Tonglen: The Practice of Giving and Receiving

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Tonglen — Tibetan for “sending and taking,” often rendered “giving and receiving” — is a compassion meditation from the Tibetan Mahayana tradition. Its method is deliberately counter-intuitive: on the in-breath you breathe in the suffering of others, and on the out-breath you send out relief and well-being. It trains the heart to open where it usually closes.

The short answer

Most of us live by a quiet reflex: push pain away, grasp at pleasure, protect the self. Tonglen reverses that reflex on purpose. Tong means “giving” or “sending,” and len means “receiving” or “taking” — so the practice is sometimes called “exchanging self with other.” You breathe in what you would normally flinch from (the suffering of others, often visualized as hot, dark, heavy smoke) and breathe out what you would normally hoard (ease, coolness, bright relief). The aim is not to collect pain but to dissolve the self-centeredness that pain usually triggers, and so to grow compassion and bodhicitta — the awakened wish to relieve the suffering of all beings. Tonglen belongs to the Tibetan school specifically; it is one practice within the broader world of Buddhist meditation, not a method shared by every tradition. (Unfamiliar terms are gathered in the glossary.)

Where tonglen comes from

Tonglen is the beating heart of lojong — Tibetan for “mind training” — a body of contemplative practice within Tibetan Buddhism. According to the tradition, the teachings descend from the great Indian master Atisha (Atiśa Dīpaṃkara, 982–1054 CE), who carried them to Tibet in the eleventh century. They were later distilled into a root text, the Seven Points of Mind Training, by the Kadampa teacher Geshe Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175) — a set of pithy slogans, sometimes called the “Atisha slogans,” meant to be memorized and lived.

Among those slogans is the instruction that defines tonglen’s mechanics:

“Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.”

That single line — the two ride the breath — is the whole engine of the practice. The sending and the taking are not abstract wishes; they are tied to the in-breath and the out-breath, so that the rhythm of breathing itself becomes the rhythm of compassion. (Worth noting: traditions differ slightly on which breath comes first. Pema Chödrön often begins on the in-breath, taking in suffering; the nineteenth-century Nyingma master Patrul Rinpoche framed it the other way, beginning on the out-breath by sending happiness, then breathing in the sufferings of others. The two are the same practice — what matters is the pairing of taking and sending, not which one you happen to start with.)

In the modern West, tonglen reached a wide audience largely through the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and his student the American nun Pema Chödrön, both within the Shambhala tradition. Trungpa described it plainly in Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness: you give away your happiness and pleasure on the out-breath, and breathe in resentments and problems on the in-breath. “The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion,” he taught, “the more goodness there is to breathe out.”

How to practise tonglen

Pema Chödrön teaches tonglen in four stages, and this is the clearest map for a beginner. The whole practice is done sitting quietly, working with the breath.

1. Flash on openness

Before the breathing begins, rest the mind for a second or two in a state of openness or stillness. Chödrön calls this “flashing on” bodhichitta — a brief glimpse of basic, unconditioned spaciousness, the ground from which compassion arises. It need not be profound; a single moment of settling is enough to begin.

2. Begin the visualization — work with texture

Now bring in the breath and its imagery, working first with pure texture rather than any particular person. As Chödrön instructs:

“Breathe in feelings of heat, darkness, and heaviness — a sense of claustrophobia — and breathe out feelings of coolness, brightness, and light — a sense of freshness.”

Breathe the difficulty in completely, “through all the pores of your body,” and let the relief radiate out the same way. This stage trains the basic gesture — taking in the heavy, sending out the light — so that when you turn it toward real suffering, the movement is already familiar.

3. Focus on a real situation

Bring the practice down to something concrete. Choose a painful situation that is real to you — the illness of someone you love, a friend’s grief, your own fear. As you breathe in, take in their suffering with the wish to free them from it; as you breathe out, send them comfort, ease, and whatever would help. Keeping it specific and real is what keeps tonglen honest, rather than a vague hovering over “all suffering everywhere.”

4. Extend it outward

Finally, widen the circle. If you began with one person, extend the practice to everyone caught in that same situation — all who are sick in that way, all who grieve that loss, all who feel that fear. Chödrön extends it even to those one might call enemies, on the recognition that everyone is tangled in the same human confusion. Compassion, she notes, “naturally expands over time.”

A vital point: start where it is bearable

Tonglen can sound alarming — am I supposed to absorb other people’s pain? It helps to understand what is actually happening. This is reflective imagery, not a claim that you take on literal harm or illness. What you are really working with is your own habitual pattern of avoidance: the reflex to shut down in the face of suffering. Tonglen loosens that reflex.

Because of this, the traditional and modern advice is to start where the practice is bearable. Many teachers suggest beginning with yourself or a loved one before turning to the difficult or the stranger. If breathing in your mother’s illness feels like too much, breathe in your own difficulty first — your own anxiety, your own ache — and send yourself relief. When that feels steady, extend it. There is no merit in forcing an opening the heart is not ready for; the point of letting go of self-protection is that it happens gradually, not as an act of violence against yourself.

This is also why Chögyam Trungpa could insist there was “nothing to lose” in the practice. The fear that tonglen will leave you depleted gets the logic backwards: the more honestly you take in difficulty “with a sense of openness and compassion,” he taught, the more genuine goodness there is to send back out. You are not a sponge soaking up harm but a heart learning that it can stay open and not be destroyed. That discovery — that you can meet pain without armoring against it — is the real fruit, and it tends to make a person more available to others rather than less.

Tonglen “on the spot”

Tonglen is not confined to the meditation cushion. Pema Chödrön teaches a practice she calls tonglen “on the spot” — using the difficulties of ordinary life as the raw material. When you see someone suffering on the street, or feel your own jealousy or resentment flare, you can breathe it in for that moment and breathe out relief, right where you stand. Painful encounters become, in her phrase, the very fuel for awakening compassion. This is one of tonglen’s quiet gifts: it gives you something to do with the suffering you meet, instead of merely flinching from it or being flattened by it.

How tonglen relates to other compassion practice

Tonglen is one of several methods Buddhism offers for cultivating the heart, and it helps to see where it sits. Loving-kindness meditation (metta) — which is shared across Theravada and Mahayana alike — works by generating warmth and goodwill and radiating it outward; it is, in a sense, all “sending.” Tonglen is distinctive because it adds the taking: it does not only wish others well from a safe distance but deliberately breathes in their pain. That makes it bolder, and for some practitioners harder. The two are complementary rather than competing — many people find that a grounding in loving-kindness makes tonglen feel safer to attempt.

It is worth restating one honest qualification. Tonglen is a Tibetan Mahayana practice, rooted in the bodhisattva ideal of taking on the welfare of others, and it is not found in this form across every Buddhist school. To present it as “what Buddhism teaches about compassion” would flatten real differences between traditions. It is a treasure of a particular lineage — and, offered in that spirit, a remarkably direct way to train the heart to stay open.

Beginning

You do not need any special preparation to try tonglen — only a few quiet minutes and a willingness to reverse your usual reflex. Sit, settle, and let the breath carry the practice: heavy in, light out; their suffering in, your relief out. Start small, start with what is bearable, and let the circle of your compassion widen on its own. For the wider landscape of practice that tonglen belongs to, see our guide to Buddhist meditation.