how connection developsLoving-kindness meditation gives attention a simple task. A person brings someone to mind and offers wishes for their wellbeing. The practice can begin with oneself, move toward someone loved, and extend to people who are less familiar.
The Greater Good in Action guide, produced by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, presents one version of this practice. It combines an audio meditation with written instructions and a summary of related research. The current guide credits Sadie McKinley for the meditation and identifies it as a practice used in a study published in 2026.
The instructions are useful in their own right because they distinguish an intention from a feeling. A person may offer goodwill while feeling warmth, distraction, uncertainty, or very little. The guide explicitly leaves room for those differences.
Beginning with attention to breathing
The resource suggests about fifteen minutes daily. It begins with finding a comfortable position and choosing whether to close the eyes or keep them open. With open eyes, it suggests resting attention on something that is not especially distracting.
Attention then moves to the sensations of breathing. This version asks participants to notice the breath as it arrives and leaves, without trying to change it. It does not prescribe a breathing rate or ask the person to make the breaths deeper. When thoughts draw attention elsewhere, the instruction is to acknowledge them and return.
Attention changes its focus as the practice unfolds. At first, it rests on a physical sensation. Later, it rests on the words and the being held in mind. The breath provides a beginning, while the wishes give the later stages their particular direction.
These details give the beginning a manageable form. The task is to notice a recurring sensation and return to it. A wandering mind is something the instructions already accommodate.
Offering goodwill without requiring a feeling
The guide next directs kind wishes toward oneself. Its recurring themes are safety, health, happiness, and ease. Repeating those wishes gives the practice its direction, while noticing the response keeps it connected to the person's actual experience.
The resource acknowledges that self-directed kindness can initially feel artificial. It does not make a particular emotional response a requirement for continuing. The intention can remain available even when the feeling is faint or absent.
That distinction changes the meaning of the exercise. Someone practicing is offering a wish rather than reporting that everything is already well. Wishing for health does not require being healthy. Wishing for ease does not require having an easy day. The words express what is being offered attention. This leaves room for a difficult day to remain difficult while someone chooses a kind intention within it. There is no need to replace an honest feeling with a more acceptable one.
Moving from a loved person to a wider community
The next stage brings to mind a living being toward whom the person has warm feelings. The guide asks participants to notice the feelings that arise and direct the same kind wishes toward that being. This introduces an existing experience of care into the practice.
Attention then turns toward a neutral person, perhaps an acquaintance or someone encountered briefly. There is no requirement for a close bond. The exercise gives an unfamiliar or lightly known person a place in one's attention through ordinary wishes for their wellbeing. This version moves toward someone neutral, without requiring the practitioner to revisit a conflict or imagine reconciliation. The scope of the task is goodwill toward someone whose life is mostly unknown.
Finally, the focus expands toward the surrounding community and beyond, including oneself. Family, coworkers, and neighbors are possible starting points. The movement is from a particular person toward a wider field of concern. The person practicing remains included as the circle widens. Care for others and care for oneself belong within the same set of wishes.
These stages describe an intentional practice rather than a progression of relationships. Thinking kindly about an acquaintance does not by itself create a mutual bond. It changes what the person practicing is attending to and wishing for in that moment.
What the accompanying research contributes
Greater Good in Action summarizes research involving different durations, populations, and combinations of practices. Its current page describes a one-week student study associated with the McKinley meditation and an earlier seven-week intervention. It also lists programs that combined loving-kindness with other forms of meditation. Those summaries provide context, but they cannot all be treated as evidence about one identical fifteen-minute exercise.
The communication study cited by the guide makes one distinction especially useful. Loving-kindness participants wrote more person-centered responses to a hypothetical distressed friend than nonmeditators did. The groups did not differ significantly in processing supportive messages, despite the guide's broader summary. Writing a considerate response and recognizing support are related capacities, but this result concerns the former. How those written responses translate into a real conversation remains a further question.
A separate 2008 experiment by Cendri Hutcherson, Emma Seppala, and James Gross tested a brief loving-kindness exercise against a neutral imagery task. Participants directed goodwill toward an unfamiliar person's photograph. They subsequently reported more positive responses, including greater felt connection, toward unfamiliar people. A reaction-time measure showed a more specific change toward the person who had been the focus of the exercise.
That experiment supports the possibility of an immediate shift in responses to unfamiliar people. Its procedure differed from the current Greater Good guide, and it did not test whether the present guide produces the same results. Keeping the practice and the experiment distinct makes both easier to understand.
The guide provides a way to direct attention and goodwill. Its allowance for distraction and varying feelings is part of the method. At each stage, a person returns to the wish being offered and notices the experience that is actually there.
Sources
Greater Good Science Center. (n.d.). Loving-kindness meditation. Greater Good in Action, University of California, Berkeley. Current version includes a guided meditation by Sadie McKinley associated with research published in 2026.
Youngvorst, L. J., Danielson-Byrnes, C. M., & Jones, S. M. (2026). The influence of meditation practices on prosocial orientations and person-centered supportive communication. Communication Reports, 39(1), 20–37. First published online in 2025.
Hutcherson, C. A., Seppala, E. M., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness. Emotion, 8(5), 720–724.