Nondual guided meditation by Michael Taft
Shamatha (i.e. calming and focusing) and Vipashyana (special insight) are two different practices that may be used together to extend the effectiveness of each. In shamatha practice we’re staying with a peaceful and focused mind. Nonetheless, this is usually interrupted by intrusive thoughts, emotions, and so forth. In an effort to help ourselves to go deeper, we will then switch to vipasyana on whatever content was interrupting the shamatha.
Let’s take intrusive thoughts, for instance. We switch to vipashyana, taking the considering as its object. That’s, we do vipashyana on the considering, noticing its emptiness. That is the “special insight” that we access in vipashyana: to see the emptiness of some apparent object. Once the emptiness of the thoughts is evident, we will then switch back to doing shamatha, and the thoughts will now be much less of an issue. We are able to do that for any material that’s causing unsteadiness in our shamatha. Thus vipashyana supports shamatha.
How does shamatha support vipashyana? As our mind becomes calm and regular, it increases the insight capability of the vipashyana apace. The more clarity and stability now we have within the shamatha, the more penetrating and powerful the vipashyana becomes.
The productive interplay between these two techniques suggests a structure of practice wherein we go forwards and backwards between doing shamatha for some time, then vipashyana for some time, then back to shamatha again. Time and again. With each round of this back-and-forth, the depth of the shamatha increases as does the facility of the vipashyana. We are able to consider this as sort of refinement process, which might leads us into the depths of true emptiness and awakening.
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