Insight meditation is about accepting things the way they are. If we’re fighting with the current state of affairs it means that we’re still holding on to it. If we don’t like the way things are, we need to take a different approach that will lead to overcoming the condition rather than suppressing it. Overcoming is not a complicated idea. It simply means waiting patiently for a particular phenomena to come to a natural end. The theory behind overcoming is just as simple: anything that has a beginning also has an end.
If everything that has a beginning also has an end, why do negative states of mind tend to persist and reoccur so frequently? Why is it so difficult to find a peaceful abiding for the mind? The reason, ironically, is that by fighting against negative mind states, we are actually holding on to them because pushing away is just another kind of attachment. Mindfulness is the antidote to this situation since when we are mindful, we can see what the mind is doing and how we are avoiding that state of mind that we don’t like.
If we train the mind to be in the present moment, we learn how to allow emotions such as sadness, fear, anger or craving to cease on their own accord. As these unfortunate elements of the mind begin to cease, there is room for peaceful states of mind to start to arise. Through this process we can reverse the momentum caused by negative states of mind so that we start to experience more happy conditions which leads in turn to more mindfulness and the effects that come with it, followed of course by increasing levels of happiness, satisfaction and peace.