If 'access concentration' takes four hours every day then what am I doing?

[u/xjashumonx]

Started meditating again for the first time in years and getting what I consider beneficial results. I've only been doing 30 minutes a day once or twice a day to build up my stamina. I'm going to aggressively avoid any Buddhist terminology and try to explain things in my own words here. After some initial difficulty what's emerged is a much more calm and fairly persistent feeling even after I finish meditating. I sit down and get a kind of stable united feeling in the body that is very pleasant, and to my surprise, compassionate feelings toward myself and others (something much removed from my typical state.) Lately I've had observations about how my senses work. For example Im beginning to regard seeing as more of a flat image as opposed to the typical way which I would say is more like looking out of a window. The phrase I've heard "in the seeing there is only seeing" now seems significant to me. And today after meditating I had a stronger sense that my body is basically empty space except for whatever nerves are being stimulated.

I say all that just to give you a sense of what I get out of my meager practice. And it's not all roses, either. The first ten minutes after sitting down is pretty killer tbh. None of this is what I would call easy or effortless. So this leads to my question, what's going on here? I'm not some genius meditator. I would say I'm probably less inclined than almost anyone. I'm definitely nowhere near jhana or even access concentration by the standards I've been introduced to here. So where are these benefits coming from? How is this ultra elementary stage described in Buddhism? If jhana IS meditation, then that means I'm not even meditating, right? The benefits feel substantial, though.

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