Tonglen Meditation Explained: Breathing In Suffering

On a Thursday night, a teacher named Meredith Ryan opens a session by asking the room a simple question: is anyone new to tonglen? Her voice is calm and unhurried, and she promises the people on the call that they will be fine. "We'll go through the steps. We'll go slow," she says. What follows, in the recording posted by the Dharma Bum Temple channel, is a guided meditation that asks students to breathe in what hurts, to send out what helps, and to notice, along the way, how tightly they hold onto their own comfort. Tonglen is a Tibetan practice whose name means "giving and taking." Its method is deceptively physical: you visualize suffering as thick black smoke, draw it into your heart on the in-breath, and release relief on the out-breath. Its purpose is less visual than it sounds. It is meant to loosen the sense of separateness that makes our own pain feel private and our own peace feel like something to guard.

Where does tonglen come from, and what is Lojong?

Ryan places the practice in its lineage early. "Tonglen's a very old Tibetan practice," she tells the room. "It dates back to like the 10th and the 12th centuries" (0:56). It belongs to a larger body of teaching called Lojong, which she glosses as "mind training," and it is one of two meditation practices within that teaching. The Dharma Bum Temple description adds the literal sense of the name: tong means "giving," and len means "taking" or "receiving." The practice, in the words of the description, is "a powerful meditation of giving and receiving, where we consciously take in the suffering of others and give them our love, compassion, and joy."

The word order matters. Tonglen takes in before it gives. Most people's instinct, when confronted with pain, is to move away from it. The practice reverses that instinct on purpose.

What actually happens during a tonglen session?

Ryan describes the session in parts, and the structure is worth understanding even if you never sit with the recording. The first part settles the body and breath for a few minutes. The second connects with what the tradition calls open awareness, which she describes as "flashing on absolute bodhicitta." Bodhicitta, in her explanation, is "our Buddha nature or our Buddha mind." Students rest in that openness briefly, feeling "the fluid nature of reality," which she describes as "the coming together and the falling apart of causes and conditions."

"Acknowledge your Bodhicitta."

Only after that grounding does the breathing work begin. Traditionally, Ryan says, practitioners synchronize the breath with visualization, and "the Tibetans love visualization." Suffering appears as "a dark, thick, hot, type of smoke." Relief appears as "a brilliant white light or a cool, comforting mist, whichever you prefer." The student breathes the smoke in and sends relief out.

The sequence starts with yourself. Ryan asks students to imagine themselves sitting across from themselves, to breathe in the smoke they recognize as their own suffering, and to send back the relief they know they need. Only later does the circle widen to people you love, then to people you do not know, and finally to all beings. In one passage she suggests a wider image: imagining "a vast ocean" in which the practitioner's compassion becomes boundless (about 35:48).

Does the smoke have to be transformed?

This is a question many new practitioners ask, and Ryan answers it generously. Some people, she explains, like to picture the smoke being changed inside the heart "into light and healing, cooling relief." That light is then exhaled back out. Others prefer not to think about transformation at all. She notes that this is often because they have a strong sense that they are not holding onto the suffering, that it is not getting stuck inside them. "They just take it in and they know that this constant fluidity of our existence allows for that smoke to just dissolve," she says. Her verdict is pragmatic: "whichever way you feel comfortable practicing is perfectly okay," and you may try both.

The point is not the special effects of the visualization. It is the willingness to let suffering enter at all.

Why does tonglen expose self-cherishing?

The most provocative thread in Ryan's talk is about the ego. She asks students how willing they are "to not only really look at and sit with suffering, but how willing are you to take on the suffering of others? Or at least allow the suffering that exists to touch you." Tonglen, she suggests, begins to reveal a set of habits she calls self-cherishing. Our egos, she says, make us believe that we are "completely separate and independent people," rather than interdependent, and that our own sense of self is "somehow more urgently important or more priority or somehow more deserving than all the other selves on the planet."

She is candid about her own discomfort with this. "That is a hard one. That's hard for me to swallow," she says. Most people want to think of themselves as open and generous, she observes, "but when we really start to look at it and examine how we think and our reactions sometimes we find that we're not as open and generous as we think we are."

She also names aversion, the reflex that shows up as "I can't deal with that." That phrase, she argues, is not a neutral statement. It means something is making us uncomfortable, and the discomfort "is really about a softness and a vulnerability within us." Tonglen asks us to notice that signal and stay with it rather than pushing it away.

Is compassion a limited resource?

This is perhaps the most useful idea in the session. Ryan describes how the ego tricks us into believing that whatever brings us safety or peace is scarce and must be kept for ourselves. Tonglen tests that belief. "When we practice this, we freely give away to other people, other sentient beings," she says, "and it actually doesn't feel like it leaves us with less" (around 7:31). Then she states the principle plainly: "The truth is that the compassion that you have within you is not a limited resource" (8:21).

She frames the lived experience as a kind of reciprocity. Compassionate thought and action sent outward, she says, "actually starts to show up for us in a way that we can actually feel. So we end up receiving what we give away." The tendency to treat what we give as a limited supply begins to relax. She is clear that this is not something to argue yourself into. "I think the only way is to really experience it so that it becomes easier to just give it away."

What does tonglen ask you not to do?

One of the most practical instructions in the recording is also one of the easiest to forget: do not try to fix anything. "The practice does not ask us to fix anything," Ryan says. "Even though it does ask us to send out what we know will help, we just breathe out what we know will help." Students are not asked to micromanage how the relief is received or to see the exchange through to a particular outcome. "Just send out what helps," she repeats in effect. The emphasis on release is central to the method. A meditation built on giving that secretly demanded results would simply become another form of holding on.

She also points to the subtler moments that tonglen can surface. Students may notice anxiety, or a flash of irritation, or a sense of being overwhelmed. Ryan encourages them to treat those reactions as information rather than failure, and to recognize that the practice gives them a place to meet those feelings directly.

Can you practice tonglen outside the meditation hall?

Yes, and Ryan is explicit about it. Once students are comfortable with the steps, she says, the practice "is certainly practiced silently." "You can practice by yourself. You can practice when you're out in the world." The steps stay the same each time, which is part of their value: a person who has learned the sequence can run it in a few breaths while waiting in line, sitting in traffic, or walking into a difficult conversation.

She closes the session by returning to the reason for it: that the practice opens us to "the interconnectedness of all beings and all things and the universal nature of suffering." Her final line, recited as a dedication, is a wish that "the benefit of this practice be" shared widely.

Where to go from here

If this session has you curious, begin small. Find a quiet place, settle into your breath for a few minutes, and try the sequence Ryan lays out: rest briefly in open awareness, then breathe in dark smoke and breathe out light, beginning with yourself. If the image of smoke feels wrong, use another, or leave transformation out and simply breathe suffering in and relief out. Notice when you feel aversion, and notice the phrase "I can't deal with that" when it arises.

The Dharma Bum Temple channel describes its broader program as alternating each week between Shamatha practice, drawing on Lam Rim, Mahāmudrā, Bön, and Dzogchen approaches, and Tonglen. Shamatha, the description explains, means calm abiding: "placing the attention on a specific object or domain of awareness and gently training the attention to remain where it was placed." Those two practices complement each other. Shamatha steadies the mind; tonglen opens the heart. Tonglen is not a technique for feeling better in a hurry. It is a training in letting suffering touch you without losing your footing, and in discovering that the compassion you give away is not running out.