Lean in

Pema Chödrön was a schoolteacher in California, twice married and twice divorced, when she walked into a Tibetan Buddhist center in the 1970s and never really left. She became a nun, then the head of an abbey in Nova Scotia, and in 1997 she wrote When Things Fall Apart, which is the book people hand each other at funerals and after diagnoses, because it tells the truth and it's kind.

Her teaching is that we spend our lives trying to get to solid ground, and there isn't any. Things fall apart; that's not a failure of the plan, it's what things do. The question is what you do when they do. Most of us run: into busyness, blame, distraction, a drink, a screen. Chödrön's practice is the opposite. Lean in. Stay with the discomfort a little longer than you want to. Get curious about it instead of fleeing.

She teaches an old Tibetan idea called basic goodness: that underneath the mess, you're fundamentally all right, and so is everyone else. Not good as in well-behaved. Good as in sound, whole, worth trusting. That's the ground she says you can stand on when the other ground gives way.

The practice she's best known for is a simple one. When something hard arrives, instead of hardening against it, you soften. You breathe it in, the whole weight of it, and breathe out space. She calls it tonglen, and it's counterintuitive and it works.

It's a key for the third month because leaning in is attention at its bravest. Everything you've learned about noticing this month, she applies to the moment you least want to notice anything.

Here's the line of hers I keep closest: "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know."