Pema Chödrön: Teachings for Difficult Times

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Pema Chödrön (born 1936) is an American Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition and one of the most widely read Buddhist teachers in the West. 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 degree in English literature) 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 leaving her for someone else. It was, by her own account, a shattering — the kind of groundlessness she would later 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 brilliant, magnetic, and famously controversial Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a pioneer in bringing Vajrayāna Buddhism to the West. 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, at a time when full ordination for women was not available in the Tibetan lineage itself and had to be sought elsewhere. After Trungpa’s death, she continued her training under Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche.

Gampo Abbey

In 1984 she moved to Gampo Abbey, on the remote coast of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia — the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America established for Western men and women — and in 1986 became its first director. For decades it was her home and teaching base, a place of retreat from which her influence spread far beyond its quiet cliffs.

What She Teaches

Pema Chödrön’s teaching is beloved because it 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 unusual 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 written more than twenty books, most drawn from her talks. Her first was The Wisdom of No Escape (1991); her most famous, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1996), has become a modern classic, pressed into the hands of countless people in crisis. Others include The Places That Scare You, Start Where You Are, 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 later shaken by serious scandal. 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 son and successor). Learning that he intended to resume teaching, she wrote that it felt “unkind, unskillful and unwise… to just go forward as if nothing had happened,” and stepped down. She has continued to teach independently. 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

More than almost any contemporary teacher, 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, the most influential Buddhist teachers; and for her books, the best Buddhist books for beginners.