About - Buddhist Author, Shaila Catherine

Shaila Catherine

Buddhist Author & Meditation Teacher

About Shaila

buddhist author and buddhist meditation teacher shaila catherine

Buddhist author Shaila Catherine is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online Dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a center for mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom in Silicon Valley, in California.

She has taught insight meditation since 1996 in the USA, Europe, Israel, New Zealand, and Canada. Shaila draws inspiration from the Discourses of the Buddha and maintains an unwavering dedication to awakening. She is known for her expertise in guiding practitioners to cultivate concentration and the deep absorption states of jhāna, and for her enthusiasm for sutta study.

Shaila is a Buddhist author of three books on meditation. Her first book, The Jhānas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States was initially published with the title Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity, (Wisdom Publications, 2008). This book introduces concentration practices and the absorption states of jhāna. From 2006–2014 Shaila trained in samādhi and vipassanā under the direction of Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw. She authored Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhanā and Vipassanā (Wisdom Publications, 2011) to help make his traditional approach to meditative training accessible to western practitioners. Her third book, Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind (Wisdom Publications, 2022) shares practical Buddhist strategies for overcoming restlessness and distraction.

Shaila also collaborates with researchers and neuroscientists with the aim of increasing our understanding of the effects of deep concentration on the brain, and documenting the ways that mindfulness and concentration practices are experienced by meditators. Read the research papers she participated in as a co-author or research consultant at https://shailacatherine.com/teachings/read/.

Training with Great Masters

Born and raised in the USA, Shaila Catherine was introduced to meditation during her senior year in high school in 1980. This introduction began a lifetime of dedicated dharma practice during which she gradually accumulated over nine years of retreat practice.

Shaila studied with renowned teachers in the United States, England, India, Thailand and Nepal and practiced with the founders of western meditation centers. She lived abroad for most of the 1990’s and trained with eminent Asian teachers including H.W.L. Poonja, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, and Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.

In 2004, Shaila completed a 10-month intensive meditation retreat with the focus on developing jhāna using the breath as the meditation subject. She devoted nearly seven months in retreat to working with mettā and the brahmavihara practices. And she twice completed a rigorous jhāna and vipassanā training program guided by Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw of Myanmar.

Shaila embodies the teachings of the great masters with whom she has trained. She loves deep meditation, gains inspiration from the early discourses of the Buddha, appreciates the detailed style of Abhidhamma, and values diverse approaches to developing and liberating the mind. She enjoys exploring a variety of meditation systems, but her preferred approach to meditation is to establish mindfulness by observing breath, body, feelings, and mind states—traditionally known as ānāpānasati and satipaṭṭhāna.

1990
Shaila with H.W.L. Poonja

Pa-Auk Sayadaw

Extensive Teaching Experience

Shaila has been teaching meditation retreats worldwide since 1996. Her approach to dhamma teaching emphasizes deep concentration, mettā, and the path of liberating insight. Students and colleagues describe her an accessible and compassionate teacher, with deep meditative attainment and exceptional clarity. She is regarded as one of the very rare western specialists with the skill to train meditators to attain the deep absorption states called jhānas.

Shaila teaches retreats on her own, and she also enjoys co-teaching. She has taught numerous meditation retreats with Venerable U Jagara that emphasize the gradual training, concentration through mindfulness with breathing, and mettā practice. She honed her satipaṭṭhāna practice while co-teaching with Anālayo Bhikkhu. In addition to leading retreats and producing books as a Buddhist author, Shaila has created some unique programs and courses. For example, she guided students through a 14-year study of all the sutta collections available as English translations, and developed an array of online courses to support and challenge meditators around the world.

Retreat Packages

Shaila offers insight meditation and concentration retreats with a variety of themes, teachings, and approaches to meditation. Over the years, Shaila has developed a number of retreat “packages.” Most of the retreat packages are designed as ten-day topical programs with structured sequential instructions. The duration of an Awakening with Insight Retreat is flexible, from a weekend to a two-week retreat. The topical packages include:

Concentration, Jhāna, and Breath: An In-depth experience of the sixteen steps of ānāpānasati samadhi

This retreat explores the instructions in the Ānāpānasati Sutta. Shaila shares her understanding of the 16 steps training to establish jhāna and realize liberating insight.

