Loving-Kindness in Plain English: The Practice of Metta

lamp. My brothers and sisters teased me about it, saying I was pretending, but my mother was quite concerned. She consulted the village medicine man, who gave her a bitter-tasting potion for me. It was made from an herb, but he wouldn’t tell her its name. Many people in Sri Lanka believed herbal medicines had mystical powers, and their components w

May my mind be filled with the thought of loving-friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. May I be generous. May I be gentle. May I be grateful. May I be relaxed. May I be happy and peaceful. May I be healthy. May my heart become tender. May my words be pleasing to others. After truly

Metta is not ordinary love. It is the quality of love we experience in our whole being, a love that has no ulterior motive — and no opposite. It can never become hatred; the love-hate dichotomy simply does not apply.

May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no difficulties come to me. May no problems come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures in life.

The word metta is derived from another word, mitta, which means “friend.” Mitta also means “sun.” We depend on the sun’s warmth to survive, and we rely on loving friendship to thrive. Accordingly, my own preferred translation of metta is “loving-friendliness”

When I was eight years old, I lost my night vision, probably because of malnutrition. After dark, it was as if I were blind. I couldn’t see anything at all, even with the light from a kerosene

Remember that the entire universe is your mind. Family, village, and country are concepts in your mind. When the mind is filled with

Metta can permeate above, below, and all around. Let every tiny little space in the universe be filled with metta, so there is nowhere unaffected by this sublime state of peace. When you practice, there is nothing between you and the far corners of the universe, nothing between you and others. Metta fills the entire cosmos and spreads everywhere, w

metta, all concepts disappear. Only the feeling of metta remains. Just as the universe is endless, this practice is boundless, all-encompassing. You cannot say, “I have a small degree of metta for small beings and a big dose of metta for elephants and whales. I have low-grade metta for my adversaries and high-quality metta for my friends and family