Vipassana (or “Insight”) meditation was the foundation on which mindfulness meditation (or MBSR - Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction) was originally developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Vipassana is a spiritual tradition, whose aim is fundamental existential transformation and the realisation of our full spiritual potential.

On the face of it, this technique is strikingly simple. At its core we find a pair of ideas. First, that the root of our discontent is that we don’t know ourselves well enough, because most of us haven’t learnt how to be present or mindful, i.e. how to show up and take a good, honest look at our only window to the world: our experience. And second, that the best way to start the development of this skill is to take some time and simply start paying attention to what is inevitably always there: our own body and its sensations.

While the ultimate goal of the practice of Vipassana meditation may be capital-I-Insight into the true nature of existence, the road to these leads through dozens-and-dozens of small-i-insights into our own lives, our own (to a large extent unconscious) behaviours, motivations, dispositions and character. Hence this tradition (in its first stages anyway) offers a concrete, simple and highly effective tool to pursue one of the oldest spiritual-political-philosophical enterprises of our world that we know of, and reply to the ancient Greeks’ call to “Know thyself!”.