Sze-Hung Daniel Tsui:
Could you describe what exactly you do when you sit for these 1-2hours?
It seems like you're attempting to do concentration, but you took some advice to move your attention around and non-jhana-like stuff is occurring. The high speed vibrating toothbrush, pressure that builds up to vibrations, etc, all sound like vipassana territory to me.
If you do insight practice, how are your concentration sits different from insight sits in technique/goals?
Sze-Hung, thanks for the great questions! Yes, I'm trying to do concentration! The non-jhana like stuff are the distractions that I allude to in the title of the post... these distractions come whether I attempt to do jhana or vipassana. I had become so frustrated with these phenomena that I gave up trying to do jhana for a long time (vipassana isn't as difficult, since I can just move from distraction to distraction... of course). Now I figure I just need to suck it up and sit

)
The advice to move attention from breath (my usual object of focus) comes from several sources, e.g.,
Leigh Brasington's Jhana Howto, where he writes, "shift your attention away from the breath to a pleasant sensation. This is the key thing. You watch the breath until you arrive at access concentration, and then you let go of the breath and shift your attention to a pleasant sensation." However, other sources like "Practicing the Jhanas" disagree; those authors might describe my recent success with jhana as a very pleasant access concentration.
When I do concentration sits, I try to stay with the object of concentration, e.g., breath - or flame, as with a fire kasina. One of the advantages of doing external object kasinas is that I don't have the hive of bodily activity distracting me. When I do vipassana, I range all over. I investigate objects and try to analyze them for the 3Cs. E.g., one of the more difficult things about handling pain for me during jhana is that I need to stay with my primary (only!) object. When I do vipassana and have a pain, I can "go" watch it and penetrate the pain, the object. I see that it is vibrations, and moves about in a disparate way, I doesn't have the solidity I first felt. When I am doing jhana sits, I don't really have that option (or I can switch or used mixed methods, and not be so rigid?).