i am thinking if to take or not Shaila Catherine’s online course. i am thinking about it as there is a cost to it so trying to decide. i have read her books and heard some podcasts. helpful. i havent taken a retreat or course with her.
has anyone taken q retreat or course with her and can share inpressions? I’m looking to deepend samadhi. will this help?
has anyone studied Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw of Myanmar? he is her teacher and i so not know what he teaches. are the jhanas he teaches real? is he alligned eith EBT?
thank you!
and pls apologize if my several posts in last 2 days annoy you. i do not plan on posting much after this. Just in a bit of an exploration now of seekjng guidance in addition to Suttas.
She has written a few books. I would start there. Doesn’t make much sense to pay for an online course with a teacher whose work you are not familiar with.
Is it the online course in November? Those costs are exorbitant.
With the amount of talks available on YouTube and elsewhere, coupled with the fact that the Canon is available online for free, I can’t see paying a well-known lay teacher that much money. That is my personal opinion, and I don’t mean to impress it on you.
Pa Auk Sayadaw is a respected samadhi teacher. His approach relies more on the Visuddhimagga and Abhidhamma, so if you want an EBT-focused approach it is probably not your thing.
In the book Wisdom Wide and Deep Shaila certainly does use the Visuddhimagga concepts that she learned from Pa Auk Sayadaw. As Bhante Sujato says, Pa Auk Sayadaw is a respected teacher, as is Shaila, and the course is likely to be helpful. The question is what you really want/need from a course/retreat, which depends on where you are at present. If you are a relative beginner, then spending some time with a teacher in person who can get to know you, and give advice based on where you are may be a better option. My experience has been that I’ve learned a lot more from people who know me than famous teachers that I only had a chance to say a few words to.
The cost thing is tricky. Apart from in monasteries, where the running costs are covered by donors and lay labour, in most cases there is a charge for the accommodation/food or for running the online systems, with optional dana for the teachers. I must admit that in some cases the costs I see for some online courses/retreats seem high, but that comes from a position of having helped to run and participated in, events and retreats run in a bare-bones way - the teacher just sending zoom link, whereas some organisations run much more elaborate systems.
On the other hand, if there were a teacher I really wanted to get some specific advice from, paying for one of their online retreats might be an order of magnitude cheaper than travelling to see them.
Hi iwanttonibbana,
I took the liberty of shifting your OP to a more appropriate category as it doesn’t present any audio-video material.
Before you post something new it might be good to look over the category descriptions here.
