Metta-bhavana is the Buddhist meditation for the deliberate cultivation of metta, loving-kindness, benevolence, an active wish for the welfare and happiness of beings. It is the first and best known of the four brahmaviharas, the "divine abodes" or boundless states, the others being compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Metta is defined not as an emotion that comes and goes but as a settled disposition that can be trained; the meditation is the training. The practitioner arouses the wish "may they be well, may they be happy, may they be free from suffering" and directs it, in the classic method, in a widening sequence: first to oneself, then to a loved one, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult or hostile person, and finally to all beings without limit.
The deliberate inclusion of the enemy is the practice's sharp point. It aims to dissolve the boundary between those we favour and those we resist, extending an equal goodwill in every direction until it is genuinely boundless, free of the partiality that ordinarily governs human feeling.