Unpleasant side effects of meditation
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.