Metta Loving Kindness
If you have taken a meditation introduction class from Deep Mental Rest, you have the baseline skills and understanding to enable the mind to settle on its own, leading to deeper and expanded awareness. You may recall from that class we also touched on the idea that there are many other useful techniques for different purposes that can be added to your practice once your mind settles.
One of the best options is Metta meditation, often referred to as “Loving Kindness”. Metta meditation is an ancient practice that is very simple, direct and effective. It opens our heart by focusing on generating feelings of goodwill toward ourselves as well as others, cutting through our ego’s tendency to create a confused sense of separateness, leading to a greater sense of awareness and connection with the world around us. Metta meditation is also an exploration of our fundamental nature as human beings. What natural qualities do we experience when our heart is open, our mind is clear and we are fully present… ?
This is not just a philosophical idea. There is a large body of research in psychology and neuroscience showing that the brain has a negativity bias. It is naturally wired to scan for threat, hold onto negative experiences, and reinforce patterns of stress and reactivity. Practices like Metta work directly against that bias.
By repeatedly generating positive intentions and directing attention toward care and connection, you are actively training different neural pathways. Over time, this can shift your baseline away from automatic negativity and toward greater emotional balance, empathy, and well-being. In other words, you are not trying to “feel happy” — you are training the conditions that make happiness, connection, and resilience more likely. It is simple, but it is not trivial.
Benefits of Metta
Repeated over time, it changes how you show up in relationships, stress, and everyday situations. The benefits of the practice include:
- Increase feelings of well-being and positive emotions such as gratitude, empathy and compassion.
- Decrease the pain and stress associated with negative emotions such as isolation, separateness and disconnection.
- Creates a spacious atmosphere of curiosity, kindness and acceptance towards whatever we experience, reducing feelings of judgment and harsh criticism, and, as a result, allows us to hold space in the world in such a way that reduces causing harm to ourselves and to others.
What to expect in the session
The class is free, will take place over Zoom and last approximately 60 minutes. The overall experience will include:
- Brief introduction to Metta meditation and its origins.
- Discussion on the true meaning of words like love, compassion, and sympathetic joy, and how they point to something unconditional, natural, and strong rather than strong preferences, objects of desire, and other modern interpretations.
- Clear, simple instructions you can follow immediately.
- A guided 15-minute Metta meditation.
- Discussion and Q&A.
- Practical guidance on how to continue on your own.
You do not need to feel loving kindness to start this practice. You only need to be willing to point your mind in a different direction and repeat that enough times to see what changes. That is the experiment.
