Tasha: A flash of insight can rock our worldview and knock us into wakefulness, but like a profound dream (or film, or acid trip) the insight soon fades and we’re back in our old patterns, chasing a memory of clarity. It’s not difficult to touch the profound, but it is difficult to sustain our contact with it. The practice of shamatha develops a serene, steady, and penetrating mind that can steep in it’s insights effortlessly. It’s said that insight is like the flame of a lamp and shamatha is the glass windscreen around it. Without the flame, we can’t see, but without the steadying protection of the screen, our insight soon flickers and is blown out. In this particular practice we “touch earth and sky”, building those qualities of mind from the ground up – from relaxation, through to stability, and into the vividness of sky-like attention; the space where insights flourish.