Guided Meditation: Radiating Metta; Dharmette: Love (41) Metta with Spatial Awareness

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Radiating Metta; Love (41) Metta with Spatial Awareness. 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 17, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Radiating Metta

Let's see if we have sound now. Wait a moment to see. Yes, you have sound. Great. I came back to IMC today, and the audio system that we have wasn't working. So, we'll use my laptop today. I still need a couple of moments to set it up properly.

First, a thank you to Nikki for covering for me yesterday; I appreciate that a lot. I had to go down to Southern California to take care of family matters, and now I'm happy to be back. We're starting a little late.

Today, we're going to do a metta^[1] meditation. Having goodwill that radiates is a powerful inner motivation and attitude. The warmth is directly related to how much we feel at ease in this life of ours—how much we feel joy and peace, and how little we are caught in craving, ill will, hatred, and grievances.

Grievances, craving, hatred, and ill will all take a lot of energy in the mind. They create a lot of stress for us. The remarkable thing is that without that kind of stress, simple goodwill, love, compassion, and a peaceful attitude that's receptive and present for others in a good-hearted way become almost like a natural phenomenon. This naturalness speaks to how it doesn't have to be so much a technique of thinking about particular people and having love for them, or even having a particular attitude towards oneself. Categories of people and categories of self can begin to dissolve, becoming less and less important—less the focus. They are instead replaced by a general warmth, a soft, warm feeling, and an attitude of goodwill, well-wishing, kindness, and friendliness. It doesn't need to be a technique, but rather something we allow to flow, move, and radiate.

There's a practice of loving-kindness called "radiating loving-kindness" that doesn't use the categories of people. It simply involves making room and allowing for a radiance of warmth, a glow of warmth from our heart center, to begin radiating out into the world in all directions.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Take some long, slow, deep breaths to settle into your meditation and into your posture. Take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Soften the body as you exhale. Soften the mind. Soften the heart. Let your breathing return to normal.

With the support of the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, settle yourself into your body and into your breathing. Feel settled and stable here. Put aside thoughts and ideas that have nothing to do with the here and now.

Is there some place within you that you associate as the heart center—the center of love or goodwill, a place that's soft and tender? Maybe this place is gentle and warm. Often times it's in the chest, but it can be other places that feel like the center for metta. As you exhale, let other concerns that you have gently fall to the side as you center yourself on your heart center—your place of kindness, care, and gentleness.

There are many ways of experiencing sensations of goodwill. It might be a warmth, softness, a gentle vibration, a tingling flow, or a small, calm excitation of energy. Breathe with whatever place you feel kindness, goodwill, or love. It is as if when you breathe in, you're filling this place. When you breathe out, you're allowing it to relax and spread.

Breathe through that place within that is the heart center. Feel a warmth, a radiance, a glow like a light shining outwards. Allow that light, that flow and glow, to flow out in front of you. You're using your spatial awareness to be intimate with metta flowing from your tender heart, your gentle place. Imagine it. Imagine its light or warmth with every breath. If it helps, you can say the phrase, "May there be happiness," without specifying who it's for. Just, "May there be happiness."

Radiate into that spatial awareness. Consider what's to your right. Do not concern yourself with how far the radiance goes, but rather open up the right side of you to have love and kindness be available for the right. With every breath, on the inhale, open to your goodwill, opening to your tenderness, gentleness, and warmth within. On the exhale, imagine it being available to all areas to the right of you.

And then to the left of you.

And then behind you.

Then let yourself become connected to your spatial awareness that is 360 degrees all around. It's as if your heart center, your kindness center, is a light that gets turned on and radiates equally in all directions. On the exhale, imagine your metta filling out into that wider space around you, spreading kindness in all directions.

To end this meditation, allow your spatial awareness to become filled with the community around you: neighbors, people of your town and city. Let your spatial awareness become filled with the comings and goings of people—going to work and coming back from work, caring for kids, for the elderly, and for each other. With all the different things people are doing, wish them well.

May all beings experience happiness and peace. May all beings experience respect and goodwill from others. May all beings be free from oppression and suffering.

And may each of us not forget our capacity for metta, for goodwill. May we bring it into the world for the happiness and welfare of all beings.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (41) Metta with Spatial Awareness

I'm happy to be here with you all, happy to be sitting here. The opportunity to reflect on and touch into goodwill, kindness, and love is one of the phenomenal opportunities of any lifetime. It is one of the things that has grown over the years with my connection to Buddhist practice, and it's a form of strength and inner health that I delight in.

When I was younger, I mistrusted this idea of metta. I thought it was artificial. Now I see it as the natural byproduct of not being attached, not being caught, and not being preoccupied. We have all these defenses—ways of protecting ourselves, pushing away the world, or being caught in desires, ill will, and grievances—that limit our capacity for the soft, gentle heart to shine.

