10/20 – 11/24 Loving-Kindness

Loving-Kindness Week 1 (10/20/25) Take Home Practice

For your first week establishing, re-establishing, or deepening your relationship with Metta practice: please focus your practice on the category of the “easy” being. This is any being who, when you think of them, it naturally brings a bit of warmth or a smile to you, and with whom your relationship is generally uncomplicated.

In your formal practice each day, please:

• Take up a relaxed, comfortable, wakeful posture.
• Call to mind that you will feel different moods and emotions across your time with this practice: no mood, or emotion (from boredom, to exuberance, to disgust, to gratitude, to fear) no mood or emotion, is a sign you are doing something particularly right or wrong. Allow whatever conditions are present in the mind and body to co-exist with your Metta practice. They are not at odds.
• Now, bring the sense of an “easy” being to mind.
• Next, clarify this sense: sharpening the image or sense of them in your mind.
• Then see if you can recognize their goodness, or connect with a sense of non-verbal appreciation for them, or delight in them. Not for what they do or have done, but more foundational: simply for their being. 
• Having intentionally clarified or sharpened the sense of this being, and appreciating their goodness, now begin to express a few simple phrases that connect to the spirit of wishing them well.
• In the guidance in class, we will generally use the phrases:
  • “May you be safe, may you be happy, may you live with ease”
• If any of these phrases feels inauthentic for you as a way to open-handedly wish the best for someone out of a friendly attitude, replace it with a phrase that allows you to feel authentic in a friendly, open-handed wish for their welfare.
• As in all meditation practice, attention will get caught up in unintentional thoughts and thinking from time to time. When this happens, simply begin again. Bringing the sense or image to mind, clarifying it, and appreciating the goodness of this being as you begin to silently recite the phrases.
• Find a rhythm that keeps you engaged. Sometimes this will be faster, sometimes slower.

In your informal practice, please:

• See if you can find about five different beings that can be in this “easy” category. That is, when they come to mind, you smile, or feel warmth or friendliness in an uncomplicated way. You don’t need to work with all 5 in each formal practice. in fact you could only work with one the whole week. But it’s good to have a small handful of “easy” beings in your Metta rolodex, so to speak.
• At least one of these beings should be a part of your week-to-week life. Examples: One could be a favorite type of bird near your home, or a neighbor, or a friend or family member you text often. Or one could even be a being you’ve never met, but whom you admire and have their picture on your wall so you see their image from time to time (this counts as being ‘in your week-to-week life’). 

Optional Resource:

If you like, you can listen to these guided instructions from a recent residential retreat on cultivating Metta for easy beings (and benefactors). They were given to a particular group, who had been living in silence on retreat for a short period. So they may not be tuned perfectly to Metta in daily life practice for you. However, some of you may find them helpful. This guided meditation is 45min long.

Loving-Kindness Week 2 (10/27/25) Take Home Practice

Week 2

Informal Practice

• As you move through your day, keep a daily log of beings for whom it’s easy to see their goodness. This is the first building block of strengthening your natural capacity for Metta/loving-kindness in the way you see and interact with the world.

Formal Practice

• Focus on consistency this week. Do not wait for the “mood” to strike you to practice Metta. We want to develop this sensibility across many moods and circumstances. By prioritizing consistency, you will both get to know the “feel” of Metta across a wide spectrum ways it can be experienced, and you’ll also continue wearing away the perennial confusion that our mindset dictates our capacity for Metta.
• If your daily formal practice has been less than 40min, and if it could be possible for you, strongly consider adding just 5min to your daily formal meditation practice.
• Begin your meditation with the ‘Easy’ being category. Feel free to use any of the beings that you worked with in week 1. You may also choose to use a benefactor (a being who has been kind/caring/generous to you), or you may generously offer metta/well-wishes to yourself if it feels ‘easy’ to offer yourself this goodwill.
• Spend the majority of the time in your meditation on the “Friend” category. Don’t pick the most complicated friendship you have, start with relatively uncomplicated friends.
• End your formal practice with a brief period of directing Metta toward all beings. For this, you can use the phrases, and discover what various representations of “all beings” enter the mind-stream. Stick with the ones that feel most natural to stabilize the intent of your practice around.

