People are going to be happy, not because you simply wish them to be happy, but because they create the causes for happiness in the skillfulness of their thoughts, their words, their deeds.

"Goodwill [mettā] is a wish for happiness — true happiness — which means it’s happiness that comes from within. As we know from the Buddha’s teachings on karma, people are going to be happy, not because you simply wish them to be happy, but because they create the causes for happiness in the skillfulness of their thoughts, their words, their deeds. Which means that when you’re extending goodwill to yourself, extending goodwill to others, there’s no question of whether you or they deserve goodwill, whether you or they deserve happiness.

When the Buddha was teaching the end of suffering to people, he didn’t ask them first, “Do you deserve to suffer?” Everybody he met had karma that could induce them to suffer, but they didn’t have to suffer from it. That’s what the teaching was all about. You don’t have to suffer.

And again, he didn’t hold people’s past against them. This is the way out. That should be the attitude you have to others as well. There are a lot of people out there who are behaving in really bad ways, and your wish for them should be, “May they understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Which in many cases means, “May they voluntarily stop doing what they’re doing and get on the right path.”

Now, that’s a thought you can have without hypocrisy for anybody. There may be part of your mind that would like to see people suffer a bit for their past misdeeds, especially people who’ve been intentionally cruel. But then again, you think back on the Buddha. He taught many people, probably people who had killed him in previous lifetimes, people who had mistreated him, but he never held it against them. He wanted to teach everybody who had the potential. That’s the nature of his goodwill, and you want to learn how to develop that kind of goodwill as well.

Send your thoughts out in all directions. As the Buddha said, make this immeasurable, as far as you can imagine.

One of the standard practices that was developed centuries immediately after the Buddha passed away was to think of specific directions, one by one: east, west, north, south, south-east, north-west, north-east, south-west, below, above. You can send your mind out in those directions, with you right in the middle, with the sense that there’s no direction, in any direction, where there’s anyone that you have ill will for.

That can settle the mind down. As long as you want to maintain that perception, hold that perception in mind.

The Buddha compares it to a person who plays a trumpet. You blow on the trumpet, and the sound goes in all directions. You don’t say, “This sound is going to go to that person, that sound is not going to go to this person.” Everybody gets to hear the sound."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

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