Guided Meditation: Elements of Metta Samadhi; Dharmette: Love (39) Metta Samadhi 14

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Elements of Metta Samadhi; Love (39) Metta Samadhi 14. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 12, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Elements of Metta Samadhi

Hello and welcome to this meditation on goodwill, mettā^[1]. The series right now is called mettā samādhi^[2], where samādhi is settling down and deeply being immersed in some activity, some area of attention. It is also a kind of unification. It is a gathering together of all our capacities, or a quieting of all the mental capacities that keep us scattered and preoccupied.

There are a number of factors to be aware of with samādhi that support this deep immersion, or this deep continuity of practice—just staying there, staying there, staying there. It feels like there is a wonderful, deep, satisfying feeling of being present, being alive, being flowing, because the forces of distraction are not operating. We are not pulled into the world of ideas and stories that give us all kinds of different impressions about what is important.

It is a settling down, an absorption in what you're doing. It is a little bit like singing a song. Maybe singing a song with other people, where the whole environment is harmonizing and the different voices are coming together. There is a wholeheartedness of being just there, in harmony and unison in the voice. We are not thinking about all kinds of things that are troubling, distracting, or scattering to the mind. The ordinary thinking mind, the conversational mind, quiets down. And when the singing stops, there is something wonderfully still, quiet, peaceful, or embodied because of the full participation of our body, mind, and maybe heart in the singing. I've known people who sang mettā phrases in order to get concentrated.

There are these few different elements for entering a samādhi of mettā. One is choosing something as the primary place to rest or to stay present for—to surf on, to glide on, or to settle into. For some people, it's the phrases of, "May you be happy, may you be safe," and so forth. For some people, it is just the simple words "happy," "safe," or "peaceful." It is the mind's ability to calmly, quietly say these words in a way that is soothing, settling, or gathering. There is something about the words that gives a focus to the mind, like singing a song.

For other people, it's a feeling in the body—a warmth, a glow, a radiance that they associate with kindness, goodwill, and mettā. They might be saying the phrases, but they're pointing the mind to stay with a feeling. Stay with a feeling. For other people, it's the image in the mind's eye or the thought or sense of the person we're doing it for.

For others, it's the pleasure that is there. There's a kind of pleasure in the good feelings. We're doing all this, but it's the pleasure which is the central focal point we stay cruising with, staying with, coming back to, gliding with, sliding along with, exploring, connecting deeply with, and hanging out there. The other things, like the phrases, are all the supportive cast for, "Here, here, stay with us, stay with us."

So, assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Take some moments to settle into your posture. Maybe breathing deeply and relaxing. Maybe softening the body. Maybe softening the edges of your body. Maybe, as you exhale, soften the heart, the heart center.

Feel a little bit whether the thinking mind is activated, energized, or excited. Is there some way, as you exhale, to calm the thinking mind, relaxing the tightness or pressure in the thinking muscle?

Then bring to mind someone for whom it's easy to have goodwill, love, a kind of delight in knowing them. Your heart smiles. You smile just knowing that they're in your life in some way. It's easy to have love for them. It could be a dear friend or a benefactor. And if the easy person is yourself—because there's an intimacy with yourself, an inner warmth, you kind of know yourself from the inside and you care, and it's tender and invaluable to have this kind of caring intimacy—then use yourself.

Think of who it is easy to focus on, and establish some image or some sense of this person. See if you can connect to an intention, a wish for their well-being. A feeling that it would be really wonderful for this person, or yourself, to be happy. Maybe imagine them happy, what they would look like with a smile. Find some simple image or sense of the person.

Are there any feelings associated with goodwill for this person? Is there a warmth? Is there a glow? Is there a tenderness or gentleness? Is there any pleasure with it?

Then consider if it's nice for you to very gently, in an inner voice that maybe you enjoy, express goodwill or care. Say the phrases, "May you be happy. May you be safe." Or, if it's for yourself, "May I be peaceful. May I be free."

Of these different elements, choose one to be the place that you ride along with, that you stay in touch with. Kind of like if you're petting a cat, it's the place where your attention just settles and relaxes and enters into the world of loving-kindness. These other elements are the supporting cast to support you to really be there with the focal point, whether it's the words, the feelings, or the pleasure.

Another element that is supportive sometimes is to do all of this somehow in harmony with the breathing—in tune, in time with the breathing.

