What Pema Chödrön Gets Right — and What She Misses

Pema Chödrön is 89 years old, and she has spent most of those years teaching one of the most counter-intuitive ideas in contemplative life: that the right response to anxiety is agreement, not flight. Ezra Klein's recent interview with her surfaced this teaching for a new audience, and the response was, predictably, large. People are desperate for a way to stop fighting their own minds.

The desperation is understandable. What is worth examining is whether the framework Chödrön offers — rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy — is the deepest account of why her method works, or whether a Catholic Christian anthropology can explain the mechanism more precisely and point the person further along.

This essay argues the latter. Chödrön's pedagogy names something real: the futile recursion of anxiety-about-anxiety, and the strange relief that comes from ceasing to resist inner experience. But the Buddhist account leaves the self structurally empty — a process, not a person — and that emptiness has pastoral consequences. When Catholic anthropology locates the same insight within the unity of body and soul, the role of the passions in moral formation, and the Carmelite tradition of passive purification, the practitioner gains not just a technique but a telos.

The trap that willingness cannot spring alone

Steven Hayes[^1], whose Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is the most empirically tested secular heir to the Chödrön-style insight, describes the central paradox with unusual clarity. If a person decides to be willing to feel anxiety only because they hope willingness will make the anxiety disappear, the willingness is fraudulent, and the anxiety deepens. The trap is logical: the goal of eliminating discomfort cannot coexist with genuine openness to discomfort. Hayes writes that true acceptance means 'taking completely, in the moment, without defense' — a reception, not a strategy.[^1]

This is correct as far as it goes. But the ACT account has a gap. It tells the person what acceptance is not (a coping mechanism) without fully accounting for what makes genuine acceptance possible for a being who is, constitutively, a desiring creature. Why should a person want to move toward suffering at all, if suffering has no inherent meaning?

The Buddhist answer is elegant: suffering arises from attachment, and the self that suffers is itself a construction. Letting go of the self dissolves the problem. But for the Catholic Christian, this is where the anthropology diverges sharply — and where the pastoral stakes become real.

The passions are not the problem

Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle's faculty psychology, insists that the passions — fear, sadness, desire, even the agitation we call anxiety — are morally neutral in themselves and become good or disordered depending on whether they are integrated with reason and will. Anxiety, on this account, is not a sign that the self has failed to deconstruct itself. It is a sign that the sensitive appetite has perceived a genuine or apparent threat, and that the organism is responding with its God-given protective machinery.

This matters clinically because it changes what the practitioner is doing when they 'agree' with their anxiety. In the Buddhist frame, they are loosening attachment to the self. In the Thomistic frame, they are performing an act of the cogitative sense — what Benjamin Suazo calls the faculty by which the human person evaluates concrete particulars in their specific significance for the individual — and they are bringing that evaluation into dialogue with reason rather than letting fear hijack the appraisal entirely.

Kevin Majeres[^3], whose work applies Catholic cognitive-behavioral principles directly to anxiety, describes a three-step process in which the anxious person is asked first to reframe the moment of anxiety as an opportunity for learning, then to feel the physical sensation of alarm as fully as possible — locating it, noticing how it shifts with breath — and finally to allow it to complete its natural arc.[^3] The safety-learning curve he describes can resolve in as little as 90 seconds or as long as 90 minutes, but it reliably resolves when the person stays with the trigger rather than fleeing it externally or distracting internally.

What Majeres adds to Chödrön, and what Hayes only partially supplies, is a teleological context. The anxiety is met not with the goal of self-dissolution but with the recognition that the emotional system is educable — that fear, when it is not avoided, becomes data for the cogitative sense and eventually modifies the apprehensions that generated the fear in the first place. The passions are not problems to be dissolved; they are apprentices to be trained.

