The main thing, in Pema Chödrön's teaching, is to get out of your own way. Not as a rallying cry, but as the distilled core of what Buddhism actually offers—a practical method for removing the obstacles we have constructed, moment by moment, between ourselves and our full potential. In a recent conversation, she traces the lineage of this idea back to what the Buddha was actually teaching, and forward to how it applies to anyone who has ever felt their own mind getting in the way.
The Mind as Cocoon-Maker
The problem, as Chödrön frames it, is not the mind itself—it is the mind's gift for constructing stories, and our habit of believing them completely. A thought arises. It hooks into the emotional body. The narrative takes over. The self becomes the center of everything: What do people think of me? How do I protect myself? How do I get what I want? How do I avoid pain? In Buddhist language, this is called ego clinging or self-referencing. It is the fundamental texture of suffering.
To illustrate the stickiness of this habit, Chödrön invokes an image from her teacher Trungpa Rinpoche: the cocoon. Inside the cocoon, everything is about me. But there is a small slit, and through it you catch a glimpse of something else—space, sky, fresh air, an infinite dimension that has nothing to do with personal survival or achievement. You are drawn to it. But the moment you think Oh, that's mine. I want it. People will admire me for this, you are back inside the cocoon. The cocoon is made of that reflexive self-concern; the infinite has nothing to do with personality or ego at all.
What Meditation Actually Does
Meditation is not about achieving a perfect mind or silencing thought. It is a training ground—a lab, as Chödrön describes it—where you sit still and watch the habit unfold. A story starts. You become caught in it. At some point, you notice. You wake up to what is happening, almost as if surfacing from a trance. You see the pattern, and you see it again, and you see it again, until you know the mind's tendency for what it is: a habit, not a truth.
This repeated noticing is the practice. It is not about becoming someone different or better. It is about understanding the mechanism that gets in the way of your clarity. And clarity, Chödrön teaches, is not something you have to create. Neither is warmth, nor openness. They are always here. What the practice does is stop covering them.
The Harder Question: Patience on the Path
But there is a question that arises for many people on the path, one that Chödrön identifies as among the most common experiences she encounters: What if I never get there? Not in this lifetime? The pain of thinking you might fail, that you are somehow incapable of awakening, is its own kind of suffering. Her answer is unhurried. Be patient with yourself. Do not give up on yourself or on the process.
She speaks from a long view. Maybe it takes twenty years, maybe ten, maybe five. Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime. The timeline is not the point. What matters is that you keep showing up, keep noticing, keep extending tenderness to what is painful in your life without the spin-off of self-judgment or hope that it should be different. This is what she calls "ego burning"—not a dramatic erasure of self, but a gradual burning away of the mechanism that was getting in the way.
And one day, she says, you look back and have a sense of humour about the whole thing. Not because the journey was easy, but because you finally see the joke—how hard you worked to construct a self that was always already free.
Full Potential Without Intention
Chödrön reflects on her own life when asked whether she fulfilled a promise she came into the world with. She speaks of a sense, always present, of a mission in the human realm—a question of what you can do in this painful realm for yourself and others. But now, she hesitates to concretize it. She does not want to reify it into something solid.
What is striking is her insistence that her work—the books, the teachings, the service—was never intentional in the sense of a personal agenda. Instead, it emerged from adapting to circumstances in a way that allowed her full potential to manifest. She acknowledges good karma, meeting extraordinary teachers, receiving precise instruction. The gift, as she sees it, is not to waste that karma but to pay it back—to keep giving, keep letting go, keep putting others in front of yourself. This is how awakening happens: not through striving, but through a kind of generosity that keeps widening the circle beyond the cocoon of self-concern.
Where to Go From Here
If you recognize the cocoon in your own experience—that moment when you catch sight of infinite possibility before contracting back into self-protection—the practice is to keep noticing. Not to judge the contraction, but to see it clearly and stay patient with yourself. Meditation is the place to do this, again and again. And when the doubt arises that you might never awaken in this lifetime, remember that awakening is not a destination you are trying to reach through force of will. It is what remains when you finally get out of your own way.
