Vipassana or Insight is the ultimate goal of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the path to that goal. Mindfulness is the enabler that helps Yogi to proceed to Vipassana. What is Vipassana? It is seeing as it is without giving any parochial stains. Vispassana is also built through Yoniso Manasikara or Wise Contemplation. But for wise contemplation to happen you need mindfulness developed. What is wise contemplation and unwise contemplation? Wise contemplation where you see things as they arrive in your mind, of thoughts at the very root. Unwise is to let the thoughts stray and then focus on them without understanding the beginning. How does one do Vipassana with the body or Kayanupassana. In this, you observe the breath with pointed concentration and see as it comes and goes. Mindfully you observe breath at times long and at times short. As you build concentration you begin to feel tactile-sensations arising in your body. They may arise at the top of the head or on your cheeks or elsewhere etc and soon spread to whole body. You observe the sensations with equanimity. With time you will observe that the breath is no longer discernible. (some get worried at this juncture thinking that one is not breathing and try to get up from the seat). With the sensations which may be still felt in the body one begins to see the body of self and may realise that after all it is a body of four foundations, hardness, liquidity, heat and air or oscillations (Pathavi, Apo, Thejo and Wayo). Then you look to others bodies with mind and realise that those too are of same. That is when one understands that after all this so called I which was of conceit is just four elements and so are others too and in reality there is no self, but only a self conceit that has been created in self due to ignorance.
