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.

[u/JhannySamadhi]

Access concentration doesn’t require four hours. If you meditate 2+ hours per day, you can usually get there within 30 minutes provided your stability has been well established over time. You’ll know when it’s beginning because you’ll feel really good and usually there will be a mind generated light that will gradually increase in brightness.

Jhana is not required to be meditating. You can get plenty of benefits without jhana. True jhana is a high tier attainment. 

[u/OddDrive7322 → u/JhannySamadhi]

How do I shift from access concentration to the first jhana reliably? If I focus only on piti, I get strong seizures that feel like my face is going to crack.

[u/JhannySamadhi → u/OddDrive7322]

Try developing more relaxation. If you’re using too much effort to hold your awareness in place, it can lead to tension once piti starts kicking in. Feel the weight of your body on the cushion, feel gravity holding you against the earth. Train yourself through repetition to maintain contact with the weight of your body. This is very important. Sometimes maintaining contact with the weight of your hands, surrendering them to gravity, can aid in this process.

If you want to enter lite jhanas, you focus on pleasant feelings, but the feelings need to be stable enough to stick with. If they’re jumping around or with an abrasive quality they won’t work. In this case continue following the breath until things stabilize. This can take a lot of work and time. 

As long as your relaxation is in good order, ideally you just want to “endure” the piti until it subsides into passadhi on its own. From here a nimitta will eventually arise, and you can enter legitimate samatha jhanas. 

There is a hack that I learned from Ajahn Brahm to enter deep jhana from strong piti, but if your stability isn’t deep enough yet, it will kick you right out. But if it works, you can get a taste of the intensity and bizarreness of deep jhana, even if it’s only for a couple seconds.

To do this, once you get into solid access concentration, which has a “rolling” feel to the piti, like the steady movement you feel on a small boat. This will feel extremely good and you’ll likely be smiling intensely. At this point imagine you get into a car with someone for a nice drive on a sunny spring Sunday. This is a very trustworthy driver and there’s nothing to worry about. You get into the passenger seat and hand the keys to the driver (this is important). The driver drives at a steady pace and has everything under control. So you let go and relax as he drives you along. 

This tricks the brain into letting go, and as the car moves along the piti grows to great intensity until “boom” jhana snatches you up like a rag doll. 

This might seem like a lot of discursive action for deep meditation, but it’s very easy to get the hang of with a little practice. When I first tried it I was astonished at how effective it is. But again, it’s likely to spit you out just as fast as it snatched you up, so ideally you want to let the piti subside on its own until a nimitta arises and you fall into that. Then it’s much easier to stay in.