"You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather."
— Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, is an American Buddhist nun, author, and one of the most widely read teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. After two divorces and personal upheaval in her thirties, she turned to Buddhism and was ordained in 1981 under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She became the first American woman to be ordained as a bhikshuni in the Tibetan tradition. As resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, she has spent decades teaching Westerners how to work with difficult emotions rather than avoid them. Her books, including 'When Things Fall Apart,' have made contemplative practice accessible to millions outside monastic life.
MINDFULNESS AND PEACE
EMOTIONAL CLARITY
NON-ATTACHMENT
Context
This line appears throughout Pema Chödrön's teaching on working with difficult emotions, most notably in talks and writings connected to 'When Things Fall Apart.' It draws on a classic Buddhist image: the sky represents awareness itself—vast, unchanging, and always present—while clouds, storms, and sunshine represent passing thoughts and feelings. The insight isn't that emotions don't matter, but that they aren't permanent or definitional. People in crisis often believe a bad mood or a hard season has become their identity. Chödrön's point, repeated across decades of teaching grieving, anxious, and confused students, is that identifying with the weather rather than the sky is the actual source of suffering—not the weather itself.
