> The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.

> There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". .

It's pretty much my experience.

Yes, when you meditate, sometime some things will have to be broken or removed to let place to something new. Those temporary states are disagreable, and from the outside can be experienced as "panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of dissociation".

Unfortunatly, if a building is in a bad shape, there is no way around destroying some part of it to rebuild. And this takes time. Meanwhile, there is a hole.

It's not specific to meditation. You will see that in psychotherapy as well.

That's why having meditation teachers is important, because they have to help you through this, make you understand what's happening, that like all the things, it's temporary, and to keep it up.

And you are right when you say:

> But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen

Because the experience vary a lot from person to person. There is no typical path. Some will not live that. Some will live a very mild or short sample of that.

Meditation is not science. You can't predict how long things will go, or how long they will take. You even can't be exactly sure somebody is practicing correctly, nor that something else is not interracting with it in a bad way. That's why serious centers take so many precautions with beginers, but it's not perfect. It can't be.

And it would be tempting (also quite logical) to think "what I'm doing doesn't work, I'm worse than I used to be".

Unfortunatly yes, the old saying of "it will get harder before it gets easier" apply here in my experience. It will apply several times during a life of meditation, in cycles. Although it's way easier once you are experienced: you just use meditation as a way to go through it. It's what it's for after all.

There is no alternative to trusting it will pass. Like with a chemothery, where some patients feel terrible for a long time before they feel better, while some patients never fully recover, and some even die.

I went through all those stages in 16 years of meditation. Panic attacks. Depression. Dissociation. It sucks. The experience of a lot of meditants is that the practice does replace them with a better life eventually. The increase in happiness is, on average over a decade, very real and positive if you practice correctly, and keep at it.

But it's hard. It's also not something you can plan for.

Plus it can worry people around you, and even yourself. Which is a good thing: it means one cares about you.

I would understand than somebody doesn't want to take the risk.

I would state it's worth it, as I feel it is. But who knows, could be survivor bias.