The Core Skills of Vipassana Meditation

The framework presented here is an adaptation of Shinzen Young’s work, who describes mindfulness practice as cultivating three mental qualities: Concentration, Clarity and Equanimity. I have adapted these into Stability, Clarity and Equanimity, while drawing on the traditional Buddhist mental faculties of Samādhi, Sati and Upekkhā.

STABILITY of Attention (Samādhi)

Building the capacity for stable attention (Samadhi) is one of the foundations of Vipassanā meditation.

Attentional stability helps us become less distracted, sustain investigation on experience more continuously, and see deeper and more subtle layers of experience. It also naturally calms the mind and simplifies experience. The opposite is an attention that is constantly reactive, scattered and pulled around by every impulse.

In every tradition I’ve encountered, practice begins by developing a basic degree of stable attention. This provides the foundation for everything that follows.

Stability of attention is usually trained by choosing a particular meditation object—a particular aspect of experience to stay with. This might be the sensations of breathing around the nostrils, the movement of the belly, or another area of the body. It can also be developed through systematically moving attention between different touch points or through the body in a particular order, as in body scanning.

Training Samādhi using sensory experiences rather than mental visualisation or mantra  is usually the most supportive foundation for Vipassanā because it naturally develops the second quality of sensory clarity.

There are two basic ways to improve attentional stability:

• Practice sustaining attention. Meditation is one way, but so are many activities that require continuous attention such as music, movement practice, arts or focused work.

• Stop doing things that constantly fragment attention. Highly stimulating, fast-switching activities—such as endlessly scrolling social media or multitasking—train the opposite habit. They strengthen reactivity and weaken attentional stability.

  
  

There is a basic level of attentional stability that is helpful before beginning deeper Vipassanā practice. If you can stay with the breath for roughly half of a meditation sitting, you’re already in a good place to begin. As that gradually increases, perhaps staying present around 80% of the time and becoming completely lost only occasionally, the mind becomes stable enough for investigation.

A common belief is imagining Samādhi as a tight, laser-like concentration. In my experience, Samādhi feels much more like stability than strain. It is steady, relaxed and continuous rather than narrow, forceful or effortful.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL CLARITY (Sati)

A phenomenon is anything that appears in experience.

A sensation of warmth in the hands.The sound of a bird. A feeling of sadness. The image of a friend’s face. The thought, “I’m not doing this right.” A tingling in the body.

Phenomena are simply the experiences that arise from moment to moment.

Developing Sati means becoming able to remain with phenomenological experience more continuously and with greater clarity.

A useful analogy is a camera. Consciousness is like the camera, while phenomena are the scene it is observing. As Sati develops, it is as though the camera gains a higher frame rate and a higher resolution. It sees more. It sees more continuously. It misses less. Now imagine that the camera does not only capture in 2D - it becomes 3D, or even 4D.

Our conscious experience is vastly richer. Some theories in mathematical neuroscience even suggest that the brain may operate within an approximately eleven-dimensional state space. Our experience is extraordinarily rich, and as mindfulness develops we begin perceiving more and more of what was already there.

When we spend long periods dreaming, planning or thinking without recognising it, and when we can barely perceive what is happening in the body and mind, phenomenological clarity is relatively low.

Through practice this changes.

We begin to spend more time with experience than lost in thought. We begin distinguishing thoughts from sensations, sensations from mental images, emotional energy from their stories. As Sati develops, we remain with experience more continuously and begin perceiving increasingly subtle phenomena. Sati also helps us notice mind-wandering earlier and quicker than before.

Phenomenological clarity is important because it allows us to observe experience as it unfolds in real time with less and less interference. Vipassanā means seeing clearly. As clarity develops, insight naturally begins to arise. Wisdom comes from seeing.

Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge. It is overlooking our direct experience and becoming caught in the thoughts, stories and beliefs that the mind continuously creates.

Combined with stable attention, phenomenological clarity allows us to investigate experience more deeply, more completely and more continuously. This is the ground from which insight naturally emerges.

One common mistake is to confuse this with intellectual clarity. Sati is not primarily about thinking more clearly or understanding concepts better, although those may become side effects. It is the clarity of direct experience.

EQUANIMITY with What Is Arising (Upekkhā)

Equanimity is just as important as stability and clarity.

Equanimity means relating to experience with a balanced openness. We are not getting caught and entangled in what is happening, but neither are we looking away from it or ignoring it.

I also like to think of Upekkhā as the spaciousness with which experience is perceived. That’s the felt sense of equanimity.

The Buddha gave a beautiful analogy.

Place a handful of salt into a small cup of water and the water becomes undrinkable. Put that same handful of salt into the Ganges River and you hardly notice it.

The amount of salt hasn’t changed. The size of the container has.

When we experience life from a contracted, collapsed place, every thought, emotion or sensation feels overwhelming. We tighten around experience. We resist it. We struggle against it.

As equanimity develops, there is a greater openness and spaciousness within which experience unfolds. Thoughts, feelings and sensations leave less trace. There is less tightening, less contraction and more freedom for experience to move through.

Equanimity is the vastness and openness with which phenomenological experience is felt—or, from a more non-dual perspective, the vastness and openness as which it is felt.

There are many depths of equanimity.

One subtle but important point is that we can even practise equanimity towards our own lack of equanimity. We can be okay with not feeling okay. We can allow ourselves to be unbalanced without needing to immediately become balanced.

Importantly, equanimity is not dullness, emotional suppression or indifference. It is not a subtle form of aversion. With mature equanimity we remain fully engaged with life, fully capable of love and care, yet deep down there is something that remains fundamentally unshaken.

The Three Skills Become One

At first these three qualities feel like separate skills that we intentionally cultivate.

We learn to stabilise attention. We learn to perceive experience more clearly. We learn to relate to it with greater openness and equanimity.

Over time, however, they begin to merge.

Stable attention naturally becomes clearer. Greater clarity naturally supports equanimity. Equanimity allows attention to become more stable. They stop feeling like separate skills and become different aspects of the same awareness.

Ultimately these three distinct skills reveal themselves as the natural qualities of awake awareness itself—of natural presence, of consciousness—that were already here from the very beginning.

We were so caught up in thinking that we didn’t notice them.

In the beginning, these qualities need to be cultivated with some degree of intention and effort. At a certain point, however, it becomes more helpful to shift from cultivating them intentionally to recognising that they are already here, effortlessly.

Rather than trying to create awareness, we notice awareness is already fully awake, stable, clear and knowing. The meditation gradually moves from cultivation to recognition, from effort to effortlessness, from practice to view.

See more in the Vipassana at Home free PDF