Somewhere past the twenty-minute mark of a guided meditation recorded in the basement shrine room of the London Buddhist Centre, the voice in your headphones asks you to bring to mind someone who makes you angry. Not a stranger on the news. Someone in your life, someone you wish had never shown up. You are told to hold that person in awareness next to yourself and a good friend, and to wish all three well. It is an unusual request for a meditation, and it is the reason the practice works the way it does. This is the metta bhavana, a meditation teacher Ksantikara leads through a roughly 25-minute sequence designed to cultivate loving-kindness and emotional strength. In the video, published by the London Buddhist Centre in August 2020 and since viewed more than 109,000 times, the method moves in a deliberate ladder: from yourself, to a good friend, to a neutral person, to an enemy, then all four held together and widened outward to the whole world. Its phrases are short, its images are concrete, and its central claim is that love is a capacity you can train, not a feeling you wait for.
Whatdo"metta"and"bhavana"actuallymean?
Ksantikara opens by unpacking the name. In the video she says the metta bhavana is "an ancient meditation practice handed down to us over thousands of years from the buddha himself," and she translates the two halves of the term plainly. Metta, she explains, "could be translated as love." Bhavana means "the bringing into being or the making of." Put together, the practice is the making of love, or more precisely, the cultivation of loving-kindness.
That word choice matters. A teacher who says "making" is telling you that the goodwill you are looking for will not simply appear when you relax. It has to be built, one repetition at a time, the way a musician builds a technique rather than waiting for inspiration. The rest of the meditation is an instrument for that construction, and like any good instrument it has a fixed structure that lets you practice the same motions until they become familiar.
Whydoesthepracticebeginwithyourself?
The first stage is the one most people rush past, and the video gives it real time. Before any other person is brought to mind, the listener is asked to settle the body. Ksantikara walks through the face, which she asks you to smooth where it tightens around the eyes or clenches at the jaw, then the shoulders, which she wants you to let roll down the back, and then the belly, where many people hold in and upward without noticing. The instruction is gentle and specific: "so just do what you can to let that go."
Only then does she bring the attention to what she calls the heart center. The question she poses is simple and unhurried: "what is it like to be you right now." The phrases come after that: may I be well, may I be happy, may I be free from suffering. Starting with yourself is not an act of self-indulgence in this framework. It is the baseline against which every later stage is measured. If you cannot offer yourself a little warmth, the video implies, you will have a hard time offering it to anyone else, and the ladder is designed so that you feel the difference as you climb.
Howdoyoubringsomeonetomindifyoucannotpicturethem?
The good-friend stage arrives around the one-minute mark, and Ksantikara anticipates a common worry. "Some of us will have quite visual minds," she acknowledges, and for those people a friend's face may appear clearly. For everyone else, the instruction is that you do not need an image. "If i said to you now think of a red bus you are able to do it," she says, and the same ability applies to a person. You can hold the presence of a good friend without seeing them.
The aim is to hold them "in our experience" and "notice the response." This is the core discipline of the whole practice: you are not performing a feeling, you are observing what happens in the body and mind when a particular person is present in awareness. The video's guidance here is to notice whether you feel "more interested disinterested," whether your emotional world feels "buoyant or shallow," or whether "there's not much going on at all." All of those are valid results. The meditation is an investigation, not a test you can fail.
Whyistheneutralpersonadeliberatestage?
Between the friend and the enemy sits a figure many people overlook: the neutral person. Ksantikara describes them as "someone perhaps a colleague, perhaps a friend of a friend, someone we know a little," someone we are not particularly interested in and do not especially want to get to know. The point of including them is that most of our daily life is lived among such people. We wish well to a few and feel nothing toward most. The neutral stage tests whether goodwill can extend beyond the circle of people we already like, using a person who provokes almost no emotion at all.
She is also careful about pacing. The phrases are to be used "sparingly," with attention to their effect. The aim is not to pile sentiment onto a stranger but to notice whether a sense of their presence can be built gently, and to let the wish follow.
Whyistheenemythehardeststage,andwhyincludethem?
The enemy stage is where the practice asks the most. Ksantikara describes this person as "someone that causes us pain," someone who "hurts us frustrates us makes us angry," someone "we maybe wish didn't exist." For those who find the phrase too charged, she offers an alternative: "you can think of a difficult person in this stage." The instruction is to choose someone you know personally, not a figure from the news, and to give yourself time to feel their presence before wishing them well.
The reason for the inclusion is stated directly. In her words, this stage is "a chance for us to acknowledge that we have the potential for love just as much as we have the potential for hate for dislike." The claim is uncomfortable and, in the way the video frames it, deeply practical. The same mind that produces anger is capable of producing goodwill, and the meditation puts both capacities on the table at once. Ksantikara also anticipates that this may feel "particularly difficult or perhaps confusing." Her answer is not to force a feeling. It is to "stay with the sense of the person, wish them well as best you can and notice the effect with no real need to change it."
