Many people drop their meditation practice when they get sick. But this is a mistake. Meditation promotes healing and reduces the self-pity that makes illness such a miserable experience.
Strategies
What happens to your meditation practice when you get sick? It’s tempting to take a day off, just like you do with work. Missing work when you are sick is reasonable; you don’t want to spread a contagious disease to others, and it’s good to avoid making your illness worse by overworking yourself. But none of these things apply to meditation.
When Tibetan Buddhists are sick, they do more meditation, no less. According to their reasoning, the disease may be the result of previous bad karma, which they want to counterbalance with the good karma of meditation. Even if you’re skeptical of this rationale, meditating on a patient is a wise move because meditation has been shown to boost the immune system and reduce the perception of pain and discomfort.
Although we tell ourselves that we cannot meditate while we are sick, this is not true. It’s just a symptom of self-pity. Even if you feel too ill to sit up, you can meditate lying down. Lying down meditation isn’t ideal—it usually leads to a less focused experience than sitting up straight—but it’s a lot better than nothing. (Please don’t force yourself to sit up straight in meditation if you feel exhausted. Practice self-kindness.)
If you have a respiratory infection, paying attention to your breathing may trigger a coughing fit, so it may be better to divert your attention elsewhere—for example, by practicing loving kindness. Loving kindness is also emotionally supportive, which is helpful when you are going through difficult times. You can say to yourself, “Be well. Be free from suffering. Be healed of this disease. Be at peace with the discomfort.” You can send sweet messages of support and encouragement to the parts of your body where you experience suffering. If you have a sore throat, wish you well. If your lungs are full of mucus, wish them well. If you feel tired and sore, wish your whole body health. This is an exercise in self-compassion and can help you get through the challenge of being sick.
Self-pity is not the same as self-pity.
By the way, self-pity is not the same as self-pity. Compassion says, “Be well,” and it lessens our suffering. Self-pity says, “Poor thing, this is terrible,” and adds to our suffering. On one occasion, when the Buddha was ill and in great pain, he was challenged by the Buddhist incarnation of doubt, Mara, who mocked him for lying useless. In essence, Mara was trying to provoke the Buddha out of self-pity. The Buddha replied, “I lie down with compassion for all beings.” He used his enforced rest as an opportunity to empathize with others who were suffering. Recognizing that others are suffering, and often much worse than we are, is a powerful antidote to self-pity. It helps us put our own suffering into perspective. You have a sore throat, but someone else has a broken leg. You have the flu, but someone else just found out they have cancer. If you have cancer, someone else has just lost a child to cancer. When we feel this way, we count on our blessings. Our own suffering is real, but usually much less catastrophic than we think.
“I meditate every day. It’s what I do. It’s part of who I am. I meditate even when I’m sick.”
To go deeper
One of the biggest misconceptions about self-compassion is that it is selfish. The term includes the word himselfso perhaps it’s no surprise that people get the wrong idea. However, the fact is that lack of self-compassion leads to lack of compassion for others. If we don’t know how to show compassion to ourselves, we’re likely to be too wrapped up in our own pain to respond compassionately to other people. The bandwidth simply won’t be available to them.
Buddha said about the first noble truth – the fact that there is suffering in our lives – that one must suffer. known. We often suffer, but we don’t know it. We don’t recognize what it is. We are completely unaware that this is happening. And because we don’t know our suffering, we don’t respond to it properly.
We get so caught up in our stories that we don’t realize we’re in pain. Think about what happens when your computer is running slowly, for example. You’re probably thinking how annoying this is and you wish the machine would run faster. You may wonder if you can afford a new one or how incompetent the software manufacturers are. This causes further suffering, so we end up in a closed circle: suffering leads to rumination, further suffering. We are caught up in the story, unable to be kind and compassionate to ourselves. And if someone tries to contact us at this time, we can snap at them for bothering us. We are unsympathetic.
When we know our suffering—when we recognize that we feel pain or discomfort—we can drop our rumination. We might think, “I’m frustrated right now. This frustration is a form of suffering. Maybe I should offer myself some support?” Now we can turn to our suffering and offer it the support it needs. We can accept our pain, look at it kindly, talk to it in a reassuring and supportive way, and even touch it reassuringly. By dealing with our suffering, we broke this closed loop. Even if the frustration remains, we are no longer entangled in ourselves. Our attention is more open and can be directed outwards.
You are no longer in this self-obsessed state, and once the qualities of empathy and compassion are awakened, these qualities become available to others. We are less likely to think of them as intruders and less likely to pounce on them. We are more likely to meet them with empathy, recognizing that they, like us, are sentient beings who dislike suffering and desire peace. In this way, we are more likely to be kind to them, to treat them with care and respect. If we sense that they are suffering, we are more likely to show them concern and support.
Practicing self-compassion leads to compassion for others. A sense of self is not selfish. This is what frees us from selfishness.
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© 2026, Bodhipaksa, Sit: 28 Days to a Rock Solid Meditation Habit. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.
