Shaila Catherine > Quotes

“There are two kinds of happiness; the kind to be pursued and the kind to be avoided,” the Buddha said.“When I observed that in the pursuit of such happiness, unwholesome factors increased and wholesome factors decreased, then that happiness was to be avoided. When I observed that in the pursuit of such happiness unwholesome factors decreased and wholesome ones increased, then that happiness was to be sought after.”7 The Buddha asks us: What pursuits lead to wholesome forces developing? And what pursuits lead to unwholesome forces thriving? The Buddha was a proponent of an efficient, long-term, sustainable approach to happiness, never settling for resigned acceptance of limited conventional comforts.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“You can save yourself a lot of anguish by investigating your response to the fundamental qualities of pleasure and pain. If you are unmindful of a pleasant feeling, the underlying tendency to greed gets activated. If you are unmindful of an unpleasant feeling, the underlying tendency to aversion gets activated. If you are unmindful of a neutral feeling, the underlying tendency to delusion gets activated.11 People commonly try to increase the pleasant, react against the unpleasant, and are dulled, confused, or inattentive to the neutral feelings. A skillful meditator will develop the flexibility to direct awareness to these subtler layers of experience and investigate the interaction of pleasure and greed, pain and aversion, neutrality and delusion.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“Meditation is designed to solve a specific problem: attachment. Awakening is not the experience of spiritual ecstasy accompanied by rainbows and fireworks. Awakening is the experience of a profound relinquishment of clinging, abandoning the cause of suffering. By understanding that the problem lies in the clinging, we learn to let go.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“As you stop resisting the fact that some things are pleasurable and other things are painful and cease diverting energy by trying to accumulate pleasant experiences and avoid unpleasant ones, you will discover an untapped potential to make significant change in your life.”
― Shaila Catherine, Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana

“This is an important distinction for the meditation practitioner to perceive. You do not practice disenchantment. You practice clear seeing; disenchantment naturally ensues.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“From a meditative perspective, solitude is not concerned with how many people populate your residence. Solitude is a contemplation of the question: What companions are we housing within our minds?”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“Concentration grows through the willingness to encounter, understand, and eventually remove all that agitates the mind.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“The human propensity to cling is the problem; meditation is designed to solve it.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“In each encounter there is a single antidote to all of Mara’s antics: mindfulness. Mindfulness is the secret weapon for which Mara’s army has no defense. Exposed to mindful scrutiny, obstructive forces always and inevitably weaken.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“Attention is not developed by riveting the attention to the breath with super glue or hammering it into the nostrils with nails. Attention becomes unwavering by the consistent willingness to gently begin again.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“Once you achieve the certainty that happiness will not be found by getting more sensory pleasures or thinking more interesting thoughts, your commitment to inner exploration will deepen,”
― Shaila Catherine, The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

“Every day, whatever you do, you trade a day of your life for it.”
― Shaila Catherine, Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana

“Mental stability is essential for this training. The use of mind-altering drugs, including legal plant-based hallucinogenic substances, is antithetical to the development of jhāna. A healthy mind is a rare and precious thing in this world — do not take casual risks with the stability of your mind. If you are serious about undertaking the practice of jhāna, it is critical to cease the use of mind-altering substances and develop skills in renunciation, right effort, right intention, and right concentration that will support the refinement of the higher mind.”
― Shaila Catherine, The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

“Emotions are dynamic processes that are in a state of flux. If you don’t refuel them through obsessive thinking, they will change and fade.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity