Metta Bhavana or Universal Loving Kindness Meditation

Happiness comes from empathizing with others and from seeing their well being and their suffering as being as important as our own.

“Bhavana” means “cultivation” or “development,” and “Metta” is a word that means “love,” “friendliness,” or “lovingkindness.” So this is a meditation practice where we actively cultivate some very positive emotional states towards others, as well as to ourselves.  We learn to bring more harmony into our relationships with others, so that we experience less conflicts, resolve existing difficulties, and deepen our connections with people we already get on with. This helps us to overcome anger, resentment, and hurt. It enables us to empathize more, and to be more considerate, kind, and forgiving. We can also learn to appreciate others more, concentrating more on their positive qualities and less on their faults. We learn to be more patient.   

From a Buddhist point of view it is not the case that emotions “just happen”. Emotions are habits, and are actively created. It seems like they have a life of their own because we aren’t conscious of exactly how we create them. If we can bring more awareness into our emotional life then we can cultivate the emotions we want to experience (those that make us and others happy), and discourage the arising of those we don’t want (those that make us unhappy and generate conflict with others).
Overview of the practice

5 stages: (Cultivating loving kindness for...)
1) - Yourself
2) - A good friend
3) - An neutral person
4) - A difficult person
5) - All beings without bounds

Traditional phrases (Say them to yourself in your head)
May you be well
May you be happy
May you be free from suffering

Traditional images
A warm light filling your body and radiating outward filling the bodies of the beings we imagine.
Focusing on sensations of the heart center and extending those towards all beings.
Dropping the phrases or intentions like a pebble into a still body of water and watching it ripple out.