Hey all! This is my first post so bear with me if I am in some way stating simple stuff here, but after having just read Daniel Ingram's book I'm now getting the sense that what I previously thought was totally normal for everyone may be a positive result of my meditation practice. The vast majority of my meditation practice for my entire life has been simple mindfulness, as that came into favor in the early 00s. I enjoyed riding that wave but did so in a highly unskilled manner, simply focusing on the breath and movement of my thoughts most of the time. Even though I've been meditating for nearly 15 years, I still feel I have much to learn. I hope this is the correct place for this post.

My experiences, ordered by estimated time since my first sit. Feel free to interpret through the lens of any school since I have yet to choose a path to focus on:

2 Months in: Strange static and orbs seen from behind my closed eyelids. Any sort of tightening my awareness on a specific orb made all of them begin to vanish.

~7-9 months in:  Felt like I was able to see through my closed eyelids into a dim grayscale version of reality. This has happened many dozens of times since then over the years, slowly shifting to images with more color and a wider field of view.

~3 years: Felt a very strange shift in my perception of hearing and space. It was as if I recognized for the first time where I was, and as if I was seeing the room I was meditating in for the very first time, even though I myself arranged all of the furniture before my eyes (was meditating with my eyes open).

~7 years in: While meditating at night in silence, I noticed the typical ringing of my ears (mild tinnitus) take on a more musical character, like the notes of a harp. Through a slight mental push I was able to shift basic characteristics of this musicality, like changing from an ascending to a descending scale, or shifting to a different scale, but was unable to control any singular notes directly or turn them into familiar music.

Unclear, likely ~6-8 years in: I noticed for the first time that I could tune into the bubbling up of my own inner monologue. If I were to think of a sentence like "I am going to the grocery store", I noticed the progression of "I" through the formation of the thought and felt myself begin to use my inner voice to speak the sentence after the completion of the construction. This felt (and still does feel) fairly disturbing, like I was tuning into how much I'm a puppet of the cosmos, so I tend to not tune into this very often. Is this a mistake?

After about year 10 my meditation practice stagnated significantly, and here at almost year 15 I've gone through most of the above on many different occasions, but feel somewhat confused about what to focus on next. 

What would you like to achieve by meditating?

As an anxious person, inner peace is important to me

As an artist, visualization is important to me

As an educator, I feel as if the deeper I can peer into the true nature of others, the more easily I can tell them exactly what they need to hear to most quickly bring out their highest potential within whatever craft they choose.

As a future parent (read: within the next 5-8 years), cultivating a presence to passively brighten my surrounding social environment seems to be something of great value, as positive traits which echo through future generations are the ones I find most important to teach kids as they learn how to move through the world.

Generally, this is hard to answer as I've already been at it for so long. I'm totally committed to engaging in these sorts of practices both on and off the cushion until the day I die, so any answer I might give would be heavily biased toward my wants and desires at this exact moment. I don't necessarily believe that those wants and desires can or even should line up with how I might view things years or decades from now, so I'm hesitant to give a specific answer when I have the feeling that I've only begun to really peek into the depths of the motivations behind how I move through the world. I will say that personal happiness is something I'm more or less unconcerned with at this stage, at least when it comes to the typical definition of that term. Whenever I'm feeling a negative shift in my thinking I just have to close my eyes for 2-3 breath cycles and I'm good to move forward. I know at the end of my life I will be totally at peace with the outcome, so I would say that a practice with a more external focus would be preferred. 

If there is an insight-focused school that could help illuminate my path (apart from reading dozens of books, which I have begun doing) then I guess at the moment that would be fairly in line with my short-term goals. Bonus points if a practice or set of practices can be done nearly at all times throughout the day, as from a selfish point of view those tend to keep me endlessly entertained haha.

Hey you're allowed to change your mind and upgrade your perspectives as you go along.

Let's give you some options:

Anxiety/Inner peace: I think insight caters to this. There is this guy with a youtube channel called inner integrations, who interviewed Ingram, and he basically had crippling anxiety that he cured by getting 2nd path on a 5 month retreat (as I understood it). No guarantees about paths tho.

Visualization: Image Streaming as taught in the book "Einstein factor" by Win Wenger is what I have known to generate gains in ability to visualize. There are anecdotes on the internet about people who have gotten so good at it they sometimes forget if they have eyes open or closed!
Fire kasina might also enhance visual acuity and visualization ability, tho I can't speak from experience on it.

Future parent/Bright influence: That's what I would call "Magnetism"/ energy projection. See CharismaSchool.com to learn about it.
I would also think clearing out trauma is of great value to future parents; it has such a weird tendency to become inherited, somehow.
EMDR, IFS and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy are great for trauma.

All-day-practice: Using Metta as an object for insight practice is what I like to do for this these days. I believe this is also what the TWIM school teaches. Very enjoyable. AnapanaSati might also be "portable" insight, to an extent. I find both very entertaining and fulfilling.

<br /><br />thanks for the well-thought-out reply!