Name a question you’re carrying. Quietly, an AI listens for the same question alive in a few others, and draws you gently together. Seven people, three unhurried calls, a human holding the space.
Metta is a Pali word for loving-kindness: the simple, unforced wish that another being be well. It is the first of the four qualities the Buddha called immeasurable, real but impossible to count. The tech giants built a metaverse, enormous and strangely empty. A Metta Circle reaches for something older — a small mettaverse, a few hearts where neither person can quite predict what happens next, and both leave changed.
That is the whole intention behind the name. Not therapy, not networking, not advice. Just a little noble company for holding a hard question, and unhurried goodwill offered both ways. The name is the invitation.
A Metta Circle is small and slow on purpose. You share what’s alive for you. The matching listens for resonance: the question several people are quietly carrying at once. Then it gathers a few of you who wouldn’t otherwise have found each other.
Then it steps back. What remains is human: three weekly calls of about seventy-five minutes, the same faces each time, an anchor who opens and closes the space and keeps a little silence at the center. Not an audience pointed at a screen, but a circle of voices, held across time zones.
Anyone can start a video call; what’s rare is who’s in the room, and the care with which they were brought together. Metta is the spirit of the whole thing.
The AI never sits in the circle. It only changes who’s in the room. Then it steps out, the way a good host disappears once the guests are talking.
Metta Circles carry a much older practice online. In person, the Awakin Circle has met for over 25 years: living rooms in more than a hundred cities, an hour of silence, a reading, a circle of sharing, often a shared meal. No teachers, no agenda, all volunteer-run.
These are two distinct offerings, not one. Metta Circles don’t replace that room. They extend its spirit to people an ocean apart, for whom no living room is near.
Find an in-person Awakin Circle near you → (a separate, in-person practice, hosted on awakin.org).