Dr. Tammie’s October 2025 Book of the Month: Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chodron
Dr. Tammie’s October 2025 Book of the Month
Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World By Pema Chodron
This title pretty much sums up our country and world right now, yeah?
I saw this book several months ago and immediately knew I had to read it. I’ve taken the last several months to slowly work my way through it. It’s the kind of book you just want to savor and let sink in. I love Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun now in her 80s. I first read her When Things Fall Apart years ago, back when I experienced a time when I felt my world was falling apart. I have never forgotten her wisdom and simple teachings.
I want you to know of Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World, one of Pema Chodron’s most recent books, as it’s helped me find a sense of peace even amidst all the chaos going on around us. I hope that it can help you too.
Choosing to “Welcome the Unwelcome” is the opposite of what we want instinctively, are you kidding? I’d much rather run away and hide, wouldn’t you?! And this is exactly our opportunity to learn and grow. To be able to sit with intense discomfort, fear, anxiety, grief, anger – all the negative emotions that we don’t want to experience but have to as we are human beings. As I’ve slowly worked my way through this book over the last several months, I have experienced a greater sense of peace, and ability to view all that is going around us, yet again, as an opportunity to learn.
Everything is our teacher. And this time of chaos, anger, and disruption is one of our greatest teachers, and our greatest opportunity to grow. We get to choose how we live through this time, how we show up, and who we are. We can run and hide, we can charge forth with anger and fear, or we can sit amid the chaos, gather our inner strength, and emerge with even greater love, truth and compassion.
I know you have this capacity within you, my dear friend. And you can emerge stronger because of this crazy time; I have no doubt. What keeps me going the most is knowing that I’m not alone – I’m doing this together with you.
With all my love,
Tammie
