Insight with my meditation experience wanted
Hello I had an experience that I’m looking for some insight on. For some background I practice breath meditation as per Ajahn Chahs teachings - start with body scan then breath meditation while reciting Bud-dho eventually dropping the mantra and just focusing on purely the path of the in and out breath. I’ve been practicing for a few years but stopped recently for about 3 years due to a sharp decline in health; I’ve started back up in the last 8 months going from 30 minutes a day back then years ago to an hour a day now and up to 3 to 5 hours on full moon days. Sits are generally a half hour long or hour long on days I meditate more. I use a meditation app to keep tabs on my time and ring a short chime when that time has been reached and it was set to 30 minutes today when I had my experience meditating. Today I whent into this meditation fatigued and tired.
So I was meditating unlike I usually do by listening to a dhamma talk but otherwise it was business as usual. I had been meditating a little while and by that point dropped reciting buddho and was just focusing on the breath. Thoughts were coming and going occasionally and I would just mentally recite “that’s uncertain”. Around the time my 30 minute timer whent off I had gotten to the point where I wasn’t having intrusive thoughts and could focus purely on my breath so I decided to keep going plus I felt like I had gotten a second wind of energy. As I kept going my breath kept getting more and more faint and was getting harder for me to perceive.
This is the point I haven’t gone past before. Normally I always have the breath to focus on. With the breath soon to become difficult to focus on I decided I needed something else to make my object of meditation and while I was becoming focused a slight pleasant feeling came over me so I took that up and shifted my attention to my pleasant feelings. They weren’t particularly strong I’d say but present enough throughout my body and easy to shift my attention to.
I sat there for a while noting another chime of my timer. One thing I eventually remembered is the Buddha basically said don’t get swept up in the bad OR the good. I could have sat there all day and enjoyed the pleasant feeling but I told myself this isn’t permanent and as soon as I stop meditating it’ll go away, it would feel bad if this feeling whent away instead of deciding to stop the feeling myself, and this pleasant feeling doesn’t define me; it isn’t mine.
It took a little bit of effort but the pleasure subsided and I felt just kindof…centered - with an awareness that was strangely detached. By that time I had developed sore spots from sitting a while that earlier was causing a bit of pain that really didn’t bother me too much but now was more just like feelings of pressure…as if someone was just pressing me gently with their finger. Sounds of the dhamma talk, outside road, general house noises were still there but more like listening to a conversation behind a closed door instead of talking to someone face to face; just kind of muffled but still aware of every individual noise. Everything else about me felt “in balance” and again I could have sat there all day. I heard the timer a third time and noted it seemed like the time it took to reach that 3rd chime seemed quicker. After that I sat a bit then had the thought “where do I go from here?” And that’s where I slowly started to come back out from my meditation.
I couldn’t think of where to go from there and the thought never occurred to me what I wanted once I got that deep into meditation so I guess that’s what kicked me out. When I was done I looked down at the timer and 1h46m passed when originally I just planned on doing 30m. It certainly didn’t feel like I had sat for almost 2 hours but I’d like to be able to repeat the process in the future and hopefully cut the time back to get to that point.
I’m posting here today asking the community if more experienced meditators can shed insight on what was going on during my meditation. I’ve read so many different descriptions of what jhana is supposed to be that I’m unsure if anything I described fits that. I’m not sure if I achieved anything other than just really deep meditation.