Metta Meets Developmental Trauma: Using Loving-Kindness to Work With Your Wounded Past

Loving-kindness meditation — metta in the Pali tradition — is typically taught as an outward-expanding practice: start with yourself, move to a benefactor, then a neutral person, then a difficult person, then all beings. What Peggy Rowe Ward and Larry Ward propose in their Lion's Roar teaching is a deliberate detour inside that sequence, pausing to address something most practitioners carry but rarely sit with directly: the unresolved pain of childhood.