I've started dabbling with a kisana practice, laying down on my couch and using a dim light immediately above it as the kisana object (?). Right now the majority of my practice is being inspired by mctb and I haven't had time to dig into any other resources so I'm following Daniel's kisana routine from the book.

I noticed a couple of things while practicing today and just wanted some input on 1) where I'm at right now and 2) where I should go from here

I've only been practicing for about a week, at first the afterimages were really unstable, moving around and flickering away a lot but today I noticed it was a lot more stable. This let me focus on how the image actually looked a bit more, the cycle it goes through. After sitting for about half an hour I started to notice the lines moving inside the nimitta, but I could only hold this for a couple cycles before my concentration broke and I went back to just watching the same cycle of colors again.

At some point I got tired of opening my eyes to look at the light more, so I just kept my eyes closed and watched the patterns under my eyelids. I seem to be somewhat prone to orb-of-color style visuals during meditation anyways, and I just focused on them. The first time I did this, I started to get really distinct and detailed visuals, to the point of feeling like I was seeing parts of my couch or other scenes with my eyes closed. Each of these would last a handful of seconds before passing, and related to whatever topic my mind was wandering on about in the background. Distinctly at one point I saw a very detailed and full-color disembodied hand pointed at me in the middle of my view! My concentration was broken by my phone ringing though, and when I closed my eyes again the orbs of color were back. This time when I focused on them they stayed abstract and eventually formed into a blobby sheet of white light that filled about 70% of my field of view.

At some point I got bored of the orbs and started chanting a mantra, I've never done mantra meditation before so I was mostly just curious what it would be like. After a bit of chanting the visuals went away and I felt focused but nothing very remarkable happened. I got bored and returned to the kisana and felt more focused while doing it.

This is the most remarkable stuff that happened, I will note that besides feelings of relaxation I didn't have any remarkable sensory experiences outside of my visual field. Towards the beginning I definitely did deal with some physical discomfort, but as I settled in to the practice my body mostly seemed to fade away into a feeling of relaxation as I didn't focus on it, the only remarkable physical feeling was a dull ache at the front of my head that I just attributed to resulting from the effort of concentrating at this level for an hour and a half. I feel like I've probably just started dipping my toes into access concentration, I don't exactly feel like my experience matches up with descriptions of the first jhana yet, but maybe it is just a low intensity version of it.

I'm excited to explore this territory further though, I've only been dedicating time to practice every day for about a week and I feel like I'm already seeing some improvement in my ability to settle into the meditation and concentrate. As of now I'm planning to stick with kisana as it seems like it's the most efficient at getting me into a meditative state, at least more efficient than breath meditation.

(Sorry if this is a little unnecessarily long and rambling for a beginner - I tried to summarize I promise - I guess I'm just a bit excited)