Mindfulness brings many benefits, and perhaps the greatest of all is insight. Insight is knowing what is happening around us and inside us, why it is happening, and how to make it better.
These insights help us let go of the confusions and misunderstandings that make us tense and stressed and create conflicts with others. We increasingly recognize the changing, insubstantial nature of our experiences, which are more like clouds than bricks. Then we hold them more lightly, with less resistance or attachment. We feel more at home inside ourselves, more at peace and stronger, and more able to deal with personal issues or injustice in the wider world.
While insight is a natural function of our mind, it can be cultivated with practice. Through formal meditation as well as mindfulness in the flow of daily life, we become more stably present, with an increasingly penetrating awareness that fosters insights. They may begin conceptually, such as by hearing the words of a teacher, and gradually become a felt knowing. They move beyond words and become the truths you live in, and which live through you.
Let’s explore insights in six important areas: relationships, individual psychology, the nature of the mind, the apparent self, the ground of one’s being, and the ground of reality itself.
Relationships
The insights of mindfulness are not philosophical or exotic, suitable only for super-meditators living in a cave somewhere. They are down-to-earth and very helpful in daily life.
For example, when you are more mindfully present in a relationship—and less caught up in rumination or hijacked by emotional reactions—you’re more able to be empathetic and see what lies beneath the surface of another person’s words (while knowing that empathy is not agreement or approval). You see what promotes trust, cooperation, and good feelings in your relationships. You understand better how conflicts arise, and therefore how to address them.
As mindfulness fosters insights into a relationship, there might be shifts inside yourself, perhaps a softening of tension in your body, a lessening of blaming yourself, a clarity about a skillful action to take, or a greater compassion for that person—and perhaps yourself.
Overall, mindfulness lets you zoom in and see important details in how people are reacting to life and to you, as well as zoom out to a bird’s-eye view that takes everything into account. Mindfulness itself is objective and inclusive, providing big picture wisdom in relationships, especially helpful when the oatmeal hits the fan.
Individual Psychology
Much as mindfulness brings insights into other people, it offers insights into your own psychology.
First, you can see into the structures of your mind. As the brain and body have many parts and depths, the mind has many parts and depths as well.
Insights into yourself reveal how your various subpersonalities or inner voices sometimes struggle with each other, and how to listen better to the quieter ones while turning down the volume on others, such as pounding self-criticism. With mindfulness, you can see down into your deeper layers, such as the hurt beneath anger or your wounds and sorrows from childhood. These insights, plus self-compassion, can help you be a better friend to yourself, and more motivated and skillful in the honoring and meeting of your own needs.
Second, mindfulness helps you see into the processes of your mind. In particular, it brings crucial insights into what scientists call the “hedonic tones” of an experience—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—and what happens next. The untrained mind chases after pleasant experiences with clinging, drivenness, and even addiction. It also resists what is painful or threatening by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. This feels stressed, contracted, and unhappy for oneself and creates issues with others.
Broadly, this is the biological machinery of craving, rooted in an underlying invasive sense of a deficit or disturbance in the meeting of an important need: something is missing, something is wrong. Consequently, when you believe or feel that your needs are met enough in the present, the biological fuel for craving decreases. External factors such as poverty or rejection certainly affect the sense of needs being met. But internal factors play a large role as well.
Insight provides a kind of buffer or shock absorber between the hedonic tone of an experience and the craving that would otherwise follow. Insight also shows you how to grow inner strengths—like gratitude, perspective, and compassion—that help you enjoy what is pleasant without getting hooked on it, and pursue your goals while ultimately being at peace with whatever happens. Inner strengths also help you deal with pain and loss and injustice from a core of calm resilience. Then you can manage life’s challenges to your needs while being less hijacked by craving along the way.
To develop more of these inner resources, you can observe that your mind takes its shape from what it repeatedly rests upon—for better or worse. There’s a saying in neuroscience that “neurons that fire together can wire together.” This means that your brain is gradually taking its shape from what your mind repeatedly rests upon.
Unfortunately, the brain has a “negativity bias” that makes useful, enjoyable experiences wash through it like water through a sieve, while harmful, painful experiences get stuck and stored in emotional memory. Insight helps you reverse this process. It helps you to recognize and then deliberately take in the good to grow the good.
So when you are experiencing whatever you’d like to develop, such as calm, self-worth, happiness, and mindfulness itself, slow down to stay with the experience for a breath or longer. Keep those neurons firing together so they wire together. Feel the experience in your body and be aware of what is enjoyable or meaningful about it, which will help the experience leave lasting traces in your nervous system. And for more of these methods in positive neuroplasticity and their supporting research, please see “Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences” in The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2023.
In these ways, you can cultivate more love and wisdom and happiness, and whatever else would help you with the challenges you’re facing these days. We can’t do anything about the past nor anything about what is appearing this moment in awareness. But we can influence who we are becoming!
The Nature of Thoughts & Things
So far, we have focused on the contents and processes of consciousness, on what we are experiencing. As insight deepens, the nature of all thoughts and things becomes increasingly clear. This is not some sort of philosophy. Insight provides a direct knowing that immediately brings you into a greater ease with the world inside you and around you.
