Jorge Freddy's Practice

Hello everyone!
This is my first attempt at having a thread regarding my practice. Thanks again to this community for the help and support provided!

I started practicing meditation about 20 years ago with my parents (doing a lot of visualization, white light, chakra cleansing, etc) but my practice had been very scattered and rare, despite a very strong natural concentration ability. About 6 years ago I experienced a typical A&P phenomenon during a sitting. Of course without having a single clue as to this representing a stage of insight (probably because I was totally unaware of such practice at that time) after feeling my body vibrate strongly, getting crazy rapture, feeling overjoyed, etc., I thought I had touched God and that I had reached the highest spiritual point, and that blah blah blah....basically felt into the 10 corruptions and thought "this is it". After that, I did not feel the need to meditate anymore. Interestingly enough, I started to enter in depressive stages a few weeks after this experience. School, family, friends, girlfriends, etc., did not seem to give me any sense of fulfillment. the situation worsened year after year, to the point of actually becoming suicidal around 2 years ago. All I could think of was how unfair and miserable life and the world are, and how worthless I had become (at least I felt that way).

Somehow I gathered up some strength and decided to stick around until "life" or "God" or whatever it was that created me decided to "uncreate" me. My depression continued however, until one day when I said to myself "enough! this is it! I'm done living this life! in this world of human rules and laws, of suffering and impermanent happiness. I became fascinated with a book by Chopra called "How to know God" and his definition of the perfect God (unmanifest, unchanging, etc) resonated with me, so I went ahead and decided to follow Buddhist insight practices head on. First I started doing Samatha because that's what I understood (within my ignorance at that time) to be the way to reach enlightenment (by reaching Nirodha). I was able to access the first 4 Samatha Jhanas with incredible ease (perhaps a couple of weeks after starting to practice them) and then started to be able to enter into the formless Jhanas (I would enter them quite softy but it was certain of their manifestation.

At this time, I had been having some 'migraine-like' headaches ever since the dark nite days, and even though the pain was absurdly strong, I felt ok about it (I guess strong equanimity?). One day during meditation I felt 2 small 'pops' followed by another 2 more, they were barely noticeable, so I did not make a big deal about it. I don't really remember if my headache went away right after that, or during the meditation of a few hours after that but it was certainly gone the same day. Another session later the same day I noticed myself hitting Jhanas in an uncannily strong way, and was jumping within them at will. Certainly my already strong concentration was feeling even stronger and refined, entering the 7-8 Jhana in a stable way for once. All I kept telling myself was 'well, if I have reached stream entry, congrats Jorge, but we are continuing to push forward regardless'. Later that night, I said I would try to see if I can go higher than the 8th Jhana (I went ahead and remember your story about reaching the Pure Land Jhanas) I figured my concentration is so strong, why not give it a shot. I hit the PL1, (quite stable to my surprise) and as I tried to reach higher I entered a very cloudy and foggy unstable state, and then after that I had the most amazing A&P experience I could imagine (I'd be glad to expand on it if anyone cares to hear about it, it was A&P nevertheless). I noticed day after day a very small and subtle, yet profound changed in my perception of myself and the world around me afterwards, change that was very hard to notice when I found myself going thru another dark nite (this is really when my wish for further investigation and review of the cycle started to be born).