Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown on July 14, 1936, in New York City. An American-born Tibetan Buddhist, she became an ordained nun, a former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism, and a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Her Tibetan name, Pema Chödrön, means “lotus dharma lamp.” Over a long teaching and writing life, she became closely associated with bringing Tibetan Buddhist practice to Western students, especially through Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, where she was principal teacher before retiring in 2020.

Her early life was not monastic. Chödrön grew up Catholic on a New Jersey farm with an older brother and sister. She graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Sarah Lawrence College, and later received a master’s degree in elementary education from the University of California, Berkeley. She married at 21 and had two children, divorced in her mid-twenties, then remarried and divorced again eight years later. She has three grandchildren.

Chödrön began studying with Lama Chime Rinpoche during frequent trips to London over several years, and while in the United States she studied with Trungpa Rinpoche in San Francisco. In 1974, she became a novice Buddhist nun under Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa. In Hong Kong in 1981, she became the first American in the Vajrayana tradition to become a fully ordained nun, or bhikṣuṇī. In the early 1980s, Trungpa appointed her director of the Boulder Shambhala Center, also known as Boulder Dharmadhatu, in Colorado.

In 1984, Chödrön moved to Gampo Abbey, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America for Western men and women, and in 1986 she became its first director. Her first book, The Wisdom of No Escape, was published in 1991. In 1993, when Trungpa’s son Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche assumed leadership of his father’s Shambhala lineage, she was given the title of acharya. She went on to publish Start Where You Are in 1994, When Things Fall Apart in 1996, No Time to Lose in 2005, and Practicing Peace in Times of War in 2007. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times became one of her most famous books, especially for its teaching on uncertainty and discomfort.

What shaped Chödrön’s thought was a life of study, illness, practice, and teaching. In 1994, she became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, and her health gradually improved. During that period, she met Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and took him as her teacher. A central theme in her teaching is “shenpa,” or “attachment,” which she describes as the moment a person is hooked into habitual negative or self-destructive thoughts and actions. Her words continue to meet readers in hard places because they do not ask people to pretend difficulty is absent. As one quote often associated with her puts it, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”