When Things Don’t Go Your Way

Things have not gone your way. The plan failed. The relationship ended. The opportunity passed. The world, in some important respect, has not arranged itself as you needed it to. What do you do with that? How do you live with disappointment, loss, and the recurring experience of being somewhere you did not intend to be?

Haemin Sunim — Korean Buddhist monk, Harvard-educated scholar, and one of the most widely followed voices on mindfulness in the world — approaches these questions not with the brisk positivity of the self-help genre but with something gentler and more honest: the recognition that suffering is real, that it cannot always be dissolved by a change of perspective, and that the work of living with difficulty is patient rather than triumphant.

When Things Don’t Go Your Way is the follow-up to his million-selling debut, and it has the same combination of compressed wisdom, visual beauty, and genuine warmth that made the first book beloved around the world. Essential reading for anyone navigating difficulty with integrity. Published by Penguin.