Each stage of the meditation should last for a few minutes.
Preparation:
Settling quietly.
Connecting into the body.
First stage:
Self:
First focus on yourself,
Focus into your own thoughts and feelings at this moment.
Noticing how it feels to be you right now.
Feel the truth of your experience; perhaps joyous, perhaps sad, tired, restless, calm, agitated or anything else — without trying to change it.
Allowing what is to be - as it is.
Now generating warm feelings towards yourself. Saying to yourself: “May I be well, happy, and free from suffering.”
Second stage:
Good friend:
Visualize a friend, family-member or loved one.
Someone roughly your age, but not someone you have sexual feelings for.
Experience your true response to thinking of this person in the moment.
Wish them happiness as you did earlier for yourself. Repeating the phrase; “May you be well, happy, and free from suffering.”
Third stage:
Neutral person:
Bring to mind someone neutral, someone you don’t know well and have no particularly strong feelings about (e.g. a shopkeeper, neighbour, or someone you see around).
Extending the same wishes; “May you be well, happy, and free from suffering.”
Fourth stage:
Difficult person:
Turn your attention to someone you’re not getting on with, someone you find challenging or difficult.
Start with someone only moderately difficult rather than the very hardest person in your life.
Remember you are not approving of any harmful behaviour; you are just acknowledging that this person, too, experiences pain and wants happiness.
Cultivate a fresh response to this person. Extending the same wishes; “May you be well, happy, and free from suffering.”
Fifth stage:
All beings:
Now hold all four; yourself, the friend, the neutral person, and the difficult person—together in your awareness.
Let this sense expand outward: your household, your neighbourhood, your city, country, all sentient beings in every direction.
Recall how all these beings are undergoing every kind of experience, even as you are meditating. Think of them all with an equally strong love and kindness.
Extending the same wishes; “May you all be well, happy, and free from suffering.”
Completing
Gradually let go of the phrases and the people.
Return the attention to the feeling of your body sitting and your breath moving.
Notice any change—even if it is very small - in mood, softness, or connection.
Opening the eyes and returning to the room.
Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi