Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well (The Anthony De Mello Legacy Library)

by Anthony de Mello

What Tony did for me was to help me understand the way our society programs people to habitually undermine their own happiness and then to blame themselves for it. Again, like so many of us, I was raised on the old formula that had me believing that if I worked hard, success would follow, and then happiness would come out of that. So, I followed the prescription. I worked hard on changing myself and my situation. Then, around the time I happened onto Tony’s work, I came to the realization that this formula was not the way happiness happened. It actually blocked happiness by producing a chronic condition of always seeking and never finding. Ironically, the first time I opened one of Tony’s books at random, I landed on a page which posed the very question that drives this old formula: What do you need to do to change yourself? Tony’s answer to this question astounded me. He said, you don’t have to do anything; it’s enough for you to simply be watchful and awake. Awareness, he said, releases reality to change you. He asserted that by simply being aware, all that is false and neurotic within you will drop and your eyes will open to the divinity surrounding you. You will suddenly see that all is well; that you are already happy, right now, and always have been; that you are already at peace right now, and always were, but you just did not know it. That’s where life becomes beautiful, he said, and all we have to do is to be aware of our reactions—positive and negative—and let gr...