Quick Answer
The Places That Scare You is Pema Chödrön's 2001 book on bodhichitta, the awakened heart, and it is the more organised half of the pair she is famous for. Its title comes from an eleventh century Tibetan woman, its best material is nine hundred years older than the book, and it needs one boundary it never draws.
Key Takeaways
- The title is a quotation. Machig Labdrön, founder of the Chöd practice, told students to go to the places that scare them. Chödrön is transmitting an instruction rather than coining a phrase.
- The near-enemy teaching is the reason to own this book. Pity counterfeits compassion, attachment counterfeits love, indifference counterfeits equanimity, and the counterfeits are what most people are actually practising.
- It is the constructive companion to When Things Fall Apart. That book removes the ground, this one describes what grows there.
- Bodhichitta is presented as a weak point rather than a strength, reachable through the moments a person feels least admirable.
- The instruction has a limit the book never states, and readers in unsafe circumstances need it stated.
🕑 15 min read
Where the Title Comes From
Most readers assume the title is Chödrön's phrase. It is a quotation, and knowing whose changes how the book reads.
Machig Labdrön lived in Tibet in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and is one of the very few women in Tibetan history credited with originating a lineage rather than transmitting one. She founded Chöd, whose name means cutting through. In Chöd the practitioner goes deliberately to charnel grounds and frightening places and visualises offering their own body to whatever is there to take it. The practice is not a metaphor for facing fear. It is a technology for dismantling the impulse to protect the self, carried out in the locations most likely to trigger that impulse.
Her instruction, which Chödrön quotes, is threefold: approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help, and go to the places that scare you.
Why the provenance matters
Read as a contemporary self-help title, "the places that scare you" suggests public speaking, difficult conversations, a career change. Read as Machig's instruction it means something considerably more severe, and it comes from a tradition in which people spent nights in cremation grounds to test whether their compassion survived terror. Chödrön has softened the delivery for a Western readership. She has not softened the demand, and readers who take the title as a metaphor for mild discomfort are reading a smaller book than the one she wrote.
What the Book Is
Shambhala published The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times in 2001, five years after When Things Fall Apart made her the best-known Western Buddhist teacher of her generation. It runs to short chapters over roughly 180 pages and it is organised, which the earlier book is not.
The subject is bodhichitta, the awakened heart, and the book is structured as a training in it. Loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity are treated in turn. Tonglen is taught in stages. The lojong slogans appear throughout. A set of practices for interrupting habitual reaction runs alongside the doctrine.
The relationship between the two famous books is worth stating plainly, because readers frequently buy the wrong one. When Things Fall Apart is the book for a person whose life has just come apart, and it works by refusing to reassemble anything. The Places That Scare You is for the period afterwards, when the crisis has passed and the question is what to build. It is a curriculum where the earlier book was a companion.
On repetition: Chödrön has published more than twenty books drawing on the same Shambhala and Kagyü material, and the overlap between them is substantial. If you own three already, the marginal value of a fourth is limited. If you own one, this is the one that gives the material a shape.
Bodhichitta as a Crack, Not a Strength
Bodhichitta is standardly translated as awakened heart or mind of enlightenment, and in most presentations it sounds like an achievement. Chödrön's move is to present it as a vulnerability.
Her image is the soft spot, a tenderness already present in everyone that shows itself most clearly at the moments a person feels least composed: humiliated, frightened, exposed, caught out. The conventional response is to armour that spot immediately. Her claim is that the armouring is the problem and the exposure is the opening.
This inverts the usual spiritual logic, in which practice makes a person steadier and less easily disturbed. Here the disturbance is the material. A reader who has spent years trying to become unshakeable will find this either liberating or infuriating, and the two reactions often arrive a week apart.
The technical distinction she preserves is between relative and absolute bodhichitta. Relative bodhichitta is trainable warmth toward suffering, one's own and other people's, and the practices in the book work on it directly. Absolute bodhichitta is direct perception of experience without the solidity the mind normally adds. She spends most of the book on the relative, correctly, since the absolute cannot be practised toward.
The Four Qualities and Their Counterfeits
This is the material worth the price of the book, and it is worth being clear that it is not original to her.
The four limitless qualities, called the brahmaviharas in Pali, are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. Buddhaghosa's fifth century Visuddhimagga assigned each of them a far enemy and a near enemy. The far enemy is the obvious opposite and is easy to notice. The near enemy is a counterfeit that resembles the quality closely enough to be mistaken for it, including by the person practising.
