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.
We make many decisions and choices in our lives. To choose one option, we inevitably sacrifice other possibilities. Beliefs and personal standpoints limit the range of our options. What are your priorities in life? What are your strongest intentions and aspirations? The Kalama Sutta offers recommendations for making decisions—consider what leads to happiness and what leads to harm. The ten unwholesome and ten wholesome actions, and ethical precepts are explored in this talk as guidelines for wise decision making.
Underlying tendencies (toward greed, hate, and delusion) fuel habits that obstruct our freedom. Tendencies toward irritation, anger, craving, and ignorance may arise in times of stress when our mindfulness is weak, and they distort our perception of things. But tendencies arise in both luxurious and modest environments, in situations of comfort as well as pain. How we relate to experience reinforces patterns and conditioning. Greed, hate, and delusion are causes for the arising of kamma (karma). The simile of the two darts describes the difference between simply enduring bodily feelings of pain, and proliferating reactions of anger and aversion that add suffering to our pain. This talk explores the primary tendencies of sensual desire, anger, and ignorance, and shows how we can free the mind from their influence in our everyday life.
Right view is an approach to life that leads to awakening, to enlightenment. As mindfulness becomes mainstreamed in western culture, serious practitioners should take care that the framework of virtue, the integrated eight-fold path, and the liberating potential of meditation practice are not lost. Both mundane and supramundane right view are examined in this talk. Ultimately, right view implies a direct realization of the four noble truths and of the model of dependent arising.
Our views, beliefs, and opinions affect our perception of events. To what extent do we assume that we are right and become attached to our opinions? With attachment to views we solidify a sense of self. Mindfulness meditation invites us to observe our relationship to views and opinions and see how it might be distorting perception by reinforcing a fixed sense of self. The term "right view" does not imply a more accurate or factual perspective; rather, right view describes a perspective beyond all attachment to views and opinions.
What do we need to know, understand, investigate, and realize through our meditation practice? In the Anguttara Nikaya. VI, 63, the Buddha described six things that should be known in six ways. The six things to be known include desires, feelings, perceptions, taints, kamma (actions of body speech and mind), and suffering. Each can be known through their presence, conditioned origin, diversity, outcome, cessation, and way to cessation. This talk explores the structure and details of this brief sutta teaching, and proposes a practical approach to investigating the mind and our relationship with life.
This talk explores the Nobel Eightfold Path and the Three Trainings of virtue (sila), concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (panna). We look at how the trainings lead directly to liberation.
Meditation can reveal the dynamic process of emotional life. In this talk, Shaila Catherine explores relationships between mind and body, between thoughts and emotions, and between present moment experience and concepts. Emotions are not avoided in meditation, instead we engage in a balanced and wise investigation of emotions and see their changing, impermanent, and empty nature. Transformative insight into impermanence may come through understanding the functioning of mental states, without worry about difficult emotions such as anger, grief, or fear. We will learn to respond, act, and speak with wisdom as we learn to open to the full range of emotional life.
This talk introduces the Four Elements Meditation as a systematic method for developing mindfulness of the body. A guided meditation and instructions are provided that reveal the body as a dynamic interaction of characteristics classified as earth (hardness, roughness, heaviness, softness, smoothness, lightness), water (flowing, cohesion), fire (heat, cold), and wind (supporting, pushing).
How does suffering manifest in attachment to views? This talk explores right view and addresses the danger of attaching to a position, philosophy, belief, or opinion. Primary sources are the teachings from the Middle Length discourses numbers 72 and 74. Recognizing the dangers of attachment and clinging to beliefs and opinions, we directly investigate what can be known in the mind and body. This is a pragmatic path of mindful awareness that results in actions that are immediately liberating.
Mindfulness brings a powerful quality of presence to our encounter with experience. By cultivating deep presence we meet life below the level of superficial concepts. We disentangle the mind from the story of self. More than charisma or social skills, deep presence implies a profound way of being which brings our momentary encounters into the immediate present.
