How to pray the daily Examen
Ignatius permitted his Jesuits to drop almost any other prayer under pressure. This was the one he told them to keep.
What it is not.
The Examen is a review of the day in God's presence. It is fifteen minutes, prayed usually in the evening, in which you walk back through the hours and notice where you were drawn toward God and where you were drawn away.
It is not an examination of conscience in the confessional sense, though the two are related and often confused. An examination of conscience is an inventory of sins in preparation for absolution. The Examen is wider: it is looking for God's action in your day, which includes your failures but is not organised around them.
The distinction matters because people who understand it as a moral audit tend to abandon it within a month. Nobody sustains a nightly practice whose reliable output is a list of their faults.
The first movement.
Something specific.
Not gratitude in general.
One · Give thanks
Begin by naming something concrete you are grateful for from this day. Not "my family" or "my health" — a thing that happened. The light on the way to work. A sentence someone said. Ten minutes when the house was quiet.
Ignatius puts gratitude first deliberately, and the ordering does real work. It establishes that you are speaking to someone who has been generous to you before you begin reviewing where you fell short. Reverse the order and the whole prayer curdles.
The second movement.
Two · Ask for light
Ask God to show you the day as he saw it.
This is a short petition and it is easy to skip, but it is the hinge on which the honesty of the whole exercise turns. Left to your own resources you will review the day through whatever mood you happen to be in — which means an anxious evening produces a catalogue of failures and a pleased evening produces nothing at all. Neither is the day. You are asking to be shown something other than your own current weather.
The third movement.
Chronological.
No editing.
Three · Walk back through the day
Go through the hours in order, from waking until now. Not the highlights — the ordinary sequence.
What you are watching for is movement. Ignatius's language for this is consolation and desolation. Consolation is the interior movement toward God: an increase of faith, hope, and love, a sense of things opening. Desolation is the movement away: turning inward, closing, a heaviness that pulls you out of relationship.
These are not the same as pleasant and unpleasant, and that is the most important thing to understand about them. A difficult conversation you did not avoid can be consolation. An entirely comfortable evening spent numbing out can be desolation. The question is not how the moment felt but which direction it moved you.
Do not analyse as you go. You are noticing, the way you would notice landmarks from a train.
The fourth movement.
One thing. Not everything.
Four · Stay with one moment
Choose a single moment from the review that carries weight — the one your attention keeps returning to. It may be something you did badly, or something that moved you, or something you cannot yet name.
Speak to God about it directly. If it is a failure, say so plainly and ask for mercy; the prayer does not require you to construct an explanation first. If it is a grace, say thank you for that specific thing.
One moment. The instinct to process the entire day is what turns a fifteen-minute prayer into a forty-minute rumination, and rumination is not what this is.
The fifth movement.
Five · Look toward tomorrow
Ask for what you will need. Be specific — patience for a particular meeting, courage for a particular conversation, or simply the desire to pray tomorrow when you do not want to.
End with a prayer you know by heart. The Our Father is the usual choice. Ending with fixed words rather than your own closes the session cleanly and stops the reviewing from continuing into the night.
On the bad days.
When the day has gone badly
These are the evenings the Examen is for, and the evenings people skip it.
Two things help. First, keep the gratitude step even when it feels false — especially then. Find one small true thing. The point is not to talk yourself out of the day but to establish who you are talking to.
Second, hold the line at one moment. On a bad day the fourth step wants to expand to cover everything, and what you get instead of prayer is an hour of self-accusation with God listening in. If you notice the review turning into a case against yourself, that is the signal to stop and go to the closing prayer. Ignatius's own counsel in desolation was to make no changes and take no major decisions while it lasts.
Some things are too heavy to carry alone in fifteen minutes at the end of a day. If something surfaces that you cannot set down, bring it to a priest, a spiritual director, or a counsellor. If you are in danger of harming yourself, please reach out now — in the US, call or text 988, at any hour.
Timing.
When to pray it
Ignatius had his Jesuits pray it twice — at midday and again at night. Once, in the evening, is the ordinary lay practice and it is enough.
Fifteen minutes is standard. Five is a legitimate version and a much better one than skipping: gratitude, one moment, one petition. What matters is that it happens every day, because the value compounds. After a few months you begin to recognise your own recurring patterns — the same hour of day, the same trigger, the same evasion — and that recognition is the thing the practice is actually for.