Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936 and grew up in a Catholic family in New York City. She studied English literature at Sarah Lawrence College, took a master’s degree in elementary education at Berkeley, and taught primary school in New Mexico and California. She married twice and divorced twice, and has two children.

In her mid-thirties she met Lama Chime Rinpoche in the French Alps and studied with him for several years in London. In 1972 she met Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and from 1974 until his death in 1987 she studied with him. The foundation calls him her root teacher.

She became a novice nun in 1974 under the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, and received full ordination in July 1981. The Pema Chödrön Foundation describes her as the first American in the Vajrayana tradition to be fully ordained as a nun.

She directed Karma Dzong in Boulder in the early 1980s. Chögyam Trungpa asked her to work towards a monastery for Western monks and nuns, and in 1984 she moved to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In 1986 she became director of Gampo Abbey, which the foundation describes as the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America for Western men and women. The foundation calls it her home monastery.

The Wisdom of No Escape appeared in 1991, Start Where You Are in 1994 and When Things Fall Apart in 1996. The foundation counts more than twenty titles in all, the latest being Another Kind of Freedom. She teaches in the United States and Canada and plans more time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.