Insight Meditation

Insight Meditation is the form Theravada practice took when it reached Western lay life. Its technique comes from Burma — from Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin — but its setting is new: retreat centres rather than monasteries, teachers who are mostly not ordained, and students who go home afterwards.

The Insight Meditation Society, founded in Barre, Massachusetts in 1975 by Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, set the pattern, and Spirit Rock followed on the west coast. What they kept was vipassana and metta, sustained silence, and the long retreat. What they set aside was ritual, cosmology and the monastic rule.

That trade is the whole argument about this path. Its teachers say the practice travels without the forms; its critics say the forms were holding something. Both are worth hearing before you choose.