Loving-kindness is the deliberate practice of directing caring wishes toward yourself and toward other people. It is not the manufacture of a feeling. You do not need to produce warmth, and nothing has gone wrong if none arrives, you offer the wish sincerely and notice what is there. The practice widens in a particular order, starting with yourself and moving outward, because the wish gets harder as it goes and it helps to begin where you can mean it. This is the compassion step of the method, practiced in both directions at once.

In this exercise you will begin with yourself, repeating four wishes silently. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I live with ease. You will offer them to yourself twice, leaving time after each phrase rather than hurrying to the next. Then you will bring to mind someone you care about and offer the same four wishes to them, and then a neutral person, someone you neither like nor dislike, and then a mildly difficult person. If resistance appears there, you will acknowledge it, keep any boundary you need, and offer only the wish you can offer sincerely. Then you will include several people from your daily life, and finally widen the same four wishes to all beings, returning to the phrase you were on each time attention moves away.