Coming Closer to Ourselves: Making Everything the Path of Awakening

How to Befriend Your Most Challenging Emotions and Experiences
In challenging times, why do so many of us turn to Pema Chödrön for guidance? Many say that it's her honest and caring way of communicating the core teachings of Buddhism-not just conceptually, but directly from her heart to ours. In these inspiring sessions, she teaches us how to give that compassion to the person we neglect most often-ourselves. With her, you will explore:
What to do when it feels impossible to be kind to ourselves
. In challenging relationships and situations, how to let go of our story and see what's really happening
. Cultivating inner comfort and greater kindness toward our bodies
. Leaning into frustration, sadness, and fear with a spirit of trust and intimacy
. Many other insights and recommendations to befriend the difficult places within us
Through gentle and clear guidance, Coming Closer to Ourselves shows us how, even in the tumult of life's uncertainties, we can begin with a glimmer of curiosity, move closer into our experiences, and discover a place of welcome and refuge within.
Course objectives:
Discuss what to do when it feels impossible to be kind to ourselves
. Describe how to let go of our story and see what's really happening within challenging relationships and situations
. Explain how to cultivate inner comfort and greater kindness toward our bodies
. Discuss how to lean into frustration, sadness, and fear with a spirit of trust and intimacy

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren.
While in her mid-thirties, Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to England at that time, and Pema received her ordination from him.
Pema first met her root teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full monastic ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.
Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong, in Boulder, until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche asked her to work towards the establishment of a monastery for western monks and nuns.
Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.
Pema is interested in helping establish the monastic tradition in the West, as well in continuing her work with Buddhists of all traditions, sharing ideas and teachings. She has written several books: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, When Things Fall Apart, The Places that Scare You, No Time to Lose, Practicing Peace in Times of War, and most recently, Smile at Fear.
For more information, visit pemachodronfoundation.org.