A popular New Year’s resolution is to take up meditation.
There are many types of meditation. Some practices ask meditators simply to sit with the thoughts, sensations or emotions that arise without immediately reacting to them. Such meditations cultivate focus, while granting more freedom in how we respond to what life throws at us.
Other meditations ask practitioners to deliberately focus on one emotion — for example, gratitude or love — to deepen the experience of that emotion. The purpose behind this type of meditation is to bring more gratitude, or more love, into your life. The more we meditate on love, the easier it is to experience this emotion even when we aren’t feeling particularly loving in our day-to-day life.
One such meditation is known as metta, or loving kindness. As a scholar of communication and mindfulness, as well as a longtime meditation teacher, I have studied and practiced metta. Here is what loving kindness means and how to try it out for yourself:
Unbounded, universal love
Metta is a type of love practiced by Buddhists. Like many forms of meditation, there are secular and religious forms of metta. One doesn’t need to be a Buddhist to practice loving kindness. It’s for anyone who wants to live more lovingly.
Loving kindness, the feeling cultivated in metta meditation, is different from romantic love. In the ancient Pali language, the word “metta” has two root meanings: The first is “gentle,” in the sense of a spring rain that falls on young plants, nourishing them without discrimination. The second is “friend.”
Metta is limitless and unbounded love; it is gentle presence and universal friendliness. Metta practice is meant to grow people’s ability to be present for themselves and others.
Metta isn’t reciprocal, conditional or discriminatory. To practice metta is to give what I describe in my research as “the rarest and most precious gift” — love offered without any expectation of it being returned.
How to practice loving kindness meditation
In the fifth century, a Sri Lankan monk, Buddhaghosa, provided instructions for loving kindness meditation in an influential text called the “Visuddhimagga,” or “The Path of Purification.” Contemporary teachers tend to adapt and modify his instructions.
The practice of loving kindness often involves quietly reciting several traditional phrases designed to evoke metta, and visualizing the beings who will receive that loving kindness, starting with ourselves.
It’s typical during this meditation to say:
May I be filled by loving kindness
May I be safe from inner and outer dangers
May I be well in body and mind
May I be at ease and happy
After speaking these phrases, and feeling the emotions they evoke, next it’s common to direct loving kindness toward someone — or something — else. It can be a beloved person, a dear friend, a pet, an animal, a favorite tree. The phrases become:
May you be filled by loving kindness
May you be safe from inner and outer dangers
May you be well in body and mind
May you be at ease and happy
Next, this loving kindness is directed to a wider circle of friends and loved ones: “May they …”
The final step is to expand the circle to include the people in our community and town, people elsewhere, all living beings and the whole Earth. This last round of recitation begins: “May we …”
Loving kindness may benefit our societies, too
Clinical research shows that loving kindness meditation has a positive effect on mental health, including lessening anxiety and depression, increasing life satisfaction and improving self-acceptance while reducing self-criticism. Loving kindness meditation may also increase a sense of connection with other people.
The benefits of loving kindness meditation are not just for the individual but also for society as a whole, as my research shows. Indeed, the practice of democracy requires us to work together with friends, strangers and even purported “opponents.” This is difficult to do if our hearts are full of hatred and resentment.
Each time meditators open their hearts in metta meditation, they prepare themselves to live more loving lives: for their own selves and for all living beings.
Engels is liberal arts professor of communication arts and sciences at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of “On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World,” to be published Feb. 3.
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