A clear state of mind arises from our inner work with confusion…

To fully practice insight training effectively, the practitioner needs to have developed a solid and stable base of concentration and free attention. Awakening or Enlightened Mind– Bodhi– an open & caring awareness is our seed to manifesting and growing deeply in this practice. Attending Meditation (Shamatha) draws our inner essence out… and Insight Meditation (Vipassana) refines and deepens our relationship with it- our fundamental human-heartedness- Good Heart– Brave Heart– Noble Heart. This is the curious field of inquiry surrounding the oneness– the wholeness of  directly relating to mind and experience.

Given the level of difficulty and frustration often associated with this practice and its instruction, it is virtually impossible to proceed with many of the transforming exercises without a teacher. A teacher needs to give instruction for the practice and feedback for your experience with the practice.

1. to show you how to look,
2. what to look at, and
3. how to recognize what you see.

This is especially relevant when you consider that you are trying to see what you cannot see. Not to mention there are numerous pitfalls associated with this practice.

Gentleness, confidence, self-assuredness, and solidity are critical to handle whatever psychic entropy (i.e. disturbances, disorder, and chaos) may occur as we shift in changing our relationship to who and what we think we are. Transforming our outlook and our relationship to our experience directly requires that we challenge our doing out of habituation, patterned existence, and ignorance. The dawning of insight & enlightenment is recognizing & acknowledging our habituation. We must come to recognize and acknowledge through our practice the nature of our reactive patterns. Through curious inquiry, we will discover that reactive pattern is webbed with a relatively fixed sense of “self”– self-absorption, self-centeredness, and self-cherishing. In the practice, our psychic energy is not directed to the self and the many illusions or delusions supporting the constructs of self, but to whatever we are experiencing directly or arising out of direct experience, with equanimity (i.e. non-bias,non-prejudice and non-judgment), loving-kindness (i.e. radiant warmth), compassion (i.e. understanding & sympathy), and joy (i.e. radiant presence). These growth qualities and heart-felt energies are what the Buddhists refer to as the four immeasurables. These insight elements are also referenced and used to help dismantle the emotional cores driving reactionary patterns like anger, fear, jealousy, envy, bitterness, resentment, etc.

As our insight practice develops, we begin reforming and refining the way we perceive and relate to what arises in our experience. We awake from being asleep with an open curiosity. Through this training and instruction, insight is seeing- clear, direct seeing- it’s our inborn knowing. It’s experience so direct and clear that you become to know- “that’s that”. It’s not an intellectual process riddled with speculation, deduction, or inference- nor is it a belief holding to a concept or idea that conforms with how we want things to be despite evidence to the contrary. Insight practice helps us to see the picture as the picture- it is not predefined by a system of thought, feeling, or belief.

As we hold our reactionary patterns in our conscious awareness, the energy from an undischarged emotional core serves to fuel and raise the level of energy in our free attention. To effectively dismantle any of our reactionary patterns, we need to possess a higher level of attention energy than that of the habit energy itself. Consequently, it is critical for awareness to be stabilized for this to occur. Otherwise, the energy gets redirected into the reactionary patterns- often intensifying them.  As the level of energy may increase in our system throughout our early insight practice, we may also experience waves of emotions unrelated to what we are doing, with inexplicable sensations or aches and pains, or sudden surges of energy in parts of the body.

Insight practice is only concerned with direct experiential understanding…

1. how the mind is present (i.e. thinking & feeling),
2. the essence of mind (e.g. knower), and
3. what is mind (e.g. mind is what experiences things)-

like a mirror reflecting what’s there… being “one” or “whole” with what is arising in our experience- no subject/object duality. It is this practice of presence that is our “one point”– an absolute- there is no inner or outer- we are one- immersed directly with our experience. Everything that arises in experience is movement in our awareness- arising and subsiding. Our patterns of habituation attach to the content of experience- stopping movement of the experience as it is.  Through insight practice, we must first examine and learn what patterns operate within us, and to distinguish their operation, as well as to recognize and acknowledge where we fall into reaction and lose attention- falling asleep to our own experience. We learn to observe in a non-critical manner, the mechanical quality of habituation, its lifeless, limited, and automatic nature through honest and sincere self-examination. We acknowledge our internal dialogue as the chatter of habituation- like the mythical sounds of the sirens, these alluring voices call out to us in order to keep us “hooked”. From knowledge and intention, one must also be able to volitionally change their behavior and to accept the results.

Awakening mind- moment to moment knowing- manifests from our insight practice. It makes possible for our free attention to cut through and penetrate our reactive patterns which corrupt and limit our capacity- our Way to be present with Good Heart- Brave Heart- Noble Heart. In attending presence, we are without distraction- letting what arises rise and taking care not to follow. This intention needs to be clear from the outset. For example, thoughts, feelings, and sensations need to come and go freely on their own. We are not concerned with the content of the experience. We are non-striving or non-controlling of our insight practice- there is no aspiration to try and make something happen- and finally, the practice is “no work”– we simply “go empty” to allow our experience to reveal itself and bring to light the realization of what’s truly present in awareness as it is occurring. With a strong sense of faith, we manifest the willingness to open directly to our awakened mind, and with the courage and the intention to stay present in the face of habituated patterns until they release into our free attention, and the open space of our awareness. Transformation flows from this realization, the dawning of our mindful intelligence, and the practice itself. It is through this confluence of being and awareness, where we touch the essence of sustaining our awakened state of mind.

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