Live Meditation - Sunday Sangha

Sunday Sangha – 20th April 2025

This session is led by Shaila Catherine.

Start Time: 11 am PDT (LA) / 2 pm EDT (NY) / 7 pm BST (London) / 8 pm CEST (Paris). 90-minute live session.

This week’s theme: Protecting the Mind

The encounter with sensory experiences can lead to insight and calm, or reactivity and suffering. How do you guard your mind in the midst of a daily barrage of sensory input? How do you protect your mind so that tranquility and wisdom will be well established? The Buddha encouraged restraint of the senses, but this restraint does not require avoidance of sensory contacts or control of the external environment. In this talk, Shaila Catherine will describe how mindfulness allows us to meet the experiences of sensory contact – of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking with a mind free of reactivity. Mindfulness protects the mind so that it does not come under the sway of defilements. Mindfulness is a special quality of attention that is balanced in the moment of observing experience. Before looking, before reaching, before speaking, before any activity, we can establish the intention of mindfully meeting the experience without giving rise to anger, irritation, lust, fear, or any defilement. The practice of sensory restraint leads to a life of happiness and joy, and lays the foundation for experiences of deep concentration and awakening.

This session is freely-offered, but dana/donations are invited to help us meet our substantial running costs and to support our teachers. To donate, please click here. We appreciate your generosity 🙏

Shaila Catherine

Shaila Catherine is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online Dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley. She began practicing meditation in 1980, spent more than nine years in silent retreat, taught meditation internationally since 1996, and authored three books on mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

Her first book, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity (2008) introduces the deep concentration practices of jhāna. Her second book, Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhāna and Vipassanā (2011) makes the systematic practices taught by Pa-Auk Sayadaw accessible to western practitioners. Her third book, Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind (2022) teaches skills to overcome restless thinking, rumination, and obstructive habitual patterns. Shaila’s teachings emphasize deep samadhi, jhāna, and the path of liberating insight. Click here to learn more about Shaila Catherine.