Tenzin Palmo

About Tenzin

Born Tsering Dolma in a small village in Ladakh, she was the youngest of five children in a farming family. Her village sat at 3,800 meters, surrounded by mountains that she says "taught me about permanence and impermanence at the same time." At 12, her eldest brother was killed in a border skirmish — an event that would shape her entire life's work.

At 16, she entered the Jamyang Choeling nunnery in Dharamsala, where she took the name Tenzin Palmo. She studied philosophy and debate for eight years under the guidance of Geshe Sonam Rinchen. But the intellectual rigor of Gelugpa Buddhism, while sharpening her mind, didn't touch the grief she carried for her brother.

At 24, on a scholarship arranged by her teacher, she traveled to Zurich to study at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. It was there, studying Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, that something broke open. She felt her brother's death in her body for the first time — not as a philosophical concept, but as a physical knot she'd been carrying for twelve years.

She returned to Dharamsala transformed. She now combines Tonglen meditation — breathing in suffering, breathing out compassion — with Somatic Experiencing, working primarily with refugees, survivors of conflict, and anyone carrying the heavy burden of unprocessed grief. She sees clients from a small room in her nunnery, with a view of the Dhauladhar mountains.

She still wears her maroon robes. She still shaves her head. She is, by all accounts, the gentlest person many of her clients have ever met.

Therapeutic Approach

Tradition

Tibetan Vajrayāna

Monastic name: Tenzin Palmo (born Tsering Dolma)

Ordained nun (Gelugpa tradition)

Methods

Somatic Experiencing + Tonglen

Education & Training

Geshe studies — Jamyang Choeling Nunnery, Dharamsala
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner — ISSTD, Zurich
8 years of philosophical study under Geshe Sonam Rinchen

How Tenzin Works

Tenzin begins every session by asking a simple question: "How is your body today?" She trusts the body's wisdom more than the mind's stories. Her work is slow, somatic, and deeply compassionate. She helps clients feel what they've been avoiding, but at a pace that never overwhelms. She uses Tonglen meditation as a therapeutic tool — sometimes guiding a client through breathing in their own pain and breathing out kindness to themselves. She frames grief not as something to overcome but as something to be honored. "Your grief is the echo of your love," she often says. "We don't want to silence it. We want to learn to listen to it."

What It's Like to Work with Tenzin

Extraordinarily gentle. Moves slowly, speaks softly, but with an underlying strength that's unmistakable. Her eyes seem to see everything. She cries easily — not from weakness, but from a compassion so deep it has no filter. She'll say "I don't know" more often than most therapists. But when she does speak, it often arrives like a key fitting into a lock you didn't know was there.