How does "Ask for clarity and honest perception" work?

Explicitly requesting honest perception is a metacognitive move: it acknowledges that self-review is prone to self-serving bias and creates a brief gap between the review and automatic self-justification. This pause functions as an intention-setting step — the psychological literature on implementation intentions shows that explicitly stating what one intends to do increases the probability of doing it, even in demanding conditions.

How does "Review the day following your feelings" work?

Ignatius prescribed reviewing the day through felt movements — consolations (feelings of life, connection, alignment) and desolations (feelings of flatness, isolation, or being drawn away from what matters) — rather than purely through events. Emotions carry information about value-alignment that event-recall alone misses: what energized or deflated you reveals what genuinely matters, not just what happened. This is an affective-information approach to self-knowledge, consistent with the idea that feelings are signals rather than noise.

How does "Face shortfalls with honest sorrow, not shame" work?

Honest acknowledgment of error, held with self-compassion rather than shame, is the stance most associated with genuine behavioral change. Shame produces avoidance and defensiveness; honest sorrow produces motivation to repair without the paralysis of self-punishment. Ignatius’s structure is designed to reach this moment only after gratitude and grounded review, which is why the self-examination can be honest rather than merely painful.

How does "Close with a forward-looking resolve" work?

Converting reflection into a specific behavioral intention activates the implementation-intention mechanism: naming when, where, and what you will do creates a pre-committed plan that fires more automatically than a vague aspiration. The single-resolve constraint also prevents the overcommitting that collapses into nothing — one concrete thing is actionable; five vague resolutions are not.

How does "Practice the Examen daily and briefly" work?

The Examen’s benefit comes from repeated self-knowledge over time — the patterns of consolation and desolation visible across weeks are not visible in a single session. Keeping the practice brief enough to be sustainable daily is not a compromise; it is what makes the compounding effect possible. Ignatius’s own recommendation was 15 minutes; the pattern-recognition benefit requires frequency, not duration.

Ignatius of Loyola

What are the five movements of the Ignatian Examen and how do you practice them?

The five-step Ignatian review — source, structure, and honest notes on what each movement offers

Short answer

The Ignatian Examen is a five-step daily prayer and reflection practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola: give thanks, ask for clarity, review the day, face what fell short, and resolve what comes next. As a structured reflection method it is centuries-old and widely practiced; its benefits are supported by the broader research on gratitude, emotional review, and implementation intentions, not by trials of the Examen itself.

Ignatius of Loyola considered the Examen the one practice a Jesuit should never skip — more important than longer meditation. The Examen is not self-criticism dressed up in prayer; it is a structured movement from gratitude through honest self-review to a concrete forward resolve. Each of the five movements has a specific psychological function. Below are those movements as practices, with the mechanism behind each and an honest account of where supporting evidence is strong and where it is thin.

The practices (6)

Why it works

Deliberate gratitude review shifts the attentional frame of the whole reflection from threat-scanning to appreciation, which lowers the defensive arousal that would otherwise make honest self-examination feel dangerous. Naming specific rather than generic gifts also counters the negativity bias that allows positive events to pass unregistered, building an accurate rather than threat-skewed ledger of the day.

How to do it

1Find a few minutes of quiet and let yourself arrive — release the momentum of the day with a slow breath.
2Call to mind two or three specific good things from today, including small ones.
3Sit with genuine appreciation before moving to the review — not as a formula but as an actual felt state.
4If you practice within a devotional frame, direct the gratitude explicitly; if not, the felt quality of gratitude is the active ingredient.

Evidence

Mechanistic

Gratitude practices reliably improve positive affect and well-being across multiple meta-analyses. Opening with gratitude before honest review is mechanistically sound: it reduces threat arousal before self-examination. The Ignatian framing of this step is a devotional practice rather than a trialed protocol.

Honest caveat: The gratitude evidence supports the mechanism broadly; applying it as the opening of the Examen specifically is tradition and practitioner report rather than direct study.

— Emmons & McCullough (2003), Counting blessings versus burdens, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Common mistake: Treating the gratitude step as a brief formality before the "real" review. Rushing past it means the self-examination happens from a threat-detection stance rather than security, making honesty harder.

Go deeper on this practice →

Practice this with IX Coach

Reading about a practice changes nothing on its own. IX Coach turns these into a guided, adaptive routine — discerning where you are in real time and walking the practice with you, session after session.

Start with IX Coach →