A Teacher
Pema Chodron
Leaning into difficulty
The transmission
Pema Chodron (born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, 14 July 1936) is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and one of the most widely read Western teachers in the Shambhala and Kagyu-Nyingma lineages.
After early careers and personal upheaval, she became a novice nun in 1974 under the sixteenth Karmapa and a principal student of the Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; in 1981 she became one of the first American women in the Vajrayana tradition to take full ordination.
She moved to Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia in 1984, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America for Westerners, and became its director. Her best-known book, When Things Fall Apart (1996), reframes fear, loss, and groundlessness not as obstacles but as the very ground of awakening.
Drawing on the Tibetan lojong (mind-training) and tonglen practices she inherited through Trungpa, she teaches a counterintuitive move at the heart of the mind-power tradition: instead of fleeing pain or grasping for security, one turns toward difficulty and rests in the open, shaky uncertainty it reveals.
For a wide secular as well as Buddhist audience, she has made “leaning into the sharp points” a working method for transforming one’s relationship to suffering.
What they gave
Leaning into difficulty: Teaches that fear, loss, and groundlessness are openings to awakening rather than enemies to be escaped.
- Lojong and tonglen for the West: Made Tibetan mind-training and the practice of “sending and taking” accessible to a broad modern audience.
- Groundlessness as freedom: Reframes uncertainty and the loss of fixed reference points as the doorway to a more open mind.
- Contemplative resilience: Shaped a Western contemplative culture in which working skillfully with one’s own mind is the response to crisis.
In their words
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; the Tibetan lojong mind-training and tonglen tradition; Shambhala and the Kagyu-Nyingma streams of Vajrayana Buddhism.
- Influenced: Western Buddhist and secular contemplative culture around resilience and groundlessness; the popular spread of tonglen and lojong practice; self-help and mindfulness teaching on working with painful emotion.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- When Things Fall Apart1997
- The Places That Scare You2001