This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Centered Pleasantness of Metta; Love (27) Metta Samadhi 2. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Guided Meditation: Centeredness and Pleasure of Metta; Love (27) Metta Samadhi 2 - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 17, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Centeredness and Pleasure of Metta
Warm greetings from Redwood City. IMC here, and today we continue on this sub-theme of the week, which is metta1 samadhi2, the samadhi of metta.
For it to be a samadhi, I'd like to emphasize two things that are important. These two things are important for samadhi, but also important for metta—for whatever metta is for you: kindness, goodwill, loving-kindness, or love. It has these qualities built into it which are not so usually associated with love.
One is that it is a unification, a gathering together to becoming centered. We can say centered on oneself. Centered right here at the junction, at the nexus of all our experience within and outside and inside—that we're centered. We're grounded and settled.
And so with samadhi, we're not reaching forward to have something. We're not trying to get something. We're not searching for something. We're not expecting something. We're not trying to make something happen in a certain way. There's no need for it to be reciprocated, to get something in return. Samadhi is kind of a beautiful, holistic, self-contained experience where we're settled at home here in this experience right now, and so is metta.
The second is that samadhi involves pleasure. Explicitly, sometimes deeper samadhi is associated with joy and happiness, sometimes even with bliss. But to some degree, there is a pleasure without it needing to be dramatic or special. There's something extremely pleasant and satisfying and nice about the experience of samadhi, and it's a pleasure which is self-reinforcing. It is a pleasure which is self-inviting: "Here, come here, this is good. This is a good pleasure."
The samadhi of metta also has pleasure. There's pleasure in love, but not the pleasure of sensual pleasure, not the pleasure of receiving and getting something, but a self-contained pleasure of something that's really centered and grounded and flowing here in ourselves.
So these two qualities we tap into to get concentrated, to get absorbed, to get completely connected here in the groundedness, subtleness, and centeredness here. And we search for the pleasure of love. Let that pleasure of love be a gathering of more and more of this attention here.
So to assume a meditation posture. Some people, when they do metta meditation, they make sure the posture is pain-free, if that's possible. Ensure that the posture is tension-free, without collapsing or sinking, or luxuriating.
So then to feel the body, maybe gently closing your eyes. As you feel your body, see where in the body there's a feeling of pleasure. Pleasantness doesn't have to be dramatic. It could be a subtle vibration, glow, warmth. And ideally, this pleasure is not there because there's something that's touching you or doing something to you. It's just something pleasant about being alive right now in the body.
Maybe what's pleasant in the mind is the pleasure of sitting in a meditation posture with nothing else you need to do, but to discover something new about your capacity to love.
Taking a few fuller breaths. And as you exhale, relax into a centered place within, a grounded place within. At the end of the exhale, the inhale begins from this grounded place. And while something stays rooted there, there's the growth and the expansion of the inhale through the body.
As you breathe in and out, if it's easy enough, breathe through or breathe with whatever pleasure that's here and now in your body. The simple pleasure may be connected to the simplicity of being.
Then think of someone that's easy for you to have metta for—goodwill, uncomplicated friendliness, kindness, love—where you need nothing back from this person. But it delights you to know the person. It brings you a smile, a joy just to know that this person is in your life. This joy, this delight.
Can you find the pleasure of your positive regard for this person? Maybe it takes the form of a smile, a smile in the heart. And if you have a love, kindness, or goodwill for this person, say yes to it. A yes that allows you to inhabit the pleasure of the goodwill. Wherever that pleasure is.
And then connecting breathing with the pleasure. Connecting breathing to a centered place within. Gathering a sense of centeredness, breathing, and the pleasure of metta, goodwill, and wishing them well.
Wishing your person, "May you be happy." And seeing if you can settle into that wish to feel the pleasure behind it. Quieting distracting thoughts so you can dwell in the simplicity of being centered here with goodwill for your friend, enjoying the pleasure of love and goodwill.
There is a general mood or atmosphere that keeps you welcomed, invited into the immediate world of the body, the heart, and the breathing, infused with goodwill. Feeling the pleasure that's available, however subtle it is in the body, in the sensations of breathing. Maybe in a place of inner quiet stillness.
And to have that pleasure together with love, goodwill that needs nothing in return. That is just a radiance, a glow. A field of subtle pleasure in which you breathe, within which you wish well to others. "May you be happy."
As we come to the end of this sitting, appreciate if you can this simple pleasure of goodwill, holding others in a positive regard with generosity and kindness, in which there's pleasure and comfort. Just being this way. Just having love. No need for it to be reciprocated. No need for others to know you have this kind of metta.
Recognize that it might be really nice for you to be this way, and that it's okay to stay this way towards all beings, even those that are difficult. Because to not do that diminishes you. You lose touch with this pleasure in the self-contained place of being centered here and now. The metta of samadhi.
Allow your metta to go out into the world, to glow, to flow unto all beings equally.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may all beings stay close to their own capacity, their own ability to be nourished, to be delighted by their own capacity to love, their own capacity for goodwill. May all beings enjoy the benefits of goodwill. Thank you.
Love (27) Metta Samadhi 2
Hello and welcome to this continuous series on love in the Buddhist meanings of the word love. One of the forms of love in Buddhism is metta. Usually translated as loving-kindness, I often translate it as goodwill.
One of the things to appreciate is that goodwill and love take many different forms. So whatever ways I talk about it, or someone else talks about it, it might not be a good fit for how you do it. I try to talk about all the different component ways that might come into play so that even just one of those might be your way.
For some people, it's more of a feeling. For some people, it's more of an intention. For some people, it's a form or way of thinking. For some people, it involves a feeling of a certain kind of healthy desire. For some people, it's a glow. For some people, it feels like a light. Some people just feel a kind of wonderful, tingling sensation. There are all kinds of ways in which it's felt. There are many aspects to it.
