This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Settling into Goodwill: Love (19) with Goodwill. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Guided Meditation: Settling into Goodwill; Dharmette: Love (19) With Goodwill - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 05, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning. Hello. Welcome.
One of the benefits of practicing meditation is to slow down, steady oneself, and rest in some form of inner stability and non-anxious vitality. To be present for what is rather than overriding it, missing it because we're barreling ahead to the next moment, the next activity, too busy doing or too preoccupied in our concerns and our own mind and heart. To calm down and to be more present is to see more clearly, to see ourselves more clearly, see others more clearly.
It allows us to feel and recognize how deeply we can be sensitive, aware of others, aware of ourselves. There's so much information that passes back and forth. There's so much resonance, so much humanity that exists between people who are present. And when we have a lot of time, when we have a sense of well-being, it's almost natural to have goodwill. I said to have rather than to practice goodwill. To just be, to smile, to say hello, to offer someone a helping hand, to offer them a cup of tea, to do a lot of small gestures of care, respect, from a sense of rapport, appreciation.
This source within of goodwill, well-wishing, can become a phenomenal reference point, a strength for our lives that we can be devoted to. It can feel like the capacity for goodwill, the capacity for care and love, is so healthy. It's so integral to who we are that we don't want to lose it. We would like to live from that place, not because we should, but because anything less than that is a loss, is a diminishment of ourselves. This is a phenomenal thing to discover: the naturalness of some degree of goodwill that may be the simplest type. From a simplicity of being, there can be care.
Guided Meditation: Settling into Goodwill
So to begin this meditation, assume a posture that is just the right posture for you. A posture that is somewhat intentional so that there is a greater sense of vitality, aliveness in the body. We're not overemphasizing a relaxed posture which sometimes dampens the natural feeling of vitality, aliveness. Even lying down, it's possible to adjust the spine, the shoulder blades, the shoulders, sometimes the arms, even the fingers, the positioning of the head, the position of the legs.
Gently closing the eyes. And with a sense of permission or a sense of broad okayness with how it is, allowing it to be the way it is. Spend a few moments to sense and feel your own body, letting the attention roam all over. Just checking in, like you're checking in with a good friend you haven't seen for a long time, saying hello.
To feel this inner aliveness, vitality just a little bit more, take some deeper or fuller breaths. Not vigorously, just enough to wake something up, to wake up a sense of sensations, connectivity to our body, our torso, to the rib cage. And to relax on the exhale. Spend a little more time softening on the exhale, relaxing any tension, softening around the tension. And do so with an attitude of goodwill, kindness, care in the simplest forms it might take. With appreciation for the different parts of the body. With goodwill to the parts that are tense or tight or hurt. A gentle softening. A gentle goodwill.
Bringing the same goodwill to your thinking mind. Feeling any agitation, tension, tightness. Without ambition, without upsetting anything, gently with goodwill, kindness, let there be an undemanding, unambitious softening, relaxing of the thinking mind on the exhale.
Then lowering the attention to experience the body breathing. The body knows how to breathe. And in doing so, the body is caring for itself, providing the needed oxygen and removing the unneeded carbon dioxide. Perhaps you can connect, be present for your breathing with goodwill, kindness, kind attention. A kind of attention that doesn't crowd your breathing or interfere with it or try to do and accomplish something through it. But attending to breathing with appreciation, with goodwill, with kind attention, it allows the breathing to relax, to breathe itself.
Perhaps the vitality, the aliveness of attention of your body, heart and mind, just maybe it can be informed, suffused with goodwill, with kindness, gentleness. Whatever arises, whatever is happening, to know it, be aware of it with the simplest forms of goodwill, kindness.
Careful that you notice the mind wandering off. Maybe feeling the pressure, the momentum, the tension of thinking. Relaxing that. Settling back. Settling back into a place of goodwill. Goodwill that suffuses awareness, knowing, attention to whatever is happening.
As we approach the end of the sitting, if you like, gently drop the word mettā1 or kindness into your being and let yourself relax into the goodwill, the kindness, the mettā. So not a projection of goodwill, but a resting back into it.
As we come to the end of the sitting, imagine you've come to the end of a hike, the end of a trip that brings you to a great vista, a mountain top, and there's a bench. You sit down on the bench, relax into the bench. It feels good to be supported and having arrived. And then you gaze out across the land with relaxed and soft eyes.
So, to let yourself relax into whatever sense of goodwill, mettā, you find in your heart, in your torso, in your mind. Just relax into it. Release into goodwill. And from there, gaze out across the world with goodwill. Sitting on your bench. No one needs to know that you have goodwill and there's no need to justify it or to have a reason for it. It's just what flows through the eyes, through the gaze. Be at rest and gaze upon the world kindly, kindly.
May these words encourage in you this ability to rest back and to gaze forward into the world.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. May all beings be appreciated through your gaze. May all beings be respected through your kind regard. May you delight in a resonance, the rapport with all beings. May all beings benefit from your goodwill and kind gaze. May our practice benefit this world.
Dharmette: Love (19) With Goodwill
Thank you.
Hello, welcome to this fourth talk on the different elements and aspects of love. I hope that these are aspects of all the different types of love that we can experience. It's not the final description of them, but rather the building blocks of them, what comes together to really make our love, our kindness, our goodwill, our friendliness, our compassion stable and strong and carry more efficacy to ourselves and to the world around us.
