Notice, as often as you can, that each and every experience arises, is here for a while, and then disappears. Just that simple. Recognize the constant change in the thinking mind. Feel it in the heart and know it in the sensing body.
Sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, impulses, actions — they appear and then they disappear. Notice that over and over. Take it in until you have no doubt that arising and passing is what every experience (and every thing or phenomena) does. That is the basic nature of every thing.
Usually we are so caught up in trying to make pleasant experiences arise and stay, or trying to make unpleasant experiences disappear. Or we get lost in the details of mental and emotional dramas,. We don’t notice the basic characteristic all experiences and things share: their impermanence.
On the cushion, in formal practice, settle into the grounded body. Connect with the breath, whether you find it at the nostrils, the chest, or the belly, whether the breath is long or short, deep or shallow, fast or slow. Let the whole breathing body gradually calm down on itsd own. Then gently open to notice how each and every experience is slipping away.
Alternate grounding/calming with opening/seeing. Experiment with going back and forth between calming and seeing, until they begin to happen at the same time.
And then in the midst of daily activities, just notice as you can how experiences and phenomena are arising and passing away, moment after moment. When we’re busy, our recognition of constant change is fleeting, but the power of fleeting insight gradually accumulates over months and years.
Let the implications of the fact that everything is changing sink deep into your bones. Know what it means in mind, heart, and body. Live that knowing in the choices of life day to day. This fleeting world is precious. We have some choices within a world of momentum and contraint, and those choices matter: they lead to suffering and regret, or to freedom and peace.
Closely related to the impermanent nature of everything is the fact of their interdependence. Each thing depends on causes and conditions, not on our preferences. Grasping at what we find pleasant and rejecting what we regard as unpleasant are inevitably unsatisfying.
As impermanence and interdependence are directly perceived and known, really known and accepted, then craving and struggling and the confusion which causes them come to an end. The deepest confusion is the illusion that we are a fixed self separate from the flow of experience that is happening to us.
Here is Buddhadasa’s two-step method of insight meditation:
- Breathe in and out with awareness, until you are just calm and cool enough to…
- Examine experience as it arises, seeing that nothing — not sensations, not feelings, not any of the mind’s activities — are permanent, ultimately satisfying, or separate from the causes and conditions that are cause them to arise.