How to Practice Vipashyana, Analytical Meditation

When you practice Vipashyana, or analytical meditation, what are you going to analyze? You could meditate on the Four Immeasurables, or meditate on impermanence. Or if you’re radical enough – emptiness. It’s up to you. If you’re a maverick, a radical, you meditate on emptiness, or selflessness.

When you do those kinds of analytical meditation, you still need to turn your attention inward as you do in Shamatha, or calm abiding meditation. Because Vipashyana is inner analysis. It’s not about anything outside, it’s about your own realization. So turning your attention inward is still important.

And when we engage in analysis, in the context of analytical meditation, it’s important for that analysis not to be interrupted by other things.

Sometimes you’ll get distracted, going further and further away from what you’re analyzing. Let’s say you’re meditating on impermanence, and after you keep going for a while, you go outside impermanence. You’ve wandered into some other stuff altogether, and you’re distracted. When you recognize this, it’s your sign to come back – refresh and come back to your meditation, your inner analysis.

In Vipashyana, it’s also important for our mind not to lapse into dullness and torpor. In this way, analytical meditation has a similar quality to resting meditation. Analytical meditation doesn’t just mean you think thoughtlessly, going on and on and on.  It involves precise, targeted reasoning. Otherwise, it’s not analytical meditation; it’s just our usual thought processes.