The three that we've done so far are: appreciation, to really appreciate others, to find what you can appreciate. The second is respect, to view people as worthy and dignified and respectworthy. It may not be what they do, but who they are as a person and what their potential is—a potential that maybe won't come forth unless there's someone, maybe you, who offers a degree of respect. And then there's rapport, where the relationship between you and others is a healthy relationship, a relationship that resonates with what's beneficial and healing and healthy and onward leading for everyone involved. The rapport, the relationship between, allows for something deep to unfold, deep connection.
And then today is goodwill. Some basic level of goodwill, well-wishing. It’s almost a natural kind of well-wishing, wanting to support the well-being of others. Maybe not with great ambition, with great ideas, but in the simplest kind of ways of being able to meet people with goodwill where we have a smile on our face, maybe, or in our heart. Where we maybe offer tea or offer to open the door for people or do a small favor or care about whether they're comfortable or how they are, asking them how they are out of a sense of appreciation, respect, rapport.
This capacity for goodwill is my translation for mettā1, a word that's often translated into English as loving-kindness. I love the expression loving-kindness, but I sometimes feel that it sets a high standard for how loving we are and how kind we are that maybe isn't always realistic or isn't really always what's appropriate. So I like the more humble word goodwill because it's easier to imagine having goodwill for people we're challenged by than it is to have loving-kindness. It's easier for me to imagine goodwill to people who I find in a certain kind of way difficult to love or who feel disagreeable in some strong way, but I can still have goodwill at a very, very basic level. It also allows me to have some positive regard for strangers, people for whom it doesn't make sense to meet with anything stronger than a basic friendly attitude.
To feel that this goodwill, this friendliness, is good for you to have, that it comes out of you because it's a healthy part of yourself. It's not a should, it's not a requirement, it's not a technique, it's not a policy. But rather it's a practice of settling or finding a place of being at ease with oneself enough that we can feel and sense the place where we have a kind of natural goodwill. What I've learned is that if I don't have that, don't have access to that, that is the time for practice. That's the time to stop, slow down, catch my breath, kind of catch myself, come back into myself. For me, mostly if I don't have an easy access to goodwill, I'm not really in myself. I'm preoccupied with something. I'm involved with trying to do too many things. And so, just stop. Come back. Feel here. Don't override that movement of coming back into oneself, settling into oneself in order to have goodwill, because then the goodwill is not really—it's more surface-like and maybe people can feel the difference. But to settle back into oneself, to become oneself again, then the goodwill is going to have more embodiment, more fullness. I think it's going to have more efficacy because people can feel the difference in a kind of surface goodwill versus something that seems to suffuse or grow out of oneself.
This is also where the goodwill, the loving-kindness, the mettā is really supported by taking the time or having the ability to appreciate others. If we don't appreciate them, where's that goodwill going to come from? Non-appreciation is probably also a sign of not being connected deeply.
I'm going to wait a moment. Street sweepers are going by. I don't know if you could hear it.
So, to have appreciation, to have respect—and again, it doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be... Okay, the street sweeper has gone by. It's very nice that they come to clean the streets periodically, especially this time of year where there are still leaves on the street.
And so respect, rapport. This is probably a really key thing to begin appreciating, a really key thing to begin including as part of our span of attention. What is the rapport that we have with people? Even as simply as going to a store and opening the door for someone else to come in or stepping aside to let someone who is challenged with their shopping cart to get by. Not just to do it perfunctorily or just do it out of some simple kind of care where you turn away and look at the magazines or something else, but to stand there and open the door, make room for someone to pass, where you're not imposing on people, nothing is required from others, but you're there available and to feel and sense, "This is a human being." So if they looked at you or said thank you, you're ready to smile back and receive it. To live a life of rapport is to live an enriched life. And with appreciation, respect, and rapport, it's easier to have goodwill.
Goodwill is one of the forms of love that we emphasize in Buddhism. The word mettā comes from the word for friend, mitta. It's related to it. So sometimes it's considered to be a kind of a fundamental, deep kind of form of friendliness that we can have. And to practice that friendliness, to practice that goodwill.
I would encourage you to spend the next 24 hours seeing if you could have goodwill for the strangers you see in this world—that you see on the streets, you see in places where people congregate, in stores, at work. No one has to know, but to take the time to be at ease enough, not rushing around enough, to take little goodwill moments and see if you can find in yourself maybe a really basic, really simple kind regard, a really simple kind of positive regard, goodwill, kind feelings. Maybe of appreciation, maybe of respect, maybe of feeling this is a person it's worthy to resonate with, to feel connected to, to have a warm-hearted relatedness with that person even if they don't know.
The exercise today, if you want a more dramatic name for it, is secret acts of kindness. Not even acts, secret... It's the street cleaner coming back. So if we relax and breathe, we can use that as a reminder to clean ourselves, our minds, our hearts.
So, in the same way, private acts, private movements of goodwill. Acting on goodwill, that's for later. But for now, to just develop a habit for the day of finding goodwill, finding how to have goodwill in the simplest way for the people you don't know that you'll be encountering. And of course, it's nice to do it to the people you do know as well. But maybe the exercise is one of stretching yourself into the world of those you don't know to have a resonance, a rapport there.
So, thank you very much and tomorrow we'll do the last of the five elements for love and then we'll continue with it over these next weeks. Thank you.