Here is a guideline for a traditional metta practice:
Take a very comfortable posture. Make your posture relaxed and comfortable. Begin to focus around the solar plexus, your chest area, your “heart center”. Breathe in and out from that area, as if you are breathing from the heart center and as if all experience is happening from there. Anchor your mindfulness only on the sensations at your heart center.
Begin by generating kind feeling toward yourself. Feel any areas of mental blockage or numbness, self-judgment, self-hatred. Then drop beneath that to the place where we care for ourselves, where we want strength and health and safety for ourselves.
Say to yourself:
I have suffered. I have not always received to my good, I have experienced being separated from love and inclusion. I have known pain and fear. I have felt alone, my heart closed.
Continuing to breathe in and out, use either these traditional phrases or ones you choose yourself. Say or think them several times.
May I be free of suffering.
May I be happy and at ease.
May I find the healing that I seek.
May I love and be loved.
May I give and receive the joy of kindness.
May I find peace.
Next, move to a person who most invites the feeling of loving kindness, the love that does not depend on getting anything back. The first person is usually someone we consider a mentor, a benefactor, an elder. It might be a parent, grandparent, teacher, someone toward whom it takes no effort to feel respect and reverence. It does not need to be a human, it may be a beloved pet.
Repeat the phrases for this person:
I know that you have suffered….
Then the metta phrases
May you be free of suffering…..
Now move to a neutral person, someone for whom you feel neither strong like nor dislike. It may be someone you do not know well, someone you see at the store or at the gym.
As you repeat the phrases, allow yourself to feel tenderness, loving care for their welfare.
Now move to someone you have difficulty with–hostile feelings, resentments. Repeat the phrases for this person. If you have difficulty doing this, you can say before the phrases, “To the best of my ability I wish that you be….” If you begin to feel ill will toward this person, allow yourself to feel compassion for yourself. Then return to this person.
Let the phrases spread through your whole body, mind, and heart.
Finally, radiate loving kindness out to all beings. Stay in touch with the ember of warm, tender loving-kindness at the center of your being, and begin to visualize or engender a felt sense of all living beings.