Pema Chodron: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
When your life is coming apart, Pema Chodron's teachings show you how to stay with the pain instead of running. Her life, her books, tonglen step by step, and the criticism she has faced.
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Who is Pema Chodron and what does she actually teach?
Imagine you are a few weeks past something that broke your life open: a divorce, a diagnosis, a phone call you never wanted. Friends keep telling you to stay positive. Then someone hands you a small paperback called When Things Fall Apart, and it tells you what nobody else has: you do not have to fix this today.
The short answer: Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition. She teaches that most suffering comes from arranging life so nothing painful can reach us. Her alternative is simple and hard: stay with the discomfort long enough that it stops running you.
She was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York City in 1936 and raised Catholic. She went to Miss Porter's School in Connecticut, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of California, Berkeley, then taught elementary school in New Mexico and California for years.
She married twice and had two children, and both marriages ended in divorce. When the second collapsed, she looked for something that could explain the experience rather than repair it. That search seeded nearly everything she later taught, built out through meditation and the Tibetan mind-training slogans.
Unlike most Western dharma writers, she never promises you will feel better. Her books describe no state to reach and no better phase after the hard one.
Her first book, The Wisdom of No Escape, is named for this: there is nowhere to get to and no exit from the conditions of a life. She calls that good news. Picture a packed suitcase kept by the door for years. Unpack it, and the energy spent guarding that escape route comes back.
She writes about herself without polish: losing her temper, wanting a hard situation to end. Those stories carry the argument better than doctrine. Many readers who come for inspiration feel unsettled, because she keeps steering them back to what they hoped to avoid.
How did Pema Chodron become a Buddhist nun?
In her mid-thirties she met Lama Chime Rinpoche in the French Alps and studied with him on later visits to London. She took novice ordination in 1974 from the Sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje.
In 1981 she received full bhikshuni ordination in Hong Kong through the Chinese lineage, because the Tibetan tradition had no intact ordination line for women. She is often described as among the first American women to hold it.
What is Gampo Abbey and what was Pema Chodron's role there?
Gampo Abbey is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the Cape Breton coast in Nova Scotia, founded in 1984 within the Shambhala lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She left the Karma Dzong center in Boulder, Colorado, which she directed, to become its first director.
She stayed as resident teacher for decades, and much of her books began as talks to monastics during its long winter retreats.
What does Pema Chodron mean by groundlessness?
If you have ever felt the floor drop out from under you, this is the word for it. Groundlessness, for Pema Chodron, is the honest description of a moment when nothing you hold will hold still. It is not a mood or a spiritual achievement.
Your health, relationships, reputation and sense of self all change without permission, and no planning makes them solid. The Buddhist roots are impermanence and no fixed self, but she rarely argues philosophy. She points to the moment a diagnosis arrives or a partner leaves. The ground was never there before either. What changed was your ability to pretend.
Her claim is that the pain in those moments is not only the loss. It is withdrawal from an addiction to solid ground. She treats the free fall as the start of seeing clearly, and teaches you to stay in it without grabbing the nearest thing.
She separates the fact of groundlessness from your panic about it. The fact is neutral. The panic is a set of familiar moves: blaming someone, building a story, seeking reassurance, reaching for whatever numbs. The moment before those moves fire is, she says, your most useful moment, because a different outcome is still possible.
Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (2012) is her fullest treatment of the theme. It is organised around three commitments from Buddhist vow traditions: not causing harm, taking care of others, and embracing the world without conditions.
She never claims it feels pleasant. It is like learning to float: still in deep water, but no longer thrashing. It keeps feeling like falling. You just stop treating the fall as proof something has gone wrong.
Is groundlessness the same thing as anxiety?
No. Groundlessness is how things are. Anxiety is one response to noticing it, though she says they feel alike in the body: the drop in the stomach, the urge to act now.
Anxiety pushes you to act so you feel in control. Her instruction is to feel the sensation without acting and let things stay unresolved longer than is comfortable.
Why does Pema Chodron call groundlessness good news?
She argues that keeping up the illusion of solid ground takes enormous effort and drives much exhaustion and defensiveness. If nothing is solid, nothing needs defending, and that energy is freed. Without the need for stability you can also be warmer to others, since much unkindness comes from protecting a position.
