What is Insight?

Insight: When Practice Starts Seeing for Itself

There’s a moment in every yoga practitioner’s life—usually somewhere between your third attempt at Marichyasana D and your first truly calm Savasana—when something clicks. It’s not a stretch, not a pose, not even a breath. It’s a flash of understanding that doesn’t come from reading or reasoning but from seeing. That’s what we call insight.

So what is insight? In Sanskrit, it’s close to vipashyana—clear seeing. In systems language, it’s when the feedback loop of your practice becomes self-aware. You’ve done the work long enough that the system (that’s you, by the way) begins to understand itself from the inside out. Insight isn’t new information; it’s transformation. It’s the moment the lights come on in the room you’ve been living in all along.

Praxis → Insight

If praxis is the marriage of study and experience, insight is the child of that union. You practice; you reflect; you adjust. Eventually, the process itself starts teaching you. The body learns to listen, the mind learns to stop interrupting, and awareness starts noticing patterns you didn’t even know you had—on and off the mat. That noticing? That’s insight. It’s what happens when you’ve been repeating the same vinyasa for months and suddenly understand that the point was never the jump-through but the quality of attention you bring to it.

In Vipassana terms

In Vipassana meditation, insight arises through direct observation of impermanence—watching sensations arise and pass, realizing there’s no “me” running the show. Ashtanga can do the same thing, just with a lot more sweat and occasional toe cramps. Each inhale and exhale reveals impermanence; each asana is a wave that appears, stabilizes, dissolves. Insight dawns when you stop trying to control the sequence and start witnessing its intelligence.

Systems Thinking: The Emergent Property of Practice

In systems thinking (thank you, Donella Meadows), an emergent property is something that arises from the whole system, not from any single part. Insight is an emergent property of sustained praxis. You can’t force it, hack it, or buy it on Amazon. It arises spontaneously when the system stabilizes and becomes sensitive enough to sense itself. In that way, insight is less about thinking and more about tuning.

Examples of Insight in Ashtanga

• The day you realize that “jumping through lightly” means engaging your bandhas, not holding your breath like you’re sneaking past a sleeping dragon.
• The moment in Urdhva Dhanurasana when you stop pushing your chest up and start feeling your heart open.
• When your student’s frustration mirrors your own, and you realize—oh, right, this isn’t about them or me; it’s just what it feels like when the ego meets resistance.

Try this: After your next practice or meditation, instead of asking “Was it good?” ask “What did I see?” It might be something subtle: a habit, a fear, a kindness. It might be something profound: “There’s nothing to fix.” Whatever it is, insight is less about content and more about clarity. You start seeing not only what you’re doing but howand why—and that’s when the system begins to evolve.

Insight isn’t the end of practice—it’s the next iteration. Each one reveals a deeper layer of the same truth: you’re already whole, you’re just learning to see it clearly.