Loving-kindness has hatred as its far enemy and attachment as its near enemy. Wanting someone to be well and wanting to keep them feel identical from the inside and behave completely differently under pressure.
Compassion has cruelty as its far enemy and pity as its near enemy. Pity looks down. It requires the other person to remain the one suffering, and it quietly resists their recovery, because the recovery ends the arrangement.
Sympathetic joy, gladness at another person's good fortune, has envy as its far enemy. Its near enemy is a joy that has comparison inside it, pleasure taken because the good thing reflects on you.
Equanimity has anxiety and craving as far enemies and indifference as its near enemy. This is the most consequential of the four for contemplative practitioners, because a long meditation practice reliably produces a state of unbothered distance that can be mistaken for equanimity for years.
The reason this scheme earns its place: it is the only diagnostic tool in popular Buddhist literature that tells you your practice may be going wrong in the direction of apparent success. A person becoming more detached, less reactive and less troubled by other people's difficulties has either developed equanimity or developed indifference, and from inside there is no difference in the felt tone. The test is behavioural. Equanimity acts. Indifference explains why acting is unnecessary.
Chödrön's contribution is to make this operational for readers with no access to the commentarial literature. Our guide to metta practice covers the training side of the first quality in detail.
The Three Difficult Practices
The second genuinely useful piece of equipment in the book is a three-step method for interrupting habit, which she calls difficult and means it.
First, acknowledge. Recognise the reaction as a reaction while it is running, rather than an hour later. Chödrön is explicit that this recognition has to be compassionate, since recognising your own pattern with contempt just adds a second pattern on top of the first.
Second, do something different. Anything at all that interrupts the habitual sequence. Stand up. Leave the room. Sing. The content of the alternative does not matter and the interruption does. This is the step people skip, because they wait to want to do something different, and the wanting never arrives while the reaction is live.
Third, make it a way of life. The practice is not a technique applied to a crisis. It is what you do for decades, mostly failing, which is why the first step has to be gentle.
Practice: name the near enemy you run
Take the quality you believe you are strongest in. If you consider yourself compassionate, spend a week watching for pity: the small satisfaction when someone confides a difficulty, the flicker of loss when they solve it. If you consider yourself calm, watch for indifference: the reasons that arrive to explain why a situation is not yours to address. Do not try to fix what you find. Seeing the counterfeit clearly once is worth more than a year of building the real thing on top of it.
The Slogans Running Underneath
Threaded through the book are the lojong slogans, a set of fifty nine terse instructions compiled by Chekawa Yeshe Dorje in twelfth century Tibet as a training in mind. They are deliberately blunt and most of them are four or five words long. Drive all blames into one. Be grateful to everyone. Always maintain only a joyful mind. Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.
Chödrön uses them the way the tradition intends, as things carried around rather than studied. The instruction is to take one, hold it for a week or a month, and let ordinary situations test it. The slogans are designed to be irritating on first contact, since several of them recommend positions no reasonable person holds, and the irritation is part of the mechanism.
"Drive all blames into one" is the one that stops most Western readers, because it appears to instruct a person to accept fault for everything. The traditional reading is narrower and better: the target is the reflex of locating the cause of one's own distress in other people, which is a habit rather than an analysis. It says nothing about who is actually responsible for an event, and a reader who takes it as an instruction to absorb blame in a harmful situation has read it exactly backwards.
The full set circulates freely, and a reader who wants the slogans without the surrounding book can find Chekawa's root text in most Tibetan Buddhist collections. Chödrön has also devoted an entire separate volume to them, which is the better purchase for anyone who finds this thread the most useful part of this book.
Three Styles of Warrior
Chödrön borrows a traditional set of three images for how a person orients their practice toward others, and uses them descriptively rather than as a hierarchy.
The king or queen becomes established first and helps from that position, on the reasoning that a person with nothing cannot give. The ferryman crosses together with everyone else in the boat, arriving at the same time. The shepherd sends everyone ahead and comes last.
The tradition often ranks these, with the shepherd's aspiration considered the most complete. Chödrön declines to rank them, treating the three as temperaments, and this is a sensible pastoral choice for a general readership. A reader who is naturally a shepherd and exhausted by it does not benefit from being told the shepherd is the highest form. That reader needs permission to be a monarch for a while.