In order to go into the samadhi of metta—meaning in order to really immerse oneself deeply in the whole experience and the whole capacity for metta, so that it becomes the unified, continuous place that we rest and abide in—it's an amazing thing that that's possible. Our whole being is somehow suffused with some degree of goodwill, and this is what we're centered on. This is what we're about in the course of the samadhi itself.
There's a lot of learning that happens in this state, and I wanted to emphasize two things today.
One is that samadhi is a state where we're somehow self-contained, self-unified. We're at home, centered on ourselves. The mind and the heart are not reaching forward for something, expecting something, wanting something, trying to get something, trying to avoid something, or trying to push something away. That whole movement of pushing and grabbing, getting and taking, and avoiding all quiets down, because in samadhi we're becoming deeply centered here and now. I'd like to say almost centered on oneself, but there's something about "self" that paradoxically begins to become amorphous or intangible as we get more and more centered here on ourselves. So, we're really here.
Often, conventional love in our society is transactional. It comes with expectations. It comes with things that we want to have. We want to be with the person we love more. We want to be appreciated by them. We want them to be committed to us. We want them to somehow reciprocate by loving us in all kinds of ways. We want to have pleasure. We want to have time. We want, we want, we want.
Some of that is fine, and some of that is healthy. But clearly, in a samadhi state, that is not there. There's no reaching out or wanting. This is a revolutionary way for some people to experience love, because for some people, their mind is incessantly wanting something or not wanting something. Every thought involves some desire or aversion, some preoccupation that we're concerned with. But in samadhi, we're coming home to ourselves. There's no more clinging desire. There's no desire reaching out beyond ourselves, wanting something. If there is a desire, the desire is to be fully at home here, to relax into this experience here, to open up into this experience here.
Learning that in samadhi, and having the samadhi be centered on metta and on love, begins to show us that we have a capacity for love that can be non-transactional. It can be independent of what other people are doing, independent of what we get in return, and even independent of whether people are doing something that we strongly disapprove of. If it's transactional, we feel like, "Well, I can't love them if they're doing something awful." We don't have to approve of what they're doing. We can sometimes even stand and say, "No, you can't do that." But what we learn in samadhi is that we are harming ourselves, harming our samadhi, and harming our capacity for love if we limit our love and exclude people from it.
The wisdom is being able to feel kindness, to feel goodwill non-transactionally, and letting wisdom take care of things in the world. This is one of the gifts that we can learn from samadhi: sitting in meditation and discovering a centered, grounded kind of goodwill which is complete in itself. It needs nothing else. Even if it has the wish, "May someone be happy," the wish is not a desire that needs to be fulfilled. So that's one aspect that is kind of universal when we're talking about samadhi.
The other is that samadhi is pleasant. There's pleasure in samadhi. Healthy love has pleasure in it. It's pleasant to have it. One of the ways to become grounded and centered in samadhi is to really feel the welcoming, nurturing sensations of pleasure that are there as part of it. Different people experience that pleasure in very different ways. For some people, it might be more cognitive and mental. For some people, it might be more emotional and heartfelt. Some people might feel it somatically, radiating through the body, and in other ways as well.
But feel some kind of pleasure and pleasantness in our whole psychophysical system someplace. It could be in one little spot. It could be a wider area. It could be the whole body. Recognize that, and really allow the gathering, the unification, and the centering of ourselves in the experience here to include that pleasure. Include that pleasure so that it can begin to suffuse, pervade, or spread—to use the language of the Buddha—so that it can have an influence that spreads through our body to help bring more of this pleasure around.
So when the samadhi has to do with metta, it's the pleasure that comes from having love, the pleasure that comes from having goodwill. You're allowed to have that pleasure. If we're too concerned with a "should"—we're supposed to be kind, we're supposed to do it right, we're supposed to have this and that—then we're not centered in ourselves. We're not relaxed and being here, and then it's hard to feel the pleasure.
Begin feeling that pleasure, and let that pleasure and that centeredness not be tricked away or hijacked by beliefs that you don't deserve this, you shouldn't be this way, this is not something good people do, or that this is too selfish. There are all kinds of things that would take us away from centering here, relaxing here, and being here in a full way.
So these are two qualities that can support the samadhi of metta: the quality of being really centered here in yourself, and the quality of feeling the pleasure of being here, the pleasure of having goodwill.
As we stay with goodwill, stay with that pleasure. Some people can just simply stay with it and radiate it. That pleasure of goodwill kind of becomes the focal point. As we breathe, we breathe through it, and the feeling of love then spreads, which allows the thinking mind to get quieter and quieter.
Other people find that it's really useful to have the thinking mind engaged very simply with expressing this goodwill. Sometimes I use the word "yes"—just saying "yes" to this love. Sometimes I just say "happy," "joy," or "peace." And sometimes, more classically, well-wishing has a phrase. That is saying, "May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be peaceful. May you be free."
Each person has to find their own way through some of these different component parts of loving-kindness. But the guide is to do so very simply, in such a way that we start feeling the invitation to become centered here in our experience, feeling the pleasure of it all, and just being with it.
I hope that makes sense for all of you, and we'll continue this series on metta samadhi tomorrow. I saw there were some chats about the low volume here, so maybe something has changed in the settings. We had trouble last week with the recording system here. So, I appreciate the chats and I'll go check now if there's anything to do with the settings. I have been wondering whether it's actually my voice. Maybe because of this topic, I'm a little bit too close to this meditative state, and so my voice is getting even lower than usual. I'll look into it, and I hope that my voice will be loud enough for all of you tomorrow. Thank you.