A Year with Anthony De Mello: Waking Up Week by Week

Finally, an Anthony De Mello book designed just like the famous workshops De Mello conducted in the 1980s at Fordham University.

The book's binding allows the book to open fully for the pages to lay flat, making it easy to journal and to complete the simple worksheets and exercises.

The Promise Anthony (Tony) De Mello Makes: "I can promise you this," Tony said in opening his workshop. "I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware in this way who didn't see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of your life changes, so you don't have to take it on faith anymore. You see it; you're different. You react differently. In fact, you react less and act more. You see things you've never seen before. You're much more energetic, much more alive. You lose your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. Relaxed. You will gaze out at the world and say, My, how different everything looks."

The Breakthough into Happiness: We have all been programmed to seek happiness outside of ourselves—seized through great effort from an unpredictable world—and then to become upset and self-condemning when our effort fails to realize its promise of fulfillment, which it always fails to do. This is not to say that success isn't a reasonable pursuit, but it cannot give us happiness. Nothing of the world can.

Why? Because we have it already.

The happiness, peace, and love that defines fulfillment are already yours, encoded in your spiritual DNA. They are not earned or acquired. They live in you as you to be expressed through you. The only effort needed is really no effort at all; it's a matter of seeing and then dropping a set of false beliefs blocking you.

A Year with Anthony De Mello is a week-by-week workshop of fifty-two passages gleamed from De Mello's workshops. It is suggested you go week by week, but you can move through the sections at whatever pace works best for you.

Each week's passage is followed by a favorite parable or koan Anthony admired to illuminate the passage, and each week there are two simple but engaging exercises to actualize the week's teaching. Following each week's section is a number of lined, blank pages for journaling about your own insights during the week.