This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditaiton: Metta for Self and/or Easy Person; Love (31) Metta Samadhi 6. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Metta for Self and/or Easy Person; Dharmette: Love (31) Metta Samadhi 6 - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 23, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Metta for Self and/or Easy Person

Welcome, and welcome to our guided meditation together. We are continuing in this ongoing series on metta samadhi¹. To be in metta samadhi is to be immersed, absorbed, and forest bathing in the experience of goodwill.

There are many component parts of goodwill and love that I've been talking about over these past weeks. Hopefully, some of these begin to come together into a wider field, a wider experience. One part of it is something to settle into, starting to get absorbed in the specific, so the whole comes along.

This week, I'm going to talk about the categories through which the classic instructions practice loving-kindness, or metta. I'm going to reframe them a little bit. The principle behind them is to start with where it's easiest. As it's easy, we develop it there, and then begin exploring how to have the same goodwill toward where it's not so easy, until that becomes easy. Then, we move outward to difficult people. It is a practice of learning to open the heart, learning to find a healthy way to have universal goodwill for everyone.

Classically, it begins by doing goodwill practice toward oneself: holding oneself in a lot of positive regard, holding oneself in well-wishing, and wanting to support and benefit yourself. Even if you don't feel that you deserve it, a part of you can wish you to be well, wish you to be safe.

Some people find it easier to direct it toward a friend or someone they have a lot of warm affection for. Today, I'd like to suggest a combination of the two. You can choose doing it to yourself, doing it to someone where it's really easy, or this new way that I'll offer to you: to gently rotate. Start with either yourself or a good friend, and do some rounds of goodwill toward them. Radiate to them. Open your heart to them. Feel the impulse of kindness, goodwill, the pleasure of it, the warmth of it. Know the thoughts and the phrases of goodwill that give it expression.

Do it to oneself, or do it where it's easy, and then switch to the one you didn't do. You might start with yourself, then someone else; or start with someone else, and then do you. The third step is to direct it to the "we"—to the relationship and how you are together. If the person is a public figure you don't know personally, you can still imagine a rich field of goodwill that can exist, because the person you're thinking about probably has some capacity for goodwill and friendliness too.

"May we be happy." "May I be happy." "May you be happy." As we live together and live in this world together, may we be happy, where the sum of the parts is greater than the parts. Love is greater than the sum of its parts.

So, sit quietly in a meditation posture, a posture of alert repose. Alert repose. Alert relaxation in the body. Relax the body on the exhale. Emphasize alertness on the inhale.

Then, alert repose with the heart. Be alert like turning on a light for the heart as you breathe in. Relax the heart center on the exhale. And then for your thinking mind, gently turn on the light of alertness and awareness on the in-breath, awakening the clarity of mind. Relax the mind on the exhale.

Feel into your body to where the home of goodwill, kindness, and love is. As you breathe in, turn on the soft light of clarity for where love usually lives in you. Soften that area as you exhale.

In whatever area your love, your goodwill, your tenderness, and gentleness lives, turn it either to yourself or to an easy person to love. Spend a little while with goodwill radiating and extending to that person, to yourself, or the other. Maybe use phrases: "May you be happy," and so forth. Or maybe just use the words: happy, safe, peaceful, free.

Now, switch to the other person. If you were doing yourself, now do the other, the easy person. If you started with the easy person, now do yourself.

And then switch to the "we", to the both of you together. Wish for the relationship between you: "May we both be happy."

Then gently rotate in your own easy way between self, the easy person, and the "we". Massaging and watering your capacity for love and goodwill. Stay with the goodwill and feel the pleasure of it. Let the pleasure be part of the forest bathing.

As we come to the end of the sitting, turn the light of attention to the "we"—the relationship and connection between self and other. It has no clear location, no clear way in which it registers or is transmitted. It exists somehow in the connection, the interchange, happening in relationship to knowing the person and being known by them.

Allow your heart, your tenderness, and your kindness to open to this unlimited, indistinct field of relationship. Feel an indistinct radiance and glow flowing between you and another that can go outward and beyond into your relationship with all people. It's not a one-way relationship. In some way, you are an antenna for that relationship returning to you, in how you receive them.

In that rich world of interbeing and interconnection, wish all of us, the whole world, to be well, to be healed, to be safe. No matter how big that task is or how seemingly impossible, it's the heart's prerogative. It's the heart's ability to wish it all well.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free of suffering. And in the "we", may all of us together have the same aspiration, the same wish for each other's well-being. May all beings be well.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (31) Metta Samadhi 6

I've seen a few comments in the chat this week and last week about the volume being low for some people. I don't know if that's because of settings on your device that can be adjusted, but we're also going to look into it here at IMC. There might be something in the electronics and wires that can be adjusted, but it's not something I can fix quickly, so please be patient.

Continuing with this series on love, and in particular on metta, goodwill, kindness, and loving-kindness, we are learning the samadhi of goodwill—learning how to be immersed in goodwill. It isn't just a random attitude or wish that comes up accidentally here and there, but it becomes something that we live with. It's almost like we carry it with us, a continuous flow that is just here.

