Patrick Zeis Like a lotus rising from muddy waters, Pema Chödrön’s path to becoming one of America’s most beloved Buddhist teachers emerged from personal hardship, loss, and profound transformation. After the collapse of her marriage shattered the life she had once envisioned for herself, she turned toward Buddhist practice and eventually became the first Western women to be fully ordained as a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition. Through bestselling books, conversations with figures such as Oprah Winfrey, and her leadership role at Gampo Abbey, Chödrön has helped millions learn how to meet uncertainty, fear, heartbreak, and change with greater courage and compassion. Her teachings remain among the most accessible and influential introductions to Buddhist wisdom available today.
The Life of Pema Chödrön
In the summer of 1936, a young girl named Deirdre Blomfield-Brown entered the world on July 14 in New York City. Born into a devout Catholic family, she spent her early years on a farm in New Jersey, her childhood gently anchored in the rhythms of family life and the traditions of her upbringing. But the life she would come to lead was nothing like the conventional path mapped out for someone of her background.
By her early twenties, Deirdre had already embarked on a familiar American story: marriage, two children, and the hope of a settled domestic life. Yet despite her best efforts, her first marriage ended in divorce, and shortly thereafter she remarried and moved to the West Coast. In California she pursued higher education—earning a Bachelor’s in English Literature followed by a Master’s in Elementary Education at UC Berkeley—while longing for a sense of stability her relationships could not deliver.
Then came the blow that would change everything: her second marriage collapsed. She found herself in a landscape of emotional wreckage, searching for something that could heal, restore, and reinvent her being. It was at this threshold of despair that she encountered the teachings of Buddhism and the practice of meditation. A chance reading of an article by Chögyam Trungpa awakened a spark of recognition—a first glimmer of an inner life that was both unfamiliar and quietly compelling.
Guided by that spark, she journeyed to London to study with Lama Chime Rinpoche, whose warmth and clarity opened new vistas of possibility in her life. After several years of disciplined training and eventually taking novice vows under Lama Chime’s guidance, she returned to the United States and became a formal student of Trungpa.
Drawn to the depth of his growing community and his extraordinary ability to illuminate the Dharma with unmatched precision, she immersed herself in his guidance and began taking her practice more seriously. It was during this era of intensive training and inner reckoning that she realized the most important relationship she would ever cultivate was not with another person, but with herself.
At the age of 38, in 1974, Deirdre took novice vows and adopted the name Pema Chödrön, bringing her path full circle—from the turmoil of personal heartbreak to the wholehearted embrace of Buddhism. Several years later, in July 1981, she made history when she received full bhikshuni ordination in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition—becoming the first American woman in the Vajrayana lineage to do so.
In the mid-1980s, Pema helped her teacher Trungpa establish Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, a monastery specially designed for Western men and women, and in 1986 she became its first director. From this remote and tranquil setting, she teaches, writes, and embodies a path of vulnerability, courage, and compassion—inviting others to lean into fear, embrace groundlessness, and discover the heart’s natural warmth even in the midst of chaos.
Though her early life did not go according to plan, Pema Chödrön now reflects with gratitude on the painful detours that guided her into a deeper truth. From a conventional American upbringing to overseeing one of North America’s first marquee monastic communities, scenically nestled on a mountainous island in eastern Canada, her journey stands as a testament: when things fall apart, insight is there waiting to be understood.
Today, Chödrön remains one of the most influential Buddhist voices in the Western world. Alongside her work as senior teacher at Gampo Abbey, she has become a cherished author, frequently appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Network as a guest, with books that have reached millions and profoundly influenced how we speak about compassion, resilience, and inner transformation. Over the course of her career, she has written more than twenty books —including The Places That Scare You, Taking the Leap, and the enduring classic When Things Fall Apart—each offering guidance for meeting life with wisdom and an open heart.
Three of Pema Chödrön’s Most Influential Works
Few contemporary Buddhist teachers have helped people navigate life’s difficulties with as much warmth, honesty, and compassion as Pema Chödrön. Drawing upon Tibetan Buddhist teachings while speaking directly to everyday experiences of fear, uncertainty, grief, and change, she has guided millions of readers toward a more skillful relationship with suffering. The following books represent some of her most influential works and continue to serve as trusted companions during life’s most challenging moments.
When Things Fall Apart (1996):
Few contemporary Buddhist books have offered more comfort during periods of loss, grief, and uncertainty than When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Rather than promising quick relief or emotional escape, Pema Chödrön draws from her own hardships and argues that our deepest moments of vulnerability can become the beginning of genuine transformation. Written with unusual honesty and warmth, the book introduced millions of readers to her teachings for the first time. Chödrön writes:
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.
The Places That Scare You (2001):
Fear narrows our world. It persuades us to avoid difficult conversations, painful emotions, and uncertain situations. In The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, Pema Chödrön gently challenges that instinct, showing how the moments we most want to escape often become the doorway to greater openness, compassion, and authentic confidence. Ultimtimately, the book stands as one of Chödrön’s most accessible introductions to courageous living. She writes:
When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.
Welcoming the Unwelcome (2019):
Written after decades of teaching students around the world, Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World reflects the mature voice of a teacher who understands that uncertainty is not an occasional disruption but a permanent feature of human life. Rather than resisting difficult emotions or unpleasant circumstances, Pema Chödrön encourages readers to receive them with curiosity and awareness. Through storytelling, practical meditation guidance, and timeless Buddhist wisdom, Chödrön shows how we can always tap into our own basic goodness regardless of what’s changing around us. She writes:
We all have tremendous potential and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to avoid the unpleasant, the painful, the insecure, the unpredictable. There is vast, limitless richness and wonder we could experience if we fully accustomed our nervous systems to the open-ended, uncertain reality of how things are.
20 Inspirational Pema Chödrön Quotes
We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.
You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.
We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.
Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.
When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.
As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.
We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.
Pain is not a punishment, pleasure is not a reward.
To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is.
Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.
If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that’s endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn’t inherent in the place but in your state of mind.
The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.
Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.
We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
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