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Guided Meditation: Peace and Goodwill; Dharmette: Love (26) Metta Samadhi. - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 16, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Peace and Goodwill

Hello and welcome to our meditation on this holiday in the United States.

For this day, or for this week, I would like to begin with the topic of the samadhi¹ of metta²—the deep kind of unification of mind, body, and heart around this topic of goodwill. It centers around this capacity we have for goodwill, for love, well-wishing, and loving-kindness.

It is a phenomenal thing that we have the ability to become unified around this, to gather around this, so that goodwill becomes the singular orientation, focus, and engagement of our lived life as we are meditating. We are no longer distracted, no longer scattered, no longer shut out. To spend time in this kind of holistic experience of love can be life-changing. So, the samadhi of metta.

To begin, take some time as a way of starting this unification process, gathering ourselves together. Spend some time organizing your body, gathering your body together, aligning it, and adjusting it. Even the smallest little details of posture—care for that. Do so with a kind of love of putting everything right in the best way you can.

Check the position of the head, maybe even rotating the head a little bit to help you find a midpoint. Maybe rolling the shoulders a little bit, wiggling shoulders back and forth just to be more careful and attentive to what might feel really good. Find a way of letting your shoulders hang. Maybe a small adjustment in the spine would feel good. Small adjustments to how your hands and arms are, and to the legs and feet.

Doing so makes things maybe more awake, more comfortable, more engaged in the meditation. But it is also a way to express care for your body, maybe even a goodwill or love for it—that you value it. You want it to do well.

Gently close your eyes, and with some care, do it in a nice way. Maybe slowly take some fuller inhales and a longer relaxation as you exhale, partly just to become familiar with your breathing. Have a loving interest in how you are breathing, what breathing is like.

Then, allow your breathing to return to normal. See if there are very simple, small ways to adjust your breathing to make it nicer, more comfortable. Offer this care and love to yourself to see if breathing can be adjusted to be nicer. Maybe relaxing the belly. Maybe allowing the exhale to be a moment longer so you linger there slightly long enough that there is a wonderful feeling—maybe gratitude, relief, appreciation—when you begin to breathe in.

Also, as a way of caring for yourself and benefiting yourself, see if you can experience some place in your present-moment sitting where things are peaceful for you. A peaceful spot somewhere in your body, somewhere in your heart or your emotions. Or perhaps you can feel a peace around you, in your room, in the place you are. Or maybe visualize the vast sky above—maybe that feels peaceful. Or the solid earth below.

As you breathe in, breathe in that peace. As you breathe out, gently spread it through your body.

If there are ways you feel the opposite of peace, that is okay. The peace can meet that with peacefulness. Not challenging it, but holding it gently, kindly with every breath. Breathing in peace. Breathing out, spreading it through your body.

As you breathe out, relax the thinking mind. Relax it under the gentle influence of whatever peace you feel.

Breathing in peace, and then breathing out metta. Breathing out goodwill, love, kindness. Maybe in the form of a heartfelt warmth or glow. Breathing in peace, and spreading goodwill, kindness, and warmth through your body on the exhale.

As part of the peace, part of whatever calm is here, breathe in goodwill, kindness. Breathe in a gentle pleasure or sweetness of care, love, warmth. Exhale that goodwill out into your whole body. Maybe feeling the pleasure of goodwill, kindness, or the tenderness, the warmth.

As you breathe, breathing in peace, goodwill. And then on the exhale, letting whatever resistance, tightness, or contraction begin to soften, like your body would slowly relax on a cold day standing in the sun—in the sun of your goodwill, your love.

Say hello to all of who you are, kindly, gently.

As you breathe in love or goodwill, well-wishing, and as you breathe it out through your body, maybe there is a sense that goodwill, metta, is a wonderful envelope, bubble, or blanket that holds all of who you are within it.

Breathing in metta, spreading it throughout your body as you exhale. Quieting your thinking mind. Maybe having a very simple thought that just keeps other thoughts away. Maybe the thought "yes." Maybe whenever you exhale, "yes" to goodwill. Maybe the thought "love," "metta," "goodwill." And maybe a gentle smile of appreciating whatever degree of love, kindness might be here.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, breathing in peace and goodwill, exhaling it out into the world. A gentle wind, a gentle warmth that flows from your heart, from your goodwill, out into the wider world. In a large circular way, like a spreading bubble, spreading out into the cross of lands. However wide and large that bubble of care can be.

No stress, no "shoulds," for whatever you do is enough. Opening your heart wide to the world as you breathe out love, kindness.

And then seeing if you can have the wish that today's meditation is a support for goodwill and kindness for the whole world. That it supports you, in whatever known and unknown ways, to care for the welfare and happiness of all beings.

May it be that this practice we do helps others be happy.

May it be that our practice helps us to spread safety into this world.

May it be that our practice contributes to this world being safe for the people we meet.

May it be that this practice helps all of us, everyone, to be free of suffering.

May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (26) Metta Samadhi.

So, welcome to this continued series of talks on love.

For this week, the particular focus will be the samadhi of metta, metta samadhi. This is this amazing capacity we have to become unified and fully present for our goodwill, for love, for the heart's ability for kindness and care.

I use these different words because different people have different things that land in their heart or awaken some sentiment of well-wishing for others, well-wishing for oneself. For some people, the word "love" works. Some people: goodwill, loving-kindness, kindness, care. Some people like to use the Pali³ word, the ancient Buddhist word metta.

The amazing thing is that we can really get ourselves centered or filled with this experience, this feeling. It is kind of like after some difficult task is accomplished, maybe we feel a deep sense of contentment, peace, and ease that just fills us. This is good. Or maybe we feel somehow at ease, at peace, and because we are not distracted and everything is good and well, it is easy to have a feeling of love for the world, for ourselves, just love for others. It fills us with a wonderful feeling of pleasure, of delight, of joy, of appreciation, of a feeling of resonance or mutuality.

