goba g gobasson:
I feel i'm getting nowhere in my practice (I have not yet attained "mind and body"-nana). I've have not yet experienced this "powerful shift in consciousness" that jack kornfield writes about and i'm wondering if this is my problem.
How long does it take to develop access concentration? I've been practicing almost every day (maybe 30 minutes) for 5 months switching between shamata and vipassana (i've been mostly doing shamata).
Be patient, goba. And keep practicing as you have been, focusing on samatha.
Access concentration doesn't take that long to develop. It just depends on what you do with it once you realize that you have achieved it.
One thing that helped me when I was going through this "growing period" was the instruction that the Buddha gave in the Maha-satipatthana Sutta to "establish mindfulness" before yourself. "Mindfully he breathes in, mindfully he breathes out." Before even attempting to meditate, if you first establish
sati (mindfulness), your meditation session will progress with much stronger intensity and concentrative focus. It's that intensity/energy and concentrative focus that you want to establish before you begin to meditate.
I'm talking about the kind of intensity that a baseball player has when facing a pitcher. He has to be focused on the release of the ball in order to see it to hit it (and as well to get out of the way if it's coming at him). All this takes place in fractions of a second. So his focus must be established before the pitcher pitches the ball. It's the same way in meditation. Think about that example and focus on increasing your intensity before and during your meditation. And watch how your meditation sessions respond to that.
If you can do that, you will eventually breeze past access concentration to
samadhi fairly easily.