Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices.
The method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse attributed to Buddha himself.
Vipassana is a direct and gradual cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by piece over a period of years. The student's attention is carefully directed to an intense examination of certain aspects of his own existence. The meditator is trained to notice more and more of his own flowing life experience.
Vipassana is a gentle technique. But it also is very, very thorough. It is an ancient and codified system of sensitivity training, a set of exercises dedicated to becoming more and more receptive to your own life experience. It is attentive listening, total seeing and careful testing. We learn to smell acutely, to touch fully and really pay attention to what we feel.
We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught up in them.
The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention. We think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It comes from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the ongoing surge of our own life experiences that we might just as well be asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to notice that we are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.
Through the process of mindfulness, we slowly become aware of what we really are down below the ego image.
We wake up to what life really is. It is not just a parade of ups and downs, lollipops and smacks on the wrist.
That is an illusion. Life has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if we look in the right way.
From - Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana
2020.09.30 -
Evening BHAVANA session w/ Bhante Saddhajeewa
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