Pema Chödrön

Deirdre Blomfield-Brown was born in [[brooklyn|New York City]] in 1936, raised on a New Jersey farm, attended Sarah Lawrence and the University of [[berkeley|California]], married, divorced, married again, divorced again, raised two children, and trained and worked as an elementary-school teacher into her late thirties. The breakdown of her second marriage in her late thirties — an event she describes with characteristic directness in her later books — was the personal crisis that opened her to Buddhist practice.

She encountered the Tibetan teacher Lama Chime Rinpoche in the French Alps in 1972 and trained briefly with him; in 1974 she met Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Karma Kagyu lama who had escaped Tibet in 1959, founded [[naropa-university|Naropa University]] in [[boulder|Boulder]] in 1974, and was building what would become Shambhala International. She took novice ordination as a Buddhist nun in London in 1974 and full bhikṣuṇī ordination in Hong Kong in 1981 (Tibetan Buddhism does not currently confer full bhikṣuṇī ordination on women within its own tradition; she received the lineage through the Chinese tradition, as several other Tibetan-trained Western women have).

In 1984 Trungpa Rinpoche asked her to direct the establishment of Gampo Abbey, a Vajrayāna monastery on a remote stretch of Cape Breton coast in Nova Scotia. She has been a director of the abbey ever since and is one of the principal teachers in the Shambhala lineage descending from Trungpa.

The teaching

Chödrön’s books are direct, practical, and psychologically frank. They engage the lojong tradition — the Tibetan mind-training practice of working with fifty-nine slogans of Atisha and the Seven Points of Mind Training — and translate it into accessible contemporary English. Several distinctive emphases recur across her work:

• Staying. The principal practice she names again and again is to stay with difficult emotion rather than escaping it through distraction, addiction, or spiritual bypass. 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.
• Tonglen — sending and taking. The Tibetan practice of breathing in the suffering of oneself and others and breathing out relief, ease, and compassion. Chödrön has been the principal teacher of tonglen in the contemporary West.
• The bodhisattva path as ordinary. Bodhichitta — the awakened heart — is not a special accomplishment but the willingness to remain present with the texture of ordinary life, including its difficulties, on behalf of all beings.
• Working with fear. Many of her books center on the question of fear — what to do with it, how it can become a ground of practice rather than an obstacle. The Places That Scare You is the most concentrated treatment.

On Trungpa and Shambhala

A note for honesty. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a teacher of remarkable insight whose American institutions also include credible records of substantial sexual and financial misconduct, both during his lifetime and under his designated successor (the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who stepped down in 2018 after sexual-abuse allegations). The Shambhala community has been in extended reckoning over these failures since the late 2010s, and the questions of how to honor what was real in the teaching while acknowledging what was destructive in the institutional behavior are still being worked. Pema Chödrön has herself been a thoughtful voice in this reckoning — neither defending the abuses nor disavowing her own genuine debt to Trungpa as a teacher. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture is similar.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[buddhism]]
• Parallels: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Pema Chödrön. The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of [[metta|Loving-Kindness]]. Shambhala, 1991. Source class: book / primary.
2. Pema Chödrön. Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living. Shambhala, 1994. Source class: book / primary, lojong slogans.
3. Pema Chödrön. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala, 1997. Source class: book / primary.
4. Pema Chödrön. The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Shambhala, 2001. Source class: book / primary.
5. Pema Chödrön. Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change. Shambhala, 2012. Source class: book / primary.

Lenses still to grow

• Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche as a complex figure deserving his own treatment — the genuine teacher and the institutional failures, held together honestly.
• Lojong as a practice tradition deserving its own entry.
• Gampo Abbey as an institution.
• The Shambhala reckoning of the late 2010s as a piece of contemporary Buddhist institutional history.
• Western Buddhist nuns as a category — the long struggle for full ordination and the contemporary state of women’s monastic Buddhism.