This is her claim, not an established finding. You can only test it in your own life.
What is the core message of When Things Fall Apart?
If you picked this book up in a hard season, its message is for you: the moments when your life comes apart are more workable than the moments when it holds together, because your usual defences are briefly out of order.
Published by Shambhala Publications in the 1990s from talks at Gampo Abbey, it is why most readers know her name. Its short, mostly independent chapters are written on purpose for someone in crisis who cannot concentrate.
The instruction never changes. When something painful comes up, do not fix, explain or escape it right away. Stay with the physical feeling as long as you can, then a little longer. She calls this leaning in, the opposite of staying positive or moving on.
The book also introduces maitri, which she translates as unconditional friendliness toward yourself, including the parts you would rather not have.
The book circles one instruction from different angles instead of building an argument, so you can open it anywhere. That has kept it useful in hospital waiting rooms for decades. It resists summary, because the effect comes from repetition, the way waves shape a rock.
What surprises readers most is her view of hope. She calls giving up hope a positive step, meaning the specific hope that this situation will turn comfortable, and she separates it from despair. Hope and fear, she says, are the same movement, both fixed on a future that has not arrived. That is rare on the self-help shelf, and it explains both the loyalty and the resistance the book draws.
What does Pema Chodron mean by leaning in?
Turning your attention toward an unpleasant feeling, as body sensation rather than thought. Find where the feeling sits. Describe its texture to yourself. Stay there while the urge to check your phone or call someone rises and passes.
She contrasts this with both suppressing and venting, since both end your contact with the feeling.
Is When Things Fall Apart a self-help book?
It is usually shelved as one, but has no program, stages or promised outcome. It collects Buddhist dharma talks first given to monastics, lightly adapted for general readers.
It is practical and free of jargon, so the confusion is fair. Expect steps and you may find it frustrating. Expect encouragement and you may find it cold.
What is shenpa and how do you catch it in daily life?
Think of the last time a remark made your chest go tight before you knew why. That split second has a name. Shenpa is the Tibetan word Pema Chodron popularised as getting hooked: the tightening that comes before a habitual reaction takes over. She credits the framing to Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, who calls it the charge underneath liking and not liking.
Shenpa is physical, and it comes first: a clench in your chest or heat in your face before any thought. The story about why the remark was unfair comes later, when the reaction is already moving. She treats that body stage as your only real leverage point.
So learn your own early warning signs. Most people have two or three, like a tightening jaw or a sudden urge to explain themselves. When one appears, pause, feel the charge without acting, and wait. It fades surprisingly fast if you stop replaying the scene.
She gives shenpa a life cycle. The hook fires. Then comes the scratching, her word for whatever relieves the itch: a sharp reply, a drink, a purchase, an hour of scrolling. The relief is real but brief, and it strengthens the pattern for next time. Like a mosquito bite, scratching feels good and makes it worse.
She calls this a chain reaction. The hook will keep arising. The aim is to stop the automatic scratching.
Don't Bite the Hook, an audio program later printed, is her most direct treatment. It closely matches what behavioural therapists call urge surfing, though the traditions arrived separately. She adds what clinical versions usually omit: warmth toward yourself while the urge is active, not shame at being hooked.
What is Pema Chodron's three-breath pause?
Stop what you are doing, take three deliberate breaths while feeling your body, then carry on. She suggests natural transitions, like before opening your laptop or after ending a call.
It is the smallest workable practice for people who will not sit for thirty minutes. It interrupts momentum, so how often matters more than how long.
How is shenpa different from an emotion?
Shenpa is not the emotion but the sticky quality that makes it grab you. Anger can come and go without shenpa. Anger with shenpa brings the urge to act, rehearse and justify.
She places it closer to sensation than feeling, a charge or a clutch. Analysing why you are angry usually comes too late. Noticing the clutch comes early enough to help.
How do you actually do tonglen practice, step by step?
If you have ever sat beside someone you love in pain and felt helpless, tonglen may speak to you. It reverses your instinct: breathe in what hurts, breathe out relief. She teaches four building stages.
Stage one: a brief flash of openness. Rest a second or two with a blank, clear mind.
