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Guided Meditation: Metta for a Friend; Dharmette: Love (33) Metta Samadhi 8 - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 25, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Metta for a Friend

Welcome to our 30-minute meditation session. We're engaged in the practice of metta¹, goodwill. The way that it's most classically taught is to begin as a process of expanding our goodwill to more and more people until we develop the capacity to have universal goodwill—goodwill for everyone.

To do that in a realistic way, the idea is to start where it's easiest and really establish it well there, and then grow it. Learn how to have the heart open, caring, sensitive, and kind to more people in the way you do it to the people who are closest. Then move to people who are maybe a little bit more difficult, or just not quite as easy. Then outwards, and eventually to even people who, in the ancient texts, they call "the enemies." In the United States, we often use the term "difficult people." And so, universalizing our love, our care, our goodwill.

What's important to appreciate is that we're doing this in meditation, and it's private. No one needs to know about it. If you care for the welfare and happiness of all beings everywhere, it does not mean you have to invite them all for dinner. [Laughter] There needs to be wisdom. Whatever you meet, you might meet them with kindness, but with wisdom for the context and situation of what's happening.

Part of that wisdom is knowing that now, in meditation, hopefully you are meditating in a safe location. For the time being, you're safe. For the time being, you don't have to make any choices about people. In this particular setting, we're learning to universalize our goodwill and develop our capacity. For some of us, it might be better to think of it as really being for your own sake. Whether other people deserve it, or whether you should behave towards them with goodwill, that's for wisdom to decide later. But for now, it's so good for us as practitioners to not restrict our capacity to love, to not hold it in check for anyone, and to learn what that's like. That becomes valuable material that wisdom can work with.

Today, we're going to expand from the easy person to someone who is maybe a friend, but perhaps a little bit complicated.

Assume a meditation posture. Give some care to assume a posture that allows your heart, your chest, your heart center to be available and sensitive, for its tenderness, gentleness, and warmth to be ready at hand. Gently close your eyes and touch into, feel into within you, where the seat of goodwill is for you—the seat of metta or of love.

Does it tend to be in the heart center? Does it tend to be somehow around the eyes, or back of the eyes? Is it in the belly? Is it throughout the body in some broad way? You don't have to be feeling it now, but see if you can recall the places in the body that light up when there's the warmth and softness of love and goodwill.

As you breathe in, try breathing a little deeper so you can appreciate a deeper connection to your body and to yourself on the inhale. There can be a caring relaxation on the exhale.

Consider how good it would be for this body of yours to be at ease and happy, to be soft with a kind of gentle love. It's just good to know that you would like that, even if you don't feel it right now. Even gently wanting it without expectation, demand, or ideas that you can't have it. Just knowing that you care for yourself, for your body, your heart.

Let that care and goodwill grow on the inhale and spread through your body. As you exhale, let the care and your goodwill radiate outward like a warmth that radiates or a light that shines. Or like a bell that rings, and the ringing reverberates outwards.

Bring to mind a friend. Someone who is not the absolute easiest person to have goodwill for, but pretty easy. Someone where there might be a little resistance, a little question about it, whether it's always useful or whether you always have it.

For this friend, as you inhale, allow your goodwill to spread through your body, to expand and grow. As you exhale, allow your goodwill to radiate, to shine, and to extend to your friend. Maybe visualize their face, or sense them in some other way in front of you. Have soft, loving eyes gazing upon the friend. Know your appreciation for them, your respect for them. Know that there's a resonance between you.

As the goodwill expands and grows on the inhale, you might say gently and softly the words, "May you be." And on the exhale, the final word: "Happy." "Safe." "Peaceful." "Free." Use this as a way of immersing yourself in the goodwill.

Can you find the center of it where it's quiet, still, and warm?

Perhaps as you do metta for your friend, you can think of them with a smile, with a degree of happiness, allowing them to be carried along in your goodwill.

As we come to the end of the sitting, relax and open your attention beyond your friend. Open your care and love beyond your friend, widely and spaciously out into the world. Breathe in and fill yourself with goodwill, with love, with care, with well-wishing for yourself and for this body. On the exhaling, allow it to spread further out into the world. No one left out.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

In small acts of kindness, may we spread goodwill, kindness, and friendliness into this world. Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (33) Metta Samadhi 8

Hello and welcome to this series on metta samadhi², where samadhi is giving oneself over completely to something, immersing ourselves with an absorption, a real depth of fullness of attention, and full participation in the meditation that we're doing.

It's a marvelous thing. We have this capacity for full participation and absorption in what we're doing when things are really interesting, like playing a sport or an instrument, reading a great book, or—if we really enjoy cooking—giving ourselves over to that. We have this ability when an activity is engaging. It's a whole different thing to do it in meditation, which can be very interesting, but where there isn't a lot of input from the outside. It's just you with yourself. It can be more challenging here, but because of that, it's more rewarding. It's more rewarding in some ways to have this full participation where you are deeply connected and deeply aware of yourself, as opposed to losing yourself in an activity just because it's so interesting.

We're not exactly losing ourselves in meditation. We are filling ourselves, participating fully with all of who we are. What we lose is our self-consciousness and our self-preoccupation, but we don't exactly lose ourselves.

To do that with love, with kindness—some people can give themselves over fully to love when it's a romantic and sexual love. They really give themselves over to it. But to do that with a non-romantic kind of love, a deep feeling of friendship, warmth, care, compassion, or kindness, has a very different effect because there are no desires involved. There's no reaching out, no going beyond oneself. It's a deep subtleness here within ourselves. Even though this love wants others to be happy, there's no demand or need for it. There's no clinging to it. It's just a gentle, full participation—a radiance, a flow, or a care.

