Five hundred years of noticing, stretched from a single day to a whole season
If you have walked with us for years, you already know the movement of this work — the slow survey, the honest look, the willingness to leave something unharvested. This is that same movement, held to a season rather than a day.
And if you have only just found us: welcome. You need nothing but a journal and a few unhurried mornings.
A practice of noticing, not of judging
For five hundred years, people who wanted to pay attention to their lives have used a practice called the Examen. It comes from Ignatius of Loyola, and in its usual form it takes about fifteen minutes at the end of a day: you settle, you notice where Presence was, you review the hours, you attend to what you felt, and you turn toward tomorrow.
It is a practice of noticing. It was never meant to be a practice of judging, though it gets misused that way constantly.
We have stretched it here. Instead of a day, this Examen reviews a season — roughly the seven months from the turn of the year to the first harvest.
That change matters more than it sounds. A day can be recalled. Seven months has to be reconstructed, which means you won’t be reviewing the season so much as the story you have been telling yourself about it. What might look like a flaw may wind up being the most interesting part of the exercise.
One a day, for five days
Take one movement a day. If you get through two, you have done this correctly. There is no version of this you can fail.
Not only on paper
Each movement carries a companion practice — something to do with your body, your hands, or your silence rather than your sentences. Walk the perimeter of your life without your phone. Draw the field badly. Break bread with your hands and set a piece aside.
These are not decorations on the questions. For most people they are where the actual noticing happens.
Those who have heard the call, and those who have only felt the tug
Spiritual directors and dream workers who want a seasonal review that isn’t a performance appraisal. Clergy and therapists carrying other people’s harvests alongside their own. Anyone who has arrived at the first of August unsure whether the year has been a peak, a pause, or a turning point.
No prior training is assumed. Nothing in it requires you to belong to anything.
The Haden Institute is a teaching institute in Asheville, North Carolina. For over thirty years we have trained people in spiritual direction and dream work in the Jungian mystical Christian tradition — a haven for seekers, and for those who want to companion others on their journey.
Consider joining us on a journey inward
Lammas is a first harvest. Nothing here is finished, nothing is being graded, and there is a whole autumn still coming.
Download the Examen