Practice Library

Tonglen

23 teachings in the library cover this practice.

• Guided Meditation - Tonglen, Beginning with Receiving Love David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded July 2, 2025

  Begins with a preliminary practice of receiving. Bring to mind someone who has wished you real love, and feel it arriving like warm sunshine. Only then does the exchange start: we breathe in a loved one's suffering as a dark cloud and send back light. It widens to a small group, then to as many beings as your courage allows.

• Session 4 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded July 2, 2025

  In tonglen we begin with a short visualisation of receiving love, then breathe in a loved one's suffering as a dark cloud, transform it at the heart, and send back well-being, widening out to groups: guided throughout. David covers verse seven, on secretly taking on others' pain, and verse eight on the eight worldly concerns and emptiness, illustrated with bread that is empty of breadness. Tessa asks about research into benefits for others; Michelle raises clutter and body image.

• Session 3 - The Eight Verses of Training the Mind David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded June 26, 2025

  Loving kindness and compassion are extended from self to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person and finally a wide group, guided throughout as preparation for next week's tonglen practice. David works through verses five and six of the Eight Verses: offering the victory rather than retaliating, and viewing someone who wrongs us as a teacher, illustrated with the story of the borrowed baby. Members share how they tried the practice at home and at work.

• Guided Meditation - Tonglen David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded February 13, 2025

  One person you love is in pain, and their pain is imagined as dark smoke you breathe in towards a point of light at your heart, where it is extinguished. You breathe out everything good you have. It widens to a crowd with the same pain, then to hunger, thirst and homelessness, and David keeps saying the light is never burdened.

• Session 4 - Ethics & Patience David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded February 13, 2025

  In the guided Tonglen practice we breathe in a loved one's suffering, then a wider crowd's, as dark smoke dissolved at the heart, and breathe out light and wellbeing in return. David turns to ethics as the foundation of practice, likening unruly behaviour to bashing holes in a leaking boat, then works through three kinds of patience: staying calm when provoked, accepting what cannot be changed, and being patient with slow progress. One shares how the quicksand image helped with her own anger.

• D3S4 - Equanimity and Tonglen, Two Meditations in Practice David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024

  Two guided meditations fill this hour. The first is equanimity, in which we work with a loved one, a stranger and someone difficult, to separate love from the grip of attachment. The second is tonglen: we breathe in the pain of someone we love as dark smoke, extinguished at a point of light in the heart, then send back everything good in return. David addresses the fear that tonglen means taking on suffering, and whether the same ignorance applies to animals.

• D3S3 - Mudita, Self-Cherishing, and the Roots of Tonglen David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024

  The session opens with a practice of mudita in which we delight in the good fortune of a friend, a stranger and someone we find difficult. David completes the seven point instruction on cause and effect, from recognising kindness to the great resolve, then explains why self-cherishing is the root of misery and how tonglen exchanges it for others. Questions turn to where kindness tips into people pleasing, and whether karma means we should not intervene in someone else's suffering.

• Day 1 - Introduction David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded August 24, 2024

  The retreat opens with a meditation on settling body, speech and mind through relaxation, stillness and alertness. David then introduces the 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas, telling the story of Gyelse Togme Zangpo giving his robes and blood to a diseased beggar, and outlines how the week will move through samatha, the four immeasurables and tonglen. He closes with the text's opening homage, on how emptiness and compassion stand together, and takes a question on how discussion will work.

• D3S2 - Tonglen, and Vajrasattva as Guru Yoga Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 89 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024

  Giving and taking, guided from a past and future self out to one being in need, a group, then all beings, the light given out as Vajrasattva's body, mantra syllables, vajra and bell. Tenpa adds the healing adaptations, nectar heavy, warming or cooling, then shows how Vajrasattva practice itself can serve as guru yoga, the mantra recited in the manner of supplication and the nectar granting the four empowerments as it fills the four chakras. An empowerment is needed only to visualise yourself as the deity.

• Being 'Intelligently Selfish' & Tonglen David Oromith · 29 minutes · recorded May 9, 2023

  In the tonglen practice of sending and receiving we breathe in a loved one's pain as dark smoke that dissolves at a point of light in the heart, then breathe out comfort and good qualities in return, before extending the same practice to crowds of strangers and the wider world. David explains the Dalai Lama's idea of intelligent selfishness, that working for others' welfare is what actually brings happiness, and describes using tonglen in the face of grief, illness and everyday conflict.

• D3S2 - Near Enemies, and Tonglen Mounted on the Breath Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

  Teaching and questions, no guided practice. Lama Alan Wallace works through the near enemies of the four immeasurables, taken from Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification, self-centred attachment posing as loving kindness, despair as compassion, then the progression in tonglen, starting with your own mother and later mounted on the breath, and the aphorism begin the sequence of taking with yourself. A young father asks whether to put family responsibilities aside for a long retreat.

• D2S1 - Renunciation, Refuge, and a Remedy for Each Adversity Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

  A general notion is not enough, so Lama Alan Wallace works through the specific practices the text names for particular adversities: renunciation as a spirit of definite emergence, going for refuge, dispelling the arrogance that leaves a person as sterile as soil on a mountain top, purifying non-virtue by pondering the four laws of karma, rejoicing in virtue, and cherishing others more than oneself. In the guided practice we draw the darkness of the world into an orb of light at the heart, the receiving end of tonglen.

• D3S1 - Self-Centredness and Tonglen Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

  Relative bodhicitta, and Shantideva's claim that self-centredness is a root of all suffering while caring for others more than oneself is a root of all happiness. Lama Alan Wallace traces the causes of suffering from the shravakayana through to dzogchen, then turns on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents for teaching learned helplessness, and Francis Bacon's wish to put nature on the rack, which he calls psychopathic. The guided practice is tonglen with a loved one, a despised person and a neutral person.

