Coaching practices for The Ignatian Examen Five Movements of Daily Review Before Bed

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I keep starting this nightly prayer practice and then dropping it the second life gets busy, because I’ve made it this long involved thing
  • My days just blur past on autopilot and I crawl into bed having never paused to ask where I was at my best today and where I drifted from who I want to be
  • When I sit down at night to look back on my day with God, I tend to jump straight to everything I did wrong
  • When I look back on my day it’s just a checklist of what I did, and it tells me nothing
  • Whenever I review my own day I quietly spin everything to make myself look better, and I know it

Practices that may help

  1. The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
    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.
  2. The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
    The Examen is a short, structured evening review from the Ignatian tradition: you replay the day with gratitude and honest attention to where you felt drawn toward or away from your values, then carry one resolve into tomorrow. It is a centuries-old contemplative practice; its benefits are best described as mechanistically plausible and widely reported rather than established by controlled trials.
  3. Practice the Examen daily and briefly
    Do a short Examen most days rather than a long one occasionally.
    The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
  4. The daily examen (end-of-day review)
    Spend five minutes each evening reviewing where you were most and least true to yourself today.
    Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice
  5. Become aware of God’s presence and give thanks
    Open the review by pausing, settling, and naming specific gifts from the day.
    The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
  6. Review the day following your feelings
    Walk back through the day in sequence, tracking the emotional quality of each moment.
    The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
  7. Ask for clarity and honest perception
    Before reviewing, pause to ask for the capacity to see honestly rather than defensively.
    The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
  8. Close with a forward-looking resolve
    Choose one concrete intention to carry into tomorrow before closing the review.
    The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
  9. Keep it brief and daily
    Do a short Examen most days rather than a long one occasionally.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  10. The Pythagorean evening examination (Hadot’s version)
    Before sleep, review the day in three questions: Where did I go wrong? What did I succeed at? What remains undone?
    Pierre Hadot’s Spiritual Exercises

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