Metta (MET-tah) is the ancient practice of cultivating warm, friendly love for everything you encounter — yourself, the people you love, strangers, even difficult people — and living from that orientation all day long.
Better sleep. Less anxiety. Warmer relationships. A calmer, happier default mood. The peer-reviewed science is now strong enough to say it plainly: a daily practice of metta measurably improves the quality of an ordinary life. It's older than most religions, works without any religious framework, and we've made it as easy as possible to start.
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Modern life has produced the most anxious, lonely, and disconnected generation in living memory — and the most measurable, accessible, time-tested antidote to it has been sitting in the contemplative literature for three thousand years.
Depression, anxiety, and stress-related conditions are at historic highs across nearly every age group.
The Surgeon General has called loneliness a public-health epidemic on par with smoking.
Practitioners from every contemplative tradition that has tested this practice report essentially the same benefits.
Metta means loving-kindness: warm, friendly care that doesn't depend on what you get back. The practice is to cultivate that feeling on purpose, every morning, and bring it back into the day, again and again.
Each morning, spend a few minutes deliberately generating a sense of warm, friendly care. Use whatever anchor evokes it most strongly for you — a beloved pet, a child, your own younger self, a teacher, a felt sense of the divine. Let the warmth fill the chest and radiate outward.
Five minutes is enough to start. Twenty is excellent. Consistency matters more than duration.
Every interaction, every quiet moment, every difficult feeling — each one is an opportunity to come back to the orientation. A thirty-second reset between meetings. A quiet wish for a stranger. A return after losing your temper.
The morning sit gives you something to return to. The day's events give you the chances to return.
The whole practice, distilled into a beautifully designed mini-book you can read on a coffee break. Definition. Two-step practice. Three short guided meditations. The science in one page. What to do tomorrow morning. Free, forever, and made to be shared.
Loved the Starter? Get the full book — three hours of practice, science, history, and FAQs that go a hundred times deeper.
A complete, accessible introduction to the practice — its history, its science, its method, and how to live it all day. Sixteen chapters, eight appendices, thirty-five frequently asked questions, a full glossary, and a three-thousand-year timeline. Three hours of reading. Honest, beautifully written, and the foundation everything else here is built on.
Metta — known in the scientific literature as loving-kindness meditation, or LKM — is now one of the most carefully studied contemplative interventions of our time. The headlines:
A landmark 2008 randomized trial showed LKM produced lasting increases in positive emotion, social support, purpose, and life satisfaction — and reductions in depressive symptoms.
Fredrickson et al., J. Personality & Social PsychologyCompassion training engages reward and affiliation networks; empathy alone engages pain-related networks. Compassion is the sustainable response — and the one that protects caregivers from burnout.
Klimecki, Singer et al., Soc. Cog. & Affective NeuroscienceOnline compassion training increased real-money giving in an economic game — and changed brain activation in regions linked to social cognition.
Weng et al., Psychological ScienceLKM increased heart-rate variability — a marker of parasympathetic regulation — mediated by gains in perceived social connection.
Kok & Fredrickson et al., Psychological ScienceA wait-list RCT of self-critical individuals showed significant decreases in self-criticism and depression and significant increases in self-compassion after an LKM program — gains maintained at 3-month follow-up.
Shahar et al., Clinical Psychology & PsychotherapyWomen with at least four years of daily LKM practice had measurably longer telomeres — the protective caps on chromosomes that shorten with chronic stress — than matched non-meditators.
Hoge et al., Brain, Behavior, and ImmunityMetta is one of the most independently rediscovered teachings in human history. Wherever you are coming from, this practice — with very minor adjustment — is one your own tradition has been carrying for as long as it has existed.
Loving-kindness as the path to brahmavihāra — the abode of the divine.
The cardinal virtue of friendship; one of Patanjali's four-fold formula.
Universal non-harming and friendliness toward every living being, however small.
The unconditional, divine love of "God is love" and the kingdom of heaven within.
Steadfast loving-kindness; one of the divine attributes that sustain creation.
The compassion at the heart of Ar-Raḥmān, sung most fully in the Sufi tradition.
Charity in its richest sense — the divine love that wills the good of every being.
All my relations. The recognition that every being is kin.
No religious framework required. The science cited above was largely produced by researchers with no religious commitments. The mechanism — training the nervous system toward warm affiliative response — is real, measurable, and yours, regardless of cosmology.
"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
"Lovingkindness is generosity of spirit, the welcoming embrace of any person, of any place, of any moment."
"Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being."
Even as a mother would protect with her life her child, her only child — so with a boundless heart one should cherish all living beings. Karaniya Metta Sutta · c. 5th century BCE
Prefer a daily email to a book? A structured first month, delivered as one short email a day. A daily prompt. A brief instruction. A clear ask. Just enough scaffolding to get you to the point where the practice runs itself.
Five minutes a morning. Find your anchor. Feel the warmth.
Add an evening sit. Begin extending the warmth to others.
Three thirty-second resets a day. Bring the practice into ordinary life.
Difficult people. Difficult feelings. Returning when you drift.
One simple practice. One global community sitting together every day. The single most accessible, most rewarding, most recommended way to make metta a real part of your life — for less than a streaming subscription.
The community is the practice made social. A daily live group meditation. A curated stream of the best metta-related research, talks, and writing from across the world. A private space where members post, ask questions, and get help. The recurring engine of the whole project — and how a few thousand people can fund free access for hundreds of thousands more.
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30 minutes, every day, multiple time zones. The most reliable way to make metta a habit you can actually keep.
A curated stream of the best metta-related research, writing, talks, and traditions from across the world — beautiful, ad-free, no algorithmic noise.
A focused, members-only space to ask questions, share notes, and get help with the practice from peers and teachers.
Beyond the community, three direct paths for practitioners who want to go deeper or eventually teach.
One-on-one sessions with a senior practitioner — for people working with grief, trauma, difficult relationships, sustained depression, or high-stakes life transitions where the practice could carry more weight if it were tailored to you.
Two-hour live workshops on specific applications: metta in marriage, metta and parenting, metta with grief, metta at work, metta for healthcare workers. Replays included for ticket holders.
For experienced practitioners ready to teach. A cohort-based program with curriculum, supervised practicum, ongoing community, and certification on completion. Run twice yearly.
We partner with schools, healthcare systems, recovery programs, criminal-justice partners, and selective workplaces to bring this practice to people who would benefit most. Custom programs, group licenses, and on-site teaching available — pricing scales with budget; sliding scale for mission-driven settings.
Age-appropriate curriculum for students, teachers, and parents.
Burnout prevention for clinicians; complementary care for patients.
In-facility programming and reentry support, in partnership with established networks.
Adjunct practice for addiction, trauma, and mental-health recovery contexts.
Selective partnerships with employers committed to substantive wellbeing.
Metta Practice is a small, independent project built around a single conviction: the practice of loving-kindness — refined for thousands of years across nearly every contemplative tradition, and now backed by a substantial body of peer-reviewed research — should be more accessible to ordinary people than it currently is.
Most of what's good in this space costs hundreds of dollars and runs for eight weeks. Most of what's accessible is generic mindfulness content that doesn't quite get to metta. We sit in between: a free Starter and 30-day email program for anyone who wants to begin; an inexpensive community membership for daily practice and ongoing support; a serious full book for the deep read; and personal coaching, workshops, and teacher training for those going further.
The book and Starter are written by Taylor Oliphant, a long-term practitioner. The community, the live group sits, and the broader project are run by a small team of practitioners and teachers. The work itself is what matters; the people behind it prefer to stay quiet.