• Tong-Len and Loving-Kindness David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded September 5, 2021

  A Tonglen visualisation: a radiant orb of light at the heart absorbs the suffering of yourself, then loved ones, then the wider world on each in breath, and breathes out loving kindness on each out breath. David explains why this giving and taking practice is an antidote to self cherishing, drawing on Sharon Salzberg's story of realising we are the traffic too. He connects the practice to bodhicitta, the wish to help all beings rather than only ourselves.

• Lojong, the Eight Verses of Mind Training Lama Alan · 28 minutes

  Lama Alan Wallace works through the Eight Verses of Mind Training of Langri Tangpa, verse by verse. You learn to hold others supremely dear, to seek out their virtues rather than their faults, to catch a mental affliction the moment it stirs, and to treat difficult people as rare treasure. The closing verses turn to tonglen and to freeing practice from the eight worldly concerns and from grasping at a reality he describes as dreamlike.

• Establishing a Daily Practice, the Three Food Groups Lama Alan · 9 minutes

  Lama Alan Wallace sets out a workable shape for daily practice: a morning session that opens with motivation, makes the mind serviceable through shamatha, then moves into the four immeasurables or tonglen, and an evening session that gathers the day back in. He describes the three food groups of a balanced practice, shamatha, something for the heart and something for wisdom, and encourages you to season the whole day with brief returns rather than sinking into routine.

• Guided Meditation - Generating Bodhicitta, Widening the Field from Yourself Outwards Lama Alan · 26 minutes

  Lama Alan Wallace guides a steadily widening field of care. You visualise an orb of pristine white light at your heart, breathing in your own obscurations to be extinguished there and breathing out loving kindness, then extend that field to those immediately around you, the wider community and all beings. Lama Alan then reflects on how interdependent your material and spiritual flourishing is, and the practice culminates in bodhicitta: may I awaken in order to free every being.

• Guided Meditation - Equanimity, Even Care for the Neutral, the Dear and the Difficult Lama Alan · 26 minutes

  Lama Alan Wallace guides the last of the four immeasurables, equanimity. You bring to mind a neutral person, then someone dear, then someone you find difficult, and in each case you see how transient the relationship is and how constantly that person, like you, wishes for happiness. With an orb of light at your heart you breathe in the darkness of their suffering and breathe out loving kindness, closing on the difficult person set free.

• Guided Meditation - Tonglen for the Aged, the Ill and the Dying Lama Alan · 24 minutes

  Lama Alan directs tonglen through three groups in turn: those worn by old age, those living with physical or mental illness, and those close to death. For each you imagine being in their shoes, then step back and breathe in the darkness of their suffering, dissolving it in the light at your heart, the unborn and undying dimension of awareness. The wish for the dying is a transition met with serenity and without fear. It ends resting briefly in stillness.

• Guided Meditation - Tonglen, Sending and Receiving on Both Breaths Lama Alan · 25 minutes

  Lama Alan takes tonglen through its full two-way cycle. You begin with yourself, breathing in the suffering you are vulnerable to and its inner causes, breathing out from the orb of light at your heart the wish that you flourish. You then let attention rove and settle where it will, on a loved one, a difficult person or a community, moving on like a bee from flower to flower. If attention scatters, you return to the breath and begin again.

• Guided Meditation - Tonglen, Breathing In the Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 25 minutes

  Lama Alan begins from the flow of caring that runs through every choice you make, then imbues it with insight. He reasons through why the true causes of suffering lie in the mind rather than in circumstances: delusion, craving and hostility. Using only the in-breath, you draw those afflictions in as a dark cloud and dissolve them in the light at your heart, imagining the enduring peace. You close by wishing the same freedom for someone heavily afflicted.

• Cognitive & Emotional Balance Glen Svensson · 90 minutes

  The last two balances: cognitive balance, which is vipashyana seeing experience without projecting onto it, illustrated by the coiled rope mistaken for a snake, and emotional balance, which the compassion practices serve. Glen Svensson guides a nature of mind practice in which we search for where awareness is located, and then a tonglen. He then lays out how to integrate all four into daily life, and a review of one good act, one harmful act and one thing received before sleep.

• Tong-len (Taking & Giving) Glen Svensson · 88 minutes

  Tonglen, giving and taking, practised twice: first for ourselves and a friend, then we choose one mental affliction to dissolve and one quality to cultivate, before opening out to others. Glen Svensson compares the traditional black rock of self-cherishing with the light at the heart he prefers, warning against holding the smoke to punish yourself. The aspiration to take the suffering and give happiness is the key, and once learnt it can be done on a single breath as you approach a difficult person.

More by practice

• Shamatha (calm abiding) 163
• Compassion (karuna) 155
• Loving kindness (metta) 118
• Mindfulness of breathing 89
• Dzogchen 88
• Open presence 79
• Vipashyana (insight) 77
• The four immeasurables 76
• Bodhicitta practice 55
• Visualisation 45
• Lojong (mind training) 34
• Vajrasattva purification 25
• Mahamudra 23
• Analytical meditation 20
• Body scan and body awareness 20
• Empathetic joy (mudita) 20
• Mantra 20
• Equanimity 19
• Settling the mind in its natural state 17
• The four applications of mindfulness 17
• Guru yoga 13
• The four opponent powers 13
• Awareness of awareness 10
• Qi gong 9
• Yoga (asana) 8
• Refuge 6
• Deity yoga 5
• Settling body, speech and mind 5
• Feeling tone (vedana) 3
• Journalling and reflection 2
• Walking meditation 2
• Phowa 1