We shortchange ourselves when we don't touch into this deep form of health. Living in grievances, living in cravings, and living in desires is not really healthy for us. It's not really an expression of inner health. Having a deep sense of peace, satisfaction, purpose, and settledness allows our goodness to emerge. It gives us the time, the willingness, and the interest to connect with people kindly, to be with people in a nice way, and to be available as a friend. We can be available even if there are no people around, or if there's not really a call for it. We have this natural capacity that we can make more room for. We can give it more possibility to allow it to grow, spread, and become strong.

One form of metta meditation, metta samadhi^[2], does not involve using phrases, nor does it involve using categories of people—like self, benefactor, friend, neutral person, enemy, or difficult people. It just doesn't need to have an object. This is one of the miracles of love. Love that has no object needs no object. If an object comes within its scope, then the love goes to it. It's like a light that's turned on in a room where no one is present, but if someone comes in, they receive the light.

The idea is that the heart's radiance, the heart's light, is maybe always on and always available, except we don't turn it on or we don't go to its room. We are searching elsewhere; we're searching in the dark for our happiness. But if we go where the light is, where the warmth is, then we find it. It's there.

It can seem impossible at times because the strength of our preoccupations is so strong. The strength of our fears, our resentments, our ill will, and our hurts seem so important, and we get preoccupied. We get so focused on things that we don't have room in the mind to stay attentive to the heart center—to the chest, to the deep inner sensitivity where the goodness and warmth reside.

This ability to sense and feel profoundly within us is one of the consequences of mindfulness practice. It is the ability to be mindful not just of the surface—surface thoughts and feelings—but to be quiet enough to sense and feel what's going on under the surface, in the deeper quality of our being. This deeper level is not dependent on what's going on in the world around us. We learn to live independent of what's going on in the world around us. Not disconnected, but living knowing and feeling that which inside of us is not dependent on the world, and with that, we go into the world.

When that which is not dependent on what goes on in the world is love—wow. Then it's fantastic to be able to love, to have goodwill, compassion, and care that is not dependent on others. Instead, it is dependent on how open we are to ourselves, how settled and satisfied we feel in ourselves, and how content we feel in a deep way just to be alive and allow this deeper wellspring of goodness to flow outward. This is phenomenal.

In the meditation practices associated with the earliest teachings of the Buddha, he did not teach how to use categories of people. He seemingly didn't even teach how to use words. Rather, he understood that when we're deeply settled, deeply at ease, and when we have some degree of freedom from greed, hate, and delusion, right there, goodwill is available. Right there, goodwill is as present as possible^[3]. We then allow it to radiate as we sit quietly.

Close the eyes and really enter into this world of goodwill. Trust it. Just become it. Let go of anything that takes you away from it. Feel it, know it, enter it, settle into it, and abide in it. Let it fill you and let it radiate, let it flow, let it move outwards.

Some people will imagine it as a light—maybe a colored light, a white light, or some color that seems to radiate from us out into space all around. For some people, it's a feeling of warmth, a glow, or a subtle vibration.

What we're using here is our capacity for spatial awareness. We can know where we are in space. We can reconstruct or sense and feel when there's a lot of space around us or when there's very little space. Our spatial awareness takes into account where other people are in space. We can close our eyes and still have some general imagination or sense of how large a room is or where we are in the room.

This ability to have spatial awareness is one of the forms of awareness we're using for metta. We're imagining or allowing that ability to be receptive, allowing goodwill to flow out into that space all around us.

One of the ingredients we bring in here to make it an all-encompassing samadhi is engaging our spatial awareness as part of the field of what we do. In order to make it samadhi, we slowly begin to harmonize together all the different faculties of who we are, including the sensations of our body. We can know what is present. We can know that there's goodwill, we can know there's warmth, and we can connect to it.

There is the attitudinal faculty: we can have an attitude of goodwill and we can have wishes. We can have a nonverbal, heartfelt wish for the well-being of others—a kindness, wanting them to be happy.

As for our thinking, if we're thinking, it's not about distracting things. Instead, we're gently and quietly engaged in a profound form of thinking—thinking about metta, about how to stay connected to it, how wonderful it is, and letting it flow. It's not a primary thing we do, but just a gentle little breeze of thoughts in the background that keeps us present and engaged with the metta itself.

Then there's the spatial awareness that we can also include. We're bringing together all the ways in which the mind and body are operating, and it's all now concerned with goodwill and metta.

Sometimes you can even intentionally go around and gather all the parts of yourself so that everything is flowing with metta. The radiance and flow of it can feel like we almost become that radiance. We almost become that wider space. It is almost like we become love. What else would we be?

The radiance of metta is what we'll practice for the rest of this week. This may be the form of metta that is most closely related to the freedom and liberation that Buddhism focuses on. In fact, there is an idea that there is a liberation of the mind based on goodwill. It's a phenomenal liberation.

Thank you all very much, and I look forward to being here tomorrow.