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Loving-kindness meditation, or metta meditation, helps us cultivate feelings of warmth and goodwill toward others. Ideally, we extend this love to all beings, everywhere. For most of us, however, such a boundless expression of care is something we need to work up to.
In this loving-kindness meditation guided by Sean Fargo, we are invited to open the heart by practicing with someone we already have loving feelings for. By bringing mindfulness to the sensation of metta in our body, heart and mind, we encourage loving-kindness to grow and expand.
Listen in a safe, quiet place where you can be relatively free from distraction. Practice with eyes opened or closed, in a posture that balances comfort with alertness. May this meditation be of benefit to you in your mindfulness journey.
Find hundreds more guided audio meditations or download 200 meditation scripts to expand your personal practice, or to share with others.
Loving-kindness meditation, known as metta in the Pali language, is a thousands-of-years old practice that helps us cultivate a more open, kind and loving heart. Traditional mindfulness practices for deepening love and compassion offer us a means of methodically progressing toward an ever more boundless expression of care.
Classically, we enhance our capacity for loving-kindness by first practicing with ourselves. We send ourselves wishes for happiness, health and well-being. We then practice sending the same wishes to a most beloved teacher and a dear friend before working with a challenging person, and eventually, all beings everywhere. This is not a hard, fast rule but an invitation to begin where it feels easiest.
In this guided loving-kindness meditation with Sean Fargo, we begin with a being who brings a smile to our heart each time we think of them. This may be a fellow human, or possibly even a pet. As we mindfully rest in the sensation of loving-kindness, we are then invited to direct those feelings toward ourselves.
It’s normal to experience discomfort or challenges with loving-kindness meditation. We tend to be quite practiced in self-criticism and self-judgment, for example. What’s more, we typically reserve our loving-kindness only for those we are close to, or those who love us back.
As compassion and mindfulness deepen, we may observe that limiting our goodwill only causes harm, while offering it without limit results in great benefit. This truth is something we discover for ourselves, experientially, through meditation.
Learn more about loving-kindness meditation, including how to practice and teach it, with the following free mindfulness resources:
About Sean Fargo:
Sean Fargo is a former Buddhist monk and the founder of Mindfulness Exercises. The online platform, which has shared free and premium mindfulness resources with over 3 million people worldwide, has now certified over 500 Mindfulness Teachers.
Sean is the lead instructor for the teacher training program, a unique self-paced approach which invites world-renowned mindfulness teachers to share their insights and experiences. Sean has taught mindfulness and meditation for corporations including Facebook, Google and Tesla and for health and government organizations, prisons and hospitals around the world.
