Opening the Heart

Loving-kindness meditation, called metta in Pali, is the practice of wishing people well on purpose. You sit, bring someone to mind, and offer them a short, plain wish for their good. You begin close to home, with yourself and the people you love, and widen the circle in stages until it takes in all beings. The Buddhist word points to a friendliness that holds nothing back and leaves no one out, yourself included.

One step before any giving makes the rest easier. A compassion practice published by Mindful.org opens with receiving. You recall the care and kindness others have shown you and let it become what you send out. That way you start from warmth you already know. Loving-kindness has also been studied on its own. A review of 24 studies found that it gives a medium-sized lift to everyday positive emotions. In one experiment, a session of under ten minutes left beginners feeling more connected to other people.

Where the practice comes from

Metta is one of four qualities the Buddhist tradition calls the brahmaviharas, or sublime states. The other three are compassion (karuna), empathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekka). Classic lists of Buddhist meditations place these divine abodes beside mindfulness of breathing. Researchers who sort techniques usually file metta with the focused methods, where attention rests on one object. Here that object is a feeling of goodwill. One scheme gives it a category of its own, generative practice, because it sets out to grow a quality such as kindness. Open-monitoring practices watch whatever turns up instead.

Living teachers keep it close to the centre of their work. Sharon Salzberg is among the names most tied to it, and Upaya publishes one of her talks on opening the heart with lovingkindness. Ajahn Brahm recommends it as a core practice for opening the heart, under the Pali name for the meditation, metta bhavana. Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun whose books helped bring these practices to Western readers. Her The Compassion Book: Teachings for Awakening the Heart comes with a forty-five-minute audio program called Opening the Heart. It teaches tonglen, a practice of giving and taking.

The practice has also moved into clinics. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction includes loving-kindness techniques. Paul Gilbert built compassion-focused therapy for people weighed down by shame and self-criticism. He drew on evolutionary, social and developmental psychology, on neuroscience and on Buddhist ideas. Among its tools are short phrases such as may I be safe and may I be happy.

The image of an opening heart reaches past Buddhism. Yoga and other Eastern traditions call the heart centre the Anahata chakra and treat it as a hub of love and compassion. You don’t need a view about chakras to use the phrase. In practice it points to a place you can feel: the middle of the chest, where the breath lifts the ribs.

Loving-kindness and compassion

The two words travel together, but they point in slightly different directions. Loving-kindness wishes someone well. Compassion turns toward their suffering and wishes it eased, so a compassion phrase tends to sound like may you be free from suffering. Self-compassion makes the same move toward yourself. It wants your own pain relieved and meets it with kindness, mindfulness and a sense of shared humanity.

The difference shows up in the research. Zeng and colleagues (2015) pooled studies of these practices. Programs centred on loving-kindness lifted positive emotions by a medium amount, while those centred on compassion showed only small effects. The review measured self-reported positive feeling and nothing else, so it tells you which practice is likelier to brighten your mood. It says nothing about what else compassion might change.

A practice to start with

Give it ten or fifteen minutes at first. Sit where you can stay still without strain; a chair is fine. Let the breath find its own pace and rest your attention in the middle of the chest. The session moves in one direction: from care you have received, through yourself, out to others and finally to everyone.

care you receivedkindness toward yourselfkindness toward othersall beings

1. Recall one specific time you were cared for. Keep it small and concrete: a meal someone brought, a hand on your shoulder, a friend who stayed late, a voice on the phone at a bad hour. Stay with the memory until you can feel a little of how it was to receive it.
2. Turn that care toward yourself. Offer a short wish, silently and slowly: may I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease. Your own words work as well. If a rhythm helps, give one phrase to each out-breath.
3. Bring to mind someone you love in an uncomplicated way. See their face, the way they lean in a doorway, and give them the same wishes.
4. Widen it in stages: someone you barely know, the people in your building or on your street, people you will never meet, and at last all beings.
5. Let the words go and sit for a minute. Notice what is in the chest now, warmth or nothing much, and leave it as it is.

The mind will wander off to a plan, or to a sound in the next room. When you notice, come back to the face you were holding and pick up the wish where you left it. The phrases are a handle for attention, something kind for the mind to return to.

Two findings from Zeng and colleagues (2015) bear on how you practise. Across the studies they pooled, neither the length of a program nor the minutes people sat made a clear difference to the size of the effect. So a short daily sit is a fair place to begin. But programs with no teaching component showed only small effects. Understanding why you do each step seems to count for more than the minutes. The neuroscientist Richard Davidson makes a related point about keeping a daily practice alive. It helps, he says, to have a story about why you sit. His is that he meditates for the benefit of others, which is close to the spirit of metta.

When the wish feels hollow

Some days the words will feel borrowed, like someone else’s lines. Change them until they sound like something you would say to a friend, or cut them down to two: be well. If wishing yourself well is the hard part, go back to the first step and stay longer with the remembered care. Then what you offer yourself starts from something you have known.