Concentration & the Jhanas: Cultivating Concentration, Jhana Factors, and Jhana States

This retreat will follow the approach to deepening concentration and attaining the absorption states of jhāna as described in Shaila Catherine’s first book, Focused and Fearless, republished in 2024 under the new title, The Jhānas. Instructions will use the breath at the nostrils as the primary meditation object and will encourage the development of meditative skills that lead to deep concentration (samādhi). This approach enables the jhāna factors to develop and a samadhi nimitta to arise, and inclines toward jhāna absorption.

Daily group instructions will guide participants to efficiently overcome hindrances, cultivate the jhāna factors, develop skill in the meditation object, apply balanced effort, and learn how to enter, emerge, and master the jhāna attainments.

Concentration, Lovingkindness (Mettā), and the Jhāna Factors

This ten-day residential retreat will provide instructions in loving-kindness (metta) to cultivate concentration. The instructions will emphasize developing five factors that intensify focused attention and characterize the blissful states of meditative absorption known as jhana.

The five factors are applied attention, sustained attention, joy, happiness, and one-pointedness of mind. Although these are called the Five Jhana Factors, they are not exclusive to jhana states. The teachings on this retreat will provide practical instructions for developing and balancing these factors while cultivating loving kindness; distinguishing between the jhana factors and the states of jhana absorption; and examining the powerful role that concentration plays on the path of awakening.

Beyond Distraction: Practical Strategies for Freeing the Mind

This retreat follows the structure of teachings offered in Shaila’s third book, Beyond Distraction. Participants practice mindfulness-based meditation methods as the backdrop for refining skills to overcome habitual thoughts, hindrances, or restlessness that may obstruct their progress.

Liberating Meditations on the Body, Impermanence, and Death

This retreat offers traditional meditation practices for contemplating the body and impermanence, including meditations on anatomical parts, four elements, corpses in decay, skeletons, and the perception of impermanence.

Seven Qualities that Liberate the Mind: Cultivating the Seven Awakening Factors

This retreat encourages mindfulness of body, feelings, and mind (satipaṭṭhāna practices) as the means to cultivate the seven factors of awakening: mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity.

Insights into Emptiness: Meditations on the Six Senses

This retreat will develop insight meditation practices using the structure of the six sense bases.

We will cultivate mindfulness of sensory experience, and contemplate the impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self characteristics in contact with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mental activities. By clearly seeing the emptiness of lived phenomena, habitual patterns fall away, the causes of suffering cease, and there can be a genuine awakening—a realization of nibbana.

Awakening with Insight

The instructions and teachings on the Awakening with Insight retreats vary from retreat to retreat. Morning instructions often emphasize mindfulness of body, feelings, and mind (satipaṭṭhāna practices), or the contemplation of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self (vipassanā).

Shaila Catherine represents a new generation of Dharma practitioner in the West, with in-depth experience studying with some of the greatest masters of both the Theravadan and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Her commitment to intensive practice has been matched by her dedication to study, and her exploration of the practice of concentration and jhanas reflects both these strengths.

— Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

I consistently find Shaila’s teachings to be accessible, clear, and inspiring. I particularly value the depth of Shaila’s understanding of the dhamma and her ability to connect it to experience that is relevant to my own practice.

— Katrina B., Georgia

Shaila writes with an authority that comes from genuine meditation experience, and a clarity that is informed by her own personal experiences of this training.

— Pa-Auk Sayadaw, author of The Workings of Kamma

Great teachers not only know their stuff, they embody what they have learned. Shaila is profoundly serious about her teaching, deeply attentive to her students, and yet she is never more than a couple of seconds away from a hearty and joy-filled laugh. She is a wonderful teacher, and her courses are profound!

— Michael M., California

Shaila Catherine is a deep, wonderful Dharma teacher and one of the most profound Buddhist practitioners in the West. She has a warm heart and is also gifted with crystal clarity of thought. Her talks and instructions glow with simplicity, humility and humor.