Give yourself over to this fully. Willingly put aside any interest in your discursive thoughts, your conversational thoughts, so that if you are thinking, it is all in support of becoming quietly immersed, engaged, and centered in goodwill, one breath at a time.

We will continue now in silence. Give yourself over to the practice of goodwill. If necessary, surrender to doing it.

[Silence]

And as we approach the end of the sitting, feel around your body and heart. Has anything shifted for you in a good way? Are you calmer? Is there an increased sense of goodwill or kindness? Something that feels pleasant, joyful? Are your eyes now relaxed and capable of gazing upon others kindly? Are you softer, gentler?

In whatever ways that the practice of goodwill has grown a feeling of kindness or goodness throughout your body and mind, dip more deeply into it. Like you're dipping into a refreshing pool of water or a warm bath. And in the middle of it, notice the gentle massage of breathing. Somehow the breathing moves through the field, the waters of kindness and goodwill.

Now, turn your attention outward, across the lands. Consider in a happy way how good it would be for others to be happy, for others to be well. Act as if your smile and your goodwill make a difference and support all beings. Gaze upon the world kindly, wishing it well.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be free.

And may all of us here today for this meditation, may we in small and big ways contribute to that possibility. May we support the goodness and the wellness of this world.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (39) Metta Samadhi 14

So my friends, we continue with this series on love right now with the title mettā samādhi: the immersion, the absorption, the full engagement in goodwill.

I hope all of you have had some experience of being fully engaged with some activity where you kind of lost sense of time. You lost sense of—in a wonderful way—the world around you. Maybe you were absorbed in reading a book—when people read books [Laughter]—and you weren't disconnected from the world, but you didn't really notice what was going on around you. People might have been talking, or maybe someone in your house called your name, but you were so involved. Whatever you were doing, it felt good. It felt peaceful. The mind was not in conflict with anything. The thoughts were not struggling with anything. The mind was absorbed, centered, and engaged in some activity. It could be exercising, it could be walking in nature, but it was something that you really gave yourself over to. Sometimes there's a real primary focus on doing a craft, or meditation itself.

It's an amazing thing that it's possible for the primary activity of the moment to be completely involved in wishing goodwill. Completely. Not simply as wishful thinking, but as a whole embodied sense of being. A being of love, a beingness of goodwill, of kindness. A gentleness, a warmth, a joy, a radiance, where that is what the mind is most interested in. There might be distracting thoughts, thinking about other things, but you're not really interested in those. The mind is interested in everything having to do with goodwill.

It's a kind of surrender to goodwill, to mettā. A surrender to doing this one thing. It's possible to get phenomenally concentrated, so that goodwill, love, kindness, and samādhi become what we're fully immersed in. This is much better than being immersed fully in hatred, sorrow, depression, preoccupation, greed, or fantasies, which is all too easy to be absorbed in. Those are activities that don't necessarily do us much good. They don't bring unification or a gathering together of all the healthy emotional and social capacities that we have. So, if we're interested in the samādhi of mettā, then we have to recognize the major elements of our being that we're gathering together to really be immersed in it and surrender to it.

As I said in the beginning of the meditation, there are four or five different elements. One is to have a posture that somehow supports the practice of goodwill, that evokes it. Some people really like to have their chest kind of open. It makes it more sensitive there, more tender. There is a sense of openness and even vulnerability that allows for the flowing of some kind of goodwill. Some people like an upright posture where there's confidence—a confidence in our ability to offer goodwill. Maybe we need a posture where we feel confident and safe. It can feel frightening sometimes to live with goodwill. We don't know if people are going to take advantage of us, or we feel too exposed. So, it helps to have a posture in a situation where we feel safe, confident, and present.

Then, there is who we're directing the goodwill to. It's possible to practice universal goodwill without directing it specifically towards someone, but most people find that it's easier to evoke if we find someone who is easy to direct it toward. Some people find it easiest to direct to themselves because there's an intimacy from the inside out with oneself. It's easier to gather all the forces in ourselves into goodwill when we know it's all centered right here. That's less distracting. Some people prefer to do it to a benefactor, a good friend, or someone who really inspires them with love. They have a lot of love for that person, or a lot of goodwill, and it's easy to want them to be well. It's easy to imagine them happy, smiling, with a twinkle in their eye. We choose a person to direct it to, and we bring that person to mind. If we visualize easily, we can have a picture of their face or picture them in some activity that inspires us in our love. Maybe they have a smile, or maybe they've helped us in some way or done something good towards us. We remember that occasion.