With mindfulness, you can see that any experience consists of multiple aspects or elements. For example, feeling frustrated while stuck in traffic involves body sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, images, desires, and more.
Second, you see that whatever you are experiencing depends upon its causes and conditions: perhaps the phone rang or something moved in your stomach or a background worry about your health has pushed forward into awareness.
Third, you see again and again that your experiences are impermanent. Even the ones that seem regrettably stable—such as that pain in your knee or that ache in your heart—have a shifting, dynamic quality to them.
In sum, as these insights deepen, you realize that all experiences are made of parts that are connected and changing. This applies to everything passing through awareness, all of the contents of consciousness. Much like a room can be empty of furniture, every experience is “empty” of essence, independence, and permanence.
For a sense of this, take a few minutes and try this brief practice.
Practice: The Nature of All Experiences
You can do this practice over the course of just a few breaths, or longer. You just let your mind run for a bit, and then pause to recognize three things about it.
- Establishing mindfulness, become aware of the experience of breathing, in your chest as a whole or even at a single point on your upper lip. Notice that the experience of breathing has many aspects to it. Perhaps qualities of warmth or coolness, of pressure and release, and more. Can you recognize that the experience of breathing is made of parts? Can you know that every experience is made of parts?
- Now return to simply being mindful of the sensations of breathing. Can you recognize that these sensations are occurring due to various causes and conditions, such as the movement of air flowing in and out, and the physical structure of your nose and chest and lungs? Can you know that no experience appears on its own? Can you know that every experience is connected to its causes?
- Now return one last time to simply being mindful of the sensations of breathing—air flowing in and flowing out, chest rising and falling. Can you notice that every sensation of breathing is impermanent, as it appears in awareness and then passes away? Can you know that every experience is impermanent and constantly changing?
- Rest as long as you like in this knowing.
And your brain has the same nature as your mind. In our Big Bang universe, the final pathway of all the causes streaming together to make this moment of consciousness runs right between your ears.
Neuroscience is a baby science, but it’s already clear that our experiences of hearing, seeing, remembering, loving, hating, longing, and all the other threads in the tapestry of the mind are being woven by billions of neurons making trillions of synapses with each other—like little microprocessors—dynamically firing away many times a second, all depending on various causes and conditions, including other bodily systems. Each of those neurons is made of molecules that are connected and changing. And those parts are made of parts made of parts, all the way down to the quantum foam.
In other words, your brain and body and eyes that read these words are just as empty of essence, independence, and permanence.
Insight shows us that all phenomena, all thoughts and things, are processes in relationships. At all scales, from an atom to an elephant, from the quicksilver flicker of a thought to the formation of our solar system over billions of years, all phenomena are eddies in the river of time, swirling together until they swirl apart.
Thoughts/things, mind/matter, inside/outside, all with the same nature: same/same.
Of course, the fact that thoughts and things are empty, in this specific sense, does not mean that they do not exist. A tangible rock exists. An intangible sight of that rock exists. Whatever exists does exist…emptily.
These insights into the nature of thoughts and things can be hard-won, as they push against the tendencies of our own biology. Evolving over millions of years, the nervous system attempts to unify what is made of parts, to separate what is connected, and to hold on to what is continually changing. Those sort-of-delusions helped our ancestors live to see the sunrise, and to pass on the genes that have made our human bodies. But today, with insight, we can become disenchanted in a good sense, and wake up from Mother Nature’s well-intended spell.
Recognizing the compounded, “spread out,” mosaic-like nature of any experience helps you deal with it not as a tight knot but as something you can unpack, and disentangle, and open up, and air out, to let in some light. Seeing the interconnected nature of your experiences—including important ones such as chronic anxiety or inner peace—draws you naturally into exploring their underlying causes, and what you can do about them.
When you see that all experiences are impermanent, so that no single experience can ever provide lasting happiness, you realize that happiness comes from letting go rather than holding on. And knowing that no experience lasts forever helps you bear the painful ones and hold the enjoyable ones more lightly.
These insights may begin as mere ideas, but they feel increasingly true with regular mindfulness practice. We develop more conviction about them and trust in them. They become the frame in which we receive the next moment arising.
What Self?
Now let’s consider insights into me-myself-and-I. A lot of suffering is associated with a presumed self, such as trying to impress others, getting stuck in positions, envy and jealousy and feeling inadequate, and taking life oh so personally. Insight into the apparent self immediately reduces this kind of suffering
For sure, each of us is a person, a particular body-mind process with a history and a future, and rights and responsibilities. (In this essay, the words “we” and “you” and “I” refer to persons.) We should have compassion for persons, and care for them, so we should have compassion and care for the person who wears our own name tag. You are a person and I am a person. A person clearly exists.
But does a self exist? Usually, we define the self as unified (there is only one self per person), independent (things happen to the self, but it is distinct from them), and enduring (in its essence the self always stays the same). When you look into your consciousness, with mindfulness, you cannot find such a one.
