What is “Metta Meditation”?
Metta meditation. One of the loveliest, most pure versions of meditation. It’s also known as loving-kindness meditation.
Metta meditation is when we cultivate a mental state of unselfish and unconditional kindness and love towards all beings.
I won’t lie to you and say it’s easy - it’s actually one of the hardest types of meditation I have come to try. Why? Because not only are you sharing love with those that you feel warm feelings and care for, but the meditation also challenges you to give love to acquaintances - people you might not particularly care that much about - and people who have wronged you or hurt you.
Now, this is where most people get stumped. I’m supposed to what? Give love to those who have hurt me and wronged me? Yes, you heard that right.
“But I hate them!” I hear you say. That’s where the challenge comes in. Metta meditation asks us to cultivate a state of love towards any and all beings. And what is more important than loving those that have wronged us? It might sound counterintuitive at first. But when you start practicing it, you realize that liberation of those negative feelings might arise from a place of love. Can you still extend that love to those that have hurt you? And by doing so, can you maybe change the story?
No good came into the world from a place of anger and hate. Look at wars, murders… you know the rest. They don’t come from a place of loving-kindness, they come from a place of anger. What would happen if we showed people that anger does not affect us but helps us? And if we show them love instead of anger, how will it help us continue moving through the world?
When we attach to negative feelings, such as anger, we give them space to grow. When we cultivate feelings of love and kindness, we let those spread into our being. We move through the world more lightly. It’s challenging but oh-so rewarding.
Now to the science. Is metta meditation actually helpful? What is happening to our brain when we practice this meditation? Loving-kindness meditation has been shown to affect multiple regions of the brain. We can start with the extensive list. It affects the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventral thamalic area, and orbitofrontal area… (5)
These terms might not mean much to you (yet - this blog will slowly take care of that), but it shows that this type of meditation training doesn’t only affect how we feel, but can also change our brain’s anatomy and activity.
The take-home message here is that loving-kindness meditation can affect neural systems that are related to empathy and compassion. There might be more to this type of meditation than just anecdotal stories of how much it increases compassion and warm feeling...
And those stories might not just be stories. It’s been shown that kindness-based meditation decreases self-reported depression and improves psychological well-being.(6) More research needs to happen in the field of metta meditation - but we have a good start here.
Now give it a go, and let me know how it goes…
Laia Alonso
5. Mascaro, J. S., Darcher, A., Negi, L. T., & Raison, C. L. (2015). The neural mediators of kindness-based meditation: a theoretical model. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00109
6. Galante, J., Galante, I., Bekkers, M.-J., & Gallacher, J. (2014). Effect of kindness-based meditation on health and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 82(6), 1101–1114. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037249
