Insight
I keep imagining these words as a deck of tarot cards: you pull one in the morning, carry it with you, and let it percolate. You allow it to follow you around. It might show up while you are in a team meeting or the next time you catch yourself snapping at your kids. Ahh—problems, paradox…
insight.
Insight is a big word for me because it sits at the intersection of two traditions that have shaped my life: psychology and Buddhism. Both are interested in how we see clearly—and both recognize that often, we don’t.
So after we chose the word, I spent four days trying very hard to have a really good insight. No luck. Like an orgasm, the more you try to force insight, the more likely it is to disappear. Expect a major insight from me in a few weeks, once I’m done trying.
Want to listen to the audio of Diana Hill’s live “Word of the Week” talk?
Join Diana’s FREE Community Circle to get all of Diana’s live talks and meditations on demand.
Two Mini Insight Problems
Don’t work too hard at these:
MCE MCE MCE
What does this represent?
SIGH_
What phrase does this represent?
Hold them lightly in the back of your mind. Insight sometimes arrives after we stop staring directly at the problem.
The Psychology of Insight
When I was in graduate school, the psychology department was divided into specialties.
There were the clinical psychologists, which is what I was. We studied human behavior, psychopathology, and flourishing. There were the social psychologists, who were generally the most fun at happy hour. There were the neuroscientists, who spent a lot of time doing things with rats.
And then there were the cognitive psychologists.
The cognitive psychologists studied memory, attention, perception, reasoning, and problem-solving. They spent a lot of time staring at symbols on computer screens and asking people to complete peculiar little tasks. They may not have been the most exciting happy-hour companions, but they developed useful ways of understanding insight.
In cognitive psychology, an insight problem is one in which your first understanding of the problem sends you in the wrong direction. You reach an impasse because you are operating inside a frame that cannot produce the solution. The breakthrough comes when an assumption loosens and the problem is represented differently.
The answer may feel sudden, but the shift often has been building outside your awareness.
Sometimes the obstacle is not what you don’t know. It is what you already know.
Your memories, expectations, beliefs, habits, and previous solutions create what psychologists call top-down processing. They shape what you perceive, what you pay attention to, and how you interpret what you find.
Three Blind Mice
Let’s return to the first puzzle:
MCE MCE MCE
Each “MCE” is missing the letter I. Three missing I’s—or three missing “eyes.”
Three blind mice.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The information was there the entire time, but you were not organizing it in a way that allowed you to recognize the pattern.
And the second puzzle?
SIGH_
The word sight has no final letter. There is no end in sight.
These are silly puzzles, but they demonstrate something important: we can look directly at something without seeing it.
The Mind Is Bigger Than the Head
We tend to imagine thinking as something the brain does alone inside the skull. But insight often emerges through interaction among the brain, body, other people, and the material world.
Sometimes your hands and feet, relationships, or vast physical spaces can help you discover a lot more than thinking through things.
Insight can also benefit from incubation: engage with the problem, step away, and return later. This may be why insights arrive in the shower, on a walk, while playing catch with your kid, or a few hours after you hang up the phone.
Insight in the Buddhist Tradition
Buddhist insight is not merely a clever solution to a difficult problem.
It is a direct seeing into the nature of experience.
In meditation, we begin to recognize what has been obscured by distraction, denial, grasping, and habitual interpretation. Traditionally, insight practice points us toward three characteristics of conditioned experience: unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and not-self.
1. Unsatisfactoriness: Discomfort Is Part of the Deal
If you sit in silence long enough, or sit in therapy with other people long enough like I have, you will come to the insight- life is hard. Discomfort is part of the deal. And what makes it so much harder is when you resist, control or try and think your way out of pain.
2. Impermanence: This Is Already Changing
The next insight naturally comes from the first–as long as you are willing to stay with it. Everything, the good stuff and the bad stuff changes. As a doctor client said to me once: the bleeding will stop one way or another. Insight into impermanence does not mean we stop loving things, in fact we love them even more because we realize now is all we have.
3. Not-Self: You Are Not as Separate as You Think
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, going about our lives with our separate jobs, and houses, and cars. Until we get hit by the realization that we don’t operate in vacuums. You may have fences with your neighbors, but those fences don’t matter much when a mudslide hits, and you may think you can accomplish your goals on your own, until your goal becomes something like cancer recovery, or addiction treatment, or raising a kid. We need each other, and we are interdependent. That insight shows up in meditation, in joyful living, and most commonly in hardship.
Insight Is Not the Same as Action
There is one final complication: you can have an accurate insight and do absolutely nothing with it. As a therapist, I see this all of the time. No amount of insight makes a difference until you use your hands and feet and voice to apply it.
A useful insight should help you become more flexible, honest, compassionate, and responsive to what is actually happening. A useful insight opens the door, for you to walk through with your action.
Practice for the Week: Create the Conditions for Insight
Choose one place where you feel stuck. Instead of forcing an answer, experiment with seeing it differently.
1. Stop Working the Problem
Give it an incubation period. Walk without a podcast. Sit in meditation. Draw it. Move objects around. Take it into nature. Talk with someone who sees things differently. Ask a question and resist filling the silence.
2. Look for These 3 Insights
Unsatisfactoriness: What discomfort am I unwilling to allow?
Impermanence: What is already changing that I am treating as fixed?
Not-self: What relationships, conditions, or support am I leaving out of the picture?
4. Act on it
When an insight comes, take an action step that supports it. Now that you know what you know, what are you going to DO about it?
There is no end in sight when it comes to insight!
SIGH__