Self-critical thoughts often rise as soon as the phrases begin, and some people feel they don’t deserve the wish at all. Compassion-focused therapy offers a picture of why. It describes three systems that regulate emotion: one for threat and self-protection, one for drive and excitement, and one for soothing and social safety. Early abuse, neglect or a lack of affection can leave a person highly alert to rejection and criticism. That alertness then turns inward, as self-attack. People caught in this pattern find it hard to feel warm toward themselves, and the phrases are meant to fill that gap.

early hurt or neglectalert to rejectionattacking yourself

The suggestion from that tradition is a gentle one. Treat the critical voice as a protector that has got confused, and meet it with the same kindness you are practising. It doesn’t need to be argued with or pushed out.

A difficult person may turn up uninvited. You can include them for a breath or two, at whatever strength is honest, or set them aside and come back on a day with more room. The wish is up to you; the feeling that follows is not. Some sessions end warm and some end flat, and both count as practice.

The wish is up to you; the feeling that follows is not.

What studies of loving-kindness show

The broadest summary is the meta-analysis by Zeng and colleagues (2015): 24 studies with 1,759 participants, all measuring the positive emotions people reported in themselves. Loving-kindness programs produced medium effects on day-to-day positive emotions. That held both in randomized trials against wait-list groups and in studies without randomization. During and right after a sit, the lift ranged from small to large depending on the comparison. A few studies found that the results shifted with the kind of positive emotion measured and with differences between people.

Seppala and colleagues (2014) asked how little practice it takes. They had healthcare in mind, a field where compassion runs low and falls further under stress. They worked with people new to meditation and compared a short loving-kindness session with two other conditions: an exercise that raised positive feeling with no compassion in it, and a neutral visualization. Loving-kindness did more than the other positive exercise. Participants felt better and more connected, both when asked directly and on subtler semi-implicit measures. They also grew less focused on themselves.

10 minutes

That result came from measuring people before and after a single sit, so it says nothing about lasting change. Longer training has been tested too. Chen and colleagues (2021) randomly assigned 106 doctors at a hospital in China either to eight weeks of loving-kindness training or to a waiting list. The trained doctors gained in empathy and communication skills over the waiting group, but their mindfulness scores stayed flat. That is one trial’s hint that metta trains something of its own.

Wang and colleagues (2023) gathered the workplace trials. They looked at 327 studies of loving-kindness and compassion meditation published up to March 2022, and 21 trials with employees had enough data to combine. Across those trials the practices lowered burnout and stress. They raised self-compassion, mindfulness, mental health, relationships with others, job attitudes and psychological resources. The largest effects were on self-compassion and stress, the smallest on job attitudes and mental health. Unlike the doctors’ study, these pooled trials did find gains in mindfulness, a fair reminder that one trial and a pooled review don’t always agree. How much people gained seemed to depend on job type, on gender, and on whether the practice leaned toward loving-kindness or compassion.

How it might work

None of these studies pins down the mechanism, and their authors say so. Zeng and colleagues want more research on which parts of a program carry the effect. Chen and colleagues say the mechanisms still need explaining, and Wang and colleagues list them among the open questions.

Two broader frameworks offer a way to think about it. Vago and Silbersweig (2012) describe meditation as training self-awareness, self-regulation and self-transcendence. By the last they mean a warmer relation between yourself and others, one that reaches past self-focused needs and makes people more prosocial. They count prosociality among the supporting mechanisms, next to regulating attention and emotion. Their model was built for mindfulness and drawn from earlier work, so it explains more than it proves. Still, it places care for others inside the training itself. The drop in self-focus that Seppala and colleagues (2014) measured fits that picture.

Cohen and Sherman (2014) studied something outside meditation, and it throws light on metta’s first move, the turn toward yourself. When people feel their basic adequacy is under threat, stress and defensiveness follow, and these get in the way of growth. A short writing exercise about core values gives people “a more expansive view of the self” and takes some force out of the threat. Its benefits for education, health and relationships sometimes lasted months or years. Linking this to metta is an inference, because they tested writing and never measured loving-kindness. But it offers one plausible reason why steadying yourself first might make it easier to reach out.

Reading the evidence with care

The loving-kindness research is younger and smaller than the work on mindfulness. Creswell (2016) could review a large body of randomized trials of mindfulness programs, and the rigorous ones show improvements in areas such as chronic pain, depression relapse and addiction. Loving-kindness has nothing on that scale yet. Most of what Zeng and colleagues pooled rests on people’s own reports of how they feel. They ask for more studies before the practice is applied in clinical populations. Wang and colleagues name long-term effects as another open question.

Van Dam and colleagues (2017) warned that misinformation and weak methods in meditation research can leave the public “harmed, misled, and disappointed”. Popular pages on loving-kindness make bigger claims than the studies above, such as longer telomeres, less migraine pain or relief from chronic back pain. None of that work is among the research gathered for this page. Treat those claims as unverified until you can read the studies yourself.

If it stirs up something difficult

Creswell (2016) and Van Dam and colleagues (2017) both treat the possible risks of meditation as part of the evidence, weighed beside the benefits. The turn toward yourself can be the hardest part of metta for people who carry a lot of shame or self-criticism. That is the pattern compassion-focused therapy was built for. If a session leaves you shaken, or distress keeps coming back in the days after, set the practice aside for a while. Talk it over with a mental health professional or an experienced teacher.

You need little to begin: a quiet seat and one remembered kindness to pass on. The studies suggest that a few minutes can shift how connected you feel, and eight weeks changed how a group of doctors met their patients. To learn what metta does for you, sit with it for a few weeks and watch how you meet the people in your day, yourself among them.