Ani Pema Chödrön is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the English-speaking world and a senior disciple of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York in 1936, she encountered Trungpa Rinpoche in the early 1970s and ordained as a novice in 1974. She received bhikshuni ordination in the Chinese Mahayana lineage in 1981 — at a time when full ordination was not available in the Tibetan tradition for women.
She served as the first director of the Karma Dzong meditation centre in Boulder, Colorado, and in 1984 was appointed by Trungpa Rinpoche as the director of Gampo Abbey, the first Western monastery in the Shambhala lineage, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. She served as abbess of Gampo Abbey for many years and continues to teach there in retirement.
Her books — When Things Fall Apart, The Places That Scare You, Comfortable with Uncertainty, and many others — have introduced an enormous lay audience to the practice of working with difficulty as the heart of the path. Her teaching is rooted in the Lojong slogans and the practice of tonglen, the Kagyu and Nyingma view, and the practical wisdom of Chögyam Trungpa's presentation of the path.
She has been particularly influential in extending Buddhist practice into the lives of people in crisis — those facing chronic illness, addiction, grief, and the ordinary difficulties of contemporary life. Her teaching style is gentle, plainspoken, and uncompromising about the necessity of meeting one's own pain as the foundation of the practice.
Now in her late eighties, Ani Pema has retired from formal teaching but continues to record audio and to receive a small number of correspondence applications each year through the Pema Chödrön Foundation.
