This Is Why I Find Pema Chödrön So Essential
About this episode
The episode explores why Pema Chödrön's teachings on anxiety and compassion resonate so broadly. Her core message, as she and Klein discuss it, is that unhappiness comes not from difficult feelings themselves but from our resistance to them — befriending emotions like anxiety, fear, and grief rather than fighting them off. She explains her own long anxiety as arising from fear of rejection and shows how she learned to relax into fear, be kinder to herself, and extend that compassion to others. Klein connects her work to his own experience and to ideas like 'shenpa' — the hooked, reactive feeling — and the instruction to stay present with unpleasant feelings. The conversation touches on politics as a kind of painful teacher, the difference between Buddhist practice and a self-help book, and Chödrön's new commentary on her late teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.