Unpleasant side effects of meditation I am 45 years old. I’ve come to realize that I have been more or less unhappy in my life. So I met a clinical psychologist and I do show some childhood codependency issues and we could no CBT and anapanasati for 10in a day to get rid of my anxiety.
Contrary to all our expectations  a day or so after meditation, noticing the breath at nostrils, I become into a very strange mood, low energy, edgy, sad and rarely aggressive. After few days I started having panic attacks and I was asked to stop and do simple relaxation.
But my concern is why is this practise giving me such negative side effects? While others enjoy calm and peace. My psychologist was of the view that it might be the traumatic childhood I underwent with my father. Which was 40 years ago.
Also, I had very painful dreams of my childhood during this time. Also, loss of appetite, tension headaches and loss of taste.
Does anyone had any idea why I’m getting this unwelcomed side effect? Will it stop at some point or should I give up?
Kindly share your experiences.
My local Buddhist temple's resident teacher Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo has this beautiful metaphor of the &quot;poop soup&quot;, highly relevant to yours (and the rest of ours) situation.
In this metaphor we accumulate all kinds of neuroses (&quot;poop&quot;)     in the bowl of our psyche, until after many years it becomes veritable poop soup. Then, as we get older and more restrained, the poop gets harder and the surface of the soup becomes nice and flat. Couple more years and it gets covered by a layer of beautiful silver fungi, giving the whole thing a surreal appearance of something ethereal and fluffy. We become an adult, sometimes even an admirable person, and almost forget what hides in our bowl under its surface level.
The bowl is full of shit! (excuse my language.)
So when we start meditating, we puncture a hole in the lid of fungi and hard poop and start stirring the content. Guess what happens then? It does not smell nice. To be very honest it stinks and looks nauseating.
But wouldn't it be insincere if we kept pretending to be a nice admirable person while holding on to all that baggage?
We must work through it until our cup gets empty and squeaky clean. There's no &quot;unpleasant side effects of meditation&quot;, these are The Results of meditation, its fruit and its blessing.
Keep working until you get through it and come out on the other side.