We treat meditation like a multivitamin. Take one, feel better. But for some of us, it's like pouring gasoline on a slow burn. Living here in Vancouver, we deal with enough grey skies without inviting more darkness in during practice.

Nicolas Van Dam and Willoughby Britton Willoughby Britton have been sounding the alarm for years. Britton's research on adverse effects and Van Dam's 2018 meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science show that mindfulness can trigger anxiety, dissociation, and even psychosis in vulnerable populations. This isn't conspiracy theory; it's peer-reviewed reality. The wellness industry has a vested interest in selling you the cushion, not the complexity. They want you to think that if you're anxious, you're just not meditating hard enough. That's garbage. It's survivorship bias. You hear from the people who found peace, not the ones who found the abyss.

Psychologically, this makes sense. If your nervous system is already in fight-or-flight, turning off external distractions and forcing internal focus can be terrifying. It's like shuffling the deck and pulling The Moon during a panic spiral. The card speaks of the subconscious, but in a practice gone wrong, it's just fear feeding on itself. Jung understood this; you can't just stare into the shadow without a sturdy ego structure, or the shadow swallows you.

Inner alchemy isn't just about heating the furnace. It's about the vessel. I tell my clients the same thing about their homes. You can't place a bagua mirror over a front door if the foundation is sinking. Fix the structure first. Same with the mind. If you're dealing with clinical depression, meditation might be the bagua mirror when you need a structural engineer. Therapy, medication, community—sometimes that's the real practice. Wabi-sabi teaches us to accept imperfection. Maybe the perfection of the "ideal meditator" is the real illusion.