In particular, in meditation, we want to be able to dip down deeply and feel like we're forest bathing, or being nurtured and nourished by the goodwill that we feel. The goodwill is reciprocal just within ourselves. It feels so good to have it. Part of the biofeedback system for developing and growing goodwill is feeling the goodness of it, saying, "Yes, let's stay with this," and beginning to appreciate that we have a capacity for it.

Each person is going to have to find their own way. Not everyone is going to do it the same way. People from different cultures, backgrounds, families, and personalities, and with different neurology, will have different ways of connecting to this goodwill. It's a piece of a larger puzzle that is connected to body sensations, heart sensations, intentions, images, and the mind. All these things begin gathering together so that goodwill becomes the central orientation of the mind.

The mind is absorbed and immersed in the world of goodwill in your own way, of your own making, and through your own gathering together. What metta samadhi has in common for everyone is that it's a gathering together so that we're fully immersed and engaged with whatever our bridge to loving-kindness might be. Inevitably, I have to use language and ideas and point to aspects of it that maybe don't quite work for you. You have to find what works for you so you can dip into it.

One of the things it means is recognizing that you do have a way to be friendly, to be generous, to be kind, gentle, tender, and caring. Find how it works for you, and then begin to stay with it. Stay with it. Stay with it.

Just like in breath meditation, we stay with breathing. We come back to it, letting go of thoughts, settling down into it, and relaxing the distracted, scattered mind. We stay here with this. One of the ways to do this is to have some kind of thought or mental words that just keep you going. If the mind is idle, it might wander off into thoughts and you get distracted.

Here there's a loving decision: "Let me just stay here." Say these phrases or words in a gentle, meditative, contemplative way that supports settling in, gentling, and opening. The classic way is to start with oneself: "May I be happy. May I be safe—safe from hostility, danger, and hatred. May I be peaceful. May I be unagitated. May I have no conflicts; may my heart not be in conflict. May I be settled. May I be at peace. And may I be free, free of suffering."

Gently, over and over again, keep coming back to that. Some people like to use four phrases—that's the classic way—and rotate through them. But be careful that they don't become mechanical words. They should be words that arise out of goodwill, reminding you or pointing you back to where it lives in the body, where the pleasure, warmth, and glow are, and where it flows from.

Some people will just use one phrase over and over again: "May you be happy" or "May I be happy." Some people will just use the single word, "happy". The word itself carries the rest of it: "May I be happy. May this happen. I wish this for myself. May I be happy."

I've known people who liked using just the word "may". There's something about the opening of the word "may"—might there be? May there be room for this? May this grow? Somehow, just that word carries a kind of goodwill and well-wishing. It makes room for this feeling of goodwill to be there.

Keep it going in a gentle meditative way. The mental voice that says these words, or the nonverbal way that we evoke these concepts and feelings, should have a continuity to it. It's like holding onto a flying kite. You have to keep the string taut, but not pull it too tight, or it will break. If the wind gets strong, you have to let loose the string. If there's no wind at all, you might have to pull it in a little bit. You always want to keep it a little bit taut—not tense, but a little bit of, "Yes, stay here, stay here." It's like you're kneading bread dough and you just keep doing it, or massaging a friend, or driving a car where you have to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You have to keep your attention on the road, staying present for 99% of the time.

The same thing applies to driving the "metta car". You're just staying there. Stay in your lane. Stay present. Don't go into another lane of other thoughts. Stay with it. Settle down into it in a way that feels settling, opening, and gentling.

What we're looking for in metta samadhi is continuity—staying in touch with it. I love the expression "in touch," almost like staying in physical contact with it, using the words to point you to that way of being. The heart is in touch with it; the heart keeps opening.

Some people find it helpful to add this idea to the metta meditation: with every word, the heart is opening and sensitizing itself to feel more, to be broader, and to be more inclusive. When we say to ourselves, "May I be happy," we're opening wider.

Of course, there might be parts of ourselves that are difficult. The wonderful thing about metta meditation is that you don't have to fix them. You don't have to engage, judge, analyze, or make a story about what it means about you. Just recognize the difficulty: "This is difficult. This is unfortunate. This is not pleasant." But keep opening that metta to be wider and more inclusive, so that it includes that too.

Learn how you can have goodwill that includes what is difficult. Even with what is difficult in you, you don't have to approve of it or feed it; just keep opening this field of goodwill. Maybe you melt it that way. Maybe you convert it that way. Maybe you show the difficult parts of yourself that there is safety here, and then something different can happen. But don't make that the purpose. Just keep opening: "May I be happy."

Finally, in terms of doing this practice of metta meditation—the samadhi of metta—I also find it helpful to emphasize the last word. Sometimes I imagine that the last word is like dropping a pebble in a pond, letting the ripples open up and spread out. The Buddha talked about metta like the sound of a trumpet² going out into the world. You can't see it, but you know it's there.

The principle is to start where it's easiest, which is classically yourself, or it might be with a good friend. The third option, which I offered in the meditation just now, is to gently rotate through self, an easy person, and the "we". Maybe something about the "we" can grow this metta in a more and more full way.

Thank you very much. It feels like a wonderful gift to me, maybe to you, to all of us, and to this world that we're spending so much time on love. Imagine that. Thank you.