Pema Chödrön: Teachings for Difficult Times

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 3 June 2026 · Updated 13 November 2026

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Pema Chödrön (born 1936) is an American Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition whom the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar, which publishes her teachings, calls “one of the most beloved of American Buddhist teachers.”

Her great subject is how to stay present with difficulty — fear, grief, loss, the ground giving way beneath us — and her books, above all When Things Fall Apart, have brought that teaching to millions. She came to it, characteristically, the hard way: through a life that fell apart before it came together.

From Deirdre Blomfield-Brown to Ani Pema

She was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown on 14 July 1936 in New York City, raised Catholic, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College (a bachelor’s in English literature, by her foundation’s account; some profiles place that degree at Berkeley) and the University of California, Berkeley (a master’s in elementary education). She became an elementary school teacher, married, and had two children.

Then her settled life came undone. She divorced; she remarried; and that second marriage ended too, when her husband told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. It was, as she later told Bill Moyers, “a big groundless moment” — the kind of groundlessness she would spend her life teaching others to meet. In the wreckage of that ordinary catastrophe, she began to look for something deeper, and found her way to Buddhism.

Becoming a Nun

In her mid-thirties she encountered the Tibetan teacher Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she first trained, and in 1974 she was ordained a novice nun by His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje. Two years earlier, in 1972, she had met the man who would become her root teacher: the controversial Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who taught Vajrayāna Buddhism to Western students. She studied closely with him from 1974 until his death in 1987.

In July 1981 she took full ordination as a bhikṣuṇī, becoming — by her foundation’s account — the first American woman in the Vajrayāna tradition to do so. Full ordination for women was not available in the Tibetan lineage itself, so at the Karmapa’s request she received it in the Chinese lineage, in Hong Kong. After Trungpa’s death she studied with his son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and later became a student of Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche, under whose guidance, by Gampo Abbey’s account, she spends time each year in solitary retreat.

Gampo Abbey

In 1984, at Trungpa’s request, she moved to rural Cape Breton in Nova Scotia to help found Gampo Abbey — the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America established for Western men and women — and became its first director (in 1986, by her foundation’s account). For decades it has been her home and teaching base, a place of retreat from which her influence spread far beyond its quiet cliffs. In 2025, two years after the death of its first abbot, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Gampo Abbey appointed her its abbess.

What Pema Chödrön Teaches

Pema Chödrön’s teaching does not flinch. Where much popular spirituality promises to make pain go away, she teaches how to be with it — to stay, with kindness and curiosity, in exactly the moments we most want to flee.

Her tools come from the Tibetan mind-training (lojong) tradition, and two practices recur:

• Tonglen (“sending and taking”) — a radical reversal of our instinct to grasp comfort and push away pain. On the in-breath, you breathe in suffering — your own and others’; on the out-breath, you send out relief and ease. It trains the heart to open toward pain rather than armour against it.
• Maitri — unconditional friendliness toward oneself, the ground without which compassion for others rings hollow. Much of her work gently undoes the self-attack that so often masquerades as spirituality.

Running through it all is her teaching on groundlessness: that the shaky, uncertain feeling of life falling apart is not a problem to be fixed but, met rightly, a doorway — the place where genuine freedom and compassion become possible. It is a message of use to anyone facing grief, anxiety, or loss, and it is the natural companion to the Buddhist art of letting go.

Her Books

Pema Chödrön has published more than twenty books. Her first, The Wisdom of No Escape (1991), was drawn from talks at a one-month retreat in 1989; her most famous, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1996 by her foundation’s dating; the first edition is dated 1997), is the book Lion’s Roar’s guide to her work calls a “classic.” Others include Start Where You Are (1994), The Places That Scare You, and Taking the Leap. (Several appear in our list of the best Buddhist books for beginners.)

Stepping Away from Shambhala

It is honest to include a difficult chapter. Pema Chödrön’s lineage ran through Chögyam Trungpa and the Shambhala community he founded — an organisation shaken in 2018 by a series of reports from the advocacy group Buddhist Project Sunshine detailing sexual abuse and misconduct by its teachers and staff, including senior leaders. In January 2020, she resigned as an acharya (senior teacher) of Shambhala, in response to its handling of sexual-misconduct allegations against its leader, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (Trungpa’s eldest son, who took over as leader only in 1990, after the Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin — Thomas Rich, whom Trungpa had empowered in 1976 and who, by the community’s own timeline, served as head of the organisations Trungpa founded “until his tragic death in 1990”). The Sakyong had stepped away from teaching and administrative duties in July 2018, and the report of an investigation by a law firm hired by Shambhala’s interim board, released in February 2019, confirmed some of the allegations against him. Learning that he intended to resume teaching, she wrote that it felt “unkind, unskillful, and unwise for the Sakyong to just go forward as if nothing had happened,” and stepped down. She later made clear that she was retiring only from that role, not from teaching. That she met even this — the failure of her own institution — by naming it plainly and choosing integrity over loyalty is, in its way, of a piece with everything she teaches.

Legacy

Pema Chödrön has made Buddhist wisdom about suffering genuinely usable for ordinary Western readers — not by softening it, but by showing how its hardest practices apply to a broken marriage, a frightening diagnosis, a sleepless night. Her gift is to make the dharma a refuge precisely when things fall apart, which is when most people first come looking.

For her tradition, see Tibetan Buddhism; for other figures who shaped the path, famous Buddhist teachers; and for her books, the best Buddhist books for beginners.