Loving-kindness meditation is the practice of wishing someone well, on purpose, repeatedly — starting with the person you're hardest on, which is almost always yourself. In the old Pali texts it's called metta; in Sanskrit, maitrī — friendliness, goodwill. If that word looks familiar, it should: it's where the name Maitora comes from. This is the practice we're named after, so of all the guides on this site, this one is the family recipe.
The phrases
The whole method is the quiet repetition of a few well-wishes, timed loosely to the breath. The traditional set runs close to this:
- May I be safe.
- May I be well.
- May I be at ease.
The exact words are yours to adjust — may I be met with kindness, may I have a gentle day — as long as they're simple enough to repeat without reading and honest enough that you can stand behind the wish. You're not asserting that you are safe, well or at ease; you're extending the wish. That distinction is what makes the practice workable on the days when none of it feels true.
The circles
After a few minutes with yourself, the practice widens, one circle at a time — the same phrases, aimed outward:
- Yourself. The hardest circle for many people, which is why it comes first, not last.
- Someone dear — a friend, a child, a grandparent. Usually the easiest; let it be easy.
- Someone neutral — the person at the bus stop, a colleague you've never really met. Goodwill without a reason is the skill being built.
- Someone difficult. Not the most difficult; start with mildly irritating. And not today, if today isn't the day.
- Everyone — the wish held wide, no address on it at all.
Staying on circle one for a whole sit — or a whole month of sits — is a legitimate practice, not a beginner's compromise.
What the research shows
The best-known study is a 2008 trial by Fredrickson and colleagues, in which working adults practised loving-kindness meditation for a few minutes daily over nine weeks. The practice group reported gradually increasing day-to-day positive emotion, which in turn predicted gains in things like sense of purpose and closeness to others. It's a genuinely encouraging result — with the usual honest footnotes: the field is smaller than the one for breath-based practice, effects build over weeks rather than minutes, and much of it rests on self-report. This is a practice for slowly re-tuning how you meet people, yourself included — not a mood switch, and not a treatment for anything.
If it feels awkward
It almost certainly will at first — most people report that wishing themselves well feels somewhere between hollow and undeserved. That reaction isn't a sign the practice is failing; it's the practice locating exactly the muscle it exists to train. Treat the phrases like repetitions in a gym rather than declarations in a courtroom: you don't have to feel each one land. Said gently, again and again, they wear a path — and one day, usually without ceremony, something walks down it.
In Maitora
Self-kindness is one of the six shelves in Maitora's Guided Meditation practice — hand-written sits about meeting yourself with warmth and loving-kindness, read by a voice that ships inside the app and works entirely offline. The wider practice is in the app's bones too: the dot over the "i" in our wordmark is a bindu resting above an embracing curve, and the name — from maitrī — was chosen before a single line of code. What you practise, and whom you quietly wish well, stays on your device: no account, no analytics, no server.
Prefer to be led? Maitora is free to start on the App Store and Google Play.