After a period of time of doing stages 1 and 2, I’ve now progressed in the last few days, to stage 3. It has typically taken a fair bit of discipline to meditate for even 30 minutes up to this point…due to body discomfort, restlessness etc. Today I had what felt like a breakthrough experience. I stuck with the counting stages for at least 10 minutes each…and even went back to them after starting stage 3, when I found that I wasn’t anchored firmly enough…then finally achieved enough calmness to feel ready for Stage 3. Fairly soon after beginning stage 3, I began to notice that my hands felt very large, accompanied by a deepening, drifty feeling, but also quite focused…there was a sense of a choice to just let go and let this happen, and that if I did, I would go deeper. I just keep focusing on my breath…this focus felt more and more pleasant and effortless. I had a physical sensation of almost travelling deeper inside myself and becoming very ‘small’ within my physical body which felt more and more like just a ‘field’ of some kind, kind of like a bubble around me. I almost felt like my awareness (basically ‘I’) was like a nucleus in a large spacious cell, and that my body was like the cell membrane with just sort of a fuzzy sensation. It wasn’t that I didn’t have thoughts arising, but I had no difficulty letting them go…the focusing and breathing was much more appealing to me. When my physical sensations and mental processes began to pull me out of this state, I opened my eyes and 50 minutes had passed without so much as a change in position (beyond correcting my posture a bit)…unheard of for me prior to this point. It felt so rewarding! As I’m doing more reading and exploration, I’m hearing terms like ‘access concentration’ and ‘jhanas’…I know very little about these at this point, but am wondering if the experiences I’m describing might possibly fall into either of these categories. Your thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you :)