Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is the American Buddhist teacher who made the confrontation with groundlessness the center of a lifetime’s work. Born Ann Deirdre Langford in New York City in 1936, she was ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and became the first Western woman fully ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Her books—from When Things Fall Apart through Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change—return to a single devastating observation: the stability human beings spend their lives constructing is fabricated, not discovered, and the suffering that accompanies its dissolution comes not from the dissolution itself but from the resistance to it. Her concept of shenpa—the almost-invisible moment before craving becomes action, the hook that sets before the chain plays out—is the most precise psychological tool available for understanding why the builder cannot stop building even when the building has crossed from flow to compulsion. Her teaching on groundlessness explains why the senior engineer in