Shaila Catherine - Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus Your Mind
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The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind. Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddhas pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path.
Following the Buddhas pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind:
1. Replace unwholesome thoughts with wholesome thoughts. For example, if you find yourself thinking thoughts of ill will toward a person, try thinking instead of their good qualities as an antidote.
2. Examine the dangers of distracting thoughts. Weigh the costs of allowing thoughts of ill will, lust, greed, and so forth to obsess your mind. The costs of dwelling on distracting thoughts nearly always outweigh any supposed benefits.
3. Avoid it, ignore it, forget it. Develop the skill to turn your attention away from habitual distractions. Remove the fuel and let the fires of distraction die out.
4. Investigate the causes of distraction. By understanding the conditions that perpetuate habitual thoughts, you can learn to free yourself from those patterns.
5. Apply determination and resolve. Supported by wisdom, you can make a firm decision to stop dwelling on patterns of thought that are not supporting your deepest values and goals in life.
Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. Youll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities.
And ultimately, youll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.
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BEYOND DISTRACTION
Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind offers a comprehensive map for accomplishing the inviting promise of the title. Shaila Catherine draws on her deep reservoir of meditative experience and her careful study of the Buddhas teachings to highlight many of the familiar obstacles in meditation practice and how best to successfully overcome them. This book contains a wealth of pragmatic advice for both new and experienced meditators, and it will be an invaluable guide for all those journeying on the path to greater freedom.
Joseph Goldstein, author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
Shaila is a master of the mind. She brings deep wisdom from decades of personal practice and teaching together with accessible and pragmatic tools in a user-friendly format. Whether you are just beginning to meditate or have logged many hours on the cushion, this book is for you.
Judson Brewer, author of The Craving Mind
This book encourages us to understand our minds better, and to trust that we can shift from drivenness toward a gentler, more intentional way of living. Lots of helpful advice for these times, marked by anxiety and uncertainty!
Kate Lila Wheeler, editor of The State of Mind Called Beautiful
This is one of the most detailed and comprehensive guides to meditation out there. Deeply rooted in the Dharma but easy to follow, this very practical book will transform your ability to meditate, so you can transform your mind.
Kristin Neff, author of Fierce Self-Compassion
Beyond Distraction offers readers a treasure trove of practices to live a fulfilled life, free from the division of focused versus distracted. Shaila points out the myriad expressions of distraction such as daydreams, fantasies, and projections. She then offers skillful means to dissolve the notion of distraction and to engage fully with our priorities. Readable, clear, and down-to-earth, Beyond Distraction deserves a wide readership.
Christopher Titmuss, author of The Buddha of Love and The Spiritual Roots of Mindfulness
An excellent, entirely approachable, and eminently practical companion on the path of cultivation from one of Americas most beloved Buddhist teachers. Shaila Catherine has that rare combination of extensive understanding of Theravada Buddhist philosophy and decades teaching vipassana and jhna to Buddhist meditation practitioners in Silicon Valley. If you seek an exceptional guide for developing wisdom, compassion, and freedom from suffering on the cushion and in daily life look no further.
Lisa Dale Miller, author of Effortless Mindfulness
In this thorough and useful book, Shaila Catherine translates ancient Buddhist wisdom into practical explanations and exercises to help us work with our distracted minds. Her clear instructions and wise suggestions will help the reader to no longer be at the mercy of their thoughts and to find deeper places of joy and freedom.
Diana Winston, author of The Little Book of Being
Learn how to overcome distraction in meditation practice and develop clarity in your relationships, work, and daily life with this guide from beloved meditation teacher Shaila Catherine.
Shaila offers an accessible strategy for training the mind that is guided by the Buddhas pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Following the Buddhas approach, she guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind. Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the path to deeper concentration by directing your attention more skillfully.
Whether youre a beginner who struggles to tame a restless mind or an advanced meditator who strives to deepen their concentration and insight, the techniques presented here can help you cultivate growth and stability in your meditation practice and beyond.
With clarity and heart, Shaila Catherine shows us many effective ways to be free of stressful, anxious, hurt, and resentful thoughts. Her book is deep and vast, grounded in science and illuminated by Buddhist wisdom, and useful for both specific issues and a lifetime of practice.
Rick Hanson, author of
Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom,
and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness
Lost in Thought
T HE HUMAN MIND is a wonderful asset, capable of composing poetry, mapping DNA sequences, contemplating causality, developing the theory of relativity, and putting a human on the moon.
While we might not all have the intellectual aptitude of an Einstein, we each possess a resilient mind that can observe, communicate, investigate, problem-solve, and plan. Our minds can quickly process complicated information that we can consciously use to shape how we experience our lives.
Thinking is certainly useful, but the untrained mind may tend toward repeating distressing patterns. Many people suffer from chronic comparing, endless worrying, seductive fantasizing, or relentless planning. People can even develop anxiety through countless hours obsessing about the past or imaginative rehearsals of how they might respond to encounters in the future.
The Buddha declared, I do not see even one other thing that, when untamed, unguarded, unprotected, and unrestrained, leads to such great harm as the mind. The mind, when untamed, unguarded, unprotected, and unrestrained, leads to great harm.
The good news is that we can purposely choose to train our minds to let go of unskillful thought habits. As the Buddha concluded, I do not see even one other thing that, when tamed, guarded, protected, and restrained, leads to such great good as the mind. The mind, when tamed, guarded, protected, and restrained, leads to great good.
In meditation retreats, classes, and study groups, I have taught the sequence outlined in this book as a methodical process for removing distracting thoughts. This practice is designed to dispel thoughts that divert meditators from maintaining focus on their meditation objects or present experiences. These strategies can augment a wide range of meditation practices and can be combined with practices of mindfulness, loving-kindness and compassion, concentration, and insight.
The training begins by recognizing that a thought is just that a thought, a creation of our own minds. From this recognition, we distinguish what is skillful and unskillful, and then progress through a traditional training sequence in which we learn (1) to replace unwanted thoughts, (2) to examine the risks of fueling habitual patterns, (3) to withdraw attention from toxic conditions, (4) to investigate causes, and (5) to exert dedicated resolve.
When applied in meditation, these strategies can strengthen our mental skills, lighten our psychological load, enhance our joy, increase stability of the mind, and lead us to life-changing insights. These ancient techniques are also relevant to everyday life. By understanding how the mind works, you can strengthen focused attention, clear away trivial distractions, organize your priorities, and reduce the destructive forces of craving, aversion, and delusion.
This book will help you unlock the incredible capacities of your mind to think clearly, reflect deeply, discern what is real, and pay attention to what is actually happening in your life. Real-life examples from meditation students who have worked with this training sequence demonstrate the relevance and value of each step. A range of pragmatic exercises will help you apply the lessons both on the cushion and in daily activities. By working with this training, you can develop skills to recognize the nature of your own mind and abandon unwholesome thought patterns.
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