8. Dec. 2001

Edited the 7. Aug. 2004

What Vipassana does for you is establishing a conscious connection between your mind and your body, it helps to see how both are inextricably interconnected and constantly influencing each other.
You can see how your thoughts are connected with body reactions and elicitations (what we usually call emotions) which constitute the substrate of your motivation structure or "energies" as I like to call it.
The practice of vipassana clears the consciousness of the connection between the thoughts and those "energetic" reactions leading to the isolation of your conscious and free capacity to not be the automatic puppet of those psychophysical reactions and linkages but to consciously control your entire psychophysical system.
Of course when I say "it leads", it demands in fact a lot of effort and use of intelligence on your part because most people blindly practice the technique itself and fail to make the necessary correlations. Even these people often experience interesting and unusual effects because the structure of the meditation in itself has a cleansing effect on what other traditions call "samskaras" or impressions (in fact psychophysical conditionings).
The meditation, by its own virtue, naturally contributes to the conscious isolation of your freedom, your essential abilities which are free and in command of the psychophysical system.
On the purely physical level you will also learn how any sensation is in fact depending on attention and that it also applies to elicited "energies" which are the physical part of the psychophysical energetic system. Interesting experiments can be made, you can even delete or copy and paste sensations around your body once you've got the principle.
On a deeper level you might be able to isolate the essential energetic aggregates that are used in the concrete psychophysical energetic forms that constitute your everyday motivation system...

All kinds of things can be done using Vipassana and its variations but my very serious recommendation is "use your intelligence". I saw people who have practiced Vipassana for years not getting the benefits of people who have practiced it for a week but whose intelligence was opened.
The Buddhist theory that is generally given with Vipassana meditation could even be seen by some (ie. Me) as often irrelevant and non fundamental. To tell you the truth I was never impressed by my discussions with the Vipassana teachers, they generally go on about the "impermanence thing" failing to grasp the real structure that can be uncovered by the use of Vipassana.

If you are the explorer type you can use Vipassana or things you have learned during Vipassana to map the intricacies of the psychophysical domain, learn about its levels, hierarchy and find out "who" or "what" "You" really are inside that system what is the real nature of that process.

If you are doing the Goenka course, I have personal reserves about the Metta Bhavana (sometimes transliterated differently), a practice that comes at the end of the course, a process of sending your "merits" to the world.
I am particularly reserved about the explicit demand to send some merits to Goenka (if he's still alive, I don't follow his organization closely).
Metta in itself can give a human dimension to a technique that can be quite dry, particularly if it is performed blindly without experimenting and following interesting clues and pathways that can appear along the way. However, when I tried the course offered by the Goenka's organisation, he asked explicitely that merits should be also send to him personally, even suggesting pseudo-jokingly that the meditation might not work if you didn't comply (Don't worry, it works anyway).
When I mentioned that fact to another Vipassana teacher from another organization, he was extremely saddened and told me that he felt like crying. If you are not the superstitious type you can freely forget Goenka's demands which are in fact a demand for gratitude. Gratitude should be given freely and spontaneously by the grateful heart, when one asks for it, he spoils it, it becomes trade.
On the other side it seems to me that the Goenka courses are the best organized (at least in some better centers) and one can see that a lot of thought has gone into getting the maximum results into a minimum of time without completely exhausting the novices. Basically it's very good time management and I really recommend it.

Another info, not all Vipassanas are alike, for example, the "Goenka" type follows strict body pathways of scanning the body sensations, some other variations don't follow any particular scanning pathway but move the body awareness from spot to spot as random dominant sensations arise and vanish in the body. All systems have their reasons to believe that their technique is the best, basically you should try more than one and make up your mind. Personally I prefer the directed scanning type like in the Goenka's course.

One last advice, there is interesting knowledge in the west that can complement Vipassana, I particularly think about the most advanced form of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) called Neurosemantics.