Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
The 59 slogans and their practical application to everyday adversity and compassion
What is Lojong mind training and how do you practice it?
Lojong is a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training system, codified by Atisha and later Chekawa, built around 59 slogans that train the mind to transform adversity into awakening and to cultivate compassion for all beings including oneself. Evidence is primarily contemplative-clinical; some practices (loving-kindness, tonglen-adjacent exercises) have been studied, but the full system is practitioner tradition rather than a clinical protocol.
Lojong mind training emerged in 11th-century Tibet as a practice for turning difficulties — illness, conflict, failure, death — into occasions for spiritual and character development. The system is built around short slogans meant to be memorised and recalled in the moment when habitual reactions would otherwise take over. The practices below distil the most practically applicable slogans, with honest notes on evidence.
Practices
- Tonglen: sending and taking
Breathe in suffering (yours and others’); breathe out relief and well-being.
- Train with the two truths throughout all activities
Hold both relative reality (things matter) and ultimate reality (things are empty of fixed essence) simultaneously.
- Drive all blames into one
When conflict arises, examine how self-grasping is the root, rather than blaming the other person.
- Practise with the unexpected
When things go wrong unexpectedly, use that moment as the actual practice rather than a break from it.
- Don’t make gods into demons
Don’t let spiritual practice become a source of pride, judgment, or superiority over others.
- Train in the three difficulties
Notice the habitual pattern, decide to interrupt it, and then work on making the interruption automatic.
- Always abide by the three principles
Maintain your vow, don’t show off, and practise impartially with everyone — not just the people you like.
How these practices connect
Each practice on this page interrupts a habitual reflex, whether pushing pain away, blaming someone else, reacting before thinking, or treating practice itself as a source of pride, and replaces it with a deliberate turn toward the difficulty. Lojong’s slogans are meant to be recalled in the moment the habit would otherwise take over. The practices differ in their object (suffering breathed in, a conflict, an unexpected disruption, a stubborn habit, a self-satisfied practice, a fixed view of a situation), but each one works by making a pause and choosing a response.
What is Lojong mind training, and how do you actually practice its slogans?
Lojong is a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training system built around short slogans, codified by Atisha and later Chekawa, that are memorized and recalled in the moment when habitual reactions would otherwise take over. The page distills the most practically applicable slogans into practices: breathing in difficulty, pausing before acting, examining your own role in a conflict, and noticing when your practice is making you harsher. It describes the full system as a practitioner tradition rather than a clinical protocol.
How do you do tonglen, breathing in suffering and breathing out relief?
Bring to mind something difficult, either your own or someone else’s. On each in-breath, imagine taking in that suffering as a dark, heavy cloud; on each out-breath, send out lightness, relief, or well-being. Start with yourself if the practice feels too abstract, then widen to others you care about, then neutral people, and finally those who are difficult. The page says compassion meditation has RCT support for reducing self-criticism and increasing positive affect, but tonglen itself has not been studied separately from loving-kindness.
What does "drive all blames into one" mean when you are in a conflict with someone?
It is the Lojong slogan that, when a conflict flares, turns the blame-seeking mind inward: ask what role your own expectations, reactions, or need for things to go a certain way played in the friction. The page says this is about clarity rather than guilt, is not self-punishment, and is not an excuse for genuinely harmful behavior. The external situation is then addressed separately, from a clearer starting point.
How do you respond to an unexpected setback without reacting on impulse?
When something unexpected disrupts you, such as a cancelled meeting or a sharp comment, notice the first reactive impulse, pause for one breath before acting on it, ask whether this is the moment to practice with, and respond from the pause rather than from the spike. The page treats the disruption as the practice itself rather than a break from it. It notes that the pause-before-response evidence comes from clinical MBCT work, and that the Lojong context has not been directly studied.
How do you change a habit you keep failing to change all at once?
Treat the change as three sequential stages rather than a single act of will, as the Lojong teaching of the three difficulties does. First, recognize the habit as it arises without trying to change it. Second, pause for one breath each time you notice it. Third, over weeks and months, let the pause become available without effort. The page links the stages to habit-formation research showing change is gradual and repetitive, and says the three-stage model itself is traditional rather than a studied protocol.
How do you keep spiritual practice from making you self-righteous or selective about who you help?
The Lojong slogan "don’t make gods into demons" asks whether your practice opens you toward others or closes you in superiority, and the page treats growing harshness as feedback rather than a reason to practice harder. The three principles of practice add the same check: keep your commitment, keep your practice mostly private rather than a display of virtue, and apply compassion impartially, including to people you find difficult. The page notes that spiritual bypassing research is limited and largely clinical.
How do you choose between these?
When a conflict flares and your mind is racing to who is at fault, use the blame slogan to examine your own part. When something unexpected knocks you off balance, take one breath before acting. When a specific habit keeps returning and you keep trying to change it all at once, work through the three stages in order. When hardship or a painful feeling is in front of you, tonglen is the practice for breathing into it. When a situation feels solid, permanent, and catastrophic, hold the two truths: keep it serious without treating it as fixed. When you notice yourself feeling more evolved than the people around you, or excluding certain people from your compassion, the slogans about gods into demons and impartial practice apply.
What these approaches do not settle
The page’s evidence is contemplative-clinical and mostly mechanistic. Loving-kindness and compassion meditation have RCT support, but tonglen has not been studied on its own. The two-truths, blame, unexpected-pause, three-stage, and spiritual-bypass links are analogies to cognitive defusion, attribution, MBCT, habit formation, and spiritual bypassing research, not tests of these practices. The page also says the full system is practitioner tradition, not a clinical protocol. Tonglen asks you to contact discomfort. If that contact becomes overwhelming, do not push through it: stop, ground yourself, shorten the practice, and seek a teacher or clinician. See the meditation-related-challenges page.
Practice this with IX Coach
Related concepts
- Metta Bhavana: The Practice of Loving-Kindness
Systematic cultivation of goodwill toward self, others, and all beings
- RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture — meeting difficult emotions with mindful presence
- Loving-Kindness (Metta) Meditation
The phrases, the widening circles, and the honest evidence on warmth practice