There is a particular moment in meditation that most practitioners recognize. It arrives somewhere between five and twenty minutes in. A thought arises that produces discomfort — an unresolved conflict, an embarrassing memory, a flash of anxiety about something unfinished. The instinct is to follow it, or to push it away, or to end the session entirely.
Pema Chödrön’s teaching — developed over decades as an ordained nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and popularized in books including When Things Fall Apart (Shambhala, 1997) and The Wisdom of No Escape (Shambhala, 1991) — is organized around this moment. Her central practical contribution is not a technique for achieving peace. It is a practice for staying.
What She Actually Teaches
Chödrön trained under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and later Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, and her teaching reflects Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism filtered through distinctly American directness. She does not promise that meditation will make your life easier. She argues, consistently, that it will make you more willing to engage with what is difficult.
Her core concept is groundlessness — the experience of having no solid footing, no guaranteed outcome, no certainty about what comes next. Most people treat groundlessness as a problem to be solved: find the right relationship, the right job, the right belief system, and the uncomfortable openness of not-knowing will resolve. Chödrön argues, drawing on the Buddhist notion of dukkha (the pervasive unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence), that this strategy cannot work. Groundlessness is the nature of experience. The question is what you do with it.
Her answer is tonglen, a Tibetan practice in which you deliberately take in — breathe in — what is painful or unwanted, and breathe out what is spacious and good. The logic inverts the standard avoidance response: instead of turning away from suffering (your own or others’), you turn toward it, receiving it, and in receiving it, loosening its grip.
The Practical Version
You don’t need to be a Buddhist practitioner to engage with the core practice she’s describing. The secular version looks like this:
When discomfort arises in meditation — or in daily life, in any moment of wanting to escape what’s happening — try staying with the sensation rather than the story. Discomfort typically has a specific physical location: a contraction in the chest, a tightening in the throat, a heaviness in the stomach. The sensation itself is usually more manageable than the thoughts that surround it.
Chödrön describes this as distinguishing the “weather” from the “sky.” The uncomfortable feelings are weather — temporary, changing, not the whole picture. What’s aware of them — the open quality of attention itself — is the sky. Weather doesn’t damage the sky. The practice is repeatedly relocating attention from the weather to the sky.
This is close to what contemporary acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) describes as “defusion” — the process of observing thoughts and feelings rather than fusing with them, allowing them to be present without letting them dictate behavior. ACT has substantial empirical support for treating anxiety and depression; Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind (Avery, 2019) is the accessible version for general readers.
Why This Is Different From Just Accepting Everything
A common misreading of Chödrön’s teaching is that it amounts to passive acceptance — sit with what’s happening and don’t try to change it. This is not what she’s saying.
She draws a careful distinction between acceptance of immediate experience — this sensation, this emotion, this moment — and acceptance of situations that require a response. Staying with the discomfort of an uncomfortable conversation is different from staying in a relationship or job that is harming you. The practice is about your relationship to inner experience, not about endorsing external circumstances.
She also makes a point that rarely survives its translation into secular wellness language: the capacity to sit with discomfort is not primarily for your benefit. In the Tibetan Buddhist framework, the reason you develop this capacity is so you can be present to others’ suffering without reflexively retreating. The practice is ultimately relational, not self-focused.
The One Thing to Try
In your next meditation session — or the next time you feel the pull to check your phone, end a conversation, or distract yourself from what’s present — try the following:
Notice what’s uncomfortable. Locate it in your body. Stay with the sensation — not the story about it, just the physical feeling — for thirty seconds. Then decide what to do.
This is not passive. It’s a small act of courage. Chödrön’s argument, implicit in everything she writes, is that this small act — repeated across a life — changes the person who does it.
Go deeper: Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart (Shambhala, 1997) — written after a period of personal crisis, and it shows. More honest and less systematic than most self-help. For the ACT connection: Steven Hayes, A Liberated Mind (Avery, 2019).