So, there's the posture, there's the person that we're directing it towards, and then hopefully there's some tenderness, some warmth, some quality of goodwill. Different people will feel it in different places. For some people, it's mostly mental—the quality of thinking, the quality of the imaging. There's a gentleness, an openness, a sparkle in the mind. For some people, it's more in the heart or in the body, where there is a glow, a joy, a pleasure, or a gentleness that just feels like that's where the love is.

We're bringing together the body as a posture, the person we're directing it to, and the feelings that we have about them. These feelings in the mind or the body can come with pleasure. Pleasure can sometimes be a kind of joy, and we can appreciate the value of pleasure as a kind of glue, a gathering force that keeps everything present. It says, "Stay with us. Stay with this. This is good." Then there is our motivation, our interest to stay here: "This is important. This is valuable."

Choose one of these to be the focal point, the gathering point for all these things, so that everything else is gathered as a supporting cast to really be absorbed in one thing. For some people, saying the phrases is the object of focus. The phrases are like the closest thing to a mantra or singing a song, where you gather yourself around the words and the whole body is involved with the singing. As I mentioned, I've known people who have actually sung the phrases of loving-kindness out loud during walking meditation. I've also known people who have made them into a simple little song in their own mind as they're sitting there. Having it more as a song is more engaging. It helps to really be engaged and to stay with the primary center of what we're doing here.

For some people, it's the emotion or the feelings in the body or mind that are associated with goodwill. They're staying close to that, or perhaps to the pleasure. For others, it's the image that they're really staying with.

I find it very useful to support this by including the breathing. Using the rhythm of breathing in and out as a kind of massage, a cycle, or a way of engagement. In the teachings of the Buddha, there is the word vicāra^[3], which is sometimes translated as sustained attention or maintaining attention, but it also has the meaning of exploring. Sometimes it implies moving around a little bit. Like if you have a cloth to polish a brass bowl, you're moving it around the bowl. With the breathing, there's a kind of moving. The attention is gently flowing, moving, dipping in, and touching. It's kind of like petting a cat here and there, as opposed to holding your attention fixed and unmoving. The breathing can help with that kind of fluidity and exploration.

Then, surrender to all of that. Do not give in to distractive thoughts. Understand that discursive thought—conversational thinking—is not really that useful here, and let it just recede to the background. With the central focus that we give ourselves over to, some people like the idea of surrendering to it, dropping into it, immersing in it, gliding with it, or surfing on it.

There is a variety of different ways people will take these elements, and people combine them in different ways. What they all have in common is a dedication to make this, to the best of our ability, the subject, the object, the be-all and end-all of what we're about in that moment. Not with strain, not with stress, but with love. To love how we're doing loving-kindness. The very way that we're engaged in the practice of mettā is an expression of love, care, and goodwill for ourselves. We're not straining, pushing, or trying to be ambitious.

How we do it is part of the totality of just getting absorbed in this. This is the good book we're reading. This is the song we're singing. This is the sport that we're fully engaged in. This is the purpose of our life in these moments—to give ourselves over fully, knowing we're doing it well. But it happens when the discursive mind, the thinking mind, becomes quieter and calmer. If it doesn't, that means we're still prioritizing our discursive thoughts. We're somehow engaged in them. Learn to relax that engagement with discursive thought, come back, and just be in the flow of this goodwill.

Occasionally the opposite happens. Sometimes practicing goodwill makes us more distracted, and the distracted mind gets stronger. Sometimes opposing emotions arise alongside goodwill, like anger. Ideally, just see that all with goodwill. See everything with goodwill, kindness, and love, and realize that sometimes we want to stop the practice of goodwill and practice mindfulness with whatever is making it difficult. Assuming it has gotten difficult, it is an expression of love to stop and really attend to that, care for it, and then come back to the loving-kindness another time.

So, be immersed. Give yourself over. I would encourage you during this period of time that we're doing this, to spend extra time meditating in this way. Maybe a second time today, maybe later in the afternoon or the evening before going to sleep. Just keep giving yourself over to this. It's a skill that builds over time and becomes second nature, and that second nature aspect supports the immersion in it.

Thank you.

Announcements

And then for some of you it might be interesting that on Saturday I'm teaching a daylong retreat online through the Insight Retreat Center. I think it's from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM. You can sign up for it and get the Zoom information at the Insight Retreat Center website. It's probably in the menu under "Online Offerings" or "Online Retreats."

Thank you, and I look forward to coming back tomorrow.