Reading List

Authors Like Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York City in 1936 and grew up on a farm in New Jersey. She married at twenty-one, divorced, remarried, and her second marriage ended when her husband told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. “That was a big groundless moment,” she later told Bill Moyers. “Reality as we knew it wasn't holding together.” She went looking for a teacher, took novice vows from the 16th Karmapa in 1974, studied with Chögyam Trungpa until his death, and in 1981, in Hong Kong, became the first American in the Vajrayana tradition to be fully ordained as a nun. From 1986 she was the first director of Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. When Things Fall Apart (1997) had about 1.5 million copies in print by 2022, and this spring she published Another Kind of Freedom, a commentary on a book by Trungpa. What readers come to her for is one plain, difficult instruction: when the ground goes, don't run — stay, soften, and use the pain as the place where practice starts. The writers below share that refusal to hurry past difficulty: her own teacher, the meditation teachers who brought the same practices to American readers, and a few who reach the same place without the Buddhist vocabulary.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Buddhism · Meditation · Groundlessness · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Pema Chödrön, start with her own teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, where much of her vocabulary comes from. For loving-kindness taught as plainly as she teaches it, read Sharon Salzberg; for self-compassion at the moment of panic, Tara Brach. If How We Live Is How We Die is the book you needed, go to Joan Halifax. And for the gentlest way into everyday practice, Thich Nhat Hanh.

10 authors like Pema Chödrön

01
Her teacher · Closest match

Chögyam Trungpa

Tibetan · b. 1939 · Buddhist teacher

Trungpa was a Tibetan lama who fled Tibet in 1959, studied at Oxford from 1963, and after a car accident in 1969 gave up his monastic vows. He moved to North America in 1970, founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974 and what became Shambhala International, and settled in Nova Scotia, where he died in 1987. His heavy drinking and his sexual relationships with students were criticised in his lifetime and remain the main objection to his legacy.

Almost everything in Chödrön's books starts here: groundlessness, “spiritual materialism”, the idea that the neurosis is the path. Trungpa says it more sharply and more strangely; she translates it into the language of an ordinary bad week. Her 2026 book Another Kind of Freedom is a commentary on his The Myth of Freedom, so the two can be read side by side.

— Lisanne
02
Loving-kindness, plainly

Sharon Salzberg

American · b. 1952 · Meditation teacher

Salzberg was born in New York City in 1952, went to India as a student and learned vipassana meditation in Bodh Gaya. In 1976 she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. Lovingkindness (1995) is her classic on metta practice; Real Happiness (2010) became a New York Times bestseller.

Chödrön's The Places That Scare You is built on the same four qualities — loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity — that Salzberg's Lovingkindness teaches. Salzberg comes from the Theravada side rather than the Tibetan one, and her tone is more encouraging and less confrontational, but both treat kindness as a skill you practise, beginning with yourself.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sharon Salzberg →

03
Self-compassion at the hardest moment

Tara Brach

American · b. 1953 · Meditation teacher

Brach spent ten years in an ashram after college, then trained as a clinical psychologist, with a PhD from the Fielding Institute. In 1998 she founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC. Radical Acceptance (2003) is about what she calls the trance of unworthiness; Radical Compassion (2019) sets out RAIN, her four-step practice for meeting a difficult emotion.

The closest living voice to Chödrön's. Both write about shame, fear and self-hatred from the inside, and both ask you to turn towards the feeling instead of away from it. Brach adds the psychotherapist's case histories and a step-by-step method; Chödrön gives you a traditional practice and trusts you with it.

— Lisanne
Every book by Tara Brach →
04
The ordinary life after insight

Jack Kornfield

American · b. 1945 · Meditation teacher

Kornfield graduated from Dartmouth in 1967, joined the Peace Corps, and trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, under teachers including Ajahn Chah. He co-founded the Insight Meditation Society with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and later Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and holds a PhD in clinical psychology. A Path with Heart (1993) is his best-known book.

Kornfield shares Chödrön's distrust of spiritual highs. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry is about what she calls starting where you are: the marriage, the job, the old anger that are still there after the retreat. He writes as a psychologist as well as a teacher, with more stories and more warmth, and less of her sternness.

— Lisanne
Every book by Jack Kornfield →
05
Being with dying

Joan Halifax

American · b. 1942 · Zen teacher

Halifax is an anthropologist and Zen teacher who worked with the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and dying cancer patients at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center from 1972 to 1975. She founded Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, where she directs the Project on Being with Dying, a training programme for clinicians, and the Upaya Prison Project.

If How We Live Is How We Die (2022) was the Chödrön book you needed, Halifax is the next step: decades of sitting with the dying and training the people who care for them. Both teach that the way you meet small endings prepares you for the last one. Halifax is more practical about the bedside; Standing at the Edge extends it to burnout and moral distress.

— Lisanne
06
The gentlest way in

Thich Nhat Hanh

Vietnamese · b. 1926 · Zen teacher

Thich Nhat Hanh was born in central Vietnam in 1926, became a Zen monk as a teenager and campaigned against the Vietnam War; Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He spent 39 years in exile, mostly in France, where he founded the Plum Village community. He wrote more than a hundred books, stopped speaking after a stroke in 2014, and died at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue in 2022.

Chödrön writes for the day the floor gives way; Thich Nhat Hanh writes for every other day — the breath, the dishes, the walk to the bus. The aim is the same: be present with what is here, including suffering. No Mud, No Lotus is the book of his that comes closest to her subject, the idea that suffering is what the practice grows from.

— Lisanne

Every book by Thich Nhat Hanh →

07
A method, without the Buddhism

Byron Katie

American · b. 1942 · Spiritual teacher

Katie was 43 and struggling with depression in 1986 when, at a women's counselling centre in Los Angeles, she had the experience that became “The Work”: four questions put to a stressful thought, starting with “Is it true?”, followed by a turnaround. Loving What Is, written with her husband Stephen Mitchell, set the method out in 2002.

