When people describe vipassana, they usually say the intention is to "see sensations clearly" or "see the true nature of phenomena."  If you use these turns of phrase, what do they mean to you in your own words.  If you can, please avoid descriptions like "seeing the selfless nature of phenomena" or "penetrating the three characteristics" because these are equally abstract and don't do much to describe what's actually happening.

Sometimes, when I 'see sensations clearly' and 'see their true nature', it means I feel kundalini as mild electricity in my spine.  Other times it feels like rapid tingling inside my body.  I might feel agitation as the instinct for my muscles to tense in my back or chest- instead of feeling it as one whole, it feels less stressful when it naturally breaks down to a frame-by-frame, collection of moments.  And also, things just feel solid and real and normal and that can also be the Vipassana lense for me.  Sounds might feel like they pass right through me, or my depth perception might be off as I feel like I am the thing I am looking at.

A common metaphor for the mind is that it is mirror-like.  One of the reasons for this analogy is that normally, what we see are our own projections.  We see a world of symbols and reference points that create our vision (literally, like a visualization) of the world.  Seeing clearly, simply means we are seeing reality as it is.  Naked, and devoid of projections, concepts, symbols, perceptions and reference points.  The self is one of our fundamental projections.  

the word 'vipassana' literally means 'seeing clearly'

confusion often arises in relation to this word 'vipassana' because a number of Burmese traditions have hijacked the word 'vipassana' and used it to refer to their idiosyncratic meditation technique, which is wrong, since 'vipassana' is not a technique itself but a fruit or result of a technique

I believe Shinzen Young translates Vipassana as "seeing distinctly". As in, seeing what is separate as separate, not letting sensations coagulate into something seemingly solid.

an example: when watching a video on my laptop, it appears as if the voices of the characters come from the place on the screen where I see them. In vipassana mode, it is obvious that there is the picture up on the screen and then there is the voice coming from the speaker on the lower left side of my laptop. Seeing distinctly stops these two from coagulating into a solid seeming image of a talking person. This same principle can be applied to sensations in the body and mind to stop them from coagulating.