Anthony De Mello was born in 1931 and grew up outside of Bombay, the oldest of five children in a happy Goan Catholic family. His father Frank was a railroad worker, and his mother was a homemaker. The family originally came from the Indian state of Goa, and although its surname is Portuguese, they were Indian. Somewhere along the line, when Goa was a Portuguese colony, his ancestors had converted to Catholicism, and it was customary on the day of their baptism to give Indian converts a Christian name.

At sixteen, Tony entered the Jesuits, and the order sent him to Spain to study philosophy at Sant Cugat del Vallès, near Barcelona. Afterward, he earned a master's in counseling from Loyola University, Chicago, and a postgraduate degree in spiritual theology from Gregorian University in Rome. He was finally ordained a priest in 1961.

What is interesting about his early years is that Tony did not begin as the boundary-crossing teacher we know him as today. He was drawn to the Jesuits for their discipline, and those who knew him then describe him as conservative in his theology, even somewhat rigid, and not especially open to what other traditions had to offer. It was his time in Spain that seemed to have changed something in him. People close to him said he seemed to have experienced an awakening, and he returned to India with a broader perspective, and that his early rigidity had softened.

In 1972, Tony founded what would become the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling in Poona. A few years later, he published his first book, Sadhana: A Way to God, in which he reimagined the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola in an Eastern form. Through the 1980s, he led retreats across the West and Latin America, often at Jesuit institutions such as Fordham. In these retreats, his particular gift emerged: he would draw on Christian mystics like John of the Cross alongside Sufi and Hindu poets such as Rumi and Kabir, weave in stories from Islamic folklore and from the life of the Buddha, and bring it all to bear on a single, unified teaching. His first exposure to the power of awareness came from retreats with the Vipassana teacher S. N. Goenka.

Tony died suddenly of a heart attack in 1987 at the age of fifty-five in New York City. For those who would like a fuller account of his life, we recommend the biography written by his younger brother, Bill de Mello, called The Happy Wanderer.__​