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Guided Meditation: Embodiment; Dharmette: Five Precepts (2 of 5) Not Taken What is Not Given - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 23, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Embodiment

Hello and welcome.

One of the orientations I come into pretty quickly when I sit down to meditate is to tune into my body. To assume and enter my posture is like a homecoming. It is a way of opening up very widely to the whole body.

Because I've been doing it for fifty years, it is almost natural now to settle. To settle the activated energies in the head and the brain—the thoughts that I'm thinking about—and let something settle and move from this conceptual world that is so easy to live in, down into my body.

If there are a lot of feelings and emotions here, those are a means by which to open up more widely. Let the whole body hold those; let the body be the temple in which the feelings can exist. This idea of dropping in, having the body be a phenomenal context, a phenomenal container, or a phenomenal field of life, connects us to all of who we are.

There is a sense of wholeness, of being whole. It is not about any particular detail, nor any particular place to fixate the attention. It is more like a broad awareness. Sometimes I liken it to the broad peripheral vision we have with our eyes. Even if we are focusing on something particular with our central vision, there is an almost effortless way in which the peripheral vision can take in the wide range of what's happening around us without fixating on it—maybe without taking in the exact details of it all. But there is a knowing, an awareness, a perception of this.

So, assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. With the support of your breathing, breathe a little bit fuller than usual to feel a connection to your body from the inside. Relax on the exhale. Relax the head and the thinking mind. It is like the melting of ice or the melting of butter; something about awareness then melts and flows and settles down into the body.

Into a broad awareness of the body as we exhale, and a broad awareness of the body as we inhale. It is a perceptual shift from being preoccupied or caught with something in particular, to a panoramic perception—a panoramic vision or sense of the whole body.

Let your breathing return to normal. Still, have the inhales arise from deep inside, from the beginning place of the inhale, and allow awareness to spread with the inhale widely through the body. Feel a settling, relaxing, and melting on the exhale. Exhale to the very end of the breath, to the grounding place deep within where the exhale ends.

Maybe have a little bit more sensitive awareness of the face and the head as you inhale. Feel a broad softening of the face and head as you exhale.

Have awareness spread out on the inhale up into the shoulders to feel the shoulders. If there is tension or holding, allow it to melt or soften on the exhale.

On the inhale, feel the front of your body: the chest, the back, and the belly. Wherever there might be some tension or holding, gently, lovingly feel it as you inhale. Maintain a wide, panoramic awareness that doesn't fixate on anything but includes a wide field of sensations. As you exhale, let there be a softening, a melting of the chest, the rib cage, the diaphragm, and the belly.

Find the same kind of rhythm with the inhale to feel, in a broad, expansive way, the sensations and experience of the thinking mind. Not so much the content of your thoughts, but what the experience of thinking is like. On the exhale, let any tension in the thinking mind soften, melt, or expand into the wide panoramic space of awareness.

Take a few moments now for a broad, global, panoramic awareness of your body. Maybe let awareness roam around the body. Maybe have awareness be like the radiating warmth of a heater that spreads its heat evenly throughout the room.

Then, within that broad experience of the body, gently and softly settle into the center of it all with the breathing. At the center of it all is the settling place, the grounding place. With breathing, find an intimacy with the experience of breathing within the wide field.

It is like walking on a beautiful path in a beautiful spring field where you are very clear of the flowers, the path you're on, and the feet that walk. At the same time, there is the wide field and the sky that are also part of the picture. So, with each step of the breath—the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out—rest within the quiet and silence of broad, peripheral awareness of your body.

If you find yourself thinking, notice how that might take you away from a broad, settled awareness of your body here and now. For these minutes, have a preference for your embodied experience instead of the thoughts you are concerned with.

If you want to stay connected to the present moment—with your experience, with breathing, with being in your body—and if that is what is important, notice how the thinking mind is taking away from you what is not given. Your thinking mind pulls in your awareness to feed it, to support it, to get lost in it. Your thinking mind is taking what is not given. Relax the thinking mind, letting awareness return to the home of your body.

As we come to the end of the sitting, notice if you are more settled or calm than you were at the beginning. If so, does it provide you with a deeper connection to yourself? A deeper intimacy or closeness that is somehow more connected, more embodied than being lost in thought or preoccupied with the world of thinking, planning, and doing?

As you feel more embodied, is there within that embodiment a sensibility and orientation of goodwill, kindness, and care for the world, for yourself, and for your family and friends? Breathe with it. Breathe through and out of that care, as if your breathing is spreading and radiating kindness out into the world—radiating the embodied warmth and well-being, the light of the heart's goodwill.

For a minute or so, have that be your choice: to spread goodwill and kindness with your imagination and your thoughts out into the world. Anything else that your thinking mind does is taking what is not given, because what is given is your care and your kindness of present-moment awareness.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may we stay close to our body, our direct experience, so that kindness is more often the default.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Five Precepts (2 of 5) Not Taken What is Not Given

Hello and welcome to this third talk on the Five Precepts¹, the five ethical inspirations that are an invaluable part of our practice.

This week, I am connecting the precepts with the instructions in mindfulness, with the understanding that the more we are mindful—the more we are really present for ourselves—the more the precepts flow naturally. The precepts become an expression or an embodiment of what mindfulness practice provides us: a clear, grounded intimacy with the present moment.

