 2454).

Ignatius's Examen overlaps with that practice but is broader in scope and different in tone. Rather than scanning primarily for sins to confess, it reviews the whole texture of the day — the good along with the difficult — looking for where God was active and where resistance or distraction pulled attention elsewhere. It's less a moral inventory and more a habit of noticing, closer in spirit to what modern writers on Ignatian spirituality sometimes call "finding God in all things," a phrase closely associated with Jesuit spirituality generally.

Consolation and desolation: the vocabulary underneath it

Central to the Examen's third step is a distinction Ignatius developed at length elsewhere in the Spiritual Exercises, in what he called the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. Consolation names any inner movement that draws a person toward greater faith, hope, and love of God — not necessarily happy feelings in a simple sense, but a deepening peace and orientation toward God, even amid difficulty. Desolation names the opposite: restlessness, doubt, and a pull away from God, even when circumstances look outwardly fine.

Ignatius's broader insight, developed from his own convalescent daydreaming, was that these movements are worth tracking over time, not just noting once. The daily Examen is the practical tool built for that tracking — a habit meant to sharpen a person's ability to recognize, in the moment rather than only in retrospect, which direction their inner life is actually moving.

Why it spread far beyond the Jesuits

Because the Spiritual Exercises were originally designed for use within a directed, month-long retreat, much of Ignatian spirituality remained fairly specialized for centuries, taught mainly within Jesuit formation and retreat houses. The Examen has been the major exception — its brevity and its usability outside a retreat setting have made it one of the most widely adopted pieces of Ignatian prayer among ordinary Catholics, taught today in parish adult education, popular spirituality books, and short daily prayer apps, independent of any broader engagement with the rest of the Exercises.