Some evenings I walk backward through my day while my feet carry me forward.
As the light goes, I return in memory to the morning and work my way through the hours that followed. I remember where I went, what occupied me, and what I noticed along the way. More and more, I also remember what slipped past me: the weather, a tree on the corner, an animal I barely registered, the light changing outside a window.
Underneath all of it sits 1 question: How did I live today as part of the living world?
This post shares the practice that has grown from that question, an Earth-Based Examen in 4 movements. Where Earth-Based Lectio Divina slows you down with 1 presence in the moment, this practice looks back across an entire day, including the hours spent indoors.
This is a working version. I initially shared Earth-Based Lectio Divina in April and refined it in July after the practice itself showed me what needed to change. I expect something similar to happen here.
How This Practice Found Me
I came to most of my work by doing it before I understood it.
On my first Camino I kept walking without knowing why, and the understanding arrived later. It was the first time I had done anything in that order, and it has shaped how I build every practice since. I try the practice on foot first and give it a name only after it has earned one.
This practice followed the same path.
When I wrote the guide for my 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat from Le Puy to Conques in September, each evening page asked the walkers a question about the day behind them and closed with a single line: What did you notice today? As the guide, I answered the same questions each evening alongside the walkers, and they deepened my own practice.
Looking back, that guide was asking for an Examen without using the word.
Since returning home, I have been asking those same questions of ordinary days, the ones spent at a desk instead of on the trail.
I first encountered the Examen many years ago during my graduate studies in religious studies. I met it again during my training in spiritual direction, where it became a way to look back over a day and notice what had been moving beneath the surface.
When I connected what I was doing with the Examen of Ignatius of Loyola, the practice gained a lineage nearly 500 years old. That lineage is longer still, and it is worth telling.
A Very Old Habit of Looking Back
Reviewing the day before sleep predates Christianity. A Pythagorean tradition preserved in the Golden Verses instructs practitioners to examine the day before sleeping, asking what they did, where they went wrong, and what they left undone. Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, referred to recalling one's words and actions in the evening as a Pythagorean custom. Seneca, writing in the 1st century CE, described a similar nightly discipline in On Anger, reviewing what he had said and done and asking where he had resisted a fault and become better. These were practices of ethical formation, meant to shape how the next day was lived.
Ignatius of Loyola gave the habit the shape most people know today.
Ignatius was a Basque soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball at Pamplona in 1521. During his long recovery, he began noticing which thoughts left him consoled and which left him empty. Over the next years, he refined the notes that became the Spiritual Exercises, published in 1548.
The Examen appears there as a daily review with 5 points.
The person praying gives thanks for what has been received, asks for the grace to see clearly, and reviews the day from the hour of rising. Then they ask pardon for faults and resolve to live differently with God’s help.
From Conscience to Consciousness
Over time, the Examen was often taught with a strong emphasis on examining faults and preparing for confession.
In 1972, Jesuit George Aschenbrenner reframed the practice as an “examen of consciousness.” The emphasis shifted toward what had been moving within a person during the day and where God had been present, with gratitude at the center of the prayer.
In 1994, Dennis Hamm gave the practice the phrase that stopped me: “Praying Backward Through Your Day.”
Hamm built his version around feelings, treating them as signs of where the real movement of the day had been. He also described the felt experience of a day as the meeting place between the creatures we are and everything else held in existence.
That language opened an ecological possibility for me.
The Examen Turns Toward Creation
Others have carried the Examen toward the living world before me.
In 2014, Jesuit Joseph Carver published an ecological Examen that keeps the Ignatian form while turning attention toward creation. He asks where we became aware of creation’s gifts, where we failed to care for them, and how we might respond with greater commitment. He describes its larger movement as awareness, appreciation, and commitment.
A later Ecological Examen developed within the Ignatian community moves further toward ecological justice. It asks practitioners to consider how their choices affect creation and vulnerable people, where reconciliation is needed, and how they might respond in solidarity.
Those practices helped me see what the Examen could become when creation enters the review of the day.
My question begins slightly earlier, with how I lived today as a member of the living world, before I ask how my actions affected it.
I begin with relationship itself: what sustained me, what I noticed, what I missed, and what those encounters ask of me now.
I also take the practice on foot and use language that people of any tradition, or of none, can enter.
The Living World Was Present All Day
Most of us reach the evening convinced there was little nature in the day.
You may have gone from home to a car or train, then into an office, classroom, or store and spent hours with email and screens. Through all of it, you breathed thousands of times, drank water, and ate food that depended on soil, rain, sunlight, fungi, and human hands.
Weather moved around every building you entered, trees stood along the streets, and your own animal body carried you through each hour.
Your participation in the living world continued all day, and what faded was your awareness of it.
The Examen gives each unnoticed encounter a second chance.
An Earth-Based Examen in 4 Movements
This is the form I practice now at the end of the day, either through an evening walk or quiet reflection before bed.
