Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is the most widely read Western Buddhist teacher of her generation — an ordained Tibetan Buddhist nun in the Kagyu tradition whose books have reached millions of readers across religions and cultures with a teaching that combines ancient Buddhist wisdom with an immediate, compassionate, psychologically sophisticated understanding of the modern Western predicament.

Born in New York, she worked as an elementary school teacher before a difficult divorce in her early thirties opened a crack in her ordinary life through which a different kind of awareness entered. She encountered the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and felt, for the first time, a philosophy that described her actual experience of groundlessness and uncertainty not as something to be overcome but as the very ground of spiritual discovery. She was ordained as a nun by her root teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1974.

After Trungpa Rinpoche’s death, she became a student of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and continued her practice under his guidance. She became the director of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America established for Westerners, a post she held for many years. It was in this context that she developed her distinctive teaching voice — warm, self-revealing, gently humorous, and deeply precise.

Her books — including When Things Fall Apart, The Wisdom of No Escape, and Start Where You Are — have reached people in prisons, hospitals, and ordinary living rooms worldwide, offering a practice that requires no conversion and no prerequisite except the willingness to sit with what is. She continues to teach internationally, carrying forward the Kagyu lineage in a form accessible to the contemporary world.