It is possible to have goodwill in an undistracted way, where the mind is not jumping around to all kinds of different thoughts. It is not getting distracted from it. Being undistractedly absorbed, connected to our inner feeling, sentiment, intention, or attitude of goodwill.

So, learning how not to be distracted, how to be really present, to learn how to be present with all of who we are—there is a gathering or unification of all of who we are when we enter into samadhi.

Most classically, it has to do with breathing in Buddhism. Getting really absorbed in breathing, really centered on it, something begins happening in the resonance between our capacity for attention and what we are attending to. What we are attending to is one thing. What our ability to attend is, is something else. But in between those, there starts becoming an influence, a resonance, a wonderful feeling of being restful, at ease, cruising along, surfing along. Kind of being caressed along.

Sometimes with samadhi there is a feeling like we are dipping into a wonderful, refreshing, warm, comfortable pool of water. Because it is so immersive in this wider state, the samadhi becomes a state, not just a singular focus. It is an overall mood, an overall attitude, an overall presence of focus, of presence, of pleasure, of really being involved with just one thing in a wonderful, resonant kind of way.

It is possible to do that with metta, with goodwill. In our Vipassana⁴ tradition, one of the ways that deep concentration, deep samadhi, is taught is actually through doing loving-kindness practice. Some people will spend whole retreats—I have known people who have spent month-long retreats, three-month retreats—where their sole practice was the practice of goodwill, of metta. It is phenomenal that someone would give themselves over for that long to love. Other people give themselves over to breath meditation for that time, really getting absorbed in that. Other people give themselves over to doing mindfulness more broadly, more receptively, in a wide kind of present-moment way.

But the benefit of doing this—giving ourselves over fully to this simple practice of meditation—is the growth of a feeling of deep peace, deep unification, deep being not fragmented and scattered. Being really settled in ourselves in a wonderful way. Not a few people will feel that this way of being feels very healthy. Some people have a sense that this way of being is what a healthy mind and heart is like. Anything else that is scattered, full of tension, desires, fears, anxieties, jumping around, being busy, being not so connected to oneself—that that is an altered state. That is an unfortunate way of living.

But to learn to be really unified in love—for example, with metta, the focus of this week—provides a very different orientation for how to live our life. It becomes an antidote or a protection against living with anger, resentment, with negativity towards others. Those might still arise, but we don't get ourselves unified or gathered around anger. Gathered and unified and consumed with resentment.

Human beings often can get extremely... this whole idea of samadhi... all the capacities that are involved with samadhi, those capacities sometimes get hijacked by states that are not so useful for us. Focuses and concerns not so useful. Sometimes we have an easier time getting concentrated when there is strong greed, lust, desires; when there is strong aversion, hostility, resentment; and when there is strong anxiety. We do have a capacity for becoming consumed by certain things. But that consumption is with tension, with attachment.

When we are doing the samadhi of metta, we are using the same abilities we have to be caught up in some unfortunate mood or attitude, but now we are beginning to apply it to something that is healthy for us and healthy for the world. Not to override the others, not to push it away. We want to be able to include all of who we are in this unified experience of metta, of kindness. So it isn't a matter of denying that we are resentful or hurt, but rather to hold it within this field.

This is a remarkable thing to be able to really cultivate and develop this mood, this attitude, this state of goodwill, this warmth, this white, broad, warm light—the sun of metta—and be able to have it land on all the parts of ourselves which are difficult. Kindly, with care, with peace, with safety for everything, all of who we are. So that even what is difficult within us, we meet it with kindness. We meet it with goodwill. Unchecked kindness. Unreserved kindness towards everything, including what is most difficult in us and in the world. This is the wonderful possibility of this kind of samadhi of metta, metta samadhi—to really be present.

To do so is a practice, and it is a wonderful practice to do. What a practice means is that we are not so good at it at first. It is a little halting, or we get distracted, or other things challenge us. It is like riding a bicycle for the first time. It is hard at first, and then it gets better and better, and pretty soon it is very smooth and absorbing to engage in it.

So, to develop that capacity, to understand it, to be intimate with it, to understand our resistance to it, to understand what other values we have that get in the way of it. And to question whether there are other things which are more important than having a basic sense of goodwill for this world. To wonder: How can we take care of ourselves and take care of the world with goodwill? Can we do it as effectively, or more effectively, than we do it with anger, or greed, or attachments, or with anxiety? We can find that out, perhaps, by meeting all of those with kindness. What happens then? What goes on?

So as we do this practice of the samadhi of metta, one of the principles is to take all of our conscious capacities that we have some ability to marshal together, and marshal them all together for the purposes of kindness. So our ability for attention goes towards metta, to kindness. That might be a feeling in our body. It might be a feeling in our heart. It might be a generalized kind of mood that seems to spread everywhere. It might be something in a very particular spot. It might be a particular thought. It might be the intention itself—the wish "May others be happy."

People who really find it through this intention find it really useful to use their thoughts to remind them to stay connected to that intention. To repeat: "May I be happy. May you be happy." To use these simple phrases. So the body, the heart, the mind, the thoughts—everything begins to be gathered, like a magnet gathers all kinds of things around it. "Here. Come here. Settle here." Settle around and unify around the idea of kindness.

It is a remarkable thing that we have this ability. It is really remarkable. It is almost like one of the natural wonders of this world, that it is possible to become unified and whole with goodwill, with kindness, with love that brings with it a deep sense of peace, a deep sense of being at ease, a deep sense of friendliness and warmth to those we meet.

So that's the topic for this week: the metta samadhi, the samadhi of metta.

So, thank you very much, and I very much look forward to continuing this tomorrow morning.