How to Practice Loving-Kindness Meditation
The mindfulness practice can improve your well-being, even in the face of conflict
Loving-kindness, or metta in the Pali language, is one of four foundational practices, collectively known as the divine or heavenly abodes, taught by the Buddha. The four practices are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. All of these are rigorous meditation practices in their own right, used for the most part to cultivate samadhi, or one-pointed concentrated attention, out of which the powers of the evoked qualities emerge, transfiguring the heart. But the essence of all these practices is contained and accessible within all the mindfulness practices.
Even so, just naming these qualities of heart and making their role explicit in our practice may help us recognize them when they arise spontaneously during mindfulness practice, as well as help us incline the heart and mind in their direction more frequently, especially in difficult times. In fact, these practices can sometimes serve as a necessary and skillful antidote to mind states such as ferocious anger, which may at the time of their arising be simply too strong to attend to via direct observation unless one’s practice is fairly well developed.