Chödrön asks you to notice the storyline and drop it; Katie gives you a procedure for taking one storyline apart on paper. The two agree that suffering is mostly an argument with what has already happened. Katie has no tradition behind her and no meditation practice, which suits some readers and leaves others wanting Chödrön's depth.

— Lisanne

Every book by Byron Katie →

08
Presence, in secular language

Eckhart Tolle

German-born · b. 1948 · Spiritual teacher

Tolle was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle in Lünen, Germany, in 1948, and describes an inner transformation in 1977, at 29, after years of depression. The Power of Now was first published in 1997 by a small press in Vancouver; A New Earth (2005) was Oprah Winfrey's book club pick in 2008 and again in January 2025.

Tolle covers the same ground — the ego, the painful story running in your head, the relief of attention to the present — without any Buddhist framework. He is calmer and more abstract; Chödrön is more candid about failing at her own practice. Readers often find that Tolle explains the idea and Chödrön shows how to live with it on a bad day.

— Lisanne

Every book by Eckhart Tolle →

09
Breakdown as beginning

Ram Dass

American · b. 1931 · Spiritual teacher

As Richard Alpert he was a Harvard psychologist who ran psilocybin research with Timothy Leary until Harvard dismissed him in 1963. In India in 1967 he met the teacher Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass. Be Here Now (1971) made him one of the best-known spiritual teachers in America; Still Here (2000) was written after a stroke in 1997. He died on Maui in 2019.

Ram Dass is devotional where Chödrön is disciplined, but he shares her honesty about how far a teacher can be from their own teaching. Still Here, on ageing and the stroke that left him partly paralysed, is the book closest to hers: loss treated not as a detour from the spiritual path but as the path itself.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ram Dass →

10
The wisdom of insecurity

Alan Watts

British-American · b. 1915 · Philosopher

Watts was born in Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, moved to the United States in 1938, and was an Episcopal priest from 1945 until 1950. From the 1950s his books and radio talks made him the best-known Western interpreter of Zen and Taoism. The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) argues that the search for security is what makes us insecure.

The Wisdom of Insecurity makes, as philosophy, the argument Chödrön makes as practice: there is no solid ground, and the trouble comes from trying to find one. Watts is wittier and more detached, a lecturer rather than a teacher; read him when you want the idea explained, and her when you need to know what to do with it.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Pema Chödrön

If you want the source of her teaching, read Chögyam Trungpa.

The Myth of Freedom, then her commentary on it, Another Kind of Freedom.

If you want the same tenderness with a method, read Tara Brach.

Radical Acceptance: the trance of unworthiness, and how to wake from it.

If you are facing a death, read Joan Halifax.

Being with Dying: what decades at the bedside teach.

If you want loving-kindness as a daily practice, read Sharon Salzberg.

Lovingkindness, one chapter and one sitting at a time.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Pema Chödrön

Who should I read if I love Pema Chödrön?

Start with her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, whose Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom are the source of much of her language. Then the American meditation teachers closest to her: Sharon Salzberg, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Joan Halifax writes about death and caregiving in the same spirit, and Thich Nhat Hanh is the gentlest introduction to everyday practice. Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass and Alan Watts cover similar ground outside her tradition.

What books are like When Things Fall Apart?

Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance (2003) is the closest: self-compassion when life goes wrong, from a meditation teacher who is also a psychologist. Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart (1993) and Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness (1995) come from the same generation of American Buddhist teaching. For the idea without the Buddhism, Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951).

Which Pema Chödrön book should I read first?

When Things Fall Apart (1997) is the usual first book and her best known, written for people in the middle of a crisis. Start Where You Are (1994) teaches tonglen and the lojong slogans in more detail, and The Places That Scare You (2001) is the best introduction to loving-kindness and compassion practice. How We Live Is How We Die (2022) is her book on death and transitions.

Who was Pema Chödrön's teacher?

Her root teacher was Chögyam Trungpa, with whom she studied until his death in 1987; she had earlier studied with Lama Chime Rinpoche in London, and took novice vows from the 16th Karmapa in 1974. Since the 1990s she has studied with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. Trungpa's heavy drinking and sexual relationships with students remain controversial, and readers should know that history when reading him.

Why did Pema Chödrön leave Shambhala?

In 2020 she resigned as a senior teacher (acharya) of Shambhala International, the organisation Trungpa founded, partly because of how it had handled allegations of sexual misconduct, saying she could no longer represent it given the direction it was taking. The same year she retired as principal teacher of Gampo Abbey.

Is Tara Brach like Pema Chödrön?

Very close in subject and tone. Both write about fear, shame and self-judgement and ask the reader to turn towards painful feelings rather than away from them. Chödrön teaches from Tibetan Buddhism and gives traditional practices such as tonglen; Brach teaches from the Theravada insight tradition and adds a psychotherapist's method, RAIN, set out in Radical Compassion (2019).

Does Pema Chödrön have a new book?

Yes. Another Kind of Freedom, published in 2026, is her commentary on her teacher Chögyam Trungpa's The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, on meditation, habitual patterns and working with pain rather than escaping it.

Footnotes

  1. Pema Chödrön — Wikipedia
  2. Becoming Pema — Lion's Roar, 2017
  3. Pema Chödrön, 86, Looks Ahead — Publishers Weekly
  4. Another Kind of Freedom — Penguin Books Australia
  5. Chögyam Trungpa — EBSCO Research Starters
  6. Sharon Salzberg — Biography
  7. About Tara Brach
  8. Roshi Joan Halifax — Upaya Zen Center

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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