Recently I needed an attention grabber for a talk I was giving on stress reduction and present-centered thinking. I reread a blog I wrote about a year ago (“Coats, Gloves, and the Power of the Pause”). I could not have predicted that a few weeks after I wrote that blog, I would have the experience of watching water gush from a broken attic pipe and flood our family and dining rooms one Tuesday night after I finished teaching a Mindful Self-Compassion class. (That’s 100% true, by the way. I was finishing our post-class debriefing with my co-facilitator when the boys began screaming “Mom! The house is flooding!”) After the water got turned off and vacuumed up and the soaking-but-possibly-salvable items had been moved to the screen porch, I surveyed the damage and went upstairs. The boys were already asleep. I sent a very brief email to my family to update them, turned on my Insight Timer app, and fell asleep before the 10-minute closing bell rang. Interestingly, the fall-apart moment