Where to Start with Pema Chödrön: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Pema Chödrön — how to approach When Things Fall Apart, her essential guide to working with difficulty, groundlessness, and fear through Buddhist practice. A complete reading guide.
By Lena Fischer
Pema Chödrön (born 1936) is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun in the Shambhala tradition and a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the teacher who brought the Kagyu lineage to North America. She is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery established for Westerners. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times was published by Shambhala in 1997 and has remained in continuous print, becoming one of the most widely read books in contemporary Western Buddhist literature and one of the most recommended books for people experiencing grief, anxiety, or crisis.
Where to Start: When Things Fall Apart (1997)
The essential Pema Chödrön — and the most practically useful Buddhist book written for Western readers in the past three decades. When Things Fall Apart begins from a teaching that runs directly against the default impulse: when things are difficult, painful, frightening, or disorienting, the natural response is to try to stabilise the situation — to find solutions, to seek comfort, to restore the sense of solid ground. Chödrön’s teaching is that this impulse is itself the source of suffering, and that learning to sit with the groundlessness rather than fleeing it is the beginning of genuine ease.
The central concept is groundlessness — shunyata, or emptiness, in the Tibetan tradition. The premise is that there is no permanent, stable self to protect; no permanent, stable situation to achieve; no solid ground to stand on. This sounds terrifying, and it is, until the practice of sitting with it reveals that the terror is partly the terror of recognising something that has always been true but was obscured by the project of maintaining the illusion of stability. Chödrön is careful to distinguish between genuine groundlessness and depression or nihilism: the recognition is not that nothing matters but that things are more open, more fluid, more workable than the panicked self-protective response assumes.
The chapters are short — most run four to eight pages — and structured around specific themes: fear, pain, loneliness, anger, grief, addiction, the impulse to escape. Each begins with a teaching from the Tibetan tradition, adapted with unusual plainness and warmth, and moves through it with enough practical instruction that a reader can apply it immediately. This is not a book of theory. Each chapter ends with a practice recommendation or a specific way of orienting attention. Chödrön writes as someone who has worked with the teachings in her own difficult circumstances, not as someone who has transcended them.
The loving-kindness practice — tonglen in Tibetan — is the book’s most counterintuitive teaching. The standard Western therapeutic approach to difficulty is to try to protect the self from pain and to cultivate self-compassion by moving away from suffering. Tonglen reverses this: the practitioner breathes in the pain, the heaviness, the difficulty — both their own and, imaginatively, that of others in similar circumstances — and breathes out spaciousness, relief, and ease. The logic is that the reflexive aversion to suffering, the attempt to push it away, generates more suffering, while the practice of moving toward it with open curiosity reduces its grip. This is genuinely difficult to accept intellectually, and Chödrön acknowledges this. The instruction is to try it before judging it.
The aggression chapters are among the book’s most practically useful. Chödrön distinguishes between the pain that underlies aggressive reactions — including self-directed aggression, which most self-help discourse pathologises without addressing its function — and the behaviour it produces. The teaching is that the pain is workable and the aggression is not, and that learning to stay with the former rather than acting out the latter is both the Buddhist path and the path toward genuine relationship.
What distinguishes When Things Fall Apart from comparable books on grief and resilience is its refusal of the framework of recovery — the idea that the goal of working with difficulty is to return to a prior state of stability. Chödrön’s teaching is that the prior state of apparent stability was never real; the crisis has simply made its unreality visible. This is not a comfortable teaching, but it is a more honest account of what difficult experiences are actually like, and it points toward an equanimity that does not depend on circumstances remaining stable.
Reading Pema Chödrön
When Things Fall Apart is Chödrön’s most widely read and most essential book for new readers. It stands alone and requires no prior knowledge of Buddhism or meditation practice.
For the full Pema Chödrön bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Pema Chödrön author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Pema Chödrön?
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997) is Chödrön's essential book — a series of short, direct teachings on how to work with suffering, fear, and groundlessness through Tibetan Buddhist practice. Written with unusual clarity and warmth, it is the most widely read contemporary guide to sitting with difficulty rather than fleeing it, and the most humane account of what Buddhist practice actually involves.
What is When Things Fall Apart about?
When Things Fall Apart teaches the Buddhist principle that groundlessness — the sense that there is no solid, stable self or situation to anchor to — is not a problem to be solved but the fundamental condition of human life. Chödrön draws on the Tibetan Kagyu tradition to argue that the practices typically used to escape from difficulty (distraction, self-improvement, spiritual bypassing) produce more suffering, while learning to turn toward difficulty with curiosity and loving-kindness is the path through it.
Do I need Buddhist background to read When Things Fall Apart?
No prior Buddhist knowledge is required. Chödrön introduces the concepts she uses with enough clarity that complete newcomers can follow the argument and apply the practices. The book is structured as short, standalone chapters that can be read in sequence or used as reference for specific difficulties — grief, fear, anger, loneliness — making it as practical as it is philosophical. Many readers who would not describe themselves as Buddhist practitioners find it among the most genuinely useful books they have encountered.
What should I read after When Things Fall Apart?
After When Things Fall Apart, Chödrön's own The Places That Scare You extends the loving-kindness practice described here into a fuller system for working with fear and aggression. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard applies the Zen practice of sitting with groundlessness to a Himalayan journey and the grief of losing a spouse — a remarkable complement. Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching provides a broader introduction to Buddhist concepts that underpin Chödrön's approach.
