Insight Meditation
Insight meditation (Vipashyana/Vipassana) guidance in Sydney and online. Explore the nature of experience and discover how it can naturally open into greater spaciousness and sense of freedom.
Insight Meditation: The Practice of Seeing Clearly
Insight meditation—known in Buddhist traditions as Vipashyana or Vipassana—is the practice of investigating experience to discover how it truly unfolds, moment by moment.
As our practice deepens, what we typically experience as fixed, solid, and separate reveals itself as fluid, open, and interdependent. Experience shows itself as a living process rather than a collection of fixed things. Rigid concepts and self-images begin to soften. The world we thought we knew opens into something more spacious and alive.
Insight meditation develops the capacity to see how experience constructs itself—and reveals how, through that very seeing, experience naturally opens into greater freedom and spaciousness.
If you sense there's more flexibility available in how you meet experience, if you're drawn to understanding how perception and meaning-making work, insight practice offers a transformative path of exploration.
Insight is part of my broader approach to meditation guidance and coaching. Continue below to explore Insight in more depth.
Complementary Approaches to Insight Practice
Insight can be cultivated through different frameworks, each offering unique methods while converging toward similar capacities for clear seeing.
Through Attentional Training
The Unified Mindfulness (UM) approach cultivates insight by refining three core capacities: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. As these attentional skills deepen, experience naturally starts to reveal themes of flow (noticing change), spaciousness (openness), and spontaneity (effortless arising). What once felt fixed and solid begins appearing more dynamic and spacious.
This path emphasizes gradual, systematic development. By training precise attention skills, insights emerge organically from your practice.
Through Recognition
Many Buddhist approaches work through recognition. These practices invite you to shift how you're looking at experience, following pointers refined by accomplished practitioners over centuries.
We primarily work with the lens of emptiness (sunyata in Sanskrit), exploring how phenomena lack inherent essence and arise interdependently. Ordinarily, we experience the world through layers of conceptual filters, habits, and assumptions that make things appear solid, independent, and inherently existent (e.g., "this is my anger"). Direct experience of emptiness is often transformative, leading to a freer, more connected way of being.
The Convergence
While these approaches differ in method—one building capacities from the bottom-up, the other exploring perspectives directly—they cultivate similar freedoms: the ability to suspend automatic meaning-making, to notice habitual patterns before acting on them, and to respond to situations with more wisdom and flexibility.
In our work together, we can draw from both traditions based on what serves your temperament, background, and current edge of development.
How we work together
I offer insight meditation as part of comprehensive meditation approach. Depending on your background and interests, insight practice might be central to our sessions or emerge naturally as your foundation deepens.
This approach allows insight practice to unfold in relationship with other styles of meditation, based on what serves your development right now.
In our sessions, we might:
Explore specific insight techniques suited to your current practice
Work with both skill-based and recognition-based approaches
Investigate what you're discovering in your meditation
Address challenges and opportunities that arise
Bridge insights from the cushion into daily life
Support the integration of liberating insight into embodied wisdom
The work is always responsive to where you are and what's ready to emerge, honoring both traditional frameworks and your direct experience.
Who this is for
This practice asks for sincerity and commitment. Ideally, you have:
A foundation in mindfulness or calm staying (shamatha) practice
A felt sense of safety and trust in your experience
A capacity to attune to your experience without becoming overwhelmed or disconnected
A genuine desire to explore deeper insights beyond practical understandings for “conventional” happiness
If you're new to meditation, we typically begin with mindfulness foundations before moving into insight practices. This ensures you have the stability and skills to work skillfully with what insight reveals.
Questions and answers
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My insight meditation guidance arises from a combination of formal training as a meditation teacher and personal practice and experience.
As a Unified Mindfulness teacher, I use this framework as a foundation for developing meditative skills and guiding the skill-based approach to insight practice.
As an Aletheia Coaching practitioner, I guide Aletheia’s meditation path that includes insight practice.
I also draw significantly from:
Mahamudra – Emptiness practices taught by various contemporary teachers
Michael Taft – Stack model and teachings on vipashyana
Planetary Dharma – Teachings on ultimate boddhicitta mind training
Rob Burbea – Seeing that Frees and recorded retreats
Classic texts – Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche and How to See Yourself as You Really Are by the Dalai Lama
These influences represent complementary perspectives that illuminate different aspects of the path. I offer an integration informed by these sources, adapted to serve contemporary practitioners navigating insight practice within the complexity of modern life.
My approach remains rooted in direct experience. The teachings serve as maps and methods; your own practice is the territory.
Next steps
If you feel drawn to explore insight practice, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation. We'll explore what's alive for you, whether this approach feels aligned, and how we might work together.
Or return to the meditation overview to explore the full range of contemplative guidance available.
Ready to start your journey?
If you're curious about this work or sensing that a meditation practice wants to deepen, you're welcome to book a exploratory conversation. There's no cost. Just a space to connect, ask questions, and sense what might be supportive.
