From Momentary Insight to Living Insight
Updated: Aug 26
Insight is not only measured by how empty experiences are seen to be on the cushion, but by how that understanding is embodied in the way we live.
By practising Vipassanā meditation and cultivating the three core qualities of samādhi, sati and equanimity, we start to taste more and more deconstructed experience. States of consciousness where the sense of Self and World fades, becomes subtler, or disappears for some time. The sense of separation, solidity and struggle gives way to dissolution and a wider, more open and spacious awareness.
But we always get up from the cushion and live our life.
These deconstructed states reconstruct over and over into our more separate, solid or struggling selves. Often, some flavour lingers—a little more space, lightness, ease and interconnection.
A huge part of the practice then becomes bringing these insights and this way of looking into our life wisely. Holding ourselves, our opinions, views and concepts more lightly and openly. Engaging with the world with more patience, openness and forgiveness. And at times, with less patience and a stronger sense of which actions—our own or others’—lead to suffering and delusion.
While in Vipassanā we practise seeing through Self, seeing impermanence unfolding and letting go of resistance, life also requires us to be a Self. It requires us to think about things, to make decisions and take actions based on assumptions and our best guesses at what things are. To accept and go through the struggle and resistance that will inevitably arise again sooner or later. To express our emotion and not only to observe them.
Friction is part of life and we learn and mature.
So the path is both one of transcending the Self, seeing through its moment-by-moment construction, and also letting a healthier more wholesome, less selfish Self emerge.
A healthy Self that can relate to others kindly, openly and compassionately, and with boundaries. A healthy Self that acts in ways that are supportive rather than harmful. A healthy Self that is held loosely and allowed to change, yet firm and confident when it needs to be. A healthy Self that is functional, helpful and knows itself, yet is happy to dissolve over and over.
Being who we are, while recognising that who we are is not a fixed, solid or separate thing.
Whether our Self is built around being a meditation teacher, a parent, a co-worker, an entrepreneur or a janitor, these life paths become the ground in which grows a healthier Self.
With practice and exposure to psychological work, we start to realise that some of these unhealthy parts of the Self are related to experiences and environments of the past, particularly from early life. The Self that was built in these times forms many of the building blocks of who we are today.
It becomes important then to do the work of becoming aware of how these patterns shape the way we create, work and relate to others.
The spiritual liberation of Vipassanā then also becomes a path of psychological liberation.
The psychological work and the spiritual work begin to go hand in hand. We notice parts of our psyche that still contract, think and act in self-centred and harmful ways that seem to contrast with the openness and compassion we experience during and after sitting or retreat.
Often, many of us are drawn to spiritual practice exactly because of these patterns of contraction and separation that we learnt as children in order to function in the environments we grew up in. It becomes all the more crucial to circle back and attend to these patterns even after we have been able to soothe or deconstruct them through meditation practice.
They tend to surface more when we are:
Dysregulated
In action or busyness
In relationship to others
Since Vipassanā is mostly practised in stillness, that same practice can be brought into the active parts of our life, which exist on a spectrum of being closer to the simplicity of meditation and further away.
Some of these different life activities might be:
Sitting meditation
Active meditation (walking/moving)
Working meditation (with a simple, embodied task)
Being by yourself
Being with others in social situations
Working on the computer
Collaborating with others
Relating to people close to you
Interacting with strangers
Being in difficult or emotionally charged conversations
Being pressured externally due to life circumstances—financial, relational or caretaking
These can also be mapped onto a few different dimensions:
Meditation generally sits toward one end of the spectrum: lower arousal, lower relationality and lower complexity. This allows us to investigate the subtler construction of Self, contraction, solidity and separation.
As we move into more relational, more stressful and more emotionally complex situations, those same dynamics appear in much grosser forms.
The same patterns of solidifying, separating and struggling appear as impulses to defend ourselves, hold tightly to our views, misuse power, judge ourselves or others, overwork, withdraw or avoid what needs to be done.
The only difference is that they now arise in the middle of a conversation, while comforting a crying child, during conflict with a partner, or under the pressure of work and responsibility.
Living Insight is therefore not the application of meditation to life. It is the continuation of the very same investigation under different conditions.
It is not about trying to maintain meditative states throughout the day. It is about recognising the very same phenomenological dynamics we observe on the cushion as they unfold under different conditions—in activity, work, relationship and the ordinary complexity of life.
For me, one arena has been becoming a father, which has brought me out of my “cave” and forced me into situations like these. These have been quite painful at times, seeing long-standing patterns of withdrawal, aversion and clinging arise and not having the space or time to meditate with them or even deconstruct them.
Less time and consistency for formal practice also tends to bring these patterns more clearly to the surface.
I find there is also a natural cyclicality to the practice and the path.There are cycles of spiritual interest, meditative insight, deeper stillness and more presence. And on the other side, periods of greater engagement with life, being more involved and busy – times for integrating or testing that spiritual insight. Sometimes working with Self and World. Sometimes working with Non-Self and Emptiness.
These cycles need not be resisted and we don’t have to think of our practice as something stable or linear. Rather, it is a long-term—a lifelong—devotion.
Awakening is a continuous awakening ourselves and our non-selves, rather than the big AWAKENING. There will be cycling between meditative insight and living insight.
Momentary Insight — depth work, subtle observation and seeing how Self and World is constructed
Living Insight — recognising those same dynamics as they unfold under the conditions of ordinary life and living from a kinder, wiser and more wholesome Self.
More and more, even this distinction begins to dissolve.
The duality between practice and non-practice, meditation and non-meditation, becomes less meaningful. The psychological and the spiritual work become part of the same dynamic interplay.
As DT Suzuki said:
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground
For more, see the Vipassana at Home PDF Guide
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