Its language grew clearer after many evenings of practicing looser versions at the end of my own days. I know it is not finished, and I am choosing to share it before it is. Part of how I develop a practice is by living with it long enough to see what it reveals, then letting other people try it and tell me what becomes clearer, where it catches, and what I may not have seen on my own.
I think of this as learning in public. The practice is formed enough to use, but still open enough to change with experience, including yours.
Each movement ends with 1 question to carry with you.
1. Thank
Begin by giving thanks for what you received today.
Ask what sustained you, fed you, sheltered you, or accompanied you. Water may come to mind, or a meal, the rain, a tree casting shade, a dog waiting at the door, or the ground beneath the building where you worked.
Let each one be what it was without forcing significance onto it.
What did I receive from the living world today?
2. Remember
Move through the day in periods, from waking to this moment.
Morning, travel, work, meals, and evening each return in turn, with no need to recall every minute. Notice the encounters you recognized as they happened, and give particular attention to the ones you recognize only now.
Perhaps you heard a bird on the way to the train and never looked up, or ate lunch in front of a screen without thinking about where the food came from.
Where was the living world present in my day, including where I missed it at the time?
3. Discern
Return to the moments that still carry some energy.
Ask where you were attentive or grateful, and where you felt delight, grief, irritation, wonder, or indifference.
Ask where another being became scenery, where a place became only something to pass through, and where convenience hid a cost.
Aschenbrenner saw these inner movements as the heart of the practice because they reveal what a day was actually about.
What kind of relationship with the living world was I living today?
4. Turn
Turn toward tomorrow.
Ignatius closed his Examen with a resolution, and relationship asks something of us here as well.
You may want to return to a particular place, learn the name of a tree you pass every morning, or eat tomorrow’s lunch away from a screen.
Some evenings the turn is small: simple thanks, or a plan to notice the maple outside the office before you go through the door.
What does what I noticed today ask of me tomorrow?
The Common Mistake: Keeping Score
The most common way this practice goes wrong is turning Discern into an environmental scorecard.
Counting how many responsible choices you made pulls you back into the same kind of accounting that later Ignatian writers tried to move beyond. This movement concerns relationship, which a tally cannot measure.
When you catch yourself grading the day, return to a single moment and ask what passed between you and that being.
The fourth movement grows more readily from that kind of attention than from a grade.
Why Belonging Has No Movement of Its Own
Readers of Earth-Based Lectio Divina will notice that Belong, its final movement, has no place on this list.
That is deliberate.
We may spend an entire day physically surrounded by the living world and still experience very little relationship with it. Breathing air, drinking water, passing trees, and eating food make us participants in ecological systems, but participation alone does not create belonging.
Belonging grows through relationship.
Lectio stays with 1 presence long enough for encounter to deepen. The Examen works differently. It looks back across a whole day for moments when relationship did happen, might have happened, or was missed altogether.
Remembering those moments gives us another chance to notice where relationship began, where it was absent, and where we might return tomorrow.
The 2 practices approach belonging from different directions, and both treat it as something that grows through relationship.
What I Am Testing
This is the first public version of the practice.
I am still watching whether 4 movements are enough, whether their names hold, and what changes when other people try it. The names in Earth-Based Lectio Divina shifted between April and July, and I expect this practice to teach me something similar through use.
After a season of walking with it, I plan to return to the form and show what changed and why.
For now, I am interested in what becomes visible when others walk it too.
Try It on 1 Ordinary Day
The easiest way to understand this working form is to practice it once and notice what happens.
An Earth-Based Examen
How long. 10 to 20 minutes near the end of an ordinary day.
Where. Walk somewhere available to you. A sidewalk, courtyard, garden, hallway, neighborhood street, or slow circuit through your home will work. If walking is not possible or does not fit the evening, you can also practice quietly before bed, seated or lying down.
What to attend to. Begin by asking to see your day more clearly in relation to the living world. You might address the sacred as you understand it, the place around you, or the land beneath you, or simply set the intention to notice what you missed while living the day. Then, whether walking or resting, let your attention move backward through the day through the 4 movements.
Thank. What did I receive from the living world today?
Remember. Where was it present, including where I missed it?
Discern. What kind of relationship was I living?
Turn. What does today ask of me tomorrow?
What you may notice. A relationship that barely registered while you were living the day may become visible in retrospect. You may also notice where relationship was absent, interrupted, or possible but missed.
Try the practice on 3 evenings this week and notice which movement asks the most of you. Since this is still a working form, pay attention too to anything that feels missing, unnecessary, or unclear. That is part of what I am learning from sharing the practice now rather than waiting until I think it is finished.
When you looked back through your day, what relationship with the living world did you recognize only afterward?
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Thank you for sharing this lovely reflective review of the day, the 4 movements offer a rich and simple form. 🍃🍂
I love the question : how did I live today as part of the living world? Will certainly be taking this with me, thank you for the offering!