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Guided Meditation: Staying True; Dharmette: Five Precepts (4 of 5) Not Speaking Falsehoods - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 25, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Staying True

Hello and warm greetings. I hope all of you are well in this winter weather that some of us are having and for these holidays that are celebrated. I wish you all happy celebrations and this beginning of turning towards light that happens now in these days. May the greater and greater light of the day translate to greater light of the Dharma in your heart. May your heart light up and fill you.

So today, the focus is a little bit more on mindfulness of thinking. Mindfulness of thinking is a valid and wonderful subject for careful attention, but it is not to think more. Some people’s idea of attention or mindfulness is actually called "thinkfulness"—to just think about things more.

What we're doing in mindfulness or bodyfulness practice is not so much thinking about thought, but having closer to a silent awareness of the event of thinking. It is kind of like you're listening to someone who speaks a language you don't know. You have no idea what they're saying, but because you don't know, you become more attuned to the emotional quality of the voice being spoken, the speed in which it's being spoken, the energy, the loudness or softness, the forcefulness or the ease and relaxation in the voice. There are all these other aspects that we tune into, and that's kind of what we do with mindfulness.

There's a time and place to be mindful of content, but for now, it's more useful to be aware of the overall process activity without concern about the content. Because what we want to do is to discover an awareness and attention that doesn't get hijacked by thoughts, doesn't get pulled into their allure, their promise, their authority.

More importantly, maybe, is how involvement with thoughts disconnects us from the fullness, the wholeness of our experience. Many people spend much of their days in their thoughts, and one way to do it is to be on a screen all day. That's really kind of this cognitive world, this world of mental processing that's very limiting.

If you get caught involved in thoughts while meditating, don't be in a hurry to let go of it, but take time to know the effect it has on you. Especially, notice how it maybe has disconnected you from your embodied experience, maybe your emotional experience. Maybe your full experience disconnects you from an awareness which is peaceful and calm, that has the overview, the bigger picture of it all without being caught in anything.

So, assume a meditation posture that's a balance between being alert and relaxed, and gently close your eyes. Notice something about the activity of your thinking mind. How much energy is there? How activated is it? Is there any tension or discomfort? Is there any sense of insistence to have these thoughts? Is your thinking mind calm, settled, more at ease than it was maybe yesterday, or more activated with the excitement of the day? Is the thinking mind tired and weary? Is it refreshed and eager to think?

And what's the physical experience? What effect does your thinking have on your body? Are there any sensations that come with your thinking? Is any part of your body activated with tension or energy?

And then, as if you're gently approaching a cat—slowly, calmly—as you inhale, gently bring your awareness to touch the thinking mind. Gently approach it to feel it, to know it in a gentle way. And let the exhale be a kind of gentle massaging or relaxing of the thinking mind. So, not being too assertive and not being too forceful, but very gently, softly on the inhale, come close to the thinking mind. Relax it as you exhale.

Sometimes instead of relaxing a thinking mind, on the exhale, open up the thinking mind. Make space for it to expand, and like a gas that expands outwards, becomes thinner and disappears. On the exhale, let that thinking mind and its thoughts float away.

And then, as if it's best to leave the cat alone, let your attention now shift in the same way—a gentle, calm attention—to the body breathing. As you exhale, relaxing and settling the body into the breathing body, the torso where the breathing is, all the way to the belly. With the inhale, a gentle growing of awareness through the torso. On the exhale, a settling, steadying of the mind of awareness here and now.

If your mind gets involved in thinking, when you notice it, try doing this: try on the inhale to gently approach the thinking mind to feel it, to touch it, to know what it's like for your body and mind to be thinking. What you're thinking about is not so important; just the experience of thinking. Approach it on the inhale, and let it relax or open or soften on the exhale. Do that three or four times, and then return to mindfulness of breathing.

If you find yourself thinking, notice the effect thinking has on you. Notice what you lose in being absorbed in thinking. And notice if what you're thinking about has nothing to do with here and now, your direct experience.

If that's the case, in a certain kind of way, your thoughts are not exactly about real things. It's about the imagination, memory. How you construct and tell stories about things. What is most real, actual, immediate, is this here and now in your body, the processes of breathing and living. Being involved in thought too much, you lose that connection to the living present.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, check in with your thinking mind. How is it different now than at the beginning? What different sensations are there? What different degrees of comfort or discomfort is there? How strong is the pull of thoughts? How loud are your thoughts?

For a few moments, appreciate your thinking mind. It's been with you for a long time and supported you and guided you through all kinds of important life situations. It might have made some mistakes for you, challenged you too. But for this day, appreciate your thinking mind. Have gratitude for its important role in your life. Not to see it as an enemy or a problem, but as a partner. Not to see it as the authority, the center of all things, but as a partner with the whole of who you are, to living a whole life. All of ourselves included.

And with all of who we are, may we wish this world well. May we wish happiness and well-being, joy and peace. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Five Precepts (4 of 5) Not Speaking Falsehoods

So hello and welcome to this fourth talk where I connect the basic instructions in mindfulness with the Five Precepts¹. Today the instruction is around mindfulness of thinking, and the precept is to refrain from speaking what's false.