Yes, there are thoughts about a self, and sense of perspective from a self, and preoccupations with a self (“Am I broken inside?”). Yet all of our self-related thoughts and other experiences are themselves empty; there is no unified, independent, and enduring entity “in” these thoughts or perspectives or preoccupations. Further, you will never find the complete “self” that these experiences assume or point to. With mindfulness, you will find that:
- There are many sub-personalities, and many voices. There is no unified self.
- These many parts come forward and step back due to their many causes. There is no independent self.
- All the parts keep changing. There is no self that is enduring.
These observations about the mind are reinforced by recent scientific observations about the brain:
- When people are asked to do various “self”-related activities while they’re in an MRI scanner, different parts of the brain get active, depending on the activity; there is no single unified region or network in the brain that makes a self.
- The activations of these various parts depend on what people are asked to do; there is no independent circuitry in the brain for a self.
- These activations are dynamic and transient; there is no enduring neural substrate of a self.
So, when there is neither a unified, independent, and enduring self in the mind, nor such a basis for it in the brain, there is no self at all.
We can have thoughts about a horse; those thoughts exist and so does the horse—emptily. We can also have thoughts about a unicorn; those thoughts exist (emptily), but the unicorn does not. The purported self is not something that exists emptily. The self is like a unicorn, a sometimes enjoyable and useful fiction, but in fact a mythical beast.
Realizing this can be very unsettling at first, especially for people with a history of trauma, dissociation, or psychosis. So, it helps to shore up yourself as a person—grounded in a particular body that is here and breathing and going on being, and who is seen and included and cared about. As Jack Engler wrote, “You have to be somebody before you can become nobody.”
Nurturing yourself as a person while letting go of the self helps you hold positions more lightly, be less sensitive to disapproval or rejection, pursue your aims with more peace about the outcomes, and make more room in your heart for other people. You may become aware of reducing the complexities and vulnerabilities and dynamisms of other people to some kind of congealed static “self” inside them. Realizing this gives them more room to breathe, less need to defend themselves, and often the heart-opening that comes with feeling more fully seen by you.
You can be mindful of the coming and going of self-related thoughts and feelings and desires, and their related “somatic markers” (patterns of sensations) in the body. These experiences are not a problem as long as we don’t identify with them. Like sounds and sights, they are simply another kind of flotsam and jetsam in the stream of consciousness, appreciated if they are useful and released if they’re not.
As these insights deepen, you feel less separated, less beleaguered, less burdened. Instead, you increasingly feel your body and mind opening out into everything, supported and lived by everything.
There is both individuality and universality. Every wave is unique and distinct, and still each one is being made by the whole ocean. Every person is unique and distinct, and still each one of us is being made by the whole universe.
It could be scary at first to realize this. And then you can be gradually gobsmacked with gratitude.
The Ground of Being
As you become more mindful of all that is arising and passing away on the surface of awareness, the contrast becomes ever more clear with what is not arising and passing away in your depths. The mind is like a pond, and with practice the sediments clouding it gradually clear away. Then you can see into a ground of being that is undivided, uncreated, and unchanging. It is an underlying, always present wakefulness, peacefulness, wisdom, and love.
Perhaps the ground of being has developed entirely through biological evolution. As someone with a scientific bent, I ask, “How can this be?” And I don’t know. But I do know that it is real and actual, and as your mind gets quieter and clearer, you can find it. It is experienced and described in various ways, such as innate goodness, true nature, or inner light. You might pause here and find your own sense of it. You did not make it, and you cannot lose it.
Amidst the whacks and bruises of everyday life, there’s great comfort in knowing that the bedrock of your being is inherently good, indestructible, inexhaustible, and always available.
Over time, the sense of identity can gradually shift from the passing show into the ground of being in which the show is occurring.
The Ground of Reality
Many people with a deep practice leave it here, and some of them are my teachers. They approach our true nature within the frame of the conditioned, unfolding “natural” Big Bang universe—either because they believe there is nothing else than that or because if there is something else, it is unknowable and not relevant to their practices of healing, growing, and awakening.
And the insights of many other people, some of them also my teachers, carry them through the depths of their individual being out into the depths of reality itself, whose underlying ground appears to be meaningfully distinct from the clockwork operations of the Big Bang universe: not arising and passing away, unconditioned rather than conditioned, timeless and eternal, absolute rather than relative.
For some, this ground of reality has qualities of awareness and love, even divinity. It’s their ultimate refuge, even as they contemplate their own passing away. Over time, identity can shift here as well, with a kind of resting in this ground as the basis of all phenomena, all thoughts and things.
This is a matter of personal exploration, experience, and belief—with respect for individual differences, and humility in mystery.
On Your Path
Starting in simple, concrete, specific ways, our insights spread out and deepen and become increasingly profound. They free us up and bring us home. They offer the good news that we can influence our relationships and who we are becoming, that we can cling less and love more, and that our deep nature is wakeful and peaceful.
Sometimes we forget what we’ve learned, and need to be reminded by another meditation, or conversation with a friend, or simply looking out the window. Breath by breath, synapse by synapse, step by step, the path keeps leading onward. I sometimes imagine people farther up the trail turning with a sweet smile and beckoning us to join them.
Of all the insights, perhaps the most important one is simply this: keep going.