Loving-Kindness Week 3 (11/4/25) Take Home Practice

Formal Practice

Please continue your daily formal practice to keep building the skill of accessing Loving-Kindness (Metta) across various inner circumstances (fluctuating moods, energy levels, distractibility, motivation, etc.). If you’ve been practicing daily for less than 40min and it’s possible for you to add 5min to your daily routine it would be a valuable thing to consider as metta strongly supports the gathering of attention (samadhi) and a bit longer practice duration allows these benefits to materialize.

Begin your practice with an easy being as an introduction to connecting with the practice. Then spend the bulk of your practice time working with a neutral being. One for whom you have no strong sentiment one way or the other. It’s generally best to stick with the same being in the neutral category for at least a week of daily practice. Spent the last couple minutes of your formal practice cultivating Metta toward all beings.

Informal Practice

Spend at least 10min each day practicing Metta for whatever beings happen to be around you at the time. Best to do this when out and about as there will be more beings who fall somewhere in the neutral-ish category, thought whatever category a being might fall in, if you become aware of them, they are suitable for this practice. Silently offer the phrases in the spirit of benevolent goodwill while they’re in your awareness. You can move freely between any beings you’re aware of. But try not to stare, it’s considered a bit rude. Have fun exploring the mind with this practice. It will reveal much to you.

Loving-Kindness Week 4 (11/11/25) Take Home Practice

Formal Practice

• Integrating Annoying Beings and “The Enemy” category into formal Metta practice
  • Create a graduated list of difficult beings (graduated how difficult it seems to wish well for them). Maybe 5 or so. No need to include the most difficult possible beings to think of, it is unlikely to be skillful to practice with those beings until you have a deeply sustained and robust Metta practice that regularly includes this category. Having this list in mind will allow you to select an appropriate being to work with during your meditation in each days formal practice, sensitive to the conditions of the mind, heart, and body at that time.
  • Begin your practice with an ‘Easy Being’ and move on either to the neutral category first, or directly to the difficult category. For the purposes of learning together, spend the majority of your time working with the difficult category. Toward the end of your practice, move on to all beings before you close.
  • Don’t forget you can (and often should) take a breaks in the midst of cultivating Metta for the difficult category. Grounding with body & breath, and then briefly returning to an easy being, can be a very skillful approach.
• Explore radiating Metta for all beings (as opposed to using phrases) if you like when you come to that category.
  • It is often skillful to briefly build momentum with an easy being before beginning the practice of radiating Metta.
  • Many find this a deeply embodied practice. The body of the meditator is included in the field of radiant good will. If it feels beneficial keep attention somewhat grounded in the somatic experience of the body while doing this practice.

Informal Practice

• Pick a daily task that doesn’t require much thought (washing dishes, showering, brushing teeth) and practice Metta for All Beings during this task. Explore what it’s like for the practice to accompany you, as you accompany yourself in the midst of daily life.
• If you enjoyed it, continue taking some amount of time (10min or more) when you are in the world (this can include on zoom) to silently practice Metta for the beings who enter your sphere of attention. If there are many beings, you can play with practicing Metta for them all at once, including yourself, using the pronoun “we” (“may we be safe, may we feel happy, etc”).

Study

I will share a few English translations of the most famous of the Buddha’s teachings on Loving-Kindness, the “Karaniya Metta Sutta”. If you like, consider reading one each day to build a relationship with the teaching.