Tonglen, and Why It Is Backwards
Tonglen means sending and taking. The practitioner breathes in the pain of a situation and breathes out relief, which reverses the reflex every nervous system runs.
Chödrön teaches it in stages, beginning with someone you already love and whose suffering you would genuinely take if you could, and expanding outward only as the practice becomes stable. The order matters, and the common error is to start with a difficult person or with global suffering, at which point the practice becomes an exercise in self-coercion.
Our dedicated guide to tonglen meditation practice covers the mechanics, the lojong context and the sequence in full, so this review will not repeat it. The point worth making here is what tonglen is for. It is not a transfer of suffering, and nobody in the tradition claims a person's illness leaves them because you breathed it in. It is a training in willingness, and its target is the practitioner's reflexive recoil from other people's pain.
The moment tonglen is actually for
Not a scheduled session. The intended use is the instant something painful is happening in front of you and your body wants to look away. Breathe it in there, standing in the corridor, for one breath. The formal practice on the cushion exists to make that available in the corridor.
Where the Advice Needs a Boundary
Any honest treatment of this book has to draw a line the book does not.
"Go to the places that scare you" and "stay with the discomfort" are instructions about internal states. Fear, grief, shame, restlessness, the urge to distract yourself. Applied there they are sound, and they match what clinicians describe as exposure and as distress tolerance.
They are not instructions about circumstances. If a relationship is coercive, if a workplace is abusive, if a community is protecting someone who is causing harm, the discomfort you feel is accurate information and the right response is to act on it. A teaching about staying present with difficulty can be picked up, by the person in the difficulty or by people around them, as an argument for remaining in place. That is a misuse, and it is a common one. If you are being harmed, leave and get help. Nothing in Buddhist practice requires you to be a container for someone else's behaviour.
This is not a hypothetical objection. The Shambhala community in which Chödrön taught for decades has been through serious institutional reckonings, and contemplative language about groundlessness and staying open has demonstrably been used inside religious organisations to discourage people from naming harm. We treat the lineage question at length in our review of When Things Fall Apart. Here it is enough to say that the caveat above is not an abstraction, and that the book would be better with it printed inside.
The Woman Writing It
She was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York in 1936, taught elementary school, married twice and divorced twice. The second divorce sent her looking, and she encountered Chögyam Trungpa, took novice ordination in 1974 and full ordination in Hong Kong in 1981. She became the first director of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.
Two things about that biography shape the writing. She came to this material as an adult in genuine distress, and she never adopts the voice of a person who was always serene. And she is a Western woman transmitting a Tibetan tradition to Western readers, which makes her a translator as much as a teacher. What survives that translation is the practical instruction. What is thinned is the cosmology, the deity practice and the institutional structure the practices were designed to sit inside.
She stepped back from her senior teaching role at Shambhala in 2020. Readers who want the full picture of that history will find it in the reporting rather than in her books.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have read When Things Fall Apart, found it useful, and want something with a syllabus in it.
Read it if you suspect your practice has been producing distance rather than warmth. The near-enemy chapters address exactly that suspicion and almost nothing else in popular Buddhist writing does.
Read Radical Acceptance instead if what you carry is shame and self-attack. Tara Brach is the warmer writer and the better fit for that. Chödrön is not interested in comforting you, which is a strength for some readers and the wrong medicine for others.
Read The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching if you want doctrine rather than practice, and Peace Is Every Step if you want the gentlest possible entry point.
The claim underneath the whole book is that the capacity for warmth is not built and is uncovered, and that the uncovering happens through the experiences a person most wants to avoid. That is a serious position with a long lineage, and it is the opposite of the therapeutic promise that difficulty can be managed down to a tolerable level. Chödrön's readers stay with her for decades because she never once suggests it can.
Our position: the better organised of her two famous books, carrying one tool of real diagnostic value in the near-enemy teaching, and one instruction that needs a boundary printed beside it. Buy it for the four qualities and the three difficult practices. Read the title as Machig meant it. And hold the staying-with-difficulty teaching as advice about your inner states, never about your circumstances.
For adjacent territory, shadow work approaches the same material from the Jungian side, and Green Tara covers the Tibetan devotional form of the compassion this book trains.
The training manual, not the crisis companion.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Places That Scare You about?
