My Greatest Vice: An Intro to The Examen
I was always an amenable child: good natured, friendly, empathetic, and although I got pretty sarcastic in high school, generally easy to be around. I am a gatherer of people, an evangelist for whatever the best new thing is that I have found and experienced. Finding life in the world around me and discovering ways to grow while staying present drive me each day. But there were times throughout my life when I would have such overwhelming frustration that I would verbally explode on whoever I was around. Many would not think it possible of me if they didn’t witness it themselves. This increased as my life became more complex and I moved from being a married man to one with children. This was also the largest source of shame and regret I would carry with me.
Eventually I became exposed to the Enneagram which introduced me to my personality type of a 9, The Peacemaker. I was good at striving for peace, but more often than not this looked like avoiding conflict and keeping the peace, which one can only do for so long before things accumulate to the point of overflow or, in my case, eruption. Over time I became better at noticing this conflict avoidance within myself, but I did not often know what to do with it afterward. This is why we stress both noticing and nurturing what is going on beneath the surface.
How do we nurture these noticings? There are many tools we can use, many ancient and contemplative, but one that I have found especially helpful in my personal life is the examen prayer, brought to us by St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius developed the examen out of his own process of spiritual formation and self awareness after a life changing conversion in the 1500s. Rather than seeing prayer as only a time to speak to God or ask for guidance, he encouraged people to look carefully at their inner lives, to notice where they felt close to God and where they felt distant, restless, reactive, or numb. The examen became a simple daily practice of reflection, gratitude, honesty, and awareness. For me, it has been a way of slowing down long enough to notice what is actually happening beneath the surface before frustration turns into eruption and then invite the Holy Spirit to help guide me into growth and healing through it.
Before he became a saint, Ignatius was a proud Spanish soldier driven by a desire for worldly glory, vanity, and a need to control his own destiny. But after a cannonball shattered his leg in battle, he was left bedridden for months with nothing but his own thoughts and a few books on the life of Christ. In that forced stillness, he began to notice something fascinating about his inner world: when he fantasized about chivalry and romance, he felt temporarily excited, but was ultimately left feeling dry, restless, and empty. Conversely, when he pondered a life of service and humility, he experienced a deep, enduring peace. This was his first taste of what we in spiritual direction call discernment: the slow, intentional process of noticing the movements of our hearts and recognizing which paths lead us toward true life and which ones lead us toward numbness or eruption.
Ignatius realized that we cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge. For him, the Examen wasn't a rigid, legalistic tool to measure how "good" or "bad" he had been each day; it was a gentle, honest mirror. He understood that our daily lives are packed with data (moments of joy, stabs of frustration, quiet invitations, and subtle shifts in mood) that we usually ignore because we are moving too fast. If a battle-hardened soldier could learn to look beneath his own bravado to find a deeper desire for peace and transformation, then there is hope for the rest of us who find ourselves trapped in our own cycles of avoidance and reactive anger.
The true importance of the Examen lies in its ability to bridge the gap between our automatic reactions and our desire for authentic peace. It teaches us to hold our "noticings" without judgment, bringing them into the light of God’s grace. When we practice the Examen, we aren't just recounting the day's events; we are looking for the patterns. For a Peacemaker like me, it means catching the tiny, quiet moments where I chose to swallow my opinion to avoid tension, giving me the chance to nurture that awareness before it builds into an explosion. It turns our daily history into a sacred text, showing us exactly where the Holy Spirit is inviting us to heal, to speak up, or to rest.
Below you will find a PDF guide to practicing the examen on your own. I encourage you to practice this as a daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly rhythm of reflection and awareness.