Stage two: texture, not story. Breathe in heat, heaviness and darkness. Breathe out coolness, lightness and freshness, until the rhythm runs through your whole body, not just your nose.
Stage three: a real situation. Breathe in the specific pain you or someone you have in mind is feeling. Breathe out whatever would relieve it, such as ease or ordinary comfort.
Stage four: widen the circle to everyone in the same situation, so it stops being about one person.
A session runs ten to twenty minutes. On-the-spot tonglen is a few breaths of the same reversal, without stages, when you meet suffering in a hospital corridor or the news.
A workable first week:
Days one and two: ten minutes of stages one and two only, so the rhythm is familiar before emotion enters.
Day three: add stage three for someone you feel simple warmth toward, like a friend having a hard week. Your own worst material is harder to start with.
Days four and five: the same for your own distress, breathing in the feeling as it is, not tidied.
Days six and seven: add stage four and end with a short rest.
Two common mistakes: trying to feel compassionate, which turns practice into performance when it only asks you to move the breath; and bracing against the in-breath, felt as shallow breathing and a tight chest. If either appears, drop back to stage two. If your distress grows, stop and talk to a professional rather than push harder.
Does tonglen practice mean you take on other people's suffering?
No. She is clear that tonglen does not move suffering between people. The imagery trains your own resistance to discomfort; it does not act on the world.
She describes it as dissolving the armour around your heart by doing the opposite of what self-protection says. If you fear absorbing harm, start with stage two, which involves no one else.
Can you do tonglen for yourself?
Yes. She often suggests starting there if you find compassion for others easier than for yourself. In the version sometimes called compassionate abiding, you breathe the hard feeling in fully, let it be as unpleasant as it is, and breathe out a sense of room around it.
Then widen to everyone feeling the same thing right now, so it meets your pain without turning into self-absorption.
Where did Pema Chodron's teachings come from?
If her words land for you, know they are not one woman's invention. They come from Tibetan Buddhism, specifically the lojong or mind-training tradition traced to the eleventh-century Indian master Atisha and organised in Tibet as the Seven Points of Mind Training.
Lojong is a set of short slogans, commonly numbered at fifty-nine, to memorise and use in ordinary moments, with tonglen at its centre. Start Where You Are (1994), her slogan commentary, shows that lineage most clearly.
Her root teacher was Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who founded Naropa University and the Shambhala organisation. She inherited wholesale his blunt, secular-sounding English for Tibetan practice. She also cites Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, source of the shenpa teaching, and was ordained by the Sixteenth Karmapa. No Time to Lose (2005), her commentary on Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva, ties her work to one of the most studied texts in Mahayana Buddhism.
You may have met her ideas without knowing it. Her framing of staying with difficulty has been absorbed, often without credit, into secular mindfulness courses, hospice work and many therapy practices, and her language about hopelessness has travelled further than the practice behind it.
In Buddhist publishing she showed that Tibetan mind training could reach plain-English readers with no interest in ritual or lineage, and much of the later Shambhala Publications catalogue follows that template. She did it while remaining a fully ordained monastic in a traditional setting, unlike popularisers who dropped the institutional side. That tension is what later made her resignation from Shambhala matter.
What is lojong and why does Pema Chodron use it?
A Tibetan mind-training system of short slogans you apply in daily situations, such as treating obstacles as practice material or dropping the habit of listing other people's faults.
It needs no retreat or special conditions, which suits working adults. Start Where You Are and Always Maintain a Joyful Mind are her main slogan books, both tracing back through Atisha to the Seven Points of Mind Training.
How much of Pema Chodron's teaching comes from Chogyam Trungpa?
A great deal. Spiritual materialism and the stress on unconditional confidence come straight from him, and her short, direct style is recognisably his.
What she added was accessibility, a personal voice he did not use, and a steady focus on tonglen as the central discipline rather than one technique among many.
Which Pema Chodron books should you read first?
The right first book depends on where you are standing right now. She has written more than a dozen, in three practical groups.
The foundational trio. The Wisdom of No Escape (1991) is clearest on basic meditation. Start Where You Are (1994) is the lojong commentary and fullest early treatment of tonglen. When Things Fall Apart (1990s) is the crisis book and best-known title; reach for it if you are hurting today.