— Kate Lila Wheeler, editor of In This Very Life: Liberation Teachings of the Buddha

Shaila’s strongest gift as a teacher is helping her students navigate the nuances of concentration practice. In doing so she is precise and sensitive, demanding and encouraging, true to her Pa-Auk Sayadaw lineage yet mindful of the challenges we Westerners face in feeling our way into absorption practice.

— Martin K., California

Shaila is a clear, fervent, eloquent, delightful voice within the movement to restore a well-rounded understanding of Buddha-Dhamma. Rather than the trendy promises of pop Buddhism—better relationships and the like—Shaila’s teaching points to the promise of non-clinging to anything in this world, that is, liberation from suffering.

— Santikaro, editor of Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree

I appreciate Shaila’s integrity to the millennia old Buddhist texts and her ability to teach directly from them. I love the intellectual illumination I get from Shaila’s dhamma talks. Her clear, orderly and compassionate teaching has benefited my practice.

— Connie S., Texas

Shaila is an excellent teacher with a vast knowledge and personal experience of meditation and dharma practice. She is quite unique in the breadth of her experience, which arises from years of dedicated learning from the greatest living masters of Myanmar, India and the West. There is a precision, clarity, and humor in her teaching. In short, Shaila is an excellent and wise dharma teacher.

— Stephen Fulder, author of What’s Beyond Mindfulness?: Waking Up to This Precious Life

Shaila has both an encyclopedic knowledge of the suttas and profound skill in giving very clear, specific, doable instruction on how to apply the Buddha’s teaching to personal practice.

— Jude F., Texas

Shaila brings a wealth of personal experience to the Dharma that exceeds teachers who are a generation older than herself. Like yogis of old, she loves entering into extensive periods of silence and personal retreat. Such commitment gives her voice enormous authority. I would encourage everyone, from the complete beginner to the most seasoned meditator and mind/body professional to listen to the teachings and guidance of Shaila.

— Christopher Titmuss, author of The Buddha of Love and The Spiritual Roots of Mindfulness

Shaila is not the kind of teacher who offers a dharma talk and then is off sequestered the rest of the day; she’s the kind of teacher that is right there with you, practicing along with you, all day long, showing you the proof is in the pudding. My other teachers have ranged from being totally unapproachable to minimally accessible. Shaila breaks the mold and offers herself, her teachings, her direct experience, and the great teachings from her respected lineage freely and openly. Months after attending a retreat led by Shaila, my heart is still full of gratitude for what she was kind enough to offer me.

— Gary Sanders, Insight Meditation Teacher

Studying with Shaila is a precious gift. She has something to offer everyone, from beginner to advanced practitioner. Her pragmatic teaching style ensures that I always walk away from her classes with not only a deeper understanding of the Dhamma, but also a clear understanding of how the Dhamma applies to my own spiritual practice.

— Kathleen N., Indiana

As a laywoman who has crafted a beautifully dedicated life, Shaila guides by example. I highly recommend Shaila as a trustworthy and compassionate guide who has walked the path in many traditions and forms, and has the ability to help sincere students, at any level, to find ease for the suffering of our human condition and to discover its hidden potential.

— Kate Lila Wheeler, editor of In This Very Life: Liberation Teachings of the Buddha

Shaila is a terrific Dharma teacher and accomplished Buddhist practitioner, a genuine Bodhisattva. I have known her for many years, in both India and America. We studied and practiced together under some of the same master teachers. She has a clear mind and a generous, loving and unselfish heart. I believe that anyone interested in our practice tradition would benefit by studying with her.

— Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within

I can’t recommend highly enough Shaila Catherine’s dhamma teachings. Grounded in decades of deep meditation experience and study, her guidance offers a rare combination of heart, intellectual rigor, down-to-earth practicality, and a faithfulness to tradition that’s balanced by refreshing open-mindedness. Beginners and veterans alike will benefit from her wisdom and the loving care with which she presents the dhamma.

– Jeremy G., Arizona