Just Like Me: A Metta Practice to Manifest more Love & kindness in the world
There may be days when seeing the good is an effort. Sometimes, it might be hard to give others grace. And sometimes it’s just neurologically impossible to focus on anything positive.
Our practice can support us in bringing more feelings of love and compassion in our lives, especially at times that feel difficult.
Metta: the Practice of Lovingkindness
Known as Lovingkindness, Metta is an ancient practice that has been around for thousands of years, but it is the medicine created for this moment. Right now it feels downright urgent to remember our own inner support, compassion, and connectedness as well as cultivate patience and openness.
Metta is about sending love and compassion to specific people we have different relationships with, and it’s typically practiced with different “types” of relationships:
A benefactor, someone who uplifts us and makes us feel good and nourished. It’s “easy” to send this person love, or feel gratitude when we think about them.
A neutral person or stranger, such as a neighbor we may pass every morning, or the vendor at the farmer’s market.
Someone who needs support right now.
A “difficult” person—someone who brings a lot of friction to your world.
Ourselves.
Metta is ultimately a self-awareness practice. It’s almost like training wheels for opening ourselves to more love and compassion: We get to know the “feeling tone” of these relationships—think love, judgement, empathy, irritation, etc.—as they arise in our bodies. And then we practice what it feels like to be a little more open with whatever arises, in service of giving and receiving more love and compassion… especially when we aren’t receiving either.
And as we diversify and bring different people to mind, we may notice a wider range of emotional responses. So, when we do this practice, it's important to remember that it's not so much about the person we're bringing up. It's information for us about our own inner experience that we're having.
The Purpose & Power of Focusing on a “Neutral Person”
In this blog, I’d like to share the practice that often gets overlooked, or feels more like a footnote, but it holds so much potential for change in the world: Focusing on a “neutral” person or a stranger.
A neutral person is someone we may have seen before but don’t know very well. Someone who is checking out your groceries at the market. Someone at the dog park. A crossing guard in your neighborhood. A person who works a few offices down that you happen to pass every day but don’t have a lot of—or any—words with.
In this Metta practice, we’re learning to pay attention on purpose because these are the people we often overlook, walk by, and don’t necessarily acknowledge. Instead of moving past them or looking through them, we’re practicing pausing and recognizing this person—specifically recognizing their humanity.
Just like me, this person just wants to be safe and well.
Just like me, this person just wants to be at ease and know peace.
Just like me, this person just wants to feel loved.
Noticing Our Habitual Impulses
Neutrality can bring to mind a state where we numb out, get bored, don’t care, overlook, override, don’t pay attention. It’s a blind spot. The practice of Metta brings attention to the places we (often unintentionally) blur out.
The more we slow down, the more we begin to notice in real life how many people we pass every day without really seeing. And, if we’re honest, we begin to notice that often we’re judging them without even realizing it.
We like them, we don't like them. They look like us, they don't look like us. I bet they vote like us, I bet they don't vote like us. I bet they treat their children like me, I bet they don't treat their kids like me.
We have a lot of assumptions about people we literally just pass and know nothing about.
It doesn’t make us a “bad person” to judge someone else. It’s a human tendency—it’s how our brain analyzes and assesses through our conditioning.
However, the more we practice Metta with a neutral person and pause to specifically make sure we are acknowledging the humanity of this other person that we don't know, then the more we start to work with our habitual impulses to judge when we're out in the world.
Also, when we “catch” ourselves judging, it’s not an opportunity to judge ourselves. We’re simply recognizing and better understanding our habits, so we can begin to offer ourselves a choice in how we behave in the world.
(If you’d like to practice with someone, or a pet, who brings a lot of easy love and warmth into your life, you’ll find it in my FREE Friday meditation series here.)
Metta Can Transform the World
Metta is a self-awareness practice about what it feels like to give and receive love, what it feels like to be closed down, what it feels like to have grief or sadness or unworthiness. We’re becoming aware of all the things that come up within us during the practice—and hopefully pausing to study what arises. If we can notice how we’re responding around the ideas of love, around the ideas of a specific person, we can better understand our impulses when we’re out in the world.
Then, perhaps we can make room to be with that person or in that situation more intentionally, more purposely, in a way that may bring change and evolution for all of us.
Practice: Just Like Me
This is my favorite portable practice that we can take anywhere we go. We’ll see many people we don’t know—we can take any of the phrases from this practice (or simply the words Just Like Me) as we cross paths to remind ourselves of our interconnectedness.
Metta Contemplations
Want to expand your awareness of our interconnectedness? Contemplate these phrases as well.
Just like me, this person has a body, mind, feelings, and emotions.
Just like me, this person has during their life experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering.
Just like me, this person wishes to be free from pain and suffering.
Just like me, this person wishes to be happy.
Just like me, this person wishes to be safe, strong, and healthy.
Just like me, this person wishes to be loved.
Need more Metta in your life? Join my FREE Friday meditations to access the Metta series! Sign up here.
Strong Body, Open Heart
New 6-Week Spring Practice Series
This full-embodied series is designed to fortify your body, lift your energy, and nurture your heart—supporting renewal from the inside out.
Each week, we’ll weave somatic strengthening movements and lymphatic-clearing techniques with mindfulness and Lovingkindness practices—inviting you to feel strong, open, and deeply present. You’ll explore intentional resistance training using blocks or light weights to support stability and embodied confidence. Extra loving care for the core is woven throughout, along with practices to expand the breath, release stagnant energy, and replenish your inner reserves.
Join me as we move together through a season of growth and transformation.