Content warning: This section of the guide briefly mentions allegations of sexual assault.

Pema Chödrön began life in 1936 in New York City as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. Raised a Catholic, she received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s in education at UC Berkeley. Thus armed with high-level abilities to write and teach, in the 1970s she began to study with esteemed Tibetan masters in London and the United States. In 1981, Chödrön became the first fully ordained American nun in Vajrayana Buddhism, taking the name Pema Chödrön (“Lotus Dharma Lamp”). During the 1980s, one of her teachers, Trungpa Rinpoche, appointed her director of his new Shambhala center in Colorado. She later became founding director of his monastery in eastern Canada, Gampo Abbey. However, Chödrön resigned from her role as a Shambhala teacher and representative in 2020, citing the organization’s “unwise direction” in the aftermath of sexual misconduct allegations against its leader, the son of founder Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Together with Trungpa Rinpoche, Chödrön has inspired many in the West to explore Tibetan Buddhism. Chödrön published her first book, The Wisdom of No Escape, in 1991, and has since published nearly 20 others, including the bestsellers Taking the Leap and Don’t Bite the Hook.