Anthony de Mello was born in Bombay, joined the Jesuit order at sixteen, was trained in Spain and the United States, returned to India in his thirties, and from 1972 led the Sadhana Institute of Counselling and Spirituality at Lonavla in Maharashtra. From there he conducted retreats across the world for the next fifteen years, and by the time of his sudden death in New York in 1987 his voice carried further than almost any Christian contemplative teacher of his generation.
His teaching method was unique. He drew openly and freely on the Buddhist parables, on Sufi stories, on Vedanta, on the Indian guru tradition, weaving them into a Christian framework that was less about belief and more about waking up to what is already the case. His books, mostly transcribed from his retreat talks, include Sadhana: A Way to God, The Song of the Bird, Wellsprings, One Minute Wisdom, and the posthumously published Awareness, which preserves his late teaching at its sharpest.
His central call was simple and uncompromising. Awareness opens with the claim that spirituality means waking up, and that most people, without knowing it, are asleep. The labels, stories, and conditioning a person takes themselves to be are the sleep itself, and seeing this clearly is the waking. He died of a heart attack at fifty-five, hours before he was due to give a conference in New York.
An example of the teaching
Sadhana: A Way to God, the 1978 book that grew out of his retreat work, is subtitled Christian Exercises in Eastern Form, and that is what it contains: dozens of short guided exercises, many adapted from Buddhist and Hindu practice for Christian use. The opening exercises ask for nothing except attention. Sit straight, close your eyes, and feel the touch of your clothes on your shoulders, the back of the chair against you, your hands in your lap. Move slowly through the body, sensation by sensation, without words. De Mello kept insisting on the difference between thinking about your hand and actually feeling it, and treated learning that difference as the doorway to prayer.
Behind the exercise sits a conviction that runs through everything he taught: God is found in the present, and the present is reached through the senses, since thought deals mostly in memory and anticipation. Even a few minutes of silenced commentary, he told retreatants, is contemplation in seed form. The later books, Awareness above all, carry the same move from the retreat house into everyday life.
Where to start
His writings are under copyright and held by the Society of Jesus, so we link out rather than hosting them.
- Sadhana: A Way to God: the exercises themselves, borrowable at the Internet Archive.
- The De Mello Spirituality Center: the official home for his books, videos, and daily readings; Awareness and The Way to Love are the accessible entry points.
- The Spiritual Exercises: Ignatius of Loyola’s retreat manual, the Jesuit root from which de Mello’s retreat work grew, hosted here.
