A comprehensive study of the insight meditation tradition can teach you many things, including the Buddha’s teaching on how happiness itself arises in consciousness. The Buddha developed and taught the insight meditation method of using the power of mindfulness and living by its associated precepts leading to ethical living.

The basic practice is supported by a style of proper sitting posture and breathing. Usually this is taught by an instructor in the tradition passed down since the time of the Buddha. You are taught the importance of ‘bare attention’ and focusing your awareness in the present moment to gently deal with any and all thoughts. Mindfulness in motion is another insight meditation practice; it is also called ‘walking meditation’. Walking Meditation w/DVD & CD-ROM byAnh Huong Nguyen and Thich Nhat Hanh is a great guide featuring 5 audio guided meditations for walking meditation.

As you begin practicing insight meditation, you will learn to recognize and understand any hindrances or blocks to mindfulness and how to work with them. These hindrances usually include the attachment to desire and aversion, or to bodily sensations such as pain, sleepiness, restlessness or any form of doubt. Your teacher gives you the antidotes to these hindrances as taught by the Buddha.

Insight practice also helps explain the loftier concepts of reality and how these compare to the more common myths of time and space, as well as those of the self.

One of the advantages of full training in the insight tradition is that it brings awakening to truth, including that of human suffering. You learn to use the painful experience to view it as a part of the changing human condition. Insight teaches you to work with these emotional states. It provides you with a platform to understand and practice the Buddha’s principles of the Four Noble Truths.

When you learn how delusion is created, you can then use the meditation practice to free yourself from these habit patterns. You do this by working with the principle of clear seeing, developed from practicing exercises provided by your teacher to help you work with your thoughts, feelings and images. This helps you recognize and let go of the delusion to realize what the Buddha called the ‘awakened mind’.

In this tradition karma is defined as ‘intention with action‘. There are many other teachings associated with the insight tradition, such as those on the Heavenly Abodes of the Buddha, the Six Realms of Existence, and the concept of equanimity as a spiritual force. You can use the quality of equanimity to help you first identify and your conditioning about the base senses of pleasure and pain.

Through your understanding of the Eight Vicissitudes and the Six Sense Doors, you work with the body’s pleasant and unpleasant feelings. And through Saddha, your acceptance of the practice of Buddhism, you practice the testing of faith. The Big Mind exercise is traditionally used to test the true nature of faith and wisdom using the five spiritual powers.

Finally, the practice of Metta, or lovingkindness, is emphasized in the Insight tradition. It helps you understand and let go of any distorted view of yourself or another. This state or practice of lovingkindness helps you learn to correctly use your strength without anger. One of the biggest benefits of learning insight meditation from a true master is that you are taught to sit in meditation daily and learn to take your meditative awareness with you into your everyday life.

To learn insight meditation from such a master, you can go on retreat for a period of time. Or you can take a comprehensive home study course.

If you would like to experience a rich and sacred retreat environment in your own home with masterful instructors, I highly recommend Insight Meditation, an audio course based on the curriculum developed at the Insight Meditation Society’s retreat center in Barre, Massachusetts. You’ll learn with a qualified Insight Meditation Society instructor how to establish and sustain a daily meditation practice using the course materials.

The course includes 24 CDs and a 90-page workbook. The CDs have over 17 hours of personal instruction in daily meditation practice presented by Insight Meditation Society co-founders Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, who are among the West’s most respected meditation teachers.

The workbook comes exclusively with the course, and is organized to accompany the audio curriculum. It features exercises that you complete and return to your insight meditation instructor.

Through this course, you’ll discover the principles of mindful living to begin seeing past the illusion of life’s obstacles and moving toward an awakened mind state, which is the true freedom as taught by the Buddha himself.