As I've said, the classic instruction for this is to begin where it's easiest and most inspiring, where you naturally think, "Of course I feel kindness and love." Then we spread it from there and learn how to have that same unhesitating love, a non-resistant giving of ourselves over to goodwill. We work the edges of it toward where it's a little bit more difficult, and more difficult. Sometimes we spend a long time on that edge, just riding it, not trying to go too fast. We might just say, "Okay, I can have 75% goodwill for this person, but there's this one thing about them that makes me afraid, hesitant, annoyed, angry, or troubled somehow, so I can't really go further."

And so, why not? What happens if I touch that edge and come up against it? What happens if I open up a little bit more? What is it I have to let go of? What wisdom do I need to understand this in a wiser way, so that I can be safe and appropriate in expanding out to have no resistance?

Part of that wisdom is appreciating that you're doing this in meditation. You must really understand that this is a separate domain. You don't have to do the same thing when you're actually with them. They don't have to know you're doing it. This is a place where you're learning to expand your capacity. In a sense, you're doing it for yourself, so maybe it's okay to do it this way. You're doing it to learn something very profound about the capacity for universal love. It's not just about a capacity for universal love, but about becoming love, just being love in a full, complete, wholehearted way.

When you learn to be love, you take your wisdom with you into the world and with people. You can navigate the world differently with them through the choices you make and what you say. When you know you have this capacity, you know you can relax. You know you're safe having this universal goodwill within you. You start learning how to care for yourself, how to be in those relationships wisely, how not to give yourself away, and how not to compromise yourself in ways that are inappropriate. You learn to hold this universal love while being in healthy relationships with people, and that is a great thing.

So we start where it's easiest. The classic Buddhist instructions are to do it for oneself, with the assumption that it's easiest to do it for yourself. Many people in the modern world don't find it that way. There's something about how modern cultures have developed that has caused people to have very difficult relationships with themselves. It's probably, in some ways, more difficult than people have had in history. This may be because of this very strong psychological culture we have now, post-Freud, where there is so much complicated inner information about ourselves, along with expectations, judgments, and ideas of how things should be. Some of it has to do with the nature of modern society, with all of its complexity and insecurity, which makes it more difficult.

If it is not so easy to do it for yourself, the "easy person" might be someone else that you know. I know some people who choose animals as their easy object for love—a really cute, cuddly, loving animal—and that's where they begin. Some people use a public figure that they don't actually know personally. I think a fair number of people I know have chosen the Dalai Lama as their easy person.

The idea is to find someone who can be that easy person, and to really discover an uncompromised or unconditional goodwill toward them. Really get into an absorption, give yourself over to the samadhi of that. Don't be in a hurry to go beyond that. Some people spend weeks—a long time—with their easy person to develop concentration, a kind of steadiness and undistractedness. They fully participate in this, cultivating a feeling of fullness where this is all that's happening and the mind is not distracted from it.

Then, begin exploring how to do it with people who are not so easy, starting with a friend. We might have a circle of friends; some we're very close to who might be the easy person, and others where the relationship is a little more complicated. Go to someone a little more complicated and see why it's complicated. Find the edges of it. See where you hold back and what it is like to go further. Can you trust it? Can you go further for a while, and then pull back? You kind of massage that edge.

Because you developed some meditative concentration, absorption, or undistractedness with the easy person, that state becomes the tool or the medium through which you now explore it with the not-so-easy person. That person is still a friend, so we have a reference point. The reference point is not the ordinary state of mind with all its doubts and concerns, but this samadhi—this goodness, radiance, and warmth that we're capable of.

We know we're capable of it. Now we're beginning to see, can we open up an unconditional positive regard to this person who is our friend and do it there? We're learning to expand so that we can keep doing this slowly, only when you're ready, only when you want to, and only to the degree that you want to. You don't have to be pushed against an edge, or pushed into a situation that is more than you care to do or more than what is good for you. You're really doing it for your own sake, to explore what it's like for you to expand in a healthy and appropriate way—the fullness, the edges, and the circle of goodwill that you can hold.

You don't have to go to your enemy or most difficult person for a long time. If you have more than one difficult person, maybe you never do some of them. You don't want to make this whole practice of goodwill a reason to harm yourself, challenge yourself unduly, or do it in a way that you're not ready or willing to do. The idea with this kind of goodwill—because we have goodwill, respect, and care for ourselves—is to do it as we're ready and as it feels good. Maybe you stay with the easy friend for a long time.

Today I was introducing the friend. Maybe that's the one that most represents metta practice, because metta is a cognate to the Pali word mitta, which means friend. Metta is a form of friendliness. For some people, that's one of the primary characteristics of metta that helps us understand what it is and how it's different than other forms of love. It's really a form of friendship—maybe agape in Greek—a deep respect and care for others.

An interesting metta practice to do today is to just track your thinking. When you think about some friend that you have, or someone you know who isn't necessarily a difficult person, don't just let your train of thought continue as it is. Take a moment to wish them well. Maybe say the phrase, "May you be happy." Just sprinkle in a little bit of heartfelt goodwill and friendliness. Remind yourself of friendliness as you're thinking about them. Whoever you're thinking about, think, "Oh, may you be happy." Then you can continue your thoughts as you wish.

It could be through words like, "May you be happy." It could simply be settling back in your heart, just opening—more like "Ah"—for half a moment. Try to sprinkle that throughout the day. If you want to do this practice, maybe there are a few strategic places where you can put a little note that reminds you of metta, so that you don't get too distracted with the fullness of life.

Thank you. I would also encourage any of you who have the time and the interest to do a second sitting meditation today, where you do this on your own to really settle into this meditation on metta. Or, if it's meaningful for you, listen to this guided meditation again. Maybe do it again just so you're staying close and getting some momentum, because momentum and samadhi kind of go together. Thank you.