Vipassana is meditation aimed at insight rather than at calm alone, though most traditional programs build concentration first as a foundation. Practitioners in the modern lay tradition typically undertake extended periods of seated and walking meditation, often in silence and under a teacher's guidance at a residential retreat, directing sustained, systematic attention to bodily sensation, breath or mental phenomena as they arise and pass.
The stated aim, across both the classical Theravada framework and its modern lay descendants, is not relaxation but a direct, experiential recognition of three characteristics the tradition holds to be true of all conditioned phenomena: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and the absence of a fixed, separate self. Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga lays out this process as a sequence of increasingly refined stages of insight, traditionally understood as unfolding under a qualified teacher's supervision rather than through self-guided reading.
Modern lay courses, most visibly the ten-day format taught in the S. N. Goenka lineage, compress an approximation of this progression into an intensive residential retreat with a fixed daily schedule, silence, and instruction delivered by recording rather than a resident teacher, a format its own teachers present as a technique rather than a religious conversion, open to practitioners of any or no religious background.