Loving Kindness Meditation

Loving Kindness Meditation warms your mood, softens self-criticism, and helps you feel more connected and at ease with others. It's the practice of silently offering goodwill, first to yourself, then outward to others, often through simple repeated phrases of well-wishing.

Repeatedly generating warm, kind intentions activates the brain's circuits for empathy and positive emotion, which over time can soften self-judgment and increase feelings of warmth and connection. You may feel warmth and ease, or notice that some phrases feel hollow or hard to mean, especially toward yourself or someone difficult. Loving kindness practice has been studied for increasing positive emotion, self-compassion, and feelings of social connection. Known as metta, it's a classical Buddhist practice of cultivating boundless goodwill, used for thousands of years. If offering kindness to yourself feels awkward or even brings up resistance, that's very common, especially early, the warmth tends to grow more genuine the more you practice.