Personal Insights: At the Heart of our Practice
Offered by Jesse Foy
Insight is essential and at the heart of our meditation and mindful living practice. It’s a light that reveals the true nature of our experiences, helping us find understanding, well-being, and genuine happiness. But what exactly is insight?
In our practice, insight is a deep and transformative understanding arising from our own mindfulness and the wakefulness it brings. Practically speaking, we can consider two types: practical and liberating insights. Practical insights are everyday realizations that help us navigate life with more awareness, understanding, ease, and skill. They might include recognizing the limitations of how we see ourselves, others, and the world, understanding the triggers behind our reactivity, or noticing how habitual behaviors limit our happiness. These practical insights benefit our daily lives, fostering wisdom and compassion and helping us live in ways that benefit ourselves, others, and our shared world.
Liberating insights lead us to profound understandings of the nature of reality and our relationship to it. They reveal the impermanent, interconnected, and non-self aspects of our existence, guiding us toward lasting inner peace and liberation. Insights help us cultivate "right view," changing how we see the world and helping us realize our innate Buddha nature. Insights are connected to, arise from, and grow our wakefulness.
Both types of insight are available to us in our meditation and mindful living practice. Usually, we emphasize practical insights, as they help us navigate our inner and outer lives, but we also remain open to the deep and transformative power of liberating insights.