These are closely connected because, in some way, thinking—whether verbal or images or other ways—is a way of talking silently to ourselves. It's a way of reflecting, kind of inner conversations, inner stories, inner ideas. And so it's closely connected to what we're saying privately to ourselves.

The idea not to tell ourselves falsehoods applies to ourselves in meditation. But what is it that's false in meditation that we want to avoid?

First, we want to avoid the false ways in which we relate to ourselves with hostility, with animosity, with shame, with ideas that somehow we're wrong or not doing it right. This is a way of losing ourselves, of shutting off parts of ourselves, dividing ourselves into the one who judges and what is being judged. The idea of meditation is to heal the divides, heal the separations, the tensions between different parts of ourselves so that we can include all of ourselves here in the practice. Not that we give everything free rein, but we give everything permission to be felt and known, not necessarily acted on.

What happens when we get preoccupied in thoughts during meditation is two things. One is that we often can lose touch with our lived experience of the moment as we get pulled into thoughts that are not about the present moment. They're about the past or the future, something in other places, not right here now. Or about fantasy that has nothing to do with anything really, but just a fantasy.

If we really look carefully at this kind of way of thinking that's not connected to the present moment, it's not really so accurate. It's not really referring to something that's actually here. If you use the word "real" kind of lightly—something in the direct real experience we're having here and now—if the mind is thinking about other things in other times, the mind is telling a story. It's constructing something. It has ideas, interpretations, judgments, images; it's a selective presentation that we have inside of ourselves.

That's not the full picture. Thinking is never providing the 100% accurate picture in a certain kind of way. When we spend a lot of time thinking, we're telling ourselves certain kinds of falsehoods. Or if not falsehoods, we're not connected to the full, real experience of the present moment where the deeper aspiration, deeper motivation, deeper upwelling of understanding and connection and motivation can reside.

So, to not then condemn ourselves for breaking the precept, the fourth precept, in the way we think, but just appreciate that we're not really as fully connected to ourselves as we could be. The path of mindfulness is to enter into a full connection, a whole connection, a unified connection; to be settled, be at harmony, be connected here to all of who we are. This is where what's real and true is to be found.

As we find it here in the present moment, as we settle more and feel relaxed and at ease and in harmony here with our lived experience of the present, breathing easily, including all our feelings and emotions, then when we get involved in conversations with other people and we're about to speak a falsehood, we will probably feel and sense how that disconnects us from ourselves. It disconnects us from what is real and present here right now.

There's something about intentionally speaking falsehoods which disconnects us. You have to be disconnected from reality to say them, to be caught in them, to be involved in them. And for all the ways that lying or falsehoods causes problems in our relationships and harms people and is a betrayal of sorts of friendships, it's also a loss of connection with oneself. It's also a little bit of abandoning this deeper connection.

Maybe abandoning it ourselves because we are caught in desires and aversions that we think are the important things to listen to, the important things to obey and go along with. That somehow we benefit from chasing desires, being pushed by desires, being pushed by aversions. But in fact, when strong compulsive desires take over, we're losing the truth. There's a kind of falsehood in there. Falsehood that these desires are going to fix me. These desires are going to make things better. If it involves falsehoods or false fantasies and unreal things, we actually don't benefit from it.

The deepest benefits we can do for ourselves is to be present, connected here to ourselves so that we become a source of peace. We become a source of well-being. We become a source of kindness and warmth and presence.

It might mean that we are slower to speak. It might mean that we're more settled. It might mean that we do things a little bit slower. It might mean that we're more available to take in and feel the whole experience of the present moment. And in the long term, we probably end up living in a better way, making better choices, having less to do to clean up and to fix. We're more likely to speak the truth. And to speak the truth in a kind way, in a beneficial way, in a timely way.

We're careful about how we speak because we know there are more important things in our relationship with other people than our opinions, being right, telling stories, convincing people that we're a good person somehow, or praising ourselves. It's possible to settle down. And there's a deep way we can be together with people with care and with love and attention.

So for this day, maybe it's a good day for mindfulness of thinking so that you don't get lost in that world. So the world of thinking doesn't pull you out of a deep place, take you away from your potential for being present in a warm, kind, friendly way from some deeper source than where the discursive thinking arises, where opinions arise, stories arise.

May it be that this practice of mindfulness of thinking, practice of the precept of not speaking falsehoods, may they together delight you in the possibility of staying grounded and centered and settled in your body, in your breathing; to feel and sense and be aware so that the best of who you are can come forth in speech. The best of who you are can come forth in smiles. The best in who you are can come forth with a warm heart.

May it be that the practice of mindfulness, the practice of embodiment, the practice of heartfulness here and now benefits you and benefits the people around you on this day.

So, thank you very much. I'll be back for one more day this week, tomorrow. And then next week I'll be away on a little vacation and I'll talk a little bit more about that tomorrow.

Thank you.