2 May 2026
on metta – what loving-kindness actually means
The first time I sat with metta practice I was waiting for something to soften. A teacher had asked us to direct goodwill toward a difficult person in our lives, and I sat there – tense, resistant, hoping for a feeling that would make the exercise feel less forced.
It didn’t come.
What came instead, much later, was something closer to clarity. Not warmth exactly, but a kind of willingness. A willingness to hold the full complexity of another person – their wounds, their choices, their context – without collapsing it into either contempt or excuse.
That, I think, is what metta actually is.
In Pali, metta is often translated as loving-kindness, which sets up a certain expectation. Kindness sounds gentle. It sounds like something you do from a position of safety, from enough distance that you can afford to be generous.
But the classical instruction is different. The Metta Sutta asks us to extend goodwill as a mother would to her only child – and anyone who has watched a mother fight for a child in danger knows that is not a soft thing. It is fierce. It is exhausting. It does not flinch.
The “loving” part of loving-kindness is not tenderness. It is commitment. It is the refusal to give up on the possibility of flourishing – in yourself, in the person in front of you, in the systems you move through.
This is why I called this practice mettaworks.
Not because I think therapy or consulting should be soft. But because I think genuine care – the kind that actually changes things – requires exactly this combination: groundedness and refusal to look away.
You cannot do good work in the world by floating above its difficulty. You have to go in. You have to stay.
Metta, practised honestly, is the capacity to do exactly that.