Loving-kindness

What it is

Mettā bhāvanā — the cultivation of loving-kindness. A Buddhist practice in which the practitioner deliberately generates goodwill and directs it outward in a widening sequence.

The standard progression:

1. Oneself
2. A benefactor — someone who has been unambiguously good to you
3. A close friend
4. A neutral person — someone you neither like nor dislike, the barista, a neighbour
5. A difficult person
6. All beings without distinction

Phrases are repeated at each stage: may you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, may you live with ease.

It belongs to the constructive family described under what meditation is — it is not an attentional exercise. It is a rehearsal, deliberately cultivating a disposition rather than observing what arises.

The Tibetan practice of tonglen inverts it and is considerably harder: breathe in another's suffering, breathe out relief. Rather than protecting yourself from pain, you take it toward yourself on purpose.

Where it came from

Mettā is one of the four brahmavihāras, the divine abidings, alongside compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā) and equanimity (upekkhā). The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, a short discourse recited daily in Theravāda communities, is its canonical source, and it asks the practitioner to hold all beings as a mother holds her only child.

Traditionally it serves two functions: it is a antidote to ill-will, and it is a support for concentration, since goodwill steadies the mind more reliably than effort does.

Compassion practice was substantially the entry point for contemplative neuroscience, since the long-term practitioners the Dalai Lama sent to laboratories in the early 2000s were largely doing this.

How it is done

Seated, with the phrases repeated silently, holding each person in mind before moving on. Some traditions use visualisation, some rely on the phrases alone. Sessions of ten to forty minutes, often working through the whole sequence, sometimes staying at one stage for weeks.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the evidence is comparatively good, and better than for mindfulness on some outcomes. Meta-analyses of loving-kindness and compassion interventions find moderate effects on positive affect, self-compassion and reduced self-criticism. Barbara Fredrickson's 2008 randomised trial found that loving-kindness practice increased positive emotions over time and that the increases predicted gains in personal resources. Helen Weng and colleagues (2013) found compassion training increased altruistic behaviour in a costly-redistribution task, with associated neural changes. Some studies have found reductions in implicit bias toward stigmatised groups.

The caveats are the field's usual ones — modest effect sizes, frequent comparison against inactive controls, and the methodological problems set out under the evidence. But the constructive practices have generally fared better in trials than the attentional ones, and it is worth noting which practice the results attach to rather than crediting "meditation".

And we can say something practical that is frequently omitted: the first stage is the hardest, and for some people it is genuinely distressing.

Directing kindness at oneself reliably produces resistance in people carrying shame, self-criticism or trauma. Paul Gilbert's clinical work identifies a fear of compassion — an aversion to receiving or generating warmth toward oneself, associated with early experience where care was unsafe or conditional — and it is measurable. Practitioners in this position may find that the phrases produce not warmth but grief, numbness, anger or a strong urge to stop.

Teachers frequently treat this as resistance to be pushed through. Clinically it is a signal, and the usual adaptation is to start elsewhere in the sequence — with a benefactor, or with a pet — and come back to oneself later, or not at all for a while.

One caution about how it can be misused. Generating goodwill toward a person who is harming you is a legitimate practice and is not a substitute for stopping them. Where mettā toward a difficult person is used to avoid a boundary, a departure or a complaint, it has become spiritual bypassing with a Pali name. The tradition does not require you to remain within reach of someone dangerous, and no classical source says it does.

We cannot say whether the goodwill reaches anyone. What can be said is that it demonstrably changes the person generating it, which is what the tradition claims first.

Further reading

• The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta — a page long, freely available.
• Fredrickson et al., "Open hearts build lives" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008).
• Paul Gilbert's work on fear of compassion, for why the first stage is hard.