This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Easeful Opening; Five Precepts (2of5) Refrain from Taking What’s Not Freely Given. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So good morning. To the person who asked, the poem “Each Day We Are Given So Many Gifts” comes from Naomi Shihab Nye’s book, The Tiny Journalist.1
So now we give ourselves over to just sitting, to arriving in this place. Settling in to just being here.
Take a deep breath and let it out. Allow this to be your body saying good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Here I am. Here I am. Here. Another breath in. Hello. And let it go free.
Still, a moment of arriving. Just let every breath go free. Let the body settle into this freedom. Feel the toes just being here, and the feet just here. The calves, the knees just here. Let your thighs relax. The hips settle. Settle.
Let go of the belly. No need to hold anything. Let your torso just be freely here. Your shoulders, allow them to just be at ease. Your arms, your hands, just here. Just freely here.
Relax your neck, that sinuous piece of your body that holds your head up. Let it just be free. Your chin dip just a tiny bit. Your head loosely suspended from an imaginary string. Just let it drop here.
Breathing in and out. Are you still aware of your body? This body you are in, experiencing the breath. Experiencing the movement of air in and out.
Can you feel the touch of air around the outside of your body? Maybe on your face. Any sensitivity across your cheeks, your chin, maybe over your shoulders, over your hands. Is there heat? Is there coolness? What are you aware of in this body as you sit in this room breathing in and out? What sensations?
Are you hearing? Do you feel sounds hitting your ears softly, harshly, sharply, smoothly, whooshing sounds. When you hear my voice, does it jar? Does it land smoothly? How does it hit your ears? How does it reverberate, the wave of my sound? Does your body contract? Does it open? What do you feel? Before the mind forms a word, what is this sensation? What is this sensation?
Take a deep breath and feel the breath. Now let it go free and just breathe. You don’t need to tell the body to breathe. It just breathes. The body just senses. Relax your elbows.
As we sit here in our bodies, thoughts arise. Thoughts arise. Let them be free also. Note what arises with the thinking, not the thought. Do your shoulders tense? Does your belly clench? Does the belly relax? Does the jaw tighten? Do the lips curve? What arises with the thoughts? Let the thoughts come and go. No need to capture them. Let them be free. Thoughts arise and pass away. And we sit here in the room, breathing.
They’re just thoughts. They come, they go, as the breath comes and goes. We allow it to come in and go out. And we stay here just for now. We don’t need that story just now. We don’t need it. We can just let it be free. Let the mind be free. Let the thinking be free. Let the body be free. Just breathe. Just here.
Hello everyone. My name is Marisa T. St. Amand.2 That’s the name that was given to me.
Today’s talk is about not taking what is not freely given. An important part about that is the word “taking.” We’ve been talking about the precepts.3 The precepts being about conduct. They’re not about ideas, not about immaterial things. It’s about what we do. The precepts have to do with the actions that we take. So when we talk about not taking what’s not freely given, we often think about the conventional thing: we don’t steal. Okay? So, we get that it’s unskillful to steal, to take what belongs to someone else that doesn’t belong to us.
But it’s really bigger than that. And it’s a place in conditioned action that comes kind of after desire. You know, “I want that, and so I take it.” It’s the action. It’s useful to think about that.
I learned something about that taking from a nun. There was a Theravadan nun that came through IMC oh, many years ago. I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago. And we were feeding her her midday meal. The precepts that the monastics take are a much longer list than five. But one of them is not taking what is not freely given. And there’s also the imperative that you don’t eat after noon. And so one day my job was to feed her. I brought the food and I laid it out and I offered her the dish, and she ate and we talked and she was a delightful person. And then there was this long pause. And finally she looked at me and she said, “Would you mind offering me some more?”
And I realized, you know, I only made this food for her. The fact that it was sitting there and that I had originally offered it to her was not enough. She needed me to offer it again. She couldn’t just take it. She couldn’t just take it from me. I needed to offer it again, even though it was there for her.
This practice of understanding that there’s a wealth of things out here for us, and that we take it all kind of for granted. We don’t really understand our relationship to the rest of the world, to the people around us, to the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the things that are here. How did they come to be here? What’s our relationship to the things that we take? It’s tied up with consumption, obviously. What’s our relationship to taking from the environment? How do we use water and heat and light and power? How do we use those? What’s our relationship to the resources of the planet?
How about how we use other people’s time? Are we aware of how we take people’s time? How do I use your time? Do I use it wisely? Do I take it for granted just because you’re there that you have to listen to me? Do I respect your time? Do I just take your time? And does this preclude asking for time? How about asking, “Do you have time now?” Do I call you? “Is this a good time to talk?” You know, I always appreciate when somebody says to me, “Is this a good time to talk?” Because you may answer because, “Oh, I know who this is on the line.” But that doesn’t mean that now is the best time to talk about something. And why not ask?
