04/09/2025
Loving kindness meditation, or meta meditation, is a beautiful practice, and can be life changing if practiced regularly. It has it's origins in the Buddhist tradition, but it can be practiced by anyone.
The idea is that we take four people - yourself, someone you find easy to love (the easiest person in your family or your best friend or even your dog), someone you recognise by don't really know (maybe a neighbour or someone you see walking their dog) and finally someone you have a tricky relationship with (possibly a family member or work colleague; world leaders and politicians also work well).
We take each of these four people in turn and direct kind and loving thoughts towards them. We can use phrases like: May you be happy, may you be well, may you be healthy, may you be loved. Or we can tailor the phrases more to the person.
This can be a difficult practice, and can bring up unexpected emotions. We might find it difficult to wish ourselves well, especially if we have trained ourselves to put everyone else first or we feel we can't be happy in our current circumstances.
Sending good wishes to a person you have an easy loving relationship with can be the easiest part of the practice, but again, this can bring up emotions if you don't see the person often or they are going through hard times.
The neutral person is always interesting because this is when we really start to train ourselves to be compassionate and empathic to people and living beings that we don't have a close relationship with. We remember that they too have the same wants and needs that we do.
And then finally to the difficult person. This can be really hard, and we might feel that we are repeating the phrases but not really feeling them from the heart. Never mind, we just keep practicing it anyway. I often remind myself that perhaps if this person was happier and truly at peace, they wouldn't be doing the thing that I am finding difficult, whether it is firing off unpleasant emails, making put down comments or committing genocide.
We can also extend our loving kindness thoughts out to all living beings wherever they are in the world. I like to include eco-systems too, whether that is the Amazon, the Arctic or local countryside. All living beings want the conditions to flourish.
If you feel that you would like to give this a try, there are lots of recordings online that you can use for practice. One of my favourites is the Befriending meditation on Danny Penman's page: https://franticworld.com/free-meditations-from-mindfulness/
I've definitely found this to be a life changing practice that has helped me to be more open and loving to the people in my life, and also more receptive and open to strangers.
Wishing someone you
