Buddhist practice has a word for treating yourself the way you'd treat someone you love
Pema Chodron's advice for a bad week isn't to fix it, escape it, or feel better about it. It's stranger than all three.
Most approaches to a crisis share one assumption: something is wrong, and the job is to make it stop. Pema Chodron, an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun, built her teaching in When Things Fall Apart (1996) around a different premise entirely, that the falling apart is not a malfunction to be corrected but the actual raw material of a spiritual life.
The practice she returns to again and again is called maitri: loving-kindness directed at yourself, in the specific moment you feel least deserving of it. Not self-help in the sense of fixing your mood. Maitri is closer to staying in the room with your own fear, your own loneliness, your own embarrassment, without editing it, running from it, or dressing it up as a lesson you've already learned.
She pairs this with a concept she calls groundlessness, the plain fact, usually avoided, that nothing was ever as stable as it felt. Rather than treating that instability as the problem, she treats it as the starting point everyone secretly already stands on.
The promise isn't that things stop falling apart. It's that you can be kind to yourself while they do.