Themed books. The Places That Scare You (2001) covers fear and bodhichitta, the one for you if fear keeps you stuck. No Time to Lose (2005) is by far her most demanding: a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva, an eighth-century Indian verse text, built on classical Buddhist argument. It shows most clearly that her popular writing rests on traditional study. Practicing Peace in Times of War (2006) applies the material to aggression. Taking the Leap and Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change revisit habit and groundlessness in shorter form.
Compilations. Comfortable with Uncertainty and The Pocket Pema Chodron repackage existing material.
Later titles include Welcoming the Unwelcome (2019) and How We Live Is How We Die (2022), on dying and the Tibetan bardo teachings.
Before buying several: many of her products are the same talks reissued, and excerpt collections overlap heavily with their sources, so readers often pay twice.
Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better is a short illustrated book from a commencement address she gave at Naropa University, closer to a gift than a manual. How We Live Is How We Die is her most substantial late work and covers dying, which her earlier books touched only lightly. If you are facing a loss, it may be the one that meets you.
Are Pema Chodron's audio talks better than her books?
Most of her books began as recorded talks, so the audio programs, many produced by Sounds True, are often the original source. You hear humour and timing that edited transcripts flatten, and guided practice is easier to follow spoken.
Books win for rereading, which matters for the slogans in Start Where You Are. If you are learning tonglen for the first time, a guided recording is usually easier than written stages.
What criticism has Pema Chodron faced?
If her books have helped you, this may be hard to read, but you deserve the full picture. Most of the well-documented criticism concerns her position inside Shambhala while abuse there was being reported.
In 2018 the Buddhist Project Sunshine reports, compiled by Andrea Winn, documented allegations of sexual misconduct within Shambhala, including against its leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who stepped back that year.
The Phase 3 report, in August 2018, included a woman's account. She said that when she told Pema Chodron she had been raped by a Shambhala center director, Pema Chodron did not believe her and suggested she may have been a willing participant.
In a public statement in September 2018, Pema Chodron acknowledged making those remarks, said she had contacted the woman to apologise directly, said she believed her account, and committed to listening better. Commentators differed on whether this was enough, and some found the delay significant.
A law firm engaged by Shambhala reported on allegations against Sakyong Mipham in 2019. In January 2020 she resigned as an acharya over his stated intention to resume teaching and an interim board's invitation for him to lead a ceremony in Europe.
A longer-running criticism concerns Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. His heavy drinking and sexual relationships with students are documented by his own community and outside reporting. His appointed regent, Osel Tendzin, continued sexual contact with students after learning he was HIV positive, and at least one student was later infected.
Critics argue that her public devotion to him, sustained across decades of writing, helped preserve the authority of a lineage where this happened. She has addressed it publicly more than once, declining to explain the conduct away as enlightened activity while saying she cannot resolve it. Those who find that evasive are not satisfied.
Some Buddhists also argue that her popular writing detaches practice from ethical training and community accountability, making it easier to consume and harder to be corrected by. You can value what a teacher gave you and still keep these facts in view.
Is Pema Chodron accused of misconduct herself?
No. The documented criticism concerns her response to others' misconduct and her tie to a lineage where abuse occurred, not any abuse by her. Online talk about Shambhala often blurs the two.
The verified item on the record is her own 2018 acknowledgment that she dismissed a woman's account of assault, and her apology for it.
How do Pema Chodron's teachings differ from Tara Brach's, and who do they not suit?
Before you commit to her way, ask whether it fits what you need now. She and Tara Brach overlap but start from different places and aim at different results.
Tara Brach is a clinical psychologist and meditation teacher in the Theravada and insight tradition, not the Tibetan one. Her best-known method, RAIN, is four steps ending in nurturing yourself. Her main book, Radical Acceptance, uses openly therapeutic language and focuses on shame and the self-critical mind.
Pema Chodron is a Tibetan-lineage monastic drawing on lojong. Tonglen turns toward pain with no soothing endpoint, and she uses almost no psychological vocabulary.
The real difference is temperature. Tara Brach is like a warm blanket. Pema Chodron is more like a friend gently taking away your last escape routes.
Pema Chodron's teaching is a poor fit for someone in acute crisis who needs stabilization first, for someone whose difficulty is external and requires action rather than acceptance, and for anyone who reads acceptance as a reason not to leave a harmful situation.
