7 Reasons Why You Should Try Loving Kindness (Metta) Meditation Today
Have you tried meditation? Maybe you enjoy it and do it regularly, but maybe you think that meditation is not your jam. And I get that, too. But hold up a moment.
There are many different forms of meditation, some include visualisations, mantras, objects, symbols, teachers, but there is also one that focuses on nurturing our most inner strength: kindness and goodness.
The purpose of metta meditation, also known as loving kindness meditation, is to make the meditator develop feelings of goodwill, kindness and warmth for others and also for yourself.
It is the meditation I recommend the most.
I aim at doing one or more of my meditations each week a form of Metta meditation and the effects are always so wonderful - it makes me feel fuzzy, happy and generally connected with the world around me.
What is Metta meditation?
Metta meditation is a form of meditation and visualisation. In the classic version, the beginning is the familiar getting settled down, taking deep breaths and becoming present. Next, you gift yourself with a set of loving phrases. There is a set of phrases that is commonly used, but you can also adjust them to what suits yourself best.
The phrases are
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease.
May I be free from suffering.
May I be free from judgment.
May I be free from ill-will.
After gifting yourself these wishes (out loud or in your mind), you visualise a person you find very easy to love. This can be you partner, kid, parent, pet, friend. You send them the same wishes:
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
…
After that, you visualise a person that you don’t have a very close relationship with, like an acquaintance or a shopkeeper you see when you get groceries. Next, you visualise a person who you don’t have a very good relationship with. But be gentle on yourself. You don’t need to choose someone who has deeply hurt you. It can be a difficult colleague, family member, or someone similar. After that, you widen your circle and include a group of people in your visualisation. A group of friends, your whole family, the people in your city, your country, continent, until you even include the whole world. And you send them these good wishes. You can also include plants and animals.
The benefits of loving kindness meditation are manifold.
1) It creates an inner sense of connection & belonging
Metta meditation can actually make you feel more connected to yourself and your surroundings from the inside. Science is actually showing that feeling connected to friends, as well as other people and the world around us, doesn’t need to be related to our actual feelings toward them - rather, feeling connected within first will help you foster external relationships. For example, you may have many friends but not feel held, you may be spending time with your partner and children but feel lonely. That is where Metta meditation can help. It helps you feel like a part of a network, a deep connection with other beings, feel supported, ultimate love for surroundings, and it can even decrease a sense of loneliness. (Last week I wrote about doing acts of kindness from home, and the last one was doing metta meditation.)
2) It increases compassion & empathy
The phrases you repeat for this meditation increase your sense of compassion and empathy for yourself and others. These are skills that are widely needed to create more community and allowing each other to be who we really are. Compassion and empathy see beyond vulnerability and see the wholeness of all beings. This can be extremely helpful at workplaces, in families and in partnerships. As a result, it helps you to actually improve your connection with others off the meditation cushion, too.
3) It can boost confidence
By practising compassion and kindness for yourself, your level of confidence can be increased. The truth is we have an innate sense of confidence, but external voices, experiences and conditioning can make us feel inferior or that we need to be approved by others first. This practice is very grounding through breathing and wishing kindness and can create a generally higher sense of success and contentment in life.
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4) It decreases stress and supports healing
We spend most of our days in the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system. This is mainly activated through stress. You could say that stress is your ultimate enemy of happiness. Stress can include being stressed for time at work, at home, but also feeling emotionally overwhelmed. Being a form of meditation, Metta makes you breathe more slowly and with more awareness. When you sit to meditate, take more slow breaths, you automatically activate the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system. This is where your body can heal. For example, it has been found that Metta meditation can decrease migraines, chronic pains and PTSD.
5) It decreases anxiety & self-judgement
In relation to the previous point, as a form of meditation, it decreases stress and also symptoms of anxiety. Plus, practising kindness through Metta on a regular basis teaches you to subconsciously experience yourself and others with more love and empathy. That also includes being less harsh toward yourself and calm down your inner critic. In that way, it also increases a sense of balance and trust in life more broadly.
6) It fosters emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is not only about knowing how to regulate and control your feelings. It also goes the other way - being able to be in touch with your own emotions and sensing other people’s emotions. Loving kindness meditation allows you to work on both of those directions through aware breathing, letting you sense your bodily sensations, and experiencing love and kindness for others and yourself.
7) It increases happiness and wellbeing
Now, you might think, of course, this meditation must increase happiness and wellbeing, and you are right. Not only have researchers found that study subjects simply love doing this meditation and that they are smiling broadly from ear to ear while they do it, they have also found that subjects record experiencing more moments of happiness and positive emotions throughout their day (Barbara L. Frederickson). They “found that practising 7 weeks of loving-kindness meditation increased love, joy, contentment, gratitude, pride, hope, interest, amusement, and awe” (Emma Sepällä).
So, what is the take-away?
Loving Kindness meditation can do a lot for you and there is more and more supportive research in the field, too. It can help you feel happier, more connected, rested, warm, and so much more. It also doesn’t have to take long. Once you have done the full version a few times, it becomes easier to improvise, change up the phrases, and shorten it, too.
