Catholic Meditation?

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My wife has been trying to get into meditation to try and move her faith from head to heart. She struggles with anxiety and found a book that was helping. It was recommended at a Catholic university. The book is Sadhana by Anthony De Mello. She knew he was a Jesuit priest but on further investigating it looks like the Vatican issued a warning about his writings as grave dangers. Is there something similar that is more in line with Church teaching?
 
For Christians, conversion is turning back to the Father, through the Son, in docility to the power of the Holy Spirit. The more people progress in their relationship with God – which is always and in every way a free gift – the more acute is the need to be converted from sin, spiritual myopia and self-infatuation, all of which obstruct a trusting self-abandonment to God and openness to other men and women.

All meditation techniques need to be purged of presumption and pretentiousness. Christian prayer is not an exercise in self-contemplation, stillness and self-emptying, but a dialogue of love, one which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ‘self’ to the ‘You’ of God”.(61) It leads to an increasingly complete surrender to God’s will, whereby we are invited to a deep, genuine solidarity with our brothers and sisters.(62)
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There is no problem with learning how to meditate, but the object or content of the exercise clearly determines whether it relates to the God revealed by Jesus Christ, to some other revelation, or simply to the hidden depths of the self.
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http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/p...s/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html
 
“Conversation with Christ” by Peter T. Rohrbach is a good book that has helped me. It talked about meditation from St. Theresas perspective and methods.
 
The Rosary is Catholic meditation. I find it very helpful.
 
Two contemporary authors come to mind. One is Father Martin Laird, O.S.A., who wrote, “Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation,” and the follow-up, “A Sunlit Absence; Silence, Awareness and Contemplation.”

The other is Father Jacques Philippe, who has also written several such books, including, “Time for God” and “Search for and Maintaining Peace; A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart.”

I’ve read all of the above-mentioned books, and found them to be most helpful.
 
The Divine Mercy Chaplet is a form of meditation. One form of meditation the Buddhist use is a repeat of a manthra over and over… Chaplets have the same effect and are prayers at the same time.
 
(Historic, traditional) Catholic meditation is a far cry from what is thought to be “meditation” these days. Many Catholics today link “meditation” not with the “mental prayer” of Catholic spiritual tradition, but with New Age / far-Eastern kinds of attempts to become mindless and selfless and dissolve into a fog of white noise. I hope very much that you reject any such recommendations that you might get, and instead seek the tried and true in solid Catholic tradition.

About a thousand years ago, the monastic method of disciplined listening to / reading Holy Scripture, called “Lectio Divina”, was explained very well, I think, in a letter from a Carthusian (Dom Guido II) to another, preserved and studied ever since as a good guide to this method of praying Holy Scripture, which includes and might even be considered a defining method of Christian meditation. The letter, titled now “A LADDER OF FOUR RUNGS BY WHICH WE MAY WELL CLIMB TO HEAVEN”, may be found and read HERE - LINK.

A contemporary booklet available, a guide to using this method - Encountering Christ in Holy Scripture with Lectio Divina - is for sale (Amazon) HERE.

The prayer of (Christian / Catholic) meditation, or mental prayer, is truly the act of praying Scripture. It is first of all engaging the mind with the saving Truth of God, in such a way such that the heart is progressively engaged with His Truth (which is what I heard your wife wanting), to the goal of full and intimate union with God - mind and heart, soul and will - which is the union of Life with Him.
 
I’d suggest the book “Time For God” by Fr Phillipe.
 
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