"Maybe in this stage you find this particularly difficult or perhaps confusing. That's fine. Stay with the sense of the person, wish them well as best you can and notice the effect." (Ksantikara, London Buddhist Centre guided meditation, published August 2020)
Whathappenswhenallfourpeopleareheldatonce?
The turning point comes after the enemy. The instruction is to bring to mind ourselves, the good friend, the neutral person, and the enemy, and to see whether all four can be held in awareness simultaneously. The request is demanding: four very different emotional tones, sitting together, each met with the same phrases. The point is less that you feel warm toward everyone and more that the practice teaches you to let your reactions coexist without one canceling the others.
Once the four are present, the meditation expands. Ksantikara invites listeners to include "the people we live with, people in our street, the people in london, the people in the world." She suggests a practical structure: friends and family, then friends of friends, then "friends of friends of friends." Her description of the method is precise: "we actively bring to our awareness more and more people, we notice our response and we wish them well." The verb "actively" carries weight. This is not a passive hope that goodwill spreads. It is a deliberate widening of the circle, one group at a time, with attention to what each one stirs.
This is also where the practice's ambition becomes visible. The ladder that began with a single body in a chair ends with a sense of humanity as a whole. Nothing about that scale is magical. It is the same act of noticing and wishing, repeated across a larger field.
Whatdoesthepebbleimageteachaboutattention?
Throughout the video, Ksantikara returns to a single image for how the phrases should be delivered. "Like dropping a pebble into a deep well," she says, "and just like dropping a pebble into a deep well we leave a bit of space after each phrase to notice it as it drops into the waters at the very bottom." The image does real work. It tells you not to recite the phrases in a rush, and it gives you a way to attend to the silence after each one. The wish is dropped, and then you wait to see where it lands.
The video is equally relaxed about distraction. "If we get distracted as we go through this meditation that's okay it's completely normal," she says. When you notice you have wandered, you are encouraged to "congratulate ourselves for noticing," then to soften the body and return to the heart center. That return is the practice. Each time you come back, you are repeating the same movement that loving-kindness depends on: attention, then warmth, then attention again.
Wheretogofromhere
The clearest way into metta bhavana is the one the video itself suggests: try it. Sit comfortably, settle the body, and move through the stages in order, spending a few minutes on each. Begin with yourself, then a good friend, a neutral person, and the difficult person. Hold all four together, then widen the circle. Use the phrases sparingly, let the pebble drop, and notice what happens without forcing it. The full guided session runs close to thirty minutes on the London Buddhist Centre's channel, and the London Buddhist Centre's own website describes its meditation work and how it is offered. Practicing the sequence is what turns it from a description into a skill.
The deeper lesson is the one the video keeps returning to. Loving-kindness is not a mood you wait for. It is a capacity that grows when you sit with the people who are easy to love, the people who are hard to love, and the strangers in between, and notice honestly what you feel each time.
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Metta bhavana is a meditation for cultivating loving-kindness, with metta translated as love and bhavana as the bringing into being or making of something. In the London Buddhist Centre guided session, Ksantikara describes it as an ancient practice handed down over thousands of years from the Buddha himself. The method works through a sequence of people, starting with yourself and widening to the world.
The practice moves through yourself, a good friend, a neutral person, and an enemy or difficult person. After holding all four in awareness together, you expand to include people you live with, people in your street, people in London, and the wider world. Each stage involves wishing the person well and noticing your response.
The phrases in this guided version are may I be well, may I be happy, and may I be free from suffering, with may you substituted when wishing these qualities to others. Ksantikara advises using them sparingly and leaving a space after each one to notice its effect. She compares this to dropping a pebble into a deep well.
In the video, Ksantikara says the enemy stage is a chance to acknowledge that we have the potential for love just as much as we have the potential for hate or dislike. Including a difficult person lets you practice goodwill where it is hardest, without forcing a feeling. She advises staying with the sense of the person and noticing the effect, even if it feels confusing.
Ksantikara says you do not need a clear mental image. You can bring the presence of a person to mind even without seeing them, and she compares this to thinking of a red bus, which you can do without a picture. The goal is to hold the person in your experience and notice how you respond.
The London Buddhist Centre video says distraction is completely normal. When you notice you have wandered, congratulate yourself for noticing, soften the tension in your body, and return to the sensations of the heart center before dropping the phrases in again.
The guided session by Ksantikara is about 25 minutes of meditation, within a video that runs just under 31 minutes in total. It was published by the London Buddhist Centre on 31 August 2020.
