Reflecting on one's ethical conduct can bring a lot of gladness and joy in one's meditation practice.

Over the years of practice we work with the precepts in a number of ways—using resolve and restraint, becoming acquainted with our karmic patterns and feeling the consequences of these, and strengthening skillful states by noticing what it feels like to do good, to behave well.

Refuges and Precepts

The Buddha taught that there are five preconditions necessary for the development of meditation practice in seclusion—good friends, virtue and restraint, engaging in talk on the Dhamma, wise effort, wisdom. These preconditions, presented in the Meghiya Sutta, are developed progressively and support one another. This talk explores the importance of restraint in a successful practice, and considers virtuous action to be an expression of wisdom. Ethical behavior and the inner respect that comes with the knowledge that we can refrain from unwholesome impulses is a foundation for practice. Precept training encourages wise reflection regarding the many choices that we make in our lives. We can reflect on the intention that initiates an action, the experience while engaged in the action, and the result that develops from an action so that we bring wisdom into every action and interaction. The five precepts, and the ten unwholesome and ten wholesome actions are presented. We have the power to choose what we develop with diligence and wisdom.

Meditation instructions by Larry Rosenberg

Use the practice to understand the boundaries, structures, and limits of our lives to locate that terrain within us which is beyond boundaries. We go to it by inclining the mind towards stopping, taking precepts and fully arriving in the present, in the sanctuary of now. We stop in the silence and with curiousity and wonder, investigate the true meaning of our life.

Part Two of the 2013 Garrison LGBTQ retreat opening evening--the Precepts