The following are ways of understanding and relating to the 2500 year old teachings about the nature of life in this world and meditation practice for maintaining the balance and clarity in our everyday lives:
Witnessing your experience: an attitude of neutrality, which is restricted to the bare registering of physical and mental events without attaching to any or posturing or positioning oneself – ‘just witnessing’.
Non-clinging: rather than seeking gratification of wishes, impulses, desires, there has to be at least some degree of non-clinging to create the space to see and ‘let go’.
Removal of the Censor: an attitude of acceptance of all thoughts, emotions, feelings and sensations coming into awareness, with impartiality, without censorship.
Cultivating Receptivity: Vipassana meditation is tuning in and being sensitive to, and intimate with, what is observed, from a place of spaciousness – ‘receptivity’ moment by moment throughout our days and nights. An image often used to describe the practice of this awareness is that of walking a tightrope. In order to do so, you must necessarily pay attention to the balance. In meditation practice, this applies to how you are relating to your experience. Reaching out to grasp the object (attaching) or pushing it away (rejecting) are both reactions that are unbalancing. Keeping your balance is developing a mind that does not cling or reject, like or dislike, and is without attachment or condemnation. Balance and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable stress and conflict is to practise the Buddha’s Middle Way.
For a meditator, developing the ability to adjust and manage one’s own effort in practice is essential. A certain effort is involved in developing ‘moment-to-moment awareness’, but it is not the effort to attain anything in the future. The effort is to stay in the present, just paying attention with equanimity in the face of what is happening in the moment, and then choosing one’s actions and living intentionally. The Theravadan teachings about compassion, generosity, ethics and moral precepts are training aids to help with living with intentionality and balance.