Tonglen, Tibetan for "giving and taking" or "sending and receiving", is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation for the cultivation of compassion that deliberately reverses the mind's ordinary instinct. Where the untrained impulse is to draw pleasure toward oneself and push pain away, tonglen trains the practitioner to do the opposite: to breathe in, with each in-breath, the suffering of others, imagined as dark, hot, heavy smoke, and to breathe out, with each out-breath, one's own happiness, ease and merit, sent to them as cool, bright relief. The practice thus uses the rhythm of the breath as the vehicle for an exchange of self and other.
The method is typically directed first toward a particular suffering being, then widened to all who share that suffering, and ultimately to all beings without limit. Practitioners are taught to begin, if the suffering of others feels too remote, by taking in and transforming their own pain, so that the capacity for the fuller exchange is built gradually.