The Four Phases of the Exercises

Ignatius recommends that, if possible, one should make the retreat over 30 days. This 30 day period is broken down into four weeks. Since we are following the Eighteenth Annotation, our retreat experience will last longer. In our case, we will not speak of one section of the retreat taking a week. Rather, we will speak and write about four phases. Within the four phases, we will have various weeks. Right now, we are in the first phase of the exercises which will last five temporal weeks.