Loving-kindness meditation, or metta in the Pali term from which it derives, is one of the older and more distinctive practices in the Buddhist contemplative tradition. It is also one of the more awkward to describe in secular English. The instructions involve silently repeating phrases of goodwill toward yourself and others, which sounds either treacly or performative on first hearing. Neither impression survives contact with the actual practice, which is more interesting and more useful than the description suggests.
What distinguishes metta from breath-focused mindfulness is that it is not primarily attention training. It is affect training. You are deliberately generating and directing a specific emotional attitude, then noticing what happens.
What the practice looks like
The standard structure, adapted from Theravada Buddhist sources by teachers such as Sharon Salzberg and popularized in the West through her 1995 book Lovingkindness, moves through a sequence of recipients:
- Yourself
- A benefactor or someone you love easily
- A neutral person, such as a stranger or acquaintance
- A difficult person
- All beings
At each stage, you silently repeat a set of phrases, traditionally something like May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease. The specific wording is less important than picking phrases that carry meaning for you and staying with them.
Sessions typically run 15 to 30 minutes. It is common, especially early on, to feel nothing warm at all. Practitioners are generally instructed to keep going anyway, on the theory that the practice is repetition of the intention, not manufacture of a specific feeling.
What the evidence suggests
Metta has been studied less than breath-focused mindfulness, but the literature is not negligible. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina has run several trials on loving-kindness training, generally finding modest increases in reported positive emotion and, in some studies, changes in vagal tone and social connectedness. Trials of loving-kindness for chronic pain, PTSD, and self-criticism have produced mixed but generally supportive results, though sample sizes are often small.
The most consistent finding is that regular metta practice appears to reduce implicit bias toward outgroup members in controlled tasks and to increase self-reported warmth toward strangers. Whether these effects hold up outside laboratory settings, and for how long, is not well established.
A notable and less-discussed finding is that loving-kindness practice is one of the more reliable ways to encounter the difficult side of contemplative practice. Directing goodwill toward yourself often surfaces material about why you feel you do not deserve it. This is not a bug; it is often where the practice does its actual work.
The trouble with wishing yourself well for twenty minutes is that it makes very clear how rarely you do so the rest of the time.
Common obstacles
Feeling fake. The phrases can feel hollow or theatrical, especially at first. This is nearly universal. Teachers generally recommend continuing anyway and treating the awkwardness as part of what is being examined.
Nothing happens. Warm feelings do not always arise. The practice is the direction of intention, not the production of a state. Sessions with no emotional payoff still count.
The difficult person. Directing goodwill toward someone who has hurt you is, unsurprisingly, the hardest stage. Most teachers advise starting with mildly difficult people, not the most difficult, and working up.
Self-directed metta is often hardest. Many practitioners find the phrases easier to direct at strangers than at themselves. Beginning with a benefactor and returning to the self later is a legitimate variant.
Where it fits in a broader practice
Loving-kindness is a useful complement to, not a substitute for, mindfulness practice. Some practitioners alternate them, some do a few minutes of metta at the end of a longer breath sit, and some prefer metta as their primary practice, particularly people who find breath meditation dry or clinical.
It is also one of the more accessible practices for people who are put off by the technical or performance aspects of mindfulness. The instructions are simple, and the point is unambiguous even when the practice is hard.
The bottom line
Loving-kindness meditation is affect training rather than attention training, with a small but real evidence base for modest effects on positive emotion, social connection, and self-criticism. It is often awkward at first, sometimes uncomfortable in useful ways, and worth trying alongside more familiar mindfulness practices.