When curiosity becomes examination of conscience

Gabor Maté[^2], writing about addiction, introduces the acronym COAL — curiosity, openness, acceptance, love — as the internal posture from which a person can investigate their own disordered patterns without the investigation becoming another form of condemnation.[^2] 'Being able to lighten up,' he writes, paraphrasing Chödrön, 'is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind and emotions.' The question 'Why did I do this again?' becomes, in this mode, not a prosecutorial demand but a genuinely open inquiry.

This is where a Catholic reader will feel the resonance most sharply — and where the distinctiveness of the Christian account becomes most important. The posture Maté describes is structurally similar to what Ignatius of Loyola prescribes in the Examen: a twice-daily review of interior movements, conducted not with harsh self-scrutiny but with the eyes of a person who believes they are known and loved by God before they begin. The Ignatian examiner is curious about their own interior life because they believe that interior life is a site of divine communication, not because they have suspended judgment about the reality of the self.

This is the peak insight: curiosity about suffering is sustainable across a human life only when it is held within a prior conviction of the person's dignity. In the Buddhist framework, curiosity eventually dissolves its own subject. In the Catholic framework, curiosity deepens the subject's self-knowledge and — this is the crucial move — increases their capacity for charity toward others who suffer in the same way.

Passive purification and the logic of the dark night

John of the Cross, in his account of the passive purifications of the soul, describes something that looks from the outside like clinical anxiety and from the inside like spiritual abandonment. The soul in the dark night of the senses finds its habitual consolations stripped away; prayer becomes dry, the will sluggish, the mind foggy. This is not pathology, in John's account — it is God's pedagogical method for purifying attachment to spiritual consolations so that the soul can receive a more direct union with God.

The Catholic practitioner who understands this account has a resource unavailable to the Buddhist or the ACT-practitioner: the possibility that a given episode of suffering is not merely something to be 'accepted' but something that is actively purposive within a providential order. This does not mean that all anxiety is a dark night, or that clinical interventions are unnecessary. It means that the framework within which suffering is interpreted is not neutral, and that interpretation affects the phenomenology of the suffering itself.

Chödrön's genius is to have transmitted something of this insight across a cultural boundary and made it available to millions of secular readers who would not otherwise encounter it. The method she teaches — stop running, turn toward the fear, get curious — is genuinely helpful and is consistent with the best evidence from ACT and Catholic cognitive-behavioral approaches alike.

But the Catholic account holds more. It holds a person — the suffering person — who is not a process to be observed but a soul in whom the image of God is being restored through difficulty. The body is not a temporary housing for awareness; it is the means by which the soul acts in the world and through which grace ordinarily moves. Anxiety felt in the chest is not merely 'sensation' but an event in the integrated person, body and soul together, who is being accompanied by a God who entered that same body-soul composite in the Incarnation.

What the method needs — and what the tradition offers

Presence + serves readers who are already curious about the intersection of psychological health and spiritual formation. For those readers, Chödrön's teaching is worth receiving with gratitude and with discrimination. The discrimination is not a refusal of her insight but a clarification of what grounds it.

Agreeing with your anxiety is not the last word. It is the first movement of a longer journey — one that the Christian tradition names as growth in the cardinal virtue of fortitude, specifically the sub-virtue Aquinas calls perseverance: the capacity to remain present to difficulty over time without collapse or evasion. Perseverance is not the same as endurance in the stoic sense. It is an acquired habit of the will, supported by grace, that allows the person to stay engaged with their own interior life precisely because they know that interior life is ordered to something beyond itself.

Pema Chödrön is right that running from anxiety is the wrong move. The Catholic tradition can tell us why staying is worth it.

References

1. Hayes, Steven (curated reading). Steven Hayes, ACT and RFT videos. — 'if you are willing to be anxious only in order to become less anxious, then you are not really willing to be anxious'
2. Maté, Gabor (curated reading). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. — 'Being able to lighten up is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind and emotions'
3. Majeres, Kevin (curated reading). How to Approach Anxiety. — 'as long as they're really with the trigger and allowing themselves to feel the anxiety...this curve will surely take place'