Retreat Recordings
Ethics to Insight 2025 GFR Retreat
Ethics to Insight
September 5-14, 2025
Aryaloka Buddhist Center, Newmarket, NH
“Love grows continuously like a ceaseless melody. Love projects itself as open-ended, with no set nature. With no limited focus and being non-conceptual in its being, it exhibits the purity of body, speech, and mind. Thus love is transformed into compassion.” - Padmasambhava
How can we become a force for good in the world? How can we make our actions of body, speech, and mind more in line with the way things are? How can we live so that we’re more aligned with beauty, goodness, and truth, and thereby move closer to Buddhahood? On this retreat, we dove deeply into the principles that Sangharakshita set out in his book The Ten Pillars of Buddhism.
Why practice ethics? How is our understanding of the ten precepts deepened through meditation and insight? Ashokashri kicks us off with this personal and inspiring introduction to the theme Ethics To Insight, entitled: How the Light Gets In.
Aryadrishti shares this personal talk reflecting on the body precepts of non-harm, generosity, and contentment. Drawing on personal life experience and her work in the Order on the Ahimsa Kula, as well as her tenure as Order Convenor for the US and Canada, there is much to reflect on here individually and collectively.
Viriyalila explores the practice of confession, drawing on the Sutra of Golden Light commentary by Sangharakshita entitled Transforming Self and World. Entitled A Fire in the Heart, this talk includes practical suggestions for the practice of confession.
Download this Confession Practice Guide excerpted from the Tiratanaloka Ethics to Insight material.
In this talk entitled Building Worlds, Amala beautifully expounds on the principles and practices of the speech precepts, namely truthfulness, kindliness, helpfulness, and harmoniousness.
Sunada rounds out the retreat by exploring the mind precepts as a doorway to insight: Abandoning covetousness for tranquility, changing hatred into compassion, and transforming ignorance into wisdom. Together, these three precepts show the way toward escaping the wheel of samsara.
The Alokasetu Trustees are the grateful recipients of a 2024 grant from The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism, www.fredericklenzfoundation.org to help support administrative costs, succession planning, mitras in need of financial support to go on retreats, and the development of ordination training resources.