One of my favorite spiritual writers is the psychologist and theologian Anthony de Mello (1931-1987). I’m not sure how I initially discovered his work; it may have been from de Mello being quoted by other authors or possibly from the podcaster Tim Ferris saying he reads Awareness every year. But regardless of how I came across de Mello’s work, I was delighted to see the new book A Year with Anthony de Mello recently come out (a great gift idea for any readers!).
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change.”
—Carl Rogers
In one of the passages from A Year with Anthony de Mello (which includes the quote above), he writes,
“People often ask me, What do I need to do to change myself? If you are one of those people, I’ve got a big surprise for you! You don’t have to do anything. In fact, the more you do, the worse it gets. That’s why people are so weary. The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t. This is a great illumination. Do you know what they need? They need to be understood. If they understood them, they’d change.”
How do you do that?
According to de Mello, there are four subtle steps:
You will first need to get in touch with all the negative feelings you’re unaware of. Lots of people have negative feelings they’re not aware of. Lots of people are depressed, and they’re not aware they are depressed. Only when they interact with joy can they fully understand how depressed they are. What negative feelings? Gloominess, for instance. You’re feeling gloomy and moody. You feel self-hatred or guilty. You feel that life is pointless and makes no sense; you’ve got hurt feelings, and you’re feeling nervous and tense. Get in touch with those feelings first.
The second step is understanding that the feeling is in you, not reality. That’s self-evident, but do you think people know it? So stop trying to change reality. Stop trying to change the other person. Watch! Observe! Watch everything in you and around you as far as possible, and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. What does that last sentence mean? It means that you do not personalize what is happening to you. […]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Perennial Meditations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.