Bodhichitta, the awakened heart, and how to cultivate it by staying present with fear rather than escaping it. Published by Shambhala in 2001, it teaches the four limitless qualities, tonglen, the lojong slogans, and a set of practices for interrupting habitual reaction. It is the constructive companion to When Things Fall Apart.
Where does the title come from?
From advice attributed to Machig Labdrön, the eleventh century Tibetan yogini who founded the practice of Chöd: approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help, and go to the places that scare you. Chödrön quotes it as the instruction the book is built around.
What is bodhichitta?
Usually translated as awakened heart or mind of enlightenment. Chödrön presents it as a soft spot already present in every person, most accessible at the moments a person feels least composed. Relative bodhichitta is the trainable capacity for warmth toward suffering; absolute bodhichitta is direct experience of things without the usual solidity.
What are the near enemies of the four limitless qualities?
Counterfeits close enough to be mistaken for the real quality. Attachment imitates loving-kindness, pity imitates compassion, comparison imitates sympathetic joy, and indifference imitates equanimity. The scheme is old, systematised in the fifth century Visuddhimagga, and it is the most practically useful material in the book.
What are the three difficult practices?
Recognise the reaction as a reaction while it is happening. Do something other than the habitual thing, which can be as small as standing up or leaving the room. Then treat this as lifelong work rather than a fix. Chödrön calls them difficult because each one fails routinely and is meant to be repeated.
How is this different from When Things Fall Apart?
When Things Fall Apart is about groundlessness and how to stay upright when the structure of a life gives way. The Places That Scare You assumes you have absorbed that and asks what to grow in the space left behind. The first is the crisis book, the second is the training manual, and the second is more organised.
What is tonglen?
A Tibetan practice of breathing in what is painful and breathing out relief, reversing the ordinary instinct to take in comfort and push away distress. Chödrön teaches it in stages, beginning with a person you already care about. It is one of the central practices of the lojong tradition.
Who was Machig Labdrön?
An eleventh century Tibetan teacher, one of the few women recognised as originating a lineage, who founded the practice of Chöd. In Chöd the practitioner visualises offering their own body to whatever they fear, working directly with terror rather than protecting against it. Her instruction supplies this book's title.
Is this book suitable for someone in a harmful situation?
Handle it carefully. The instruction to stay with difficulty is written for internal states such as fear, grief and shame. Applied to external circumstances, it can read as an argument for remaining somewhere unsafe. If a person is being harmed, the correct response is to leave and get help, and this book is not a substitute for that.
Do I need to be Buddhist to use it?
No. Chödrön writes for a general audience and the practices work without doctrinal commitment. Some Tibetan technical material appears, including tonglen and the lojong slogans, and she explains each term as it arrives. Readers who want the doctrine underneath will need a different book.
What are the three styles of warrior?
Traditional images for how a person aims their practice. The king or queen becomes established first and then helps others. The ferryman crosses together with everyone in the boat. The shepherd lets everyone go ahead and follows last. Chödrön uses them to describe temperament rather than to rank spiritual worth.
Should I read this or Radical Acceptance?
Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance is warmer, more psychological, and better for readers dealing with shame and self-criticism. Chödrön is more austere, more Tibetan and less interested in making you comfortable. Read Brach if you need holding, read Chödrön if you have had enough of being soothed.
Audit the quality you are proudest of
Pick the virtue you would list first if someone asked what you are like. Spend one week looking for its counterfeit in your own behaviour, without correcting anything. The near-enemy teaching is nine hundred years older than this book and it costs nothing to apply, and one honest week with it will tell you more about your practice than a year of adding to it.
Sources & References
- Chödrön, P. (2001). The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Shambhala Publications.
- Chödrön, P. (1997). When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala Publications.
- Buddhaghosa. Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), fifth century. The source of the near and far enemy scheme.
- Harding, S. (2003). Machik's Complete Explanation. Snow Lion. On Machig Labdrön and the Chöd tradition.
- Trungpa, C. (1984). Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Shambhala Publications.
- Lion's Roar. Teachings and interviews with Pema Chödrön on lojong and the three difficulties. lionsroar.com.
- Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. The Seven Points of Mind Training, twelfth century. The root text of the lojong slogans.
- Chödrön, P. (1994). Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living. Shambhala Publications.
- Shambhala Publications. Publication record for The Places That Scare You. shambhala.com.