• Karaniya Metta Sutta The Buddha’s Words on Loving-Kindness – Amaravati Sangha
• Mettā Sutta – Bhikkhu Sujato
• Karaniya Metta Sutta – Fronsdal

Loving-Kindness Week 5 (11/18/25) Take Home Practice

Formal Practice

This week please choose your own primary category of being to spend the majority of time during each session. It is still recommended to begin with an easy being and to close with all beings. As a reminder we’ve worked with the following categories:

• Oneself
• Easy Beings
• Benefactors & Benefactors
• Friends
• Neutral
• Difficult
• All Beings

Extra Credit Formal Practice

If you haven’t explored doing walking meditation at home (or moving meditation, however you take the body from place to place) consider using your formal practice time this week to a) integrate Metta with this practice ‘posture’ and b) integrate this practice posture into your daily life repertoire.

Informal Practice

1. Try to wake up doing metta and fall asleep doing metta. If the intention is strong, you will find, over time that the inner metta practice approaches closer and closer to the moment of moving out of and into waking consciousness. An object on one’s bedside table can be an excellent reminder to return to and strengthen this intention.
2. Continue with any and all other forms of informal metta practice that has inspired you throughout the class. It is very possible by stringing these together that we can discover what feels like a new primary way of being in the world.

Loving-Kindness Week 5 (11/24/25) Take Home Practice

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Formal Practice

This week, we explored another way to cultivate metta for all beings. With this method, a practitioner subdivides “All Beings” into different subcategories. For example:

• Large, Medium, Small, & Tiny
• Seen & Unseen
• Weak & Strong
• Healthy & Sick
• Experiencing Greed & Experiencing Freedom from Greed
• Happy/Well/Untroubled & Unhappy/Unwell/Troubled
• Waking & Sleeping
• Living in the Land, Sea, & Air

If you enjoy this method of practicing for all beings please integrate it into your formal metta practice.

Formal & Informal Practice

Please feel encouraged to be creative with your metta practice. Whereas some buddhist contemplative practices orient toward direct perception of the unconditioned, in metta practice, we are in the realm of working skillfully to influence our own conditioning and conditioned experiences. This invites a different form of responsiveness to one’s own unique inner world. Having understood the core aim of the practice, keep it as your north star: that is, to take this natural experience (that of goodwill/benevolence/friendliness) and make it increasingly accessible in both experienced and imagined relationships, across an infinite range of potential relationships (in other words, to make it “boundless”). Then, you can employ any creative, skillful means which bridge your intuition of the unique conditions in your heart/mind/body with that clear north star.

Here are a list of a few of the encouragements about “how” to practice which may help keep your creativity in metta practice effective (note that this list is very much not a set of instructions on the formal practice of Metta):

• Keep it simple
• Connecting with “seeing a being’s goodness” supports Metta to arise uncontrived
• Remember, formal Metta practice is known to draw out difficult experiences like drawing poison out of a wound (experiences like: rage, sorrow, numbness, resentment, etc). If it seems clear you are motivated to bring creativity to your metta practice because there are uncomfortable experiences arising during practice that you’d like to find a way of avoiding, it would likely be better to consult a teacher about the experiences, and to find a way forward with the formal practice instructions.
• Recruiting the verbal thinking mind (using phrases) can help reduce distractibility and support samadhi (collectedness).
• When using phrases: continue adjust the speed and rhythm to what most supports mindful engagement
• When using phrases: connect to the meaning behind the words
• When using phrases: it can be useful to have a long version and short version of each phrase, adjusting to shorter phrases when the mind feels more settled, and more easily connected to the meaning
• When using phrases: understand that it is natural that sometimes they will become cumbersome, and it is expected that at times it’s best for them to drop away while a sense of the being(s) and the sensibility of metta remain
• Return to the simplicity of awareness in the body, as often as feels right or useful
• Just as with the formal practice instructions: be aware of, acknowledge, and gently dismiss inclinations to evaluate the practice by looking for something to be “happening” while you are practicing. Instead, work with the approach consistently until you accumulate 35-75hrs of time working with the practice, and then reflect on the before, during, and after to yield insight about how this practice may be going for you. Discussion with a teacher at this reflection phase is strongly recommended.
• Keep the north star in mind

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