Today, we look at the second set of instructions for mindfulness, which is mindfulness of the body, and the second precept, which is not taking what is not given².

This precept guides how we live our lives. There is care not to take something that we see or know about without it being clearly offered. If someone says, "Here, you can have this," then it is given.

Monastics are very careful with this precept. If a Theravada³ monk comes to your home and sits on the couch, and there is a coffee table book or pictures on the table, if you leave the room and they are sitting there alone, they are not going to pick up the book to look at the pictures because it wasn't offered to them. You didn't say, "Here, you can look at this." They will just sit there contentedly. Maybe they meditate, but they are not going to pick up something to look at it.

Now, that might be more than the level of this precept that is really necessary for laypeople, but the idea is that we don't take as our own something that hasn't been offered.

There might be exceptions. If we go to the beach and find a beautiful piece of driftwood, it doesn't really belong to anyone, and maybe in certain places, it would be appropriate and fine to take it home, even though it hasn't been explicitly offered. But if someone has left a beautiful beach chair there, and you don't see anyone up and down the beach, but it was clearly placed there by someone once upon a time, chances are you shouldn't take that because that hasn't been given. Maybe if you come back for a few weeks every day and it is always there, at some point—in the way the monastics see it—it has been abandoned or forgotten, and it might be okay to take it at that point, perhaps to look for the owner.

This idea of "taking what is not given" is a little different than saying "don't steal." "Don't steal" implies we might take things which haven't been offered because we think it's okay. But to wait until it is offered, or maybe to ask, "Is it okay to take this?" allows it to be given.

Society, families, and friendships work a lot better if we have a profound sense of trust in other people—that they won't steal, that they won't take things that we haven't offered them. We can relax around people like that, and we avoid causing harm.

I was really struck many years ago by how deeply and thoroughly a friend of mine felt violated because her car was broken into at night. Someone broke the window and took what was in there. It felt like a really deep personal affront and violation. It showed me how personal it is—how it affects people's sense of safety and their sense of being at home in this world. When people take what is not given, they steal from us.

Tying this precept to the instructions: as mindfulness practice matures, it is a lot about being embodied. It is about being inclusive of all of who we are. There is a broad, wide sensitivity to our own inner well-being and to how that inner well-being gets ruptured or diminished by forces inside of us—forces of greed, attachment, and clinging; forces of hostility, aversion, and resentment. It gets lost when we are caught up in agitation or the freezing qualities of anxiety, fear, and panic.

There are so many inner forces we have where the force is so strong that they pull our attention away. They pull our groundedness away. We lose a very important part of ourselves.

In a sense, our preoccupations, obsessions, fears, and desires "take what is not given." It takes our awareness, takes our centeredness, takes our thinking, and pulls it into a world which sometimes we clearly don't want to be in. For some people who have addiction issues, it is the world of fantasy, desire, or promise. Or it is the world of fear and danger—the way the mind can construct all kinds of ideas. It is not exactly by choice that we do this, but some part of us is pulling us away from the whole, pulling us away from being centered. We take from ourselves what is not given.

It isn't exactly that we are being unethical, but it is a powerful way of understanding what is happening. It begins to break the hegemony of these ways we lose ourselves—abandoning ourselves into our thoughts, our preoccupations, the past, and the future.

This full embodiment, this settledness, this deeper connectivity that mindfulness of the body provides us, becomes a reference point for a better way of being in the world. A better way of thinking, caring, and being inspired to live. It is a way where we are not giving ourselves away, where there is not an automatic pilot or a compulsivity that takes our attention and concerns away from ourselves.

We can see it so strongly in meditation. Clearly, what we are intending is to be here in the present moment. That is what is being offered. That is what we are valuing. That is the treasure we are going to center ourselves in. And then along comes some long-forgotten memory or some desire, and off we are running. Thinking about something unnecessary, or thinking about how wonderful it would be to fulfill some greedy desire.

If we strongly identify with our thoughts, then we don't see it as "taking what is not given." But if we don't identify with our thoughts—if we don't believe in them automatically because we are centered, relaxed, and at ease deep within ourselves—then we can feel that this is not what we want to do. There is a loss. There is something that gets diminished in those preoccupations. In a certain kind of way, we are taking what is not given.

Rather than having it be a morally heavy thing, it is meant to be a recognition of what is lost. It is a falling in love with our capacity to be whole, to be present, to be embodied. This is valuable. We diminish ourselves through preoccupations. We enhance ourselves—our intelligence, our capacity to understand, our care for the world, and our care for ourselves—by being fully present here for this now.

I offer this to you as a provocative, strong reference point: mindfulness of the body helps us to be whole, to include more of who we are in a fully embodied way. It shows us how we get diminished and lose something profound when we allow our mind to take what is not given—when we allow our mind to pull us into the world of preoccupation that takes us out of this deeper connection to the present moment.

May it be that this idea of not allowing your mind to take what is not given doesn't bother you. Rather, may it inspire you to stay with what is given. To stay with what is deeply given from within you. What is given out of your body, out of your heart, and out of the depth of your being is a radiant awareness, a clear knowing, and a capacity to find your home here in the present moment.

Thank you.