I seem to have tendency to pick your posts up incorrectly too, it's not your fault or a criticism on your writing though 'cause it's up to me to read it properly. I can assure you though, I mean no harm at all and my responses are always offered with a helpful intent. The way I write seems to give the impression that I'm trying to be authoritative or dismissive of what's being said, it's not the case though and anything I write is subject to change or correction at any time 'cause I'm still learning too. I think we just communicate in different ways so perhaps my way of pointing stuff out wouldn't be of use to you, besides your practice looks like it's coming along fine anyway so I'll back out and leave you to it.
By the way, I appreciate your honesty.

Edited to add...
Adam L:
I can appreciate this, but may I also remind you that there are others (well, at least one other...ha) that are benefiting from access to all of the participating perspectives
I know what you mean, it can be useful but I just figure that it'd be more appropriate to comment directly on someone's thread if I see something I think they might benefit from knowing about. In this case though, Adam and I seem to be prone to miscommunication and so the benefits are likely to be lessened by the need to go back and forth to explain things in different ways. However, this one point which Adam made is something I would like to clarify and which will hopefully be of use to anyone interested in using it:
Tommy:
Try just sitting and allowing the body to breathe by itself
Adam . .:
if i could pull that off at will i'm sure i'd be free of suffering by now, the self process goes on whether or not one tries to shape it. but yea, i've done plenty of allowing the fabrications to fabricate as they naturally would, and observing it happening,
I should really have explained this a bit better, I didn't mean it as some sort of "do nothing" technique or just simply observing fabrications; what I'm talking about is getting involved in the process of breathing and investigating what it is that seems to control it. It's not "advanced" and doesn't require lots of subtle mental stuff, I'll give a little bit of background to this 'cause it's something I've found useful and reckon it's worth experimenting with.
I used to do a lot of Hindu-inspired yogic breathing stuff; breath cycles counted in unusual intervals like 8-4-4-8 of inhale-hold-exhale-hold and all that sort of thing. It did wonders for my subsequent concentration practices but I didn't fully understand what I was doing at that time to fully benefit from the techniques and eventually gave up. What I did notice was the way that a feeling of panic, loss of control or anxiety would arise when I held the breath past, what seemed to be, the natural point until I felt I had to breathe again really quickly, sort of like when you come up from being underwater for a long time. With practice I learned how to control that urge to breathe and began to notice how, if I paid attention to how the body felt, there wasn't actually any lack of oxygen in anywhere near the way that such a reaction would suggest.
A few months ago, I'd been investigating that feeling and noticing it appearing in all sorts of unusual situations. Part of the reason why this particular phenomena was of interest to me was that I almost died through drowning as a baby and I'd developed something of a phobia about swimming. Over time that was unravelled and I got to the bottom of how it happened for me, but there were a few general points I remembered that seemed worth mentioning:
- The idea of controlling the breath is illusory, the body knows by itself how much oxygen it requires and will respond accordingly. Even when you think you're controlling it, you're not actually doing anything other than creating a story about how "you" were going to breathe in a certain way. Just let the body breathe, don't try to change it and just notice how "you" try to lay claim to that impersonal, transient process.
- The loss-of-control and anxiety are part of the same thing: fear of death. This is pretty much what it always comes down to when fear, in whatever manifestation, appears on the scene, it's opposite is stability which, as you already know via the 3C's, is also an illusion.
- Look at all of the possible ways in which that fear or panic can manifest physically and mentally. It's like being able to see the entire 'range' of that emotional 'frequency' but without actually endangering your life.
- The manifestations of tension which arise can be incredibly obvious, from physically lurching forwards to weird abdominal tensions, just notice how that happens. These are gross forms of it, obviously, but they may provide enough of a 'taste' of that feeling to allow you to identify its more subtle aspects.
I hope that's a little clearer and more explanatory than my initial suggestion, I didn't intend to be so vague as I can't be bothered with that whole approach. It's got it's place, don't get me wrong, but sometimes you need to take a sledgehammer to the fucker and be done with it.

Drop me a PM if you've got any questions about it so that this thread can continue without going off on any further tangents.
A'ra best.