Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind

With Shaila Catherine recorded on April 24, 2022.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

Shaila will be sharing teachings from her new book, Beyond Distraction. This talk will introduce five pragmatic strategies to help you overcome distraction in meditation and develop clarity in relationships, work, and daily life. The strategies are: replacing, examining, ignoring, investigating, and resolving. You can learn to unlock the incredible capacities of your mind to think clearly, reflect deeply, discern reality, and know what is actually happening in your life.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Trudy Goodman

    Breathe! Delight in Meditation

    How can we delight in our meditation? Learning to bring loving awareness to the breath, feeling the ebb and flow in real time as we sit quietly, is an art. The key is in our approach. Sometimes in practicing mindfulness of breathing, there can be an over-emphasis or insistence on focusing attention that drives delight…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of June 12, 2023

    This week’s topic is “All We All Need”. Meditation can be compared to an artist’s studio or an experimenter’s laboratory where we create what is necessary for well-being: connection, kindness, peace… What a wonderful blessing! Moreover, this is not just a gift we give to ourselves. Because of interdependence, we also provide what is essential for all beings.

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of January 22, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Wholehearted Presence”. Meeting experience as it unfolds with presence and interest, we uncover the wellbeing and freedom available to us on the Dharma path. Through this week’s exploration we will open to what supports a wholehearted approach to practice, and understand what is nourished and cultivated when we relate to experience in this way. 

    Read More

  • Brian Dean Williams

    Seeing Clearly in an Age of Confusion

    The Buddha spoke of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. We see all three of these showing up in the realm of global events currently, and in particular, the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, intentional misinformation, and delusional thinking. How might the practice of Vipassana or ‘seeing clearly’ help us in this context? How…

    Read More

  • dale borglum

    The end of fear: conscious living, conscious dying.

    Until we are free there is a fundamental fear of the spaciousness that is our true nature. Can we become intimately familiar with the urge to run away from the love, the spaciousness, that is the essence of this moment? All fear is fear of death, fear based on our identification only with that which…

    Read More

  • Mindful Intentions: From Pressure to Growth

    What effect does it have if we practice mindfulness and meditation motivated by the fundamental assumption that there is something wrong with us? Perspectives such as ‘not being good enough’ or being ‘damaged goods’ can turn our practice into a painstaking attempt to improve ourselves. During this session we will inquire into our motivations for…

    Read More

  • Christelle Bonneau

    From conditioned perception to true and free seeing

    What do we call reality? How can we free ourselves from conditioned vision and taste life more fully and truly? Acknowledging that our perception of what we call reality is completely subjective, Christine explores the world of perception to find out what is conditioning our vision. Each one of us has been often surprised, deceived…

    Read More