Three Steps to Courage : Working Compassionately With Difficult Emotions

In the midst of fear, anger, or sadness it may seem impossible to find our ground. Yet, the feelings we want to avoid the most can open the way to fearlessness, our basic goodness, and true freedom.

Beloved Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön has a unique gift for helping those of all faiths to work with their most difficult inner and outer challenges. In this supportive series of talks, listeners will join her at her best―showing us the way back to our wisest and most heartful selves.

Here, Pema shares three simple, time-honored steps to practice when we are in pain or crisis:


• Finding the stillness and space within our inner storms so that we can act rather than react
• Using all of our felt experiences―positive and negative―as a direct path not only to immediate relief, but to real courage, nurtured through compassion
• Transforming our emotions and welcoming them as friends

The feelings that we want to run from, Pema tells us, offer us the very fuel we need to grow our strength and self-acceptance. With Three Steps to Courage, you will learn how to do just that―with welcome support and inspiration along the way.

Program Highlights

Session 1: Refraining from Emotional Reactivity
· The three steps to courage
· Guided Practice: Feeling Our Feelings
· Facing debilitating insecurity and feeling with kindness
· "Recognition" and the ability to refrain
· Releasing our storylines and softening into experience
· Emotions and intimacy

Session 2: Emotions as Paths of Awakening
· Melting the ice cube: becoming intimate with your experience
· The mindful gap, letting go, and clear seeing
· Q&A topics: holding space, recognizing wisdom, empathy, and basic goodness

Session 3: Transforming Emotions
· Working with grief and loneliness
· Courage, ignorance, and the "qualities" game
· Cultivating spaciousness with tonglen practice
· Q&A topics: karmic seeds, shenpa, patience, loneliness, optimism, regret, virtue, and the healing power of love

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.