Vipassana Meditation Practice – Introductory Journey 1
This is the first of a series of posts on vipassana-based meditation practices. The introductory journey set will not be pure vipassana; rather this set of meditations will be about practice with core principles and learning experiences in regular vipassana meditation. Rather than explain background information, I will guide a brief meditation on central principles and experiences within the vipassana framework of meditation. This process will be more difficult than simply verbally presenting information; however, it will also be far more effective relative to experiencing.
- Begin by settling in on your cushion or chair. Focus on calm, deep, slow breathing practice. Notice closely the movement of air into and out of the body. Pay closer and closer attention to this experience with the breath. Become highly intimate with the experience.
- Using your imagination, contemplate about insights or flashes of insight related to the reality of impermanence of all things and experiences. Go to that reality now and meditate on it with close attention. This is a difficult process, but approach it with a strong intention.
- Now move your attention to misperception of relative reality. Focus on the necessary knowledge required to understand via meditative experience that things are really NOT as they appear to our minds. Liberating mind and natural mind may allow you to be in true experience with a more true reality of being human. Our happiness in life will depend on how we learn to use our mind to understand at deeper levels the true nature of things and impermanent reality.
- Now shift gently to the topic of greed, and how our sense-pleasure desires (attachments, cravings) provide us with short-term pleasure but NO long-term happiness. Such happiness based on grasping at sense-pleasures cannot last long. Impermanence is at work once again. Thus a general dissatisfaction is the outcome.
- Meditate on your own reality of holding on to and clinging to sense-pleasures as a key source of your own suffering. Grasping happiness cannot last long. Be with that reality now.
- Buddhist psychology, especially specific Abhidhamma teachings, allow us to better understand HOW the mind work, and HOW all experience is broken down into smaller and smaller irreducible components all the way to atoms and beyond. In the end of this analysis, we experience emptiness of independent arising of things/experiences and the dearth of concrete separation among all things and experiences. This is a difficult reality to grasp, intellectually, let alone experientially.
- The endless search for sense-pleasures to make us happier, as well as the endless effort to avoid pain and suffering, end in the same place – more suffering. Conditioned life in samsara, where we spend most of our “awake” time trying to gain satisfaction via experiencing sense-pleasures and avoiding pain and suffering, fails all the time. So WHAT, then, is the path to joy and happiness – or at least a sense of personal satisfaction in life? Contemplate this for yourself.
- Vipassana may begin with deep meditation on the breath, sensations, thoughts, and the letting go of the same. However, it certainly does not end there. As we learn to let go of concepts and mind in deep vipassana meditation, we begin to see glimpses of a more ultimate reality. This insightful experienced knowledge leads us to true impermanence, emptiness (non-voided emptiness), dependent origination, and ultimately to no-self as the experiencer. There is no space between the object of attention the the experiencer of it.
- Now very slowly bring your attention and concentration back to the here and now – in this room. Take a few deep, slow, calm breaths. Prepare to end this meditation.
For more information refer to Catherine, S. (2011). Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 253-431.
By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC
From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont
Author of Mindful Happiness
Vipassana is a very old form of meditation, there must be something helpful about practicing it. A key principle in Vipassana is that as people learn to refine perception of awareness – in this case usually of bodily sensations – they also begin to realize a key tenet of meditative theory. That tenet is: all experiences and phenomena of the human mind and body are impermanent. Awareness and the experience itself simply arise and fall away. Mindful attention and refined concentration on personal experiences (including joy and suffering) augment understandings that all human experience (including human life) is impermanent. Readers are advised to read Goenka on your own. In that way you will obtain a well-informed cognitive explanation of the process. Here I will provide a few Vipassana guidelines and training suggestions. I hope you will try them.
your eyes opened or closed, relax your jaw, bodily muscles, and move into a slower, deeper breathing pattern. Refine your attention so you can become aware bio-perceptually of the feeling of your breath in your body. Many thoughts will come into awareness; simply allow them to pass and return stronger attention to the feeling of your breath as you breathe in and out. As you sit quietly paying strong attention to the feeling of your breath, notice gently what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling. Just pay close attention without judging, associating, following, expanding, or responding to whatever arises in awareness. Starting at the very top of your head, pay close attention to any sensation that arises. You may even notice that the attention by itself may cause some form of feeling. Slowly move to the tip of your nose, then to the center front of your throat. Just noticing sensations in a more concentrative manner. Move onto another part of your body and just pay attention to the sensations as they arise and fall away. Practice pure awareness without evaluation, seeking, dreading, etc. As you also notice thoughts and emotions arising, simply label them “thought” and “emotions.” Do nothing with them; simply continue to pay strong attention to the sensations you notice in various parts of your body. To extend this practice, select one part of your body to pay strong attention to it for 15 minutes or more.