What do we take from people that we’re not even aware of? And what’s the balance? What’s the appropriate balance? What about social, political, economic inequality? What’s your relationship to those? Even if you’re not taking it, do you stand up for those people who don’t have it, whatever it may be?
What’s your relationship to enough? What is enough? When is something enough? You know, I used to be an inveterate catalog person. I would get catalogs and I’d go through the catalogs and I’d bend down the corner of the pages of all the things that were attracted to me. And then I’d go back and I’d say, “Really? You liked that? Thank God I didn’t buy any of that stuff.” The relationship between taking and desiring. What is my relationship? How do I nurture that? How do I look at something so often that I think it should be mine? I should have that. That is mine. I should take that. What’s the relationship between taking and desire for taking? Between wanting and taking.
I have a beautiful cup here. And every morning I look at this cup and I say, “That’s a beautiful cup. I don’t need a lot of these cups. I have one really beautiful cup. I appreciate it. I’m grateful for it.” And I don’t take it for granted that I have a beautiful cup. And I love the coffee in my cup. I’m grateful for this. That’s part of my relationship to the precept of not taking what is not freely given. And I remember buying this cup from the artist and how delighted he was that I bought this cup because he could see the delight in my face.
The other part of not taking what is not freely given is the delight in accepting what someone else is offering. Their delight and your delight. Can you accept what someone is offering? Can you accept what you may not even want because it’s been offered? How does that sit with you?
Have you ever taken credit for something that someone else did? Maybe just not even corrected somebody’s misunderstanding where you get credit for something that you didn’t really do and you kind of go, “Well, you know, I didn’t really do that. You know, it was really so and so that did that. Well, I contributed. It’s okay.” You know, how does that feel? Where is that? Does it feel a little icky? A little sticky?
How about cutting in line? We were at the farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago and there was a very long line for strawberries. I mean, a really long line. And our friend was right up at the front of the line and we went over and said hello to him and he said, “You know, I can’t let you in the line.” Fortunately, I wasn’t even looking for strawberries. I said, “I didn’t want to be in the line.” And all the people behind him were glaring at us because they felt I was cheating. And all we were doing was going up and saying hello to our friend. And to watch that feeling of animosity develop around “don’t take what’s mine, it’s mine.” And to see the “mine” form, the reflections around not taking what is not freely given are legion. So many places that it can come into mind.
What’s the role of negligence, of failing to offer? Failing one’s responsibility to see what somebody wants and not be willing to offer it. And the balance of not enabling bad behavior. Somebody wants your approval. They want that approval. They want your approval. And you withhold it because you feel powerful or because you think it’s not something to be approved of. To really understand the relationship of not taking what is not freely given. Understanding when you yourself are freely giving and when you’re not freely giving. Feel when it’s sticky leaving your hands.
It’s in the action that precepts are important. Not the concept around it. It’s the action. How does it feel to give or not give? Think about the power of desire versus the thoughtlessness of availability. “It’s here, so I might as well take it.” It’s available and I just take it. I don’t consider whether taking the last cookie means somebody else that I’m not even thinking of doesn’t get one. “Oh well, there’s still one left. I think I’ll just take it.” Really? Maybe. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking that cookie. Nothing. But might it have other consequences?
There are other things we take that have much greater consequences. Things we take that we just take for granted. Taking for granted all by itself. “My mother will always be there.” As someone who lost her mother at the age of 12, I can tell you it’s not always true. I’ve recently lost somebody very, very dear to me and part of the grief around that was the realization that somewhere in my heart I thought that person would always be there. I could always pick up the phone and call them, and that’s no longer true. And how tightly I was holding to that, that I was taking that that nobody had offered me. Nobody had offered that.
So how do we work with this? There’s a poem by Jane Hirshfield called “A Cedary Fragrance.”4 So this is it:
Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water. Not for discipline nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.
My time is really over, but I want to give one more thought. Practice contentment. One of the most wonderful experiences I ever had in meditation was the feeling of total and complete contentment where I did not want anything. I didn’t even want the feeling to stay there. The feeling was so amazing. That feeling of not wanting, needing, total contentment.
This is the gift in not taking what is not freely given. This is what I hope for everyone. May you experience total contentment.
Thank you. We’ll see you tomorrow.
The poem referenced is likely “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye, which appears in her book The Tiny Journalist. ↩
The speaker is Marisa T. St. Amand, a teacher at the Insight Meditation Center. The original transcript said “Maria Stman.” ↩
The Five Precepts are the fundamental code of ethics for lay Buddhists. They are commitments to abstain from: (1) harming living beings, (2) taking what is not given, (3) sexual misconduct, (4) false speech, and (5) intoxication that leads to heedlessness. This talk focuses on the second precept. ↩
“A Cedary Fragrance” is a poem by Jane Hirshfield from her book The Beauty. ↩