The Exercises and the Discernment of Spirits

Ignatian contemplation is one component of the "Spiritual Exercises," a structured programme of prayer, meditation and self-examination designed to be made over roughly thirty days in retreat, or spread over a longer period in daily life, under the guidance of a director. The full course leads the retreatant through the reality of sin, the life of Christ, his passion, and his resurrection, using both discursive meditation and this imaginative contemplation to bring about conversion and a free choice for God.

Woven through the Exercises is Ignatius's distinctive teaching on the discernment of spirits, the art of attending to the interior movements of consolation and desolation that arise in prayer, and learning to tell those that draw one toward God from those that lead away. This attentiveness to inner experience as a guide to decision has made Ignatian spirituality a lasting resource far beyond the Jesuit order, and its imaginative, sense-rich method stands as the great Western counterpart to the visualisation practices found in other contemplative traditions, arrived at independently and framed wholly within the Christian encounter with the Gospel.