Ani Pema Chödrön, one of the first western women to become fully ordained as a Buddhist monastic, met Chögyam Trungpa when her hair was long and her name was Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. After this first encounter she moved to England where she studied dharma under Lama Chime and was ordained as Pema Chödrön by the Sixteenth Karmapa. Following Lama Chime's advice, she returned to the United States in 1974 to study with Trungpa Rinpoche. There she became a close student and a vessel for Trungpa Rinpoche's plans for a monastic tradition of Buddhism in the West. In the years since his death, in addition to nurturing the embryonic Shambhala-monastic tradition at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, she has become one of the best known Buddhist teachers in North America and the author of four best selling books: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, When Things Fall Apart, and The Places That Scare You.