Two other teachers help place her. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen teacher, shares her plain language but centres present-moment awareness and social engagement, not turning toward pain, in a much gentler tone. Byron Katie works painful thought by asking whether a stressful belief is true, closer to argument than to sitting with sensation. Pema Chodron does not dispute thoughts at all, a difference of method, not style.
Her honest limits: it does not resolve situations, does not produce a stable good mood, and makes no claim to treat clinical conditions. Its repeated exposure to discomfort can make some people feel worse. If that happens to you, stop and talk to a therapist or doctor.
Is Pema Chodron's teaching a form of spiritual bypassing?
Her core instruction is nearly the opposite. Bypassing means using spiritual ideas to avoid hard feelings, and she asks you to stay in them.
The fair criticism is about application. Someone in an abusive relationship or exploitative workplace can misread advice to accept what is happening as a reason to stay, and her writing does not always clearly separate the pain of being human from harm you should leave.
Who benefits most from Pema Chodron's teachings?
People facing something that cannot be repaired: bereavement, a terminal diagnosis, an irreversible ending, a chronic condition. Readers there often say the lack of promised improvement is exactly what makes the books usable, because encouragement rings hollow.
They help less if you have a solvable problem and need a plan, or if your main need is comfort, which the teaching keeps declining to give.
Questions people ask
Is Pema Chodron still alive and still teaching?
Born in 1936, she has stepped back sharply from public teaching. She resigned as an acharya of Shambhala in January 2020 and has not returned to a senior role there. Her books stay in print with Shambhala Publications, her talks still circulate, and new titles have appeared, including How We Live Is How We Die in 2022. For current schedules, check the Pema Chodron Foundation or Gampo Abbey, not older listings.
Do you have to be Buddhist to use Pema Chodron's teachings?
No. Her best-known books assume no Buddhist study, membership or belief in rebirth or deities, and use mostly ordinary English. Her core instruction, to stay with a hard feeling rather than act on it, needs no doctrine. Still, tonglen and the lojong slogans come from a specific Tibetan Buddhist lineage, and she says so.
What is the difference between tonglen and metta or loving-kindness meditation?
Both aim at compassion, in opposite directions. Metta, the Pali loving-kindness practice taught by Sharon Salzberg and others, repeats phrases of goodwill and grows a pleasant, open feeling. Tonglen turns toward pain, breathing in what is unwanted and breathing out relief, and does not aim to feel good. Many beginners find metta easier, and some teachers suggest building it first.
Which Pema Chodron book should a complete beginner start with?
Struggling right now? Start with When Things Fall Apart, whose short chapters each stand alone. For plainer meditation instruction, try The Wisdom of No Escape, a slower book that grew out of a month-long retreat. Start Where You Are opens the lojong slogans and gives the fullest treatment of tonglen among her early titles.
What is shenpa in Pema Chodron's teaching?
Shenpa is the Tibetan term she renders as getting hooked: the sudden tightening just before a habitual reaction. She credits the framing to her teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, who calls it the charge behind liking and not liking. Notice the hook early, stay with the raw sensation without feeding it, and let the urge fade.
Why did Pema Chodron leave Shambhala?
She stepped down as an acharya of Shambhala in a letter to its board dated January 14, 2020, which was made public. She wrote that she was disheartened after Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche said he wished to resume teaching and an interim board invited him to lead a ceremony in Europe. He had stepped back in 2018 after reports of sexual misconduct published by Buddhist Project Sunshine, and a law firm investigation commissioned by Shambhala reported in 2019. She objected to the pace of his return, not to the tradition.
Is tonglen practice safe if you are dealing with trauma or depression?
Tonglen practice deliberately turns attention toward pain, which makes it a poor first choice during acute trauma, active suicidal thinking, or an untreated depressive episode. Teachers commonly suggest starting with breath awareness or loving-kindness and adding tonglen later, beginning with a person you feel warmth toward rather than your own worst material. Pema Chodron presents her teaching as practice instruction, not treatment, and it is not a substitute for therapy. Anyone whose distress worsens during practice should stop and speak to a clinician.
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Related topics: pema chodron, when things fall apart, pema chodron teachings, tonglen practice, groundlessness, pema chodron books
