Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is one of the most beloved spiritual teachers of our time — an American Buddhist nun whose plainspoken wisdom about meeting pain, fear, and groundlessness has steadied millions of people through their hardest moments. Born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York City in 1936, she grew up in a Catholic family, studied English literature at Sarah Lawrence, earned a master's in education at Berkeley, and worked for years as an elementary school teacher. It was in her mid-thirties, in the wreckage of her second divorce — the famous moment when her husband announced he was leaving and her world fell apart — that her spiritual search truly began. That search led her to the Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became her root teacher, and in 1981 she became one of the first Western women to receive full ordination as a Buddhist nun. In 1984 she moved to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and in 1986 became director of Gampo Abbey — the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery for Westerners in North America — where she has lived, practised, and taught for decades. From that remote windswept coastline came a stream of books that changed lives around the world: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, The Places That Scare You, and above all When Things Fall Apart, her modern classic on finding peace precisely where life breaks us open. Across more than twenty books, her message is remarkably consistent and remarkably kind: lean toward the discomfort rather than away from it; start where you are; and discover that the very places that scare us are doorways to an awakened heart. Now in her tenth decade — she celebrated her 90th birthday in July 2026 — Pema has stepped back from active teaching, and her legacy is carried forward by the Pema Chödrön Foundation, which she calls her proudest accomplishment. The foundation preserves and shares her vast archive of teachings, supports her home monastery, and donates thousands of her books to prisons, shelters, and communities in need. Her voice — earthy, funny, utterly without pretension — continues to reach anyone standing in the rubble of a life that has fallen apart, offering the same steady reassurance: that groundlessness is not the end of the path, but the beginning.