One of the most attractive aspects of insight meditation is its iterative nature. No matter how many times we try meditation and don’t feel as though we have achieved our objective, we can always come back to it and improve. In fact, that is the very definition of practice. It is not helpful to come to insight meditation training with the assumption that we are going to achieve what we want out of it the first, second or third time that we try it. We have to see insight meditation as a progressive improvement overtime that will eventually lead us to our spiritual goals. That does require some patience but if we understand the goals we are trying to achieve and how valuable they are then the investments that are required to achieve them are minuscule in comparison.
Since we are aiming for progressive improvement rather than instant satisfaction, we need to have a way of measuring our progress. Measurement and evaluation is critical if we are going to progress because, without it, we could be heading in the completely wrong direction and we would never know. How do we measure our progress in meditation? The approach that we, as meditation teachers at the Buddhavipassana Meditation Centre, were trained in calls for at least daily one-on-one meeting with a meditation teacher as a mandatory element of a meditation retreat. As teachers, our job is to assess your progress and to encourage you to make adjustments where necessary and to give you positive feedback when you’re on the right track.
Once we have joined a system that gives us the feedback that we need to improve and continue moving forward, we no longer need to worry about whether we are doing the exercises correctly or not because we will get that information reliably. We just need to go ahead and do them. The satisfaction that we are seeking out of life will then come to us as a matter of course. Just like any process in life, if we have the correct cause, the effect that we desire will follow.