Shaila Catherine is the founder of Bodhi Courses (bodhicourses.org) an online Dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a meditation center in Mountain View, California (imsb.org). She has practiced meditation since 1980, with more than nine years of accumulated silent retreat experience, and has taught since 1996 in the USA, and internationally. Shaila has dedicated several years to studying with masters in India, Nepal and Thailand, completed a one year intensive meditation retreat with the focus on concentration and jhana, and authored The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States (Wisdom Publications). From 2006–2014, Shaila studied jhana and vipassana under the direction of Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw, and authored Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana (Wisdom Publications, 2011) to make his systematic approach of meditative training accessible to western practitioners. Her third book, Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind, teaches skills to overcome restless thinking, rumination, and obstructive habitual patterns. Shaila’s teachings are characterized by precision, diligence, and gentleness. She emphasizes deep samadhi, jhāna, loving kindness, and the path of liberating insight.
In this recording, Shaila Catherine offers detailed instructions in the form of a guided meditation for systematically cultivating sympathetic joy (mudita). The method involves directing attention to beings who occupy a variety of categories, while the meditator reflects on phrases that stimulate an attitude of rejoicing. Mudita is a powerful quality that uproots envy, ends jealously, and overcomes aversion, chronic comparing, and excessive competitiveness.
In this guided meditation, Shaila Catherine highlights the powerful role that concentration plays as we cultivate the awakening factors. The instructions slowly walk through the sequence of Awakening Factors demonstrating how they create the conditions for the next factor in the sequence, and then explores various qualities of the collected mind and choices the meditator may make to further develop the mind once samadhi has been established.
This is a long guided meditation in which Shaila Catherine offers systematic instruction for cultivating loving kindness (metta) and compassion (karuna) through the use of intention filled phrases directed toward beings in various categories.
Shaila Catherine describes how the wholesome state of mettā serves not only as an antidote to anger, fear, and ill will, but is also a force that can overcome all the hindrances. A mind imbued with mettā is both strong and yielding; it is balanced and upright. Mettā contributes to both the development of samādhi and also insight. A mind strengthened by mettā will be able to face the unsatisfactory conditions of dukkha with clarity and balance, without blaming society, and without getting angry at other people. Mettā training gives us a way to take responsibility for cultivating happiness. When our minds are well developed, we will dwell at ease, in comfort, free from the hindrances, primed for abandoning lust, hate, and delusion.
This guided meditation offers a comprehensive training in non-attachment and letting go. The instructions list various objects and perceptions that one might be attached to, and recommend that we train ourselves to not cling to each item. Shaila Catherine shares the advice that Venerable Sariputta offered to the lay disciple Anathapindika on his deathbed. It is essentially a reading of the discourse of Advice to Anathapindika (Middle Length Discourses 143) with some comments.
On the occasion of the publication of her third book, Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Free the Mind, Shaila Catherine shares a progressive series of strategies to overcome the hindrances of restlessness, obsessive thinking, and rumination; dispel thoughts of anger, hatred, and anxiety; and curb habitual distractions. By freeing the mind from the fetter of restlessness, meditators can calm their minds, develop tranquility, strengthen concentration, create the conditions for jhana, comprehend the nature of the mind, experience emptiness, and incline the mind toward liberating insight and nibbana. These teachings are based on two suttas (19 and 20) in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha.
In this guided meditation, Shaila Catherine introduces a progressive series of strategies to overcome restlessness, obsessive thinking, rumination, and habitual obstacles and hindrances. By freeing the mind from the fetter of restlessness, meditators calm their minds, develop tranquility, strengthen concentration, create the conditions for jhana, and incline the mind toward liberating insight and nibbana. These teachings are based on two suttas (19 and 20) n the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha.
In this guided meditation, Shaila Catherine leads you through the first step of Anapanasati, also known as mindfulness with breathing. This first step is a great way to settle yourself during a meditation session, or out in the world.
This talk explores the fifth precept: the commitment to refrain from intoxicating the mind through the use of alcohol, drugs, or addictive desires. Originally this precept highlighted the dangers of home-brewed alcohol, but can be expanded to address the many ways we may seek to excite, dull, distort, or intoxicate our minds. By working with this precept, we not only strengthen our capacity for restraint, but importantly, we investigate how the force of craving may be affecting our decisions and actions.
