Pema Chödrön:
(born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, New York, 1936).
Buddhist nun and teacher in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and author.
She tries to make Eastern knowledge appealing to the Western world.
Pema Chödrön has given many lectures and meditation courses. She teaches at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.
You are the sky. Everything else – is just the weather.
“You are the sky. Everything else — is just the weather.” means that your deeper self, awareness, or true nature is spacious and steady, like the sky.
Everything else — emotions, thoughts, moods, fears, stress, pain, life events — is temporary, like weather passing through the sky.
– Anger is weather.
– Sadness is weather.
– Anxiety is weather.
– Happiness, too, is weather.
– But “you are the sky” that holds all of it.
In simple terms:
> ‘You are not your passing thoughts or emotions. They come and go, but your deeper awareness remains.’
🧭 Origin:
The image of the ‘sky and weather’ comes from Buddhist and especially Tibetan Buddhist teaching traditions.
In Buddhism, the mind is often compared to the sky:
– open,
– spacious,
– clear,
– unaffected in its essence.
Thoughts and emotions are compared to clouds, storms, rain, or weather:
– they appear,
– they change,
– they pass away.
This metaphor is commonly used in meditation and mindfulness teachings to help people relate differently to difficult emotions.
👤 Author:
The quote is ‘widely attributed to Pema Chödrön’, an American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher.
However, the exact wording:
> “You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”
is difficult to trace to a specific book, talk, or original source by her.
So the safest attribution is:
> ‘Attributed to Pema Chödrön’
Pema Chödrön’s teachings often express this same idea, even if this exact sentence may be a later paraphrase or popular version of her teachings.
It’s not about changing ourselves. It’s about